Reasoned?
The unpleasant Dawn formerly Don Ennis, managing editor of OutSports, posted a New Year’s message to TERFS, starting with admitting he was name-calling.
The subhead tells us what to think in advance.
Outsports Managing Editor Dawn Ennis offers this reasoned response to hateful messages targeting trans women athletes and all transgender people.
We’ll decide for ourselves whether it’s reasoned or not, thanks. Talk of “hateful messages” and “targeting” in the subhead is not a good start if you want us to think the response is “reasoned.”
Dear TERFs, anti-trans activists and transphobes:
Again: not a good start.
It’s a new year, and I’m using this occasion to address you directly.
I know, you’re not keen on being called “TERFs” or any of those other names, or “labels,” as you call them; Which is odd since you seem to have absolutely no problem labeling me and people like me “transgender,” “trans” and “biological male.”
Yes, that’s a really bad start. Cheerily agreeing that you’re calling us by pejoratives that we reject is not a good start. Adding “but you started it!” is not a good start. Treating “transgender,” “trans,” and “biological male” as all one category is not a good start.
For the record, the label I choose for myself is “woman.”
For what record? At any rate, choosing a label for oneself is one thing and trying to force the entire world to adopt your chosen label is very much another.
We get that you call yourself a woman. That doesn’t mean we have to agree that you are one. Donald Trump could call himself a Guatemalan child separated from her asylum-seeking mother by ICE, but that wouldn’t make it true. Labels do not make reality. Assertion is not a magical power to make something true. Just saying is just saying.
Anybody can choose any label, but there are plenty of situations in which doing so can lead to a quarrel or an arrest. Fraud is a crime, and it’s not unknown for people to perpetrate fraud by labeling themselves something they’re not. We can choose the label “doctor” but if we start taking patients without the requisite training, we can get ourselves in big trouble.
Then he says yes yes I’m transgender but you care about that more than I do.
So, as a gesture of goodwill, for the rest of this post, I will refrain from using words that might provoke further animosity. Provocation is not why I’m reaching out.
Oreally? Then why start with the provocation and then agree that it’s provocation?
Zero for rhetorical skill, here. Take the class again.
The rest of the letter is too boring to deal with.
Ennis should answer whether Outsports is going to be just another sports magazine for men. Three men, when asked to choose the best female athlete of the year, chose another man. Should people who want to read about women’s sports go elsewhere?
And in which year will you select a woman for best male athlete?
Is it just me or are they starting to sound a little panicked? I guess 2020 is the year they find themselves on the defensive. Cheers to that.
Okay, let’s look at some of the main rational arguments:
That’s apparently the heart of the argument: they just KNOW. I wasn’t impressed when people went cross-eyed and passed out trying to convey the same point about their undeniable and completely veridical relationship with God; I’m not impressed by the same assertion now.
What do we call this? A type of Argument from Authority, I guess, combined with a Category Error. Plus an appeal to the Bandwagon Effect. And a Bad Analogy at the beginning, of course.
Poisoning the Well; Bad Analogy; Argumentum ad Misercordium.
I’m sure.
Is “trans” a bad label now? Is it now wrong to refer to transwomen as trans or transgender?
It does keep one off balance, doesn’t it?
It’s interesting to note that a lot of “TERFs” are mothers* of small children. They must be engaged in observing and participating in the learning part, and could probably enlighten us on how much of it is learning. We “just know” all kinds of stuff because we were told it when we were toddlers.
There should be a name for that – that fatuous belief that we “just know” things that in fact we were told at some point. I’ve encountered it many times and it always makes me grind my teeth.
*I say mothers rather than parents because the epithet is mostly aimed at women, and some argue that men can’t be feminists/radical feminists.
‘(There is no way to tell if the knowledge was innate or learned, given we don’t recall learning things in infancy and toddlerhood )’
Now that you mention it, that is a weirdly phrased sentence. ‘There is no way to tell’ (absolute statement) because ‘we’ don’t recall…it kind of reminds me of that Trump thing where he says ‘whoa, I bet you didn’t know (x thing I just happen to have heard)’ or ‘no one knows anything about x’ (because I don’t know anything about x), or ‘I know more about x than anyone else’ (because why wouldn’t he, his is the only mind he acknowledges).
Unfortunately we run across plenty of mothers who say things like ‘of course boys and girls are innately different, I have a son and a daughter and the son always played with cars and the daughter always played with housekeeping toys’, without recognising that a) she (or, often, particularly in the case of boys, the children’s father) consciously or unconsciously encouraged these choices and discouraged others, and/or b) she’s totally forgotten or unconsciously blanked out on all the times Jenny played with cars or Jimmy used his sister’s baking set.
@guest:
It’s a weirdly phrased sentence, yes and mine. I was fooling around with responding to a quote using parentheses and italics, and then dropped it in the second part of the post because it was weird. I didn’t mean to sound Trumpian. Basically, I was trying to say what you and Ophelia said, that babies and toddlers are constantly being taught and, as adults, there’s just no way we’re going to separate what was learned from what was innate just by thinking back and recollecting. I’m sure I was told, or overheard, that I was a girl many times. And that I was told, or overheard, what a girl was like many times. And what they’re not like. With inconsistent messages from different sources.
Why would a sense of “gender identity” have evolved?
I quite liked the parentheses and italics method of fisking, or annotating.
Sorry Sastra–I wasn’t paying attention, and thought the sentence was from the OP…. But yes, aside from the fact that ‘gender identity’ is nonsense (because every culture conceives of and expresses ‘gender’ differently) there certainly does seem to be enough sociological/psychological evidence to show that we can’t rely on anything being ‘innately gendered’. I’ve read something that pointed out that we’re already imposing gendered expectations on fetuses–future parents say things like ‘I can’t wait to see my new son, we’ll play football and explore the woods’ or ‘I’m so looking forward to cuddling with my daughter and combing her hair’. The older I get the angrier and more disturbed I am at the extent to which my entire life history has been shaped by these expectations, despite being unapologetically ‘gender nonconforming’–every person probably does have some ‘innate’ character traits (though I don’t know how we could know that for certain), but what happens to little girls who ‘innately’ like walks in the woods, or little boys who are more ‘innately’ cuddly?
Um, don’t you call yourselves trans and transgender? Isn’t that the entire basis of our dispute – that you believe people can be the ‘wrong gender’ for their sex? And, biological male is a matter of measurable, objective reality; quite different to a label applied due to viewpoint-dependent framing of sex and gender.
Cool, and the label I choose for myself is “man / male” but you keep ignoring that to call me “cis man / male”. Why do you get to ignore my chosen label for the reason of “but you just are cis, even if you don’t agree with it” but I don’t get to do the same in return?
For another example, I call myself a feminist, but you insist on adding “trans exclusionary radical” in front of that, or denying that I am a feminist altogether on the basis that I disagree with trans theory.
Oh right, one way street strikes again.
What an amazing argument. “This is right, because these institutions say so” – okay, so what about the times those same institutions supported… capital punishment? Miscegenation laws? Gay marriage bans? Slavery? The current absurd state of many laws in many nations? They’re all the correct stance, apparently, so long as those institutions still support those things. And when they no longer do, as in the case of gay marriage in recent years, what then?