A wave of intense backlash
Also in Trans Activists Hell Bent On Expelling Everyone Who Fails To Endorse The Dogma:
Dave Chappelle’s latest Netflix special is facing a wave of intense backlash after the comedian once again made jokes directed toward the LGBTQ+ community and defended the author JK Rowling, who has been previously accused of transphobia.
“Who has been previously accused,” says Maya Yang sanctimoniously.
Journalism needs to do a better job on this. Lots of people have been “previously accused of transphobia,” because journalists and others don’t hold these accusers to account. They don’t insist on a clear and exact definition of “transphobia,” so what they get is just 17 trillion venomous accusations which don’t mean anything. We’re all accused of “transphobia” as long as we don’t echo every stupid syllable of the Tranz Gospel while putting money in the plate. The reality is that none of it is “transphobia”; what it is is a rejection of the idiotic new dogma and the commands to forget all about sex because now it’s only “gender” that counts, and what gender is is whatever you want it to be, darling, provided you’re not one of those horrible transphobes we need to exclude for the sake of inclusion.
In The Closer, which premiered on Tuesday on Netflix, Chappelle declared himself a trans-exclusionary radical feminist (Terf) alongside Rowling. “They canceled JK Rowling – my God. Effectually she said gender was fact, the trans community got mad as shit, they started calling her a Terf … I’m team Terf,” the comedian said in the special, which is one of the most watched pieces of content on the streaming site.
“Gender is a fact. Every human being in this room, every human being on Earth, had to pass through the legs of a woman to be on Earth. This is a fact,” Chappelle added, before saying that “trans women’s” genitalia are “not quite what it is”.
He means sex is a fact, but anyway, yes. Gender shmender blender, but women do the heavy lifting when it comes to keeping the supply of humans going.
Netflix subscribers have urged the streaming platform to take down the special, with the National Black Justice Coalition saying, “With 2021 on track to be the deadliest year on record for transgender people in the United States … Netflix should know better. Perpetuating transphobia perpetuates violence.”
See? It’s the magic expanding suitcase of “transphobia.” Saying that men don’t gestate human beings isn’t transphobia, it’s reality.
Now arguably saying it with irritation (as I just did) is a kind of transphobia, but it’s a narrow kind that also needs to be spelled out as opposed to assumed. A lot of us do say it with irritation, it’s true, but that’s because it’s 1. bullshit and 2. harmful, and because we’re not allowed to say so. It’s bullshit the way religion is bullshit, the way reincarnation is bullshit, the way the claim that there’s a magical race of beings hiding behind a planet is bullshit, the way recovered memory is bullshit. Claiming that physical sex is trivial and meaningless and that what determines who is a woman and who is a man is what’s inside each person’s head is peak bullshit, and if we can’t tell irritable jokes about it…well then we’ll just tell more irritable jokes about it.
Yang goes on to report more complaints and protests and argle bargle, while not saying anything about objections to the complaints etc etc, merely quoting Chapelle complaining about them and then giving another complainer the last word. Not exactly a balanced piece of reporting.
‘Peak bullshit’: that’s one for the books, by which I mean the texts for Bullshitology 101; while singing ‘Climb Every Mountain.’ And don’t worry, Hollywood will soon be nosing round. Best secure the rights.
The special was ranked #4 on Netflix last night… I think it’s probably getting a lot more views than these nebulous ” Netflix subscribers” constitute.
You know what they say about people who can’t take a joke…
JKR wasn’t cancelled by the way, it was a failed attempt. They only wish they had. :P
If only the author of this piece showed half the empathy and compassion that Chappelle showed in his performance…
I can hear them now. He said every person had to come to life through the legs of a woman! He’s claiming that women who have Caesarean’s aren’t women! He’s excluding a whole class of women from womanhood! Which is, of course, bullshit, but they will stoop much lower than that…have, in fact.
I get it now…! TERFS and the like come into the world through the legs of a woman, or at least, from the womb of one, while transgender people come via the legs of a gender. Hence trans… gender..! A bit like Count Dracula, who came from Transylvania: the land beyond the forest.
Eureka..! Now I see…! Now I understand…! WHAT A RELIEF..!!
As I’ve said before, “gender” as social/amorphous stuff is not normal usage. It is a term of art, and acting as though it is not makes one utter what seem to everyone else to be absurdities. Correcting people’s use of “gender” meaning sex rather than to mean social/whatever is no more reasonable and no less silly than “correcting” people’s use of “complexity” to speak of how intricate and complicated something is rather than its computational time requirements, or their use of “accidental” to refer to the unintentional rather than the unnecessary and non-essential, or their use of “synthetic” to mean artificial rather than reality supervenience.
Using the genderists’ language is half the problem. We ought take Timothy Snyder’s advice from On Tyranny and not use our opponents’ language. We already reject their alternative meanings for pronouns, women, men, etc. The ultimate rejection is of the terminology at the core of their ideology.
Thanks iknklast for that comment. I was wondering if he knew about caesarians. Two of my six grandchildren were born that way. The last one almost was, but they managed to get her into the correct position just in time. Until then she thought it would be fun to come out sideways.
Nullius, yes, this business of completely divorcing gender from sex is a novel and still barely artificial usage, though it is becoming inlain into the minds and tongues of younger generations. I recall when the feminist argument was that “gender” meant sex-as-applied-to-people, whereas simply referring to people by their sex was dehumanising. Now gender has become unmoored from…well, anything, really, and sex continues to be dehumanising.
Also, I thought Clifford’s “Space Jews” joke was the most subversive and in some sense the most brave, as it was not couched in his own personal testimony to engender sympathy and understanding in the way he anchored his trans set piece.
On Women’s Hour today there was a Karen Ingala Smith, co-founder of Femicide Census and Chief Exec of Nia, a charity that runs services for women and girls who have been subjected to sexual and domestic violence and abuse. She would like the murder of women to be described as “femicide” to distinguish it as a particular kind of murder.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00106k1
Around 39:00
Presenter:- What does femicide make clear? What does the word define that other words don’t?
Karen:- Femicide is not just homicide against women, it’s understanding how and why women are killed and how this is difference to the circumstances in which when men are killed and understanding that is really an important step to take to ending men’s violence against women.
Presenter: So addressing gender motivated violence against women has to start with recognising the fact that it is gender-motivated.
Karen:- Well I would say that it was motivated by sex inequality and sex differences. I think it’s important that we don’t use the word gender when we mean sex because gender is something different.
Presenter: (agreeing hmhm)
Karen: I think it is motivated by misogyny and different power between women and men and sex inequality.
Presenter then asks her to talk about femicide and a rational discussion follows.
I wonder how many letters of complaint there will be about this hurtful exclusion of trans women from femicide.
@NIV # 8:
Would you therefore have no problem with all references to “sex” replaced with the word “gender” in law and politics?
I understand the point that the distinction between “gender” and “sex” is recent and perhaps artificial. But “gender” is an overloaded term (Stock describes four different definitions), and “sex” is much less overloaded. I don’t see a problem with trying to clarify the distinctions between definitions by using “sex” (where appropriate) instead of “gender”, even if the argument “gender is different from sex” isn’t strictly accurate. Similarly, I don’t see a problem with encouraging the use of “gender identity” (where appropriate) instead of “gender”. Ditto for “sex-based stereotypes” where that’s the intended reference. Perhaps all non-linguistic uses of “gender” can be challenged or modified in this manner.
Perhaps, instead of saying “they don’t mean gender, they mean sex”, people should say “they are confusing sex with gender identity” or “they want to supplant sex with gender identity”. But I don’t object to the original phrasing; I see it as suggesting clearer language, not quibbling about definitions.
Sackbut #13 wrote:
But the trans activists and the theory they’re working from usually distinguish between “gender” and “gender identity,” with the first one involving the socially-constructed assumptions regarding men and women which change according to place and time, and the second one meaning an immutable, innate sense of being a man, woman, both, or neither, which is formed in the womb.
The thing is, they gain major traction by defining words multiple ways. The public tends not to notice — and I suspect they have problems noticing it themselves. Sometimes “gender” means sex, other times it means stereotypes, and other times it means identity — as long as it refers to “man” and “woman.” It’s a sloppy, muddled blurring of distinctions which the gender critical need to call out and keep straight, if we wish to retain sex-based rights and a workable definition of “feminism” involving distinct underlying concepts.
I think the last thing we should be doing is participating in their word-swaps.
@Sastra,
I agree they gain traction by defining words multiple ways. In particular, “gender”. That’s why I was suggesting we use anything BUT “gender”. Say “sex”, “gender identity”, “sex-based stereotypes”, NOT “gender”.
I just don’t object to doing this by saying “They don’t mean gender, they mean sex/identity/stereotypes/etc”, as if they are using a “wrong” word instead of an overloaded less-clear one.
@Sackbut #15:
I’m not sure how we can accept the words “gender identity” and “transgender” while throwing out the word “gender.” Not only is it going to run into us muddling concepts (akin to defining “woman” as “an adult human female but ‘female’ doesn’t mean anything “) but I would think it would just lead us into trouble.
“I’m transgender.”
“That means you identify as the opposite sex.”
“No, never. I identify as the opposite GENDER.”
“No you don’t. No such thing.
vs.
“I’m transgender.”
“What is ‘gender?’ And which meaning is used in ‘gender identity?’”
I don’t know. Maybe it gets to the same place.
I watched the special last night. I was vaguely aware going in of the controversy.
My overall impression was that (1) it wasn’t all that funny, certainly not by Chappelle’s standards; (2) certainly there were some lines in there that I would not endorse, and that are a little blunter/ruder/whatever than they need to be; and (3) within the context of a comedy routine, it doesn’t strike me as out of line.
I tend to judge the “appropriateness” of comedy by an intermediate standard. I don’t believe in the “anything goes” (or “anything goes as long as it’s funny”) school of thought. But I also don’t think it makes sense to judge a comic doing a performance for people who have paid to see it by the same standard that you would judge people in other settings.
As for the Guardian article, it’s a classic example of how the faux-objective “view from nowhere” style of journalism can be used to push a viewpoint without being honest about what it’s doing. There’s the “has been accused” formulation noted in the OP; there’s also the use of quotes from activists and unnamed internet “users” to make arguments that the reporter isn’t allowed to put in her own words. Consider this excerpt:
Yang clearly wants to say that she thinks Chappelle’s statement is bullshit, but that would be “editorializing,” so instead she finds a mouthpiece to provide the rebuttal she wants to make.
It’s also very much a non-sequitur, too. Intersectionality cuts both ways, as Chappelle pointed out in the special (though he didn’t use that term). LGBTQ+ people can be racist just as easily as a Black man can be transphobic; if Chappelle’s race doesn’t immunize him from charges of transphobia, then why is the LGBTQ+ community exempt from his accusation that Black comedians are being treated unfairly?
I also find it interesting that The Guardian article leaves out a big part of Chappelle’s discussion of trans issues. Specifically, he tells the story (and I’m curious to know how much of this can be confirmed; comedians do exaggerate, so I take this all with a lot of salt) of how he befriended an aspiring trans woman comic; he had her open for him at a show in San Francisco. She defended him on Twitter when he was previously accused of transphobia, and the activists piled on to her. Shortly after, she killed herself.
Again, I don’t know how much of that story is true, and Chappelle himself says he doesn’t know why she killed herself. But given how frequently the “you can’t say this or else trans people will kill themselves” trope is invoked in these discussions, it seems worth noting when a trans woman apparently killed herself shortly after being the subject of a TRA Twitter mob. It would also be fair to note that “one of my best friends was trans” is not any better a defense than the old “some of my best friends are black.” But I don’t think that was the point Chappelle was making with that story.
I think I see what Sackbut means, to avoid using the word “gender” stand-alone, but we can be clear by combining the word “gender” with other words:
• “Gender identity” is an explanation in psychology, like “phlogiston”, “caloric”, and the “luminiferous aether” in physics. I lump them together because I do not believe the theory that everyone has a “gender identity” (because the existence of “cisgender identity” seems unfalsifiable).
• “Gender roles and stereotypes” are social constructs that some people want to overthrow.
• “Gender Dysphoria” (GD) is a working name for a real dysphoria. I am not totally happy using it, but insurance companies use it (e.g. to say when puberty blockers are “medically necessary” i.e. covered).
I’ll add this for discussion, because I am not sure about this point of grammar. I see people use the word “gender” stand-alone as a noun. But the phrase “gender identity” uses the word “gender” to say what kind of “identity” the phrase means. So there seems to be “gender” as a noun and “gender” as an adjective. This is another indication of confusion to avoid. My point is not to ban “gender” as a word, but to define terms or phrases (as I do in my personal bullet points above).
@Sastra:
Absolutely, and by not merely allowing but reinforcing the trans sense(s) of “gender”, we participate in the very confusion that they exploit. Their word swapping project began decades ago, and well meaning people participated in it, perhaps because the idea of deconstructing biological reality was utterly inconceivable.
All? No. Some non-zero, potentially large number? Sure.
We have two words for a reason. We say “gender” so as to avoid the perceived coarseness of “sex’, or to avoid confusion of the comedic sort. (E.g., Answering the question, “Sex?” We might say, “Female,” but we also might say, “Yes, please.”) We use “sex” in some compounds and “gender” in others for the same reason: not because the words don’t refer to the same thing, but for precision and politeness. Sex roles and gender roles refer to different things; not because sex and gender are different things, but because compounds of synonyms are (often) not synonymous in English.
This is to say that not not all instances of a word can be simply replaced with a synonym. The classic example is, “Hesperus is Phosphorus,” which conveys a synthetic truth. Replacing all instances of one name with its counterpart yields, “Hesperus is Hesperus,” which states an analytic a priori truth.
Some instances of “sex” must be so for clarity. Some instances of “gender” must be so for clarity. Some instances of either can be swapped for the other without destroying or confusing meaning.