Advanced well-poisoning
The Seattle Times has a piece on the campaign to bully the library into canceling the feminist event scheduled for February 1. It’s a classic of the type, in treating The Trans Community as The Oppressed Group and feminist women as the oppressors – not just the oppressors but the obvious oppressors, the eternal oppressors, the everyone knows they’re oppressors oppressors. It’s as if that whole thing where people started to realize that it wasn’t somehow written into the laws of the cosmos that women had to be second-class citizens had never happened.
All the more pathetic since it’s a woman who wrote the piece. This woman:
So…the society is sexist and homophobic and transphobic so the way to deal with that is to make sure that these feminists are not allowed to speak. How does that work exactly?
So let’s look at how she poisons the well.
Community members including transgender locals and trans allies have inundated the Seattle Public Library with calls and emails, asking the library system to cancel an upcoming event hosted by the Women’s Liberation Front— a self-described “radical feminist organization” that has publicly espoused what critics call anti-trans views.
Self-described, meaning, they’re lying, plus the scare quotes, so they’re lying LYING.
And it’s only WoLF that’s given this treatment – there’s no “trans activists have espoused what critics call misogynist views.” We’re told what we must think in that first sentence.
The group’s event, titled “Fighting the New Misogyny: A Feminist Critique of Gender Identity,” is publicized as “a critical analysis of gender identity” that will “make powerful arguments for sex-based women’s rights,” according to the event page. The event, scheduled to be held Feb. 1 in the Microsoft Auditorium at the Seattle Public Library – Central Branch, has placed the library at the center of a firestorm over how it can maintain its commitment to evolving ideas of intellectual freedom, provide access to information for the entire community, and be an inclusive space where all patrons feel safe and welcome.
Because, we are meant to think, the WoLF event will make patrons feel unsafe and unwelcome. But what about women? Does this rush to cancel and silence feminists make women feel safe and welcome?
Marcellus Turner, chief librarian for the Seattle Public Library (SPL), said in a statement that the event request from the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) was initially processed because it was labeled as a women’s-rights talk.
I don’t think that is what he said*, but in any case – it is a women’s rights talk. But Crystal Post wants us to think it isn’t, and that it was “labeled” that as a ruse.
Offensive speech and hate speech are protected under the First Amendment, unless the speech is deemed targeted harassment or to be a threat. However, when the American Library Association (ALA) considered amending its policies to explicitly allow members of hate groups to rent rooms last year, many ALA members pushed back, arguing that hate speech threatens the physical safety and validity of patrons and library staff from marginalized communities.
What are we meant to think? That’s too easy. We are, of course, meant to think that the WoLF event will be all offensive and hate speech.
The Washington Law Against Discrimination (WLAD) prohibits discrimination because of “gender expression or identity,” defined as “having or being perceived as having a gender identity, self-image, appearance, behavior, or expression, whether or not that gender identity, self-image, appearance, behavior, or expression is different from that traditionally associated with the sex assigned to that person at birth.”
We’re meant to think that WoLF will be promoting discrimination because of gender identity.
Library administrators are consulting other libraries, transgender staff and organizations, and with the city’s legal department to determine their next steps, Turner said.
Anything missing? Oh yes, women. Well women are the oppressor, so obviously no need to consult them. Bitches.
The Gender Justice League, a Seattle nonprofit that advocates for gender and sexuality justice, said in a statement they will speak with SPL leadership to help them consider the issue’s complexities.
“The end result of a hate group using the library as a venue to ‘critique’ the existence of a minority group creates a hostile environment and is unacceptable,” they wrote.
But it’s not a hate group.
WoLF is not listed as a hate group in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s extensive documentation of such groups in the U.S. However, WoLF has frequently been referred to by others as a hate group or trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) group, including in an online editorial for Out Magazine by Chase Strangio, the deputy director for transgender justice with the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBT & HIV Project.
Here, have some more poison for that well.
Then she does give WoLF and Meghan two whole paragraphs to say WoLF is not a hate group and that “TERF” is an offensive and dangerous label. Then it’s back to well-poisoning.
Tobi Hill-Meyer, co-executive director of the Gender Justice League, says the League characterizes WoLF as a hate group because “their stated purpose is to critique the existence of trans people and in this current climate that’s a serious threat.”
No their purpose is not to “critique” anyone’s existence. That’s a venomous canard meant to nudge people into thinking gender critics want trans people dead, which is not the case.
According to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the dehumanization of transgender people and anti-trans stigma intertwines with racism, sexism, and marginalization to create higher risks of violence against trans people.
But, again, “dehumanization” is irrelevant. It’s not the goal. Saying men are not women is not dehumanizing. Refusing to let men speak for women is not dehumanizing. Refusing to let men pretend they can speak for women by claiming to be women is not dehumanizing.
There’s a lot more of the same; I’m tired of it.
*Updating to add: I was wrong, he did say that.
A nonprofit group called the Women’s Liberation Front made a booking last month for space at the Central Library to hold a private event labeled as a women’s rights talk and presentation.
Of course, it was labeled as that because that’s what it is, but anyway, Post did quote him accurately.
At Reason, Eugene Volokh comments on the Seattle Times article from a legal perspective:
The Washington statute against gender identity discrimination should be irrelevant here; it can’t override the First Amendment, so the library can’t justify viewpoint discrimination on the grounds that it was just following state law.
Once more, the conflation of sex and gender. Women are oppressed because they are smaller and weaker than men; this is because of their sex, their anatomy, and their chromosomes, not because of their self-identification. These are fully different things. I self-identify as who I present myself to be; that is not the same as how the world views me, and it is not the same as the sex I was born (not assigned).
As far as I’m concerned, men should be allowed to wear dresses to their heart’s content. Make up, earrings, sexy shoes, bras. Go for it. But don’t think that makes you a woman.
Women should be allowed to wear trousers, even trousers with pockets, even trousers with (gasp) back pockets. They should be allowed to climb trees, stare through microscopes, run marathons, and remain single. Go for it. But don’t think that makes you a man.
The problem isn’t that people are born in the wrong body. That isn’t possible. You are born in your body. It is neither right nor wrong, it simply is. The problem is that society conflates certain behaviors with certain body types, and people accept that conflation as though it were physically, chemically, and biologically set in stone (or at least in DNA). People believe there is some crucial difference between female brains and male brains. They believe there is some difference in capability of men and women (and there is when it applies to muscle mass or size, but brain capacity? Evidence doesn’t support that). People believe because they have been taught to believe, because these beliefs have been reinforced by a steady drumbeat of movies, music, books, plays, paintings, and legal establishments. Not to mention, religions. They don’t realize their attitudes have been built by manipulating the images; they believe they have developed them through observation of real women, and have no concept that the women they see on the screen may be 180⁰ from the women they see in life, because they are conditioned to see women behaving in particular ways, so they interpret the women they see in real life through the lens they have been conditioned to see.
Trans people are not the opposite sex; they are people who like the things commonly associated with the opposite sex. GCFs have long tried to break that wall down, and were having some successes. Now trans ideology is building it back up – women in this box, men in that box. Oh, yes, and non-binary, which seems to be someone who is so confused they don’t know whether they are a man or a woman, usually because they again conflate sex with gender, and don’t realize they are either a man or a woman (unless intersex), but have behaviors and preferences associated with both sexes. In short, they are like the rest of us, but somehow special enough to claim a term to give them some sort of minority status, even though they are just like everyone else.
If you have trouble understanding this, repeat after me: I was not assigned my sex at birth, it was observed. I am the sex that my body decrees. Gender is not about wearing high heels and make up or trousers and short hair. Gender is a social construct; sex is not a social construct. We are all non-binary. A man cannot be a woman.
It is not dehumanizing to call a man a man, unless one believes that somehow men are not human.
There it is again. That word, homophobic, as always, right at transpbobia’s side. It makes me increasingly uncomfortable to see it there. Upset even. I’ve been trying to collect my thoughts on why that is. It’s something like this:
Is this how they felt about gay rights? Is this how they felt about us? It scares me a little.
I thought society came to accept gays because they thought hard and came to truly understand in a deep sense what homosexuality is: namely, an immutable trait, not a choice, not a danger to society, etc.
But the way people are reacting to the trans agenda, and directly analogizing it to gay rights, indicates that the real lesson they learned from the gay rights movement wasn’t to listen, learn and understand, but merely to bury any doubts or discomfort deep inside and attack anyone who raises any issues or expresses any concerns.
It’s true that in the case of gay rights, it turns out most (though not all*) concerns about gay rights activism didn’t have any legitimate merit — they were merely “moral disgust in drag” (as Jane Clare Jones put it). But we figured that out by listening to people who spoke up with concerns and holding those concerns up to scrutiny — where they (mostly) failed to pass muster.
That’s a process that isn’t happening with trans activism. And it makes me feel like maybe nobody really did hold their concerns or discomfort about gays up to scrutiny but instead were merely conditioned to feel guilty for having discomfort in the first place, and that they had a moral obligation to suppress those thoughts. Here I’ve been thinking I’m living in a world where homophobia has been eradicated on the Left by the triumph of rational argument, and it’s looking more and more like it’s merely been suppressed on the Left by social pressure.
The trans rights agenda really is nothing like gay rights, and there are legitimate problems with it. I would have thought the left would gladly be pointing that out — making use of that rational thinking stuff that worked so well for gay rights, to expose the problems with trans activism, and strengthen everyone’s rights — women, gays and lesbians, and transsexuals. But all I’m seeing over and over again is a message that goes something like, “they gays taught us we’re supposed to shut up and be good allies no matter how we feel, and now we have to do the same for trans people.”
That’s not a healthy or stable basis for maintaining our rights. If those attitudes aren’t truly felt, but merely enforced by social norms, whats going to happen in a crisis where social norms are weakened? Global warming, economic or political strife? If gay and trans acceptance is only skin-deep, they will be the first things to go. Trans activism should be welcoming more debate, more critical inquiry, to strengthen everyone’s understanding of transsexuals’ rightful place in society.
*Pedophiles latched onto the gay rights movement; it’s a good thing critics had space to call the movement out for harboring them, and the movement eventually got its act together and pushed the pedophiles out. That’s a good example of how open dialogue led to a stronger, better gay rights movement.
Artymorty, I have the same response seeing sexism there, but then, I’ve always suspected that a lot of people on the left were just in the mode of, hey, it’s not okay to be sexist, so I’ll shut up about inferior ladies, but they retained the same sense of male entitlement that they always had. This is why it’s still so hard for us to become unhyphenated – I’m a woman-scientist, a woman-playwright, a woman-professor, a woman-writer, a woman-whatever-I-do. Same with black rights. I talk to a lot of people who seem to be repressing what they really feel because it’s not considered socially acceptable, and would make them feel like a bad person. So, yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if that is the case with gay rights, as well.
That’s why the young man I work with, a liberal politically, has no problems telling me how it really is for women, and how it really was to be a woman in the 1980s (he wasn’t born until 1992; I was in my 20s in the 1980s, surely old enough to be considered a woman). That’s why he is able to explain how Black Lives Matter is important, yes, but they just go too damn far. And MeToo, the same way. Because he still holds a lot of repressive opinions, but he has managed to stifle them long enough to consider that his views are rational and considered, not the result of a lifetime of white male entitlement. (I don’t say hetero, because I do not know his sexuality, and because he has never opined on gay rights, so at this point, I don’t know if that is relevant).
It’s like we put a coat of paint on a rusty old vehicle, declared it shiny and new, and started driving it again. Now it’s about to fall apart because of the rot underneath the paint.
I’m beginning to think that NB’s are cake havers/eaters. They want all the positive bits associated with being mle (when it suits) and female (when it suits), but without the hard work and opprobium associated with being gender critical.
Especially when the definition of “transphobia” is increasingly taken to include the very thing that makes someone “homosexual” (at least while female) in the first place (i.e. being attracted to people of the same physical sex, and not just anyone who thinks or feels a certain way, uses certain words to refer to themselves etc.)
And what could it even mean to say that people are sexually attracted to others on the basis of the labels they use for themselves? The whole idea is incoherent. I’m not saying that everyone is attracted to the same qualities, but certainly we attracted to actual things? And not to pronouns or hidden, secret gender identities that are distinct from people and their physical bodies.
How to associate “transphobia” with “sexism” —
“Gender identity is innate and it’s what makes someone a man or woman.”
“I don’t think so. Biological sex is what makes someone a man or woman. ‘Gender’ involves cultural norms, expectations, and stereotypes.”
“Not at all. Many trans women hate ‘girly’ things, for example, and are very ‘butch.’”
“Then what made them believe they were women in the first place?”
“AH HA! Sexist!”
Probably not that far off the mark.
As for associating it with “ homophobia,” a lot of the TRAs I’ve talked with don’t seem to believe that a refusal to count trans women as women ( or trans men as men) could have its roots in anything other than a sense of disgust. “They’re not normal so you hate them.”
The Christian fundamentalist-radical feminist alliance is up there with the atheist-radical Muslim alliance beloved by Christian fundamentalists.
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