So callous and hurtful
Andrew Sullivan has form.
It’s not “pointless” to call male athletes who are displacing female athletes in female competitions “male,” because that’s what they are and because it gives them an advantage over females that everyone used to know was in fact an advantage. It’s not some random thing to call them, it’s the whole issue, and it’s certainly not pointless, it is exactly the point.
And it’s not “offensive” unless you buy into the whole silly narrative about being “in the wrong body” or having “a woman’s soul in a man’s body” or having “known she was a girl since she picked up a doll at age two weeks.” It’s the silly narrative that’s offensive, not the refusal to echo it.
And there’s nothing “accurate” about “trans female.” Male people are not any kind of female, so the only “accurate” word to put in front of “female” would be “not.”
And it’s not the women who are being bullied and shunned who are being “callous and hurtful.” It’s the male people who rob them of athletic prizes and the people who cheer on this unfair dishonest trick who are being callous and hurtful.
And saying male people are male people is not a slur, much less a “hurtful slur.” We might better ask why everyone rushes to be so melodramatically concerned about the hurt feelings of males who are hell-bent on invading women’s spaces and sports and scholarships and everything else they can grab.
Women are people too, Mr. Sullivan.
It’s important to call them males, so they jury gets a clear picture of the situation. Calling them “she” or “female” or anything else that includes the idea that they are girls plants the idea that they are just another kind of girl. That could make it impossible for them to convince a jury they are harmful to girl’s sports.
Maybe we should just rename sports competitions to with and without penises regardless of gender. That should solve the problem at least for high school athletes.
Found this in my feed today, being IWD and all, quite appropriate.
Even if I could accept that pretending that “trans women” were women was OK, I would still refuse to call them female, which clearly describes their sex, not about how they self-identify.
On Twitter, Sullivan himself agreed with someone who called treating transwomen as if they were women, and trans men as if they were men, a “polite fiction” which is “ one of the gazillion civilities required for a compassionate, decent and open society to thrive.” But it’s serious overreach when they insist they really are women and men.
A court case is definitely a situation where “polite fictions” have no place. As Iknklast points out, whether they’re fictions or not is the whole point. I’m sure Sullivan holds controversial opinions he doesn’t press in company, but writes about anyway, clearly and honestly. “Male” and “female” are not slurs, as if the trans identified runners were being called “trannies” or “degenerates.” They’re clear, and they’re honest.
The thing about treating transwomen as if they were women, and trans men as if they were men, is that it’s pretty simple most of the time, because we generally treat people as people. We don’t officially have Special Ways for each sex, however much our behavior may be influenced by implicit bias and all that. Unofficially we probably do vary somewhat, without necessarily intending to, but it’s mostly pretty subtle. It would seem very odd if it were otherwise. There are cultures – I’m told Japan is one – where there really are formal rules that dictate different language and manners for each sex, but the Anglosphere isn’t that, on the whole. Holding doors, helping off with coats? I don’t think so. One holds doors when it would be awkward or rude not to, one helps off with a coat when someone is struggling; I don’t think sex makes much difference to those any more.
So, sure, I can treat transwomen as if they were women, and trans men as if they were men, because all that requires is Nothing.
I’m reminded of that video interview of Arty Morty now, in which he (a gay man) muses (among other things) about the polite fiction of referring to MtF trans persons as “she” back in the day when the language was “transsexual” not “transgender”, despite the fact that “even they knew that they were male” (or something very near that–I am recalling from memory), and how he strenuously objects to the newfound approach of insisting that they are, in fact, female.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5kCAFwEjks
Also, Andrew Sullivan is infuriatingly slow to come around on any issue that involves women. I mean, FFS, the man supported waterboarding of suspected terrorists without a second thought, back in the day, and it took actually undergoing waterboarding himself for him to change his mind on whether or not the practice were torture or not, but anytime there is any question of rights for woman or some feminist issue he suddenly has a raft of questions that trouble him and insists upon proceeding slowly, and with caution.
I don’t think (though I may be wrong) that Andrew S supported waterboarding or torture of any kind, though he was certainly foolishly & unpleasantly wrong in his support for war with Iraq, asserting that anyone who opposed it was essentially a left-wing trendy. The idea that anyone could oppose it for good realistic reasons, as I did, seemed beyond his comprehension, since he had worked himself up into such a state of frothing rage. (That eager emotional falling for some foolish idea that seems to him ‘morally right’ is AS’s great & fundamental failing as a ‘thinker’, and I wrote to him at the time, asking why I should trust him when he indulged in this sort of myopic, emotional behaviour.) And, as I recall, it was not Andrew S who got himself waterboarded, but Christopher Hitchens, who, again, despite being gung-ho for war with Iraq (and thoroughly unpleasant with it), was definitely not in favour of torture and got himself waterboarded so that he could explain what it was like and present a better case against it.
I know the type. It’s a very odd thing, to suddenly fall off a cliff into irrational certainty about the evil of left-wing trendies (when you were one yourself ten minutes ago) and start shouting as fact things you merely guess at. Kind of Dwight Shrute crossed with Joe McCarthy.
But Nothing is not enough. It never is. It has to be a Special Nothing with whipped cream, and a cherry on top. LOOK AT MY GOLD LAME HANDBAG GODDDAMMIT! TIMs aren’t just any women, they’re brave and stunning in their womaningliness, they’re better at womaning than plain, old, boring, real women, and don’t you forget it.
Tim Harris, #8:
If memory serves, he didn’t so much support waterboarding as refused to believe that it is a form of torture. His attitude was along the lines of c’mon, how bad can it be?. So somebody offered to waterboard him, Sullivan agreed and very quickly changed his mind about it being a form of torture.
Well, all I can say, is that if my memory serves, and if what came up on my Googling ‘Andrew Sullivan on waterboarding’ is correct, AS was consistently against waterboarding and other forms of torture from the beginning. I think people are confusing him with Christopher Hitchens, who begun by suggesting that waterboarding wasn’t really torture but then tried it himself (there are videos of him being waterboarded available on the internet) and decided after the experience that it quite definitely was torture.
Of course the major trouble with this thinking is that if indeed it takes Sullivan actually experiencing a thing to agree that it is in fact real and bad, then women will never ever win him over, because he cannot be a woman.
Tim Harris@#8:
You’re right, it was Hitchens that I was thinking of, not Sullivan. I was reading them both during that time, and had slotted them both into the same category in my mind due to their support for the war. It was definitely Hitchens who poo-pooed the idea that waterboarding could be torture; I seem to recall him sneering something along the lines of “how bad could a little water up the nose be”. But then we know how accurate my recollections are, now. At any rate, Hitchens did definitely change his mind on that point, quite vehemently, once he’d undergone the procedure.
That being said, Sullivan has still been exceedingly slow to admit any kind of possible damage to women’s rights as a result of pro-trans legal lobbying. Back when he was writing a daily blog I emailed him a rather scathing retort about something along these lines, and to his credit he published it. Along with his line-by-line self-justifications, to be sure, but he still published it. Since then his ideas have continued to (slowly) evolve, and I have again emailed him asking him why he continues to be so slow in the face of very obvious assaults on the rights of female athletes. It’s not that I mind slowness in general, it’s just that Sullivan picks and chooses what he’s going to be slow about.
(Full disclosure: I subscribe to Sullivan’s weekly email, which is a shorter/condensed version of his former blog. I may disagree with the man a lot, but at least I’m not in a total echo chamber if I read his stuff. For now.)
Yes, I’m glad that this has been cleared up. And I think I recall that AS has come out against trans-women in women’s sports, in that same weekly e-mail that I also subscribe to, though he hasn’t addressed, I think, other of the issues with pro-trans legal lobbying you draw attention to. What worries me is that the Democratic Party seems to be moving supporting the whole panoply of ‘trans-rights’, which is surely politically very stupid in addition to being morally questionable – and in the long run, I suspect, untenable as the reaction against the relegation of women to people who need not be listened to grows stronger. They are merely giving the Republicans a very large stick with which to beat them in the ‘culture wars’, and, more important, preventing a proper discussion of the issues involved by simply giving in to the trans-rhetoric and supposing without addressing the issues that they are morally correct to do so. The Republicans also feel morally correct in doing the opposite, and see it also as an issue for exploitation..
Tim Harris – so right, and the other thing is that, with the right standing up for the rights of women to private spaces, they are in a position when the dust settles of being able to dictate policy on women..which is as horrifying as having the trans lobby dictate policy on women.
Either way, women lose. What else is new?