When did it begin?
Glinner (Graham Linehan) is seeking anecdotes.
I'd like to collect some anecdotes about when and why you first became involved in the debate about gender ideology/activism. If you don’t feel you can talk about it, you can simply say that. Otherwise, I’d like to hear your stories.
— Graham Linehan (@Glinner) February 26, 2019
Lots of interesting replies, as you’d expect.
When women were told to stop talking about their periods or pregnancies because "not all women" can have either of those things.
— Carrie (@NewNellieBly) February 26, 2019
I recognize that one! In my case it was abortion rights, and my response was No. PZ’s goon squad took copious notes.
https://twitter.com/DelcCris/status/1100414304027721731
I think for me it was the Vagina Monologues. Not that I find that play all that inspiring, but having it cancelled because “not all women have a vagina, so we can’t even talk about the ones that do” was a real eye opener for me.
I think it was when this blogger I follow made a post agreeing with some of the points in an op-ed by Elinor Burkett and got drummed off the blog network she was part of … I vaguely recall this.
Posts on this very blog following your departure from FTB got me thinking more about these issues. I think I’d even written a post somewhere on FTB referring to myself as “cis” without understanding the full background of the term’s use. So I guess I was saved from ignorant, (self)righteous wokedness.
Still agog over the frequent need to recalibrate the bullshit detector when it’s confronted with stuff that’s patently ludicrous and delusional (like the guy from B.C. who sued a salon for not waxing his miraculously female male bits, and who was tweeting about being near to the start of his period, while asking for tips on how to initiate conversations with young women in washrooms about their use of tampons). I’ve stopped wondering just how much more ludicrous it can get, because it keeps on getting moreso. You can’t make this stuff up, but somebody keeps trying.
For me it was a combination of Ophelia’s treatment on FtB, the spectacular lack of self-awareness it took to be up in arms about men acting entitled and creepy in elevators but not private women’s spaces, and Zinnia’s befuddling post about how hormone treatments made trans-identified men biologically female. It was a triple punch, so to speak. Before that, I was largely on the bandwagon.
Soon as I was supposed to consider trans women biologically female, I was done.
I was double done when I began seeing trans women’s issues consistently given priority over issues pertaining to female reproductive health in feminist circles. I would have been fine with expanding what constitutes women’s rights to include the needs of trans women but that’s not what I saw happen. I saw the needs of trans women dominate the narrative and silence everyone else.
For me, it was the question in late July 2015, “Do you believe trans women are women, yes or no?”
Ophelia made sense to me by refusing a simple “yes or no” because, as she wrote at the time, for one reason, “There’s a difference, for instance, between an ontological is and a political is.”
And in my mind, if we can’t talk about words and sentences having more than one meaning — to clarify what we’re talking about — then we can’t even know what the question means at face value.
But face value misses the real point, in this guest post by M.A. Melby that seems more accurate:
The FTB blog warz turned me from a fairly regular reader of Greta Christina into a very regular Ophelia Benson reader.
One part of this was the venom on display for the simple fact of wanting to avoid complex matters being reduced to an imperious yes or no demand. How dismaying to see a dismissal of complexity a) from a blog network priding itself for its freedom from dogma, and b) on a topic that is positively screaming out for careful thought. And since then the venom has only had further acidity added to it, and is turned on for the slightest straying from accepted answers.
The other major part was the sheer shallowness of the arguments put forth by their side. For example:
A person declaring themselves to be transgender is not only a person whose internal gender identity* is mismatched to their sex, but also must now be considered a member of the biological sex that matches their internal gender identity.
Or perhaps this beaut:
Penis, vagina and so forth cannot be said to be male or female anatomy, because the owner of said anatomy can declare themselves female or male.
It takes only the briefest consideration of these to see problems:
If a person’s declaration of gender means their sex switches to whichever is congruent with said identity, this necessarily means
1. The person is now cis* [man/woman].
2. Biological sex no longer exists as an objective and measurable state, everything is declarative.
3. No person’s sex and gender are ever mismatched to one another, contradicting the central concept of trans ideology.
===> Ergo, according to trans ideologues, no people are ever trans; their core concepts are self-refuting.
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*I am setting aside that this concept / word is riddled with issues, and just going with the framing as is typically presented.
I’ve had a general unsettled feeling all along. All those Republican ‘bathroom bills,’ with their claims of pseudo-trans predators? And then we get a trans-rapist in a British prison, and Mr ‘wax me’ in BC. Yes, they are the most cartoonish extremes, but they match the worst-case fantasies of the deplorable fundies.
JtD, it wasn’t just the fundies. As soon as the ‘don’t ask: don’t tell’ idea about allowing transwomen access to all areas was floated plenty of people of all political stripes spoke up about the potential for abuse. The general response was typified by a Pharyngula regular who stated that abuse of the system wouldn’t happen because it has never happened before – totally ignoring the fact that a system cannot be abused until it’s in place.
Hi, I’m new. So far I haven’t been “involved in the debate,” except inside my head, but what brought the debate onto my radar was that recent post where PZ called you “profoundly illogical,” or whatever. “Hmm, I wonder what all this is about,” I thought to myself, because I knew that when something seems profoundly illogical from the outside, it’s often because there’s an internal logic that’s being overlooked (purposely or not). People don’t generally go around being profoundly illogical just for the hell of it.
To that point, I knew that I didn’t know much about gender critical/radical feminism. In the circles I ran in, we just had a vague sense that TERFs were a bunch of weird others who were obsessed with how gross penises are, or something, and therefore deserved to be shunned, but we didn’t think much about it. So I did some reading, and: Y’all are right.
Personally, I have no problem with individual trans folks who just want to live their lives in the way that works best for them. But I’m horrified to see how the trans cause is being co-opted as a pretense for taking away everything women have: our spaces, our speech, our movement, even the words we use to describe ourselves.
To me, this seems much of a muchness with the push by some to redefine “feminism” to make it “intersectional,” i.e., a broader movement that addresses all forms of marginalization – racism, classism, ableism, etc. – and naturally pushes the actual feminism part to the end of the line. (Real intersectionality, which I understand to mean the observation that multi-axis marginalization can’t always be reduced to the sum of its parts, seems like a fundamentally different thing, because at least it leaves room for “intersectional feminism” to still be feminism.) They’re all capitalizing on how women are socialized to be accommodating, and how very easy it is to convince us that we mustn’t dare to claim anything for ourselves until we’re satisfied that everyone else already has more.
So, here I am. If I don’t know what I’m talking about, I hope you’ll let me know.
Kerith, welcome to the only site I have found where I can stand to read, and participate, in comments. The commentariat here certainly doesn’t always agree with each other, but it is one of the best educated, most well read, most literate group of commenters I have read. And no one here will offer to shove a porcupine up your private parts.
Oh good – a porcupine up the private parts sounds like it could really ruin one’s day…
For a while, a few years back, I hung out on a mostly-feminist site (one of the vaguely-anti-TERF-but-didn’t-really-talk-about-it-that-much circles I mentioned above) that was a lot like what you describe: Thoughtful, well informed people who didn’t always agree but could almost always be counted on to engage in good faith. It gradually got shaken to pieces by a number of forces (the biggest of which rhymes with schmenty-sixteen schmelection). I miss those people a lot.
Hi Kerith, now you’ve broken the ice I’ll look forward to hearing more from you.
It is a good group, isn’t it.
I’m just glad that it’s an inclusive group, otherwise I’d never meet the membership standard.
#13
A trans commenter at PZ’s suggested I bathe in hydroflouric acid for my comments in that train wreck of a comment thread. An unusually specific and fatal suggestion I must say, and then one of the usually-sane commenters over there stated that it was no more offensive than the phrase ‘take a long walk off a short pier’.
This is a subject that is causing people to take leave of their senses.
Holms, I’ve worked with hydrofluoric acid. It’s a peculiarly appalling and painful way to be injured and not one that would commonly pop into the top of most peoples minds to suggest. Bathing in the acid would not merely be disfiguring and painful but would almost certainly be fatal due to systemic toxicity. Given that HF kills tissues without dissolving them (as many other acids do) and that cessation of pain is the only effective way of determining that treatment has been successful (i.e. no pain killers), consider this: Where a burn becomes deep tissue you have to excise the dead tissue, then apply treatment to the healthy tissue beneath….
Whoever said that is a grade A arsehole.
Holms: I was never a commenter at PZ’s, nor much more than a casual occasional reader, but I’ve seen how nasty the commenters there can be when they sense they have somebody to gang up on. They get that way on all sorts of subjects (although come to think of it, all the examples that spring to mind were on conversations that had to do with feminism in one way or another, which is probably not a coincidence). So maybe it’s the subject matter that makes people that way, or maybe it’s the dynamics of that particular community that brings out people’s sadistic streaks and lets them feed off one another, or maybe it’s a perfect storm of both.
Kerith
The rancid commentary at PZ’s is in part his own doing, as he spent something like 15 years encouraging the most aggressive argumentation, including name calling and such, any time say… a creationist arrived to argue against evolution. Though I agree that this topic attracts venom in general.
Dave Ricks @ 6 and Holms @ 7 – Yes, that was of course a massive push toward the door for me too. I was staggered that people at FTB were so hostile to the simple observation that “There’s a difference, for instance, between an ontological is and a political is.” It’s so basic, but I saw one of PZ’s gang say it was just pretentious verbiage.
How ironic that guest post of Melby’s is.
The original Cotton Ceiling workshop did it for me.
For me, it was recognising the pattern of Cluster B abuse from when it happened in my favourite Asperger’s/autism forum, although I didn’t have a name for it until fellow commenters, here and on Facebook, joined the dots for themselves with regard to transactivism, and so educated me.
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It even happened the same way (Cluster B behaviour seems to go by the book):
Firstly:
Someone points out how unfair it is to expect every member to have a full, official diagnosis of Asperger’s [dysphoria]. They request that self-identifying should be enough.
• Reason 1: Official diagnosis is expensive; and difficult and convoluted to obtain.
• Reason 2: A lot of people are just suspecting that they might be on the spectrum [trans] and a support forum is the best place for them to explore their identity, and it would be mean to deprive fellow autists [possibly dysphoric] people of support just because they hadn’t yet found or couldn’t afford the official channels.
Some commenters argued that this would pave the way for non-autistic [non-dysphoric] abusers to pretend to be Aspie [trans], but were shouted down because “Who on Earth would do that?! No-one is going to pretend to be autistic [trans] just to access accommodations!” (It’s not that autistic people lack a theory of mind; it is that experience has taught us that what we first thought – that everyone thinks the same way that we do – is false, and that we cannot actually know what another person is thinking).
Of course, the cautious people (who might have encountered just such Cluster B abusers in their past) were right, because:
Secondly:
People with Cluster B personality disorders start to infiltrate. They have excellent people-reading skills, and know exactly how to present themselves to get other people to see them the way they want to be seen. They recruit ‘flying monkeys’ in back channels/private messages, and start to pile on the people who have recognised the abusive behaviour, framing the accusations in such a way that it makes it seem that the whistle-blowers are the bad guys.
The autism forum imploded, but the abusers (whilst, no doubt, having huge fun at our expense) failed to get the vehicle that they wanted for influencing wider society in their favour. This is probably because autistics (notoriously) are impossible to organise offline. Despite plenty of war-like rhetoric, the autistic lads were never actually going to get together and storm government offices, demanding whatever it was that the agitators wanted. They also misread the public attitude to autistic people – their sympathy is entirely directed to the poor, martyred ‘autism moms’, and there isn’t an ounce of empathy for autistic people ourselves.
The ‘self-diagnosed’ people simply went back to being camouflaged members of normal society, fading into the woodwork until they discovered a new vulnerable group to be their Trojan Horse. Transsexuals.
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Ophelia and the commenters here helped me to see the pattern; the way she was treated at FtB was the catalyst in my leaving that site for good. Discovering that radical feminism has a much better way to deal with dysphoria than blaming the dysphoric person (i.e. get rid of the sex stereotype boxes, don’t mutilate someone to fit into the other box) was a major influence in my deciding that ‘being trans’ actually isn’t what I am, and the totally illogical, quasi-religious ‘arguments’ of the transactivists cemented my peak trans moment.
TL;DR: Peak trans for me was discovering that transactivists are abusers, and that radical feminism has a better answer to dysphoria than saying “You’re trans.”
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