Humiliating and intimidating language
More on the efforts to silence Claire Chandler:
Addressing the Senate on Thursday evening, Liberal senator Claire Chandler said a complaint had been filed against her under Tasmania’s Anti-Discrimination Act in relation to an opinion piece on free speech published in a Tasmanian newspaper earlier this year and an email related to the piece.
In the opinion piece, Senator Chandler said women’s sports, women’s toilets and women’s changing rooms were designed for people of the female sex and should remain that way.
So we’re now in a world where legal bodies can punish women for “discrimination” for saying women are women and men are not women.
“Being summoned by a quasi-judicial body to appear and explain why I say that males shouldn’t be in female change rooms or in female sporting competitions is an indictment on the state of free speech in this country.”
It doesn’t say much for the state of people’s thinking, either.
“It is yet another example of the assault on truth and the assault on the very meaning of the word women by activists who are determined to remove every sex-based right that women around the world have and allow anyone who identifies as a woman into women’s sports and women’s spaces,” she said.
And to take jobs and promotions reserved for women, and claim to have fulfilled rules that require a fair proportion of women in particular jobs and political parties and the like. Men who say they identify as women can take everything reserved for women, and then punish women who object.
But Equality Tasmania spokesperson Charlie Burton said with free speech came a responsibility to exercise that right in a way that does not harm others.
Meaning what? Does it harm people to refuse to say their fantasies are true? If the answer is yes, does that have to be balanced against the fact that it harms everyone else to be required to endorse other people’s fantasies? Especially when those fantasies involve usurping and appropriating the ontology of other people?
Charlie Burton goes on:
“Tasmania’s law against humiliating and intimidating language has been upheld by state Parliament twice which indicates it has widespread community support.”
Yes but how is it humiliating and intimidating to say that men are not women? How does it work to say that a woman is intimidating and humiliating men by not agreeing that they are women? News flash: men as a group have more power than women as a group, so punishing women for saying men are not women looks like a very bizarre warping of ordinary understanding of how power and intimidation work.
Dr Burton invited Senator Chandler to meet young transgender Tasmanians and their families to help her understand their lives and the impact of discrimination.
“We want Senator Chandler to hear what life is really like for Tasmania’s trans and gender-diverse young people and their families, including their desire to be accepted just like everyone else, and how negative stereotypes and misinformation can cause deep harm,” Dr Burton said.
I think Dr Burton should meet female Tasmanians and hear what life is really like for Tasmania’s women, including their desire to be treated fairly just like men, and how negative stereotypes and misinformation can cause deep harm.
This is the wrong approach — and using it is an insult. It assumes the science is settled and the philosophy has achieved consensus: trans women are women. Everyone knows this, but a few people reject it anyway because trans women make them feel disgusted . It’s the same disgust which motivates people to dislike lesbians, or women of color. “That woman is not like me; they’re Other. Exclude them.”
In which case, meeting lesbians and women of color — learning that they’re not so different, they’re women like any other woman — creates a connection. Realizing that discrimination hurts them thus prompts empathy and change. Feelings of disgust dissipate.
But when the problem isn’t “disgust,” but back there in the science and philosophy departments, pulling this tactic is infantile. It’s like trying to persuade an evolutionary biologist to change their mind about evolution by showing them beautiful things. The fundamentalist is assuming the biologists just need to have their sense of wonder stimulated enough to lose the sense of misery which motivates the foolish position that God didn’t create each species from scratch. Because there’s no other explanation for why scientists believe evolution. Show them a nice sunset.
And, by the same token, if Senator Chandler just opened her heart and started caring, that would take care of that pesky pretense that TW aren’t W. Show her some crying children. Appealing to emotions like that when the issue is rational just suggests that the person doing so doesn’t know how to think like a mature adult. Or hopes to stop others from doing so.
It’s telling I think that the trans activist isn’t advising Chandler to meet trans people and realize how they’re clearly not the sex they were assigned at birth. It also indicates bad faith to throw in the term “gender-diverse” when the issue is sex, not how someone behaves or dresses.
Very telling that defending women and female only space is viewed as anti-trans. Kinda puts the lie to the claim that there is no conflict between women’s rights and trans “rights.” Funny how discussion of the integrity of women’s rights and spaces is automatically interpreted as a an anti-trans dog whistle, as if women have no legitimate reason at all to discuss their needs and safety as women. It says more about the designs of trans activists than it does the desires of women.
Yes, but really do that, she would have to start caring about women less. The way TAs are framing this, it really is a zero sum game. For them it’s winner take all. They cannot allow women’s rights and women only spaces to stand, because their “exclusion” deprives them of the “affirmation” and “validation” that access to those rights and spaces would give them. That’s why third spaces for trans identified people is a non starter: it puts the ephasis on their “transness” rather than the unquestioning acceptance of their chosen, target sex, which is ultimately not possible.
Or, for that matter, women. Bash them down with baseball bats. If they are lesbian, strip them and make them have sex with transwomen.
We are not even allowed the word to name ourselves anymore. I reclaim the word: I am a woman. Not a “cis-woman”, not a “natal woman”, not “assigned female at birth”. I am a woman. And my name is not Karen.
iknklast, yep, that’s the issue I have with the label “CIS”. It defines you by what you are not, not what you are. It says “You are not trans” as if that is the standard for comparison. I am quite happy to use the terms “woman” and “trans-woman”, and mentally competent enough to tell the difference.
I saw one of our local trans community today and was about to go up and greet him, but as he appeared to be working as an elderly person’s carer I decided to walk on and only say anything if I was greeted first. Not out of my shame, but because I don’t know what his clients know about his gender identity, so thought it best to be cautious.
The last time I saw him was at a polling booth working for the party we both support. He was working very close to a nasty christstain party, so had no hesitation in greeting him with a booming voice and a huge hug! Anything to piss off xtians. :-)
Yes, he dresses as a woman, but to me, he will always be a man. And I admire his dress style, as it leaves in doubt he wants to dress feminine, but everything else about him is hyper-masculine. If I hadn’t known him from before the rise of transcultists, I would have considered him a walking talking Poe. :-)
The problem with the Senator is that she is part of a government that is very happy to cozy up to Trump, that has policies in line with your GOP, and that she lies shamelessly. She is less a supporter of women’s rights and really just another cultural warrior from the Right.
From her maiden speech:
I outline these beliefs here today not only because they are beliefs which will guide my decision-making in th is place but also because they are beliefs worth fighting for, right now more than ever. In the last decade we have seen example upon example of personal freedoms, and particularly free speech, being stifled in this country. Everyday Australians want to be free to live their lives without anyone , and particularly not government , policing them in terms of what they should think, say or believe.
Since 9/11 the government of which she is a part has passed 84 separate laws restricting freedom under the guise of fighting the “War on Terror”.
Under one of these laws, a citizen can be held by ASIO, without charge, without legal representation, and without the means to let family, friends or employers know where they are. Can you imagine going to work one morning, being arrested by ASIO on the way? Your employer loses faith in you, your wife thinks you have had an accident o left her. Once released, you are forbidden under penalty of imprisonment to inform anyone, including your lawyer, that you were detained by ASIO.
This is the same government that has condoned raids on journalists homes, not just offices, because in one case they were providing evidence of war crimes in Afghanistan and the other reporting on our spy agencies acting illegally.
This is the government that is prosecuting a lawyer and his client for revealing that our spy agencies illegally bugged the East Timor Cabinet Room, not because East Timor was a threat to our sovereignty, but to obtain information that could be used by private enterprise in bargaining with East Timor over oil rights in the Timor Sea.
She is also part of a government that overruled the independent body and directed sports grant money away from the neediest and directed it to seats where the government needed a boost. The biggest losers were women’s sports.
So Yeah, Nah. She isn’t on your side, she is using you as a tool against her political rivals.
Yes, I gathered that she’s a conservative and I would agree with her on pretty much nothing else (except matters that are not in dispute) – but that still doesn’t make her wrong on this. I hate it that the left is so up its own backside, but it is.
I agree she is right on this. I disagree that her motives are pure.
You’d have to go a long way to find a more old fashioned Australian leftist than me, but I do know when we are being sold a bill of goods.
This is just how it’s always been, isn’t it? For most of human history, we were “not-men”. Now we are “not men who think they are women”. So little has changed…only the outfits being worn by those we are not.