Screeching and screaming and being vile
Oh dear, fallen down a wildly unpleasant rabbit hole.
That’s a lot of clashing figurative language for one tweet, isn’t it – overrun, dogpile, high ground, rabbit hole, fall down. Orwell would have a good laugh, because it’s exactly the kind of lazy reaching for a stale phrase that he was objecting to.
But the substance came later.
Well we don’t “screech,” we type, and saying we screech kind of gives away his misogyny – see there you go, lazy figurative language tripping him up again. But much more to the point, saying Xs are not Ys is not saying Xs don’t exist. It’s not the same thing. Not the same; different. Rabbits are not coconuts; that is not saying that rabbits don’t exist.
Now if rabbits had a noisy activism that insisted they are coconuts if they say they are, maybe they too would claim that saying rabbits are not coconuts is saying rabbits don’t exist…but they would be wrong too. Description is not existence. I exist but I can be wrong or dishonest about how I describe myself; so can you, so can they, so can anyone. We still exist even if we’re wrong or dishonest about how we self-describe.
This is a good thing, if you think about it. It means we don’t snap out of existence just by making a mistake on a form. Some angry dude can inaccurately call us screeching vile bigoted TERFs but we go on existing all the same.
I don’t believe trans people are pedophiles. I don’t believe trans people are dangerous or depraved.
I don’t believe trans people should be denied rights, shunned, or held in contempt.
But I also don’t believe trans women are women.
So I guess I’m a vile person?
I would re-word that a little for my own use – I would say I don’t believe trans people are pedophiles per se or as a group, and I don’t believe trans people are dangerous per se or as a group.
On the other hand I do think the trans ideology in its current form is way too useful for people who are pedophiles and/or dangerous to use as a disguise and an entry point. People like “Jessica” Yaniv for example.
A man telling women not to be so screechy. Do these fuckers ever listen to themselves?
Stop it with your lagophobia, Ophelia. I’ve had enough. I’m going to tweet now.
This whole “trans people don’t exist” thing comes from a truly bizarre jump of logic. To wit:
(i) I define an S as person who has property p.
(ii) I claim that I am an S.
(iii) From i & ii, I claim to have p.
(iv) You dispute the claim that anyone has p.
(v) From i & iv, you dispute the existence of any S (as defined in i).
(vi) [Here’s the bizarre jump.] From ii & v, you dispute that I exist.
If we were to be consistent, we’d have to say that atheists say that Jews don’t exist, because the Hebrew people are, according to their tradition, the chosen people of God. However, since atheists dispute the existence of God, they dispute the existence of a chosen people of God, and therefore they dispute the existence of Jews, who are the chosen people of God.
It’s bananas, I tell you.
To be fair Nullius, I’ve never disputed that Jews exist because I’ve always considered them a people who claim to be the chosen of God, rather than are. God doesn’t exist. They can still make the same claim. I can acknowledge their existence while believing that the claim (along with most claims of most religions) are utterly without foundation and largely bonkers. Everybody is (un)happy.
Yep, precisely correct. The idea that saying that someone isn’t in class C (when he or she claims to be in C) is equivalent to saying that person doesn’t exist—that idea is 100% bonkers.