Kinder about gender
Basic fairness in reporting the issue? Oh don’t be silly, that would never do.
She means “not all men are rapists,” not “all men aren’t rapists” which is a far broader claim (wouldn’t you think journalists of all people would get that right?), but that pales next to the hostile hyperbole of the next clause. Who the hell claims that trans women should be regarded as walking sex offenders?!
So let’s read Sarah Baxter on being kinder.
The author of the Harry Potter novels has frequently been damned as a snooty elitist for being pro-Labour and anti-Brexit and for turning Dumbledore gay.
What? It’s snooty and elitist to be pro-Labour? What universe is this exactly?
At any rate, she goes on to explain about Rowling and That Tweet.
[S]he has also been denounced as a bitch, trash, Terf (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) and worse, for concluding her tweet with the words, “But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? #IStandWithMaya”.
By sex, Rowling didn’t mean bonking, but the sex into which you are born — or, as the transgender movement would have it, into which you are “assigned” at birth but that might not represent the real you. There are few more divisive issues. The novelist nobly flung herself into a pit of seething abuse in defence of Maya Forstater, 45, a tax expert who lost her job at the Centre for Global Development think tank over “offensive and exclusionary” language. Or, in Forstater’s words, for arguing firmly that “men cannot change into women”.
Tribunal, judge, ruling.
“It is a core component of her belief that she will refer to a person by the sex she considered appropriate even if it violates their dignity and/or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment,” he said. “The approach is not worthy of respect in a democratic society.”
Of course I back Rowling and “stand with Maya” on the grounds of free speech. It was preposterous of Tayler to pronounce so blithely on what is or isn’t respectful in a democratic society.
In fairness, Forstater has stated that she would “respect anyone’s self-definition of their gender identity in any social and professional context”. That alone suggests to me that she was unfairly dismissed. But she has frequently engaged in disputes on social media that have shed more heat than light on transgender issues. I can see why she might have got up the noses of more courteous colleagues.
That’s a swift turnaround. On the one hand she’s right and I stand with her of course, on the other hand I’ll just condemn her anyway.
The ferocious trans wars echo the debates of the 1980s, when some feminists insisted that all men were rapists. Yes, there are perverts out there, but I don’t regard every trans woman as a walking sex offender, as Forstater appears to.
Ah so that’s how it’s done. You make shit up and attribute it to the person you want to trash even though you concede that she’s right. Forstater “appears” to do no such thing, and it’s shit journalism to pretend she does.
And how does Baxter attempt to back up that absurd claim? By quoting someone else and attributing the quotation to Maya. Maya has told her she didn’t say it, and told her who did, and Baxter has apologized, but the piece has not been corrected.
“Pronouns are Rohypnol,” she once claimed, referring to the date-rape drug. “They change our perception, lower our defences . . . alter the reality in front of us. They numb us. They confuse us. They remove our instinctive safety responses. They work.”
Except that she didn’t.
But did she correct the article? No she did not.
Posting a comment under the article is not the same thing as correcting THE MISTAKE in the article.
But hey, everybody be kinder, yeah?
And actually, that quote isn’t totally wrong, anyway. As we’ve discussed here before, they do lower our defenses and change the reality in front of us. By making people think of the trans as women, by calling them she, they allow a male-bodied person to take on the characteristics of a smaller, less muscular person, a person historically oppressed (and continuing to be a protected minority). They sound safer, less threatening. And they add to statistics on women and violent crime, because there are some trans women that are sex offenders, that are domestic abusers, that have committed violent crimes of all sorts – and those crimes are now listed under women’s statistics apparently even when the individual committed the crimes before transitioning to female because to do otherwise is to “dead name”, to “misgender”, to “commit actual violence”.
Oh, I think the quoted bit is flat-out true, don’t get me wrong.
My understanding is that concern about trans women being predators is minimal, and pales in comparison with the concern that once it becomes common and accepted for male people (who may or may not have made any effort to “pass” as female) to enter female ‘safe spaces,’ then it will be easy for male predators who aren’t trans to enter at will.
The two main arguments levied against this are that 1.) that’s not likely to happen and 2.) so what? Why punish trans people for what men do? The first one seriously underestimates the determination of predators, and the second one could be thrown right back at them, in several ways.
When theists would complain that they had no problem with what atheists were basically saying, but had serious problems with the way they were saying it (“Why can’t you be KIND?”) I would ask them to role model the KIND way to say the thing they had no problem with. Their responses always subtly changed the thing they had no problem with. I think I’d ask the same of those who want the gender critical case put forth without rudeness. Show me how.
“…the 1980s, when some feminists insisted that all men were rapists.” Which ones were those, then? Is this the hoary old misrepresentation of Andrea Dworkin, and/or Susan Brownmiller? (Is it redundant to say “hoary old”? Maybe definitionally, but I seem to encounter “hoary old” a lot more than just “hoary” by itself.)
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Okay, now I am thinking that a charitable reading of what Baxter wrote is not “some feminists insisted that all men have committed the act of rape”, but rather, “some feminists insisted that all men are accomplices in the social institution of rape”. I don’t know, I have just seen this simplistic reduction of feminism from that period so many times, it’s wearisome.
Ah, you’re a pedant after me own heart, Ophelia. That syntactic distinction is on my list of pet peeves.
It’s AWFUL. How can people not see the difference?
I think it’s a syntactical short-circuit that can happen when contractions are involved.
I know! It’s so fecking obvious, it makes me weep for the future.
Just like when people say something like, “Irregardless, I could care less, because for all intensive purposes it’s a doggy dog world so we literally need to hold down the fort.”
If there’s any kind of speech that needs to be policed …
How did she get from the “pronouns are Rohypnol” article to “she’s saying every transwoman is a walking sex offender”, anyway? Did she read it as claiming pronouns are literally rape? Not lowering defenses and changing perceptions in a sneaky and dangerous way, but literally rape?
I suppose if “misgendering” is “literal violence”, she might see the article that way.
Hahahaha nice collection.
Good lord. The state of “journalism” continues its decline. I would be embarrassed to be associated with such shoddy thinking.