That’s sense?
The moderate position has been found!
I don’t think that’s especially moderate though.
I really don’t think it’s “moderate” to say that people have a right to be treated as something they’re not. I think it’s pretty much the opposite – I think we all have a right to trust our senses and background knowledge about people, and act accordingly. It may be the case sometimes that a particular woman won’t mind playing along with a man’s claim to be a woman, but that should be up to her. Otherwise – it’s our choice. It’s not the pretender’s choice, it’s ours. It’s our right not to pretend, not their right to make us pretend.
And then the fact claim is highly dubious too. I get it that “trans-women are socially women” is “moderate” compared to “trans women are women,” but it’s still stupid. No, men are not “socially women,” even if they think of themselves that way. Men are playing a game of pretend, and that’s quite far away from “being” something socially.
It may sound easy at first, this treating as such, but if you think about it it isn’t. Social life isn’t like that, interaction isn’t like that, our awareness of other people isn’t like that. We will still know he’s a man. We’ll still know that he didn’t grow up experiencing life as a girl, even if he thinks he did. I just can’t see any way he has a genuine “right” to be treated “as such,” i.e. as socially a woman. He isn’t a woman even socially, because it’s just not that simple.
And Sebastian H. may think it’s rarely important who is physically female and who isn’t, but that’s a luxury men have, isn’t it. I say it damn well is important, and he can take a hike.
As a boy I ofttimes preferred the company of my grandmother and my aunts over that of my grandfather and uncles. I wasn’t treated as if I was a girl though for liking the social company of women, which would have been really weird to me back in the 1960s. The “tension” mentioned by Sebastian H evaporates when you simply let people be who they are, regardless of what sex they are.
Oh, for fuck’s sake, that is the dumbest “middle ground” I’ve heard in a long time.
Here in Toronto during a recent Pride week (or month or season or year or whatever it is now) the trans parade was proudly led — LED, as in, this person was the most celebrated and honoured transgender person among the ten million people in the Golden Horseshoe — by a sixty year old auto mechanic who left his wife and kids to pursue his “transgender” identity full-time: he self-identifies as a five-year-old girl and calls himself “Steph-On-Knee”, as in, he wants to inhabit full-time his sexual fetish of the image of a little girl sitting on his knee, only he wants to pretend he’s the little girl, because of course it’s the fetishistic switcheroo that makes you trans.
That’s not an edge case. That’s a central figure. Literally the star of the parade. Does Sebastian think this auto mechanic “should” be treated “socially” like a little girl?
Setting aside for now the obvious question, what does it mean to treat someone “socially” as a woman to begin with (huh? What would that even look like? Do you want to bring hats back so you can make a show of taking them off in the presence of a translaydee to demonstrate how much of a gentleman you are?), why do these people not comprehend that “trans woman” has become just a stupid identity label that any man can apply to himself for any reason, and which can therefore tell us absolutely nothing of value about the men who claim it?
It was trans allies like Sebastian who insisted there should be no gatekeeping around the word trans. Didn’t they realize it’s gatekeeping around who we apply the word to which gives the word a useful meaning? Take away the gatekeeping and the definition of the word crumbles.
So why, then, do they keep on acting like the term represents a uniform and special class of male-bodied-yet-somehow-vulnerable lady-souls with only a few “edge case” outliers? He didn’t even begin to make an effort to justify why anyone who claims the transgender label “should” be treated in some special way; I’m tired of these men being granted special-passes.
But I don’t want to divert into an argument about who counts as “truly” trans and who’s just “pretending,” because that’s not the right way to look at it. The right way, if you ask me, is to recognize that the reason a man adopts the trans label is ultimately irrelevant. It doesn’t matter how sincerely he wants to be a woman or “feels” like a woman (read: is turned on by the heterosexual sex-role switcheroo), none of this makes him a woman or even “moderately” close to being one. At all.
To my ears, when I hear someone saying transwomen should be treated as women in some way, they might as well be saying redheads should be treated as women in some way. Or Capricorns. It’s totally arbitrary and there’s just no reason for it.
It’s just a mess through-and-through.
When I first heard of this guy, I thought he was a bad parody, a sort of “false flag” designed to discredit trans ideology. Silly me; he really meant it. But to embrace and celebrate this delusional fetishist, who is so clearly and obviously a delusional fetishist? To blow up the credibility of your organization by choosing someone like this sick clown as an exemplar? Holy shit. That’s nuts.
In for a penny, in for a pound I guess. It’s one way of proving your purity of thought that you can demonstrate belief in three impossible things before lunch.
So does that mean we should allow Steph-On-Knee into playgrounds for little girls? Should he be at sleepovers for little girls? It seems to me the logical conclusion, if one takes what TAs say seriously, (I don’t, because I think they make it up as they go along, ad hoc for the current situation they are in), that not to invite him to the kindergarten sleepover would be actual violence.
Sometimes coddling a person’s mental sickness can become dangerous for someone else.
Strange that she blocked you on Twitter but is apparently reading your blog and tweeting comments from it.
It’s very much like with the Trump supporters, isn’t it. It’s tempting to think there has to be some misunderstanding, that nobody’s actually in favor of that stuff, and when they realize what he’s really like they will start walking out in droves. Truth and faith in humanity rarely go well together…
She really doesn’t seem to have made it past adolescence, does she?
The Sebastian H quote was a comment on this blog? Where?
Oh, I see: http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2021/why-wont-you-bitches-compromise/#comment-2855941
What if she identifies as a middle-schooler? It would be actual violence to say that!
This is what I was trying to say in a recent thread. We’ve lost the ability to stick to the argument. The trans ‘movement’ is incredibly distracting and it’s almost impossible to get through a rebuttal of a single argument without being deflected by a new articulated lorryload of insanity hitting you amidships.
Far be it for me to tell people how to activist. I tried that in the olden gnu atheist times and look how that worked out. I can’t even get through a single paragraph without mixing a metaphor, nobody should be listening to me. I mean, “amidships”? Where the fuck did that come from?
But having said all that, what we all need to do is focus a lot more on what we cannot concede. Unapologetically. Irreverently. Rudely. Belligerently. Like a bellicose giant, to steal a phrase from Dawkins. Like people, what is more, who will not take any shit.
I know all of us around here are brilliantly cross and argumentative already, it’s what I love about this place. And the message here could not be clearer: men are not women, women are not men, what the fuck is this non-binary bullshit anyway? But we’re all in danger of losing focus when we argue because of the distracting gew-gaws of fuckbuggery I mentioned before. This is why I miss the brilliant Helen Staniland on Twitter. She was absolutely focused on one particular issue, usually phrased as the question you’ll all be familiar with. No matter what nonsense came her way, she found an entertaining route back to that question. Very effective, that’s why She Had To Go. Me, I’m all over the fucking place, but I learned a lot from Helen. Focus like a laser on your bottom line, on the thing you’re not willing to concede, and your enemies will scamper about it like cats.
You see? Even I can do metaphors when I really try.
In other words, framing (sorry) is important. This is not an argument about rights. Nobody’s rights are in danger. This is because trans people have all the rights the rest of us have anyway and we are absolutely unwilling and unable to compromise on the existing rights of women and homosexuals. We won’t do it. It won’t happen. That’s not the argument and it never has been and never could be, but it’s horrifyingly easy to be sidetracked into arguments about rights anyway.
The argument has to be about what we can concede, and it turns out it’s loads of stuff. We can stop judging the gender non-conforming (come on, even we who consider ourselves more enlightened do it a bit, we can admit it and we can try to stop doing it). We can fight more for acceptance of the gender non-conforming: upset at events where drag queens read to children because of the grotesque and harmful caricature of ‘femininity’ and non-conformance on display? I am, I’m fucking furious about it. But what I do is complain about it instead of setting up more positive events about gender non-conformity.
What I’m saying is that’s the kind of concession we need to make; to be as open to doing things that help people who are lost as we are resolute in not giving up rights and language and free speech. I think we are, but we are easily sidetracked into debates about rights because we are somewhat logical beings who care a great deal about truth. And because we are emotional beings who care a great deal about injustice. We’re easy – in other words – to manipulate.
As I’ve said before, negotiation is about creating options, not about giving away things we don’t want to give away in exchange for not being beaten with a pink baseball bat. Come at me with the bat, trans activists. Come at me. It will not work out well for you and I will not budge one inch. But I will happily work with you and your many, many other enemies to help de-marginalise the non-conforming. I’ll move heaven and fucking earth for that.
Now…. why won’t you work with me to do that, trans activists? It’s a question worthy of Helen.
Hey Arty, good to see you!
I did not know “Steph-On-Knee” had led the Toronto Pride parade (or any other Pride parade). For fuck’s sake.
GW @ 9 – I didn’t realize that comment was from here! First-time commenter, so I didn’t recognize the name.
Sorry, it’s Thought Crime to acknowledge that. Karen White, Jessica Yaniv, and now ‘Steph-on-Knee.’ Even if the latter isn’t a known criminal, to recognize the existence of these is to invalidate the whole oppressed status ‘intersectionalling’ that the TRAs demand.
Ok, what are these “edge cases” where it matters whether or not you’re female?
1.) Women’s bathrooms, changing rooms, showers.
2.) Women’s shelters, crisis centers, therapy groups
3.) Women’s sports
4.) Women’s awards, honors, incentives, and diversity goals
5.) Women’s lesbian spaces.
6.) Other stuff
Oh, there’s controversy here? No matter. That’s the narrow band of uncertainty which we’ll just have to figure out.
Sastra:
I think the important thing is the act of asserting that sex is important only in edge cases. Doing so signals that you are open-minded and level-headed. You’re the adult in the room and mediating between irascible children focused on extremes. Whether there are quite a lot of situations in which one’s sex matters is ultimately irrelevant. What matters is that you’re above the fray.
latsot:
To be precise, don’t judge the gender non-conforming for being non-conforming. That’s the difficult needle to thread, I think: when someone looks ridiculous, they look ridiculous, and a hairy man in a crop top and make-up like a clown’s looks ridiculous. He doesn’t look ridiculous because crop tops and make-up are for women. He’d look just as silly in speedos and a sport coat.
Well, most of us certainly suffer from SIWOTI syndrome.
Now…. why won’t you work with me to do that, trans activists? It’s a question worthy of Helen.
I mean, at this point, that question is easy to answer.
Sastra, you missed one, though of course it can be lumped under “other stuff”. Women’s health. Especially reproductive health, but actually any health care, matters if you are male or female, because our bodies differ enough to make it important. Men are more prone to be color blind or have hemophilia. Women might get endometriosis or cervical cancer.
To me, the insistence on coopting health care into pretending sex doesn’t matter is as important as restrooms, sports, and prisons. All of these things are major areas where sex matters, not edge issues, and they are not rare, as the helpful man implied. People can die. When compromise leads to the potential offering up of your own life as sacrifice, I do not believe it is a reasonable compromise.
[…] a comment by latsot on That’s […]
Caroline Criado-Perez’s excellent book is all about these “edge cases”, of which there are a great many, more than I had ever thought, me being male and all. It was a revelation for sure.
I’ve had entirely too many conversations with people who insist that we really need mixed-sex restrooms, changing facilities, and even sports, we should stop all this silly segregation by sex for pretty much any purpose, we have so many hang-ups. Maybe this is pie-in-the-sky goal for a future truly egalitarian society, but we are extremely far from that right now, and we can’t get there by fiat.
Dr Jane Clare Jones has an excellent response to “equalty feminism” here:
https://mobile.twitter.com/janeclarejones/status/1383342013857239042