Which party is spewing hatred?
I avoided it at first because blegh, but let’s take a look at that letter of former Ellen now Elliot Page’s.
The third paragraph:
My joy is real, but it is also fragile. The truth is, despite feeling profoundly happy right now, and knowing how much privilege I carry, I’m also scared. I’m scared of the invasiveness, the hate, the ‘jokes,’ and of violence. To be clear, I am not trying to dampen a moment that is joyous and one that I celebrate, but I also want to address the full picture. The statistics are staggering. The discrimination towards trans people is rife, insidious, and cruel, resulting in horrific consequences. In 2020 alone, it has been reported that at least 40 transgender people have been murdered, the majority of which were Black and Latinx trans women. To the political leaders who work to criminalize trans health care and deny our right to exist and to all those with a massive platform who continue to spew hostility towards the trans community: you have blood on your hands. You unleash a fury of vile and demeaning rage that lands on the shoulders of the trans community, a community in which 40% of trans adults report attempting suicide. Enough is enough. You aren’t being ‘cancelled,’ you are hurting people. I am one of those people and we won’t be silent in the face of your attacks.
People who have investigated the murder statistics point out that most of the murders of trans women are of sex workers; it’s well known that sex work is dangerous, in the sense that johns can turn violent. It’s not clear that all the murdered trans women were murdered because trans as opposed to because sex workers. If a trans woman tries to climb Everest and dies in the attempt it’s not necessarily because the trans woman is trans.
And about this “spewing hostility” and “you have blood on your hands” and “you unleash a fury of vile and demeaning rage” – none of that is true. I can easily believe that in real, physical, face to face life there is hostility and mockery, because people police people who are being unusual in public. But that’s not what Page is talking about, because Page is angry at “those with a massive platform” – which I think has to mean Rowling first of all, since Page is a movie actor and the Potter movies loom large. Rowling didn’t “spew hatred” or anything resembling it. Social media ragers said she did, and they were lying when they said it. Page appears to have accepted the lies as simple truth. Page’s ragey denunciation takes up most of the room in the letter. It’s all very McCarthy, very Hate Week, very gullible and destructive.
Thanks to Sastra for highlighting that bit of the letter.
“Hi, everybody! I’m Elliot and I’m sooooo happy.
Kill the Terfs and make them paaaayyy…
All My Love, Elliot.”
Some women have pointed out that Elliot seems to have ‘come out’ right after the Keira Bell verdict. Might be a coincidence; might not. Might also account for all that spewed bile.
Does somebody now have to go through the credits of everything Page has acted in, changing every ‘Ellen’ to ‘Elliot’? Re-print every DVD sleeve? Does every videotape of interviews with Page, every showbiz and movie programme, every radio show, require voiceover artists to dub ‘Elliot’ over every mention of ‘Ellen’? Will any and all awards Page received specifically for ‘female actor’ be rescinded and awarded to the runners-up?
We all know how violent it is to ‘deadname’ these precious people, after all.
They’ve been doing that already. I saw it said somewhere that Juno is now about a “pregnant person”…
Maybe Elliot will have to equip herself with the international symbol of Trans Rights: a wooden bat wrapped in barbed wire.
Or maybe she’ll get a phalloplasty; I hear it feels about the same anyway.
Forty… FORTY murders? This is such a tiny, tiny number being touted as if it’s statistically significant (if it’s even true at all). I don’t recall what the exact percentage of trans anything the population is supposed to be, but assuming it’s 0.7% (one of the numbers I’ve seen) is represented by around 0.002% of homicides in the US(from one of the CDC’s ready reckoners).
BKiSA, who are you going to trust? The CDC, or Ellen/Elliot Page?
…Out of a total of 14,185 [FBI] murders total for USA in 2019 (the stats for 2020 will only be compiled next year). 40 murders of 14,185 means trans people comprise 0.28% of all people murdered in USA, despite being an estimated 0.58% [wiki] of the US population. Clearly, this is slightly less than half the expected murder rate for their population – they are underrepresented in the murder statistics. 0.58% of 14,185 is 82.
The usual rebuttal to this – on the rare occasion that a TRA bothers to address this at all – is that the reporting of crime is at a different standard of thoroughness from state to state, and so the trans status of murder victims may be underreported. That may well be so, but that does not mean we can simply assume the numbers are such that the trans proportion of all murder victims surpasses 82 just to make the narrative true. A person could make an estimate as to the true number of murdered trans people, but they would have to show their calcuations and more importantly their assumptions… and I think the assumptions would tell the story.
Meanwhile, 14,145 non-trans people were murdered. No mention of them in the trans pity party.
Also, I’d love to know where the 40 stat was taken from. If it was from this Human Rights Campaign page on trans murders which made a bit of a stir in the news recently, there is a very large caveat right at the top of the page: “Fatal Violence Against the Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Community in 2020″. Yes, it pads the numbers by including ‘gender non-conforming’ people in that statistic. Specifically, one ‘gender non-conforming’ and one ‘non-binary’ person. Granted, this only bumps the number up by 2, but that is still 2 higher than what the number ought to be – 38 of 14,185, or 0.27%, or 44 short of parity with expected.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmm gee, let’s think about that for a moment. White people comprise the majority of the US population, yet black and hispanic people comprise the majority of all murdered trans people. I looked at the photos of every trans victim on that site, and only 4 of the 38 trans murder victims were white, with another 3 or so with hispanic names light skinned enough to potentially pass as white (though the names suggest otherwise).
Anyone but a fool can see that race dominates, and not trans status.
Yeah, I’m sure all the porn sites with naked clips and images of EP will get right on it. They’ll be terribly concerned to make sure that no one mistakes her for a woman.
Actually I just feel very sad for her. She’s always struck me as rather fragile and struggling with her fame and the fact that having sexual appeal these days means some pretty gross consequences on the internet. It’s hardly surprising that another young lesbian seeks the dubious ‘out’ of saying they’re a bloke who likes women, rather than a women who likes women.
I also somewhat cynically wonder whether the wonderful people who have supported her along that journey have in fact subtly (or not) led her along that journey. I don’t want to discount her own agency in making her choices, but when someone is fragile, tormented and unhappy, they can be very easy to lead.
Holms @7, yes. Quite. By the time you’ve accounted for sexual orientation, gender orientation (and presentation), race and occupation, I suspect the Trans status becomes a non-factor.
Fragility is not a good thing. When people talk about “white fragility” – it isn’t generally a complement.
When trans activists talk about “Cis fragility” – is something that non-trans people are expected to work on.
This is maybe one of the issues that most plagues social justice in general – that all too often the need for reciprocation is ignored.
The idea that my fragility makes me precious and someone to be protected, and your fragility makes you weak and someone to be scorned.
People who talk about the need for safe spaces, also glory in “privileged” tears, even when the privilege goes the other way.
The fragility of one’s happiness is not the responsibility of one’s society. While it is important to deal with bullying, and prejudice is a problem in need of solving – fragility isn’t about these two issues.
Those two issues are fundamentally about when someone sets out to harm you or your perceived group. Fragility – is all about the slips, about unintentional harms.
While it is reasonable to be upset at such harms, there is an extent to which one has to be able to tough them out for the sake of living with everyone else.
This is why I find that I have zero sympathy with threats of suicide. All too often such threats are made not by the bullied, but the bullies. It is a form of emotional blackmail, demanding a level of concern which the blackmailer is not prepared to reciprocate.
Otherwise we wouldn’t see such staunch campaigns against “Terfs” or suchlike. Fragile people, don’t seem all that shy about attacking others.
And thus I am left cold by such statements as, “my joy is real, but also fragile”. Your joy is your concern, not mine.
About this claim that 40% of trans adults report attempting suicide – so what? There’s as much difference between attempting suicide and claiming to have attempted suicide as there is between being a woman and claiming to be a woman. Of course, if you believe TWAW then I suppose it’s easy to think RASIAS (well that acronym turned out rather pleasing)
(originally posted on wrong thread)
The great thing about lying with statistics is that 90% of the time you get away with it.
The rate of suicide goes up after people transition, which is then recuperated as proof that people need to transition.
This is not a fair statement. It discounts an entire group of people who are not doing emotional blackmail, but genuinely suffer and just want to die. Yes, the trans rights activists are using this as emotional blackmail, but to discount all threats of suicide is to discount the reality of what many people live with, and real suffering.
iknklast
Let me clarify, I don’t think someone talking about suicide is necessarily making a threat. Someone saying they’re suicidal, and expressing their pain is not, I think, making a threat.
But when someone says they’re going to commit suicide and it will be your fault, that’s the sort of thing I’m talking about here. One is a call for help, the other is a serious red flag.
There’s also some overlap of those categories. There are people who really are suffering and really do in some sense want to commit suicide but also want to punish. Think Sylvia Plath for instance – she had clinical depression but she also wanted to punish Ted Hughes.
Brendan O’Neill has a great column about Ellen Page; in case some of you missed it:
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/12/02/we-need-to-talk-about-ellen-page/
He hits on so many of the issues that were bothering me about reactions to this story. All the careful walking on eggshells regarding “deadnaming” and all the advice about the “correct” way to talk about Page. Massive amounts of virtue signaling, everyone falling in line instantly.
It’s so annoying when Brendan is right about something.
Papito #11
I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but 87% of all statistics cited to support an argument are made up on the spot.
Which party is spewing hatred? Well, this post oozes with hatred so… yours.
Where? Where do I ooze hatred? Be specific.
Christ, for a moment I thought that was Skeletor going totally off the rails…
Heh, no, a first-timer, who apparently is not coming back, so more of a drive-by.
Well, they sure showed us, didn’t they.