More pummeling of feminist women please
A Vanity Fair piece from last month by trans woman Grace Robertson says how wrongy-wrong JK Rowling is and muses aloud about why.
Rowling, a British feminist, is soaking up these anti-trans views—she’s transphobic because everyone she reads and listens to is. Why? That’s the real mystery. Some pin the blame on many British journalists’ close ties to 2000s “skeptic” movement, largely built around dismissing pseudosciences such as homeopathy and “anti-science” views. My view is that it’s about just how white and privileged journalism is in the U.K.
Wait wait wait. Back up a step. Don’t be in such a hurry to step over that. What about this skeptic movement which is built around “dismissing” – or rather saying what is wrong with – pseudosciences such as homeopathy and anti-science [without scare-quotes] views? What does that tell you? If there’s a connection to skepticism about bullshit and hostility to science, what does that tell you?
It tells you that the fact-claims of trans ideology are pseudo-scientific bullshit, and that that matters. It tells you there’s little or no reason to think the claims are true. It tells you that if you accept them all uncritically you are being had.
Robertson also wishes UK feminists could get beaten up as much as US ones have.
My view is that it’s about just how white and privileged journalism is in the U.K. One study estimated that 94% of British journalists are white, with another finding that over half come from private schools (an eternal indicator of Britain’s class system). This is not a unique issue, but privilege has gone less challenged than in the U.S. “Middle- and upper-class white feminists have not received the pummeling from black and indigenous feminists that their American counterparts have,” wrote Sophie Lewis in the New York Times last year.
I get the feeling Robertson would be happy to volunteer.
Paris Lees, trans columnist for British Vogue, wrote on Twitter that feminists who criticize her are also hostile to black women who “put forward an anti-racist agenda.”
No doubt he did, but it’s a lie.
I love the disparagement of the ‘skeptic’ movement. Silly layabouts dismissing pseudosciences!
Cue Mitchell and Webb:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0
The bait-and-switch is so interesting to watch. We start out with “transphobic” views…how quickly will we get to “white” feminists? THE TWO HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH EACH OTHER. TRANS ACTIVISTS ARE THEMSELVES LARGELY WHITE.
I just hate how they garner sympathy by attaching themselves to people who truly are marginalized. Yes, trans face discrimination, I am sure that is probably true. But….it is NOT RACISM. They know the use of the words “white” and “middle class” (or upper class, but it is usually middle class) are instantaneous in their visceral reaction. White privilege = transphobic. This equation does not work.
For mostly white, mostly middle-class trans activists to complain about white, middle-class feminists is, to say the least, hilarious. If it weren’t so effective, it would be hilarious. But most people swallow the bait and accept the switch. These women are white, they are middle-class, they must be racist, hence, they must be transphobic, ergo, transphobia must be bad. QED.
The sad thing is that white, middle-class women, while having privileges other women don’t enjoy, still deal with sexism and misogyny. We deal with ageism, probably more than any other group, because the women who belong to the masters of the universe are supposed to remain young and beautiful forever, even as their men age into beer bellied remote-control pushers with gray hair.
But we are no longer allowed to talk about misogyny as it relates to women, because, well, women, amirite? The oppressors of their trans-sisters (oops, unfortunate phrase). The oppressors of all men everywhere, and, apparently, the only ones who have ever oppressed black people are white women. So it’s okay to scream hatred at us, call us Karens, call us whatever sort of nastiness. And, apparently, lie about us with impunity.
Please, peak trans now.
“While many demographic factors were indicators for how respondents viewed transgender people, the study did not find a correlation between race and perceptions.”
Source.
Full article is here. Among the results:
So in other words, 53 percent of Americans don’t agree that TWAW, and are therefore transphobes according to TRAs. Now, I know better than to claim that the fact that a view is common means that it is morally just; a majority of Americans didn’t approve of interracial marriage until the 1990s, I believe it was. But it does suggest to me that the simple “you are a TRANSPHOBE” response is not likely to work on a large scale, i.e. outside of Twitter or certain liberal circles.
Something else I found interesting (though not surprising):
The authors tend to cluck their tongues about this, lamenting that trans people shouldn’t have to “pass” to be accepted. I’m not so sure. Is it really that terrible for the public to say “yeah, if you really appear to be a woman/man, I don’t need to know what your genitals are, but if you just look like a man who put on a dress and makeup, I’m not going to take your self-declaration as gospel”?
… Holy shit.
I just realized the next bit of evidence showing that TRAs are pushing the same old male privilege narrative. This goes back a bit:
In the 80s, there was a horrible, awful, vile movie called Revenge of the Nerds. It was low-success overall, but among the nascent computer geek generation, it was VERY popular.
Now, the movie did not age well. Most folks nowadays will recognize just how it’s a toxic stew of masculinity, and I’ve run through before how it pretty much had the heroes commit virtually every sin of the cyber-age: Stalking, voyeurism, revenge-porn and rape all happen, but are treated as funny because it’s the nerds doing it, (The rape, in particular, is immediately excused by the victim because ‘Nerds are so good at sex’.)
But there’s another, more subtle crime in the movie as well. At the end of it, there’s this big speech by one of the titular nerds in which he decries anti-nerd discrimination–while being supported by a phalanx of African-American men. In short, the rich white guy claims that being bullied in high school is just as bad as 450 years of enslavement, abuse, torture and segregation, and a bunch of black guys agree with him, because the script says they do.
It’s a safe bet that any random 40+ white guy on the internet these days probably saw that movie and loved it at the time. It really has a lot to answer for in terms of laying the foundation for, say, Gamergate.
But that appropriation of racial suffering is another bit that slipped into the manosphere, generally, and I think this shows that a lot of that thinking infects the TRAs, too.
iknklast: It’s probably safe to guess that it’s not “white” feminists but “white feminists“, which has become a way to say “feminism what I don’t agree with”.
Screechy @#3:
If you do not do that, you are suspending critical thought and judgement: a skill BTW that has to be learned and refined by years of practice.
This has had serious historical consequences. Witness polytheist India, sitting smack bang in the middle of monotheist Pakistan (E & W) at the equatorial edge of the Indian subcontinent. India in relation to Pakistan is an economic and scientific powerhouse. Pakistan in relation to India is an economic and scientific basket case.
I put this down to the Pakistani education system, which discourages training in critical thought, lest the acquired critical skills be turned on the highly vulnerable bag of garbage known as Islam. The clerics ensure that this ball keeps rolling via calls and street marches for the public execution every so often of someone they have found guilty of ‘blaspheming’ Islam.
Name any religion, and India has got it in spades. The result is that no bunch of Indian clerics have ever managed to gain the domestic political clout that has been acquired by the Islamic clerics of Pakistan.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/pakistans-most-famous-accused-blasphemer-escaped-to-canada-others-remain-on-death-row/2019/05/18/339557ec-7713-11e9-a7bf-c8a43b84ee31_story.html
I’ve only got as far as the first sentence. Are all the trans women called Grace?
The sceptic movement?
But then how would we explain the clusterfuck at FTB, and PZ’s descent into lunacy in particular? Weren’t they the outriders of the sceptical movement?
Here’s my hypothesis. The sceptics began by setting out a position contrary to (many) right-wingers, because those right-wingers tended to deny science. So far, so good. But that shifted from an opposition to the anti-science to an opposition to the right-wingers. In other words, less “We oppose you because of what you say” than “We oppose what you say because of who you are”. That done, once denial of brute facts became a more lefty thing, quite possibly because trans people in the US really do have a shitty time of it (in turn, because *most* people in the US either have, or are a fag-paper’s thickness away from, having a shitty time of it), the fact that it was factually mistaken and scientifically and metaphysically nuts to take on board the gender-identity stuff didn’t make a difference any more. It was right because the right people were saying it.
More, resistance to fact-denial became ipso facto anti-progressive, which forced gender-criticals and so on to places like Quillette, which just proved the point.
Enzyme #8 wrote:
I think this is an important insight. I became involved in the skeptic movement in the early 90’s; I became involved in atheism — and then gnu atheism — at the same time. I saw the rise of social justice atheism, and watched its relationship to the skeptic movement deteriorate. Some valid criticisms became lost in an increasing tendency to declare ideas, and then groups, “toxic.”
Skepticism itself has always been internally divided between the skeptics who consider pseudoscience, woo, and religion to be the natural outgrowths of common human tendencies to error — and the skeptics who considered them to be what happens when stupid, arrogant people get stupid and arrogant. When social justice was added to the mix, it seemed to me to be coming from that second orientation, adding “bigoted” and “narrow-minded” to the list describing the opposition. Eventually the “skeptic movement” itself was thrown into the category of the stupid, arrogant, bigoted, narrow-minded people.
Freemage, I have a specific reason for dreading that movie. It was shown at my college, which has both a substantially geek population and a substantially white population. The geeks in general were pleased with the nominal theme of geeks vs. jocks. The parts of the movie that haven’t aged well include not only the stupefying level of racism but also the ridiculous portrayal of homosexuals. Not to put too fine a point on the javelin, but Lamar Latrell belongs in the same museum of stereotypical overachievement as Long Duk Dong from Sixteen Candles.
We had a young fellow at our college whose name I will not say, who, beyond being black, and young, and thin, and very effeminate, physically resembled Lamar. This young fellow was in the closet at the time, or at least thought he was; perhaps he was in the closet only to himself. By the point of said javelin throw, the association had been made by the entire audience, and they cheered Lamar’s effort by chanting the name of our fellow student. Who ran out of the theatre in tears.
I would like to remember that I went after him, and told him that people loved him very much, and were not ridiculing him or trying to be mean to him. Memory is fickle. I am certain I told him that at some point, but it’s also possible that, that night, I joined in the chanting but refuse to remember it that way. I know that later on in life he told me he was appreciative of how kind I’d been to him then. In any case, no, I can’t watch that movie either. It’s horrible, and an example of how elevating one group almost always involves kicking down another group.
Regarding skepticism, I think it would be remiss to not point out that it was it was mainly the Social Injustice Warriors (SIWs) of the far right – in particular the anti-feminist, MRA mob – who brought down movement atheo-skepticism. If anything, the FTB crowd just put it out of its misery. I have seen enough of the stuff that the Slymepit crowd and their ilk would throw at people like Rebecca Watson or Jennifer McCreight – or Ophelia for that matter – to not have any have any reservations against calling these people toxic not to mention every bit as tribalistic and ideological* as the SJWs they despise. It didn’t lead me to reject critical thinking, but critical thinking and movement skepticism are two very different things indeed.
I still think the FTB crowd were basically on the right side in the whole “Elevatorgate”/”Dear Muslima” shitstorm as well as the ensuing Anti-Harassment Policy Wars, but then they fucked it up. As I have previously written, I don’t doubt that many of the people currently riding the TRA bandwagon got on it for reasons that seemed both noble and worthy at the time. The first small concessions to the TRA crowd may have seen harmless and benign (“That doesn’t sound quite right to me, but if it helps a marginalized group feel more welcome/safe/included/etc., then whatever”), but now they had a stake in defending them. On their way over to the dark side, they never “crossed a line” where things instantly and abruptly changed from “definitely ok” to “definitely not ok”. The same logic used to justify those first concessions as well as the need for consistency lead to further concessions requiring further justifications etc. etc. and by now they have no way to turn back without admitting to themselves and the world that they have been wrong all along, that their justifications have all been bogus, and that they in fact have become very much like the SIWs they were fighting against. Cognitive dissonance theory in a nutshell.
*As I said at the time, when people talk about “keeping ideology out of skepticism” etc. we shouldn’t let them get so easily away with framing their own views as the “unpolitical”, “non-ideological” position.
Papito, thanks for the story. I did see that movie; my son was one of the geeky kids who loved it, because he thought it was about him.
Geeks typically do have a tough time in high school, and there are ways to depict that without sinking to the level of gross stereotype and antisocial behavior. The thing is, a lot of those geeks that loved (and probably many that still do) this movie went on to positions of some success in Silicon Valley and its counterparts. They became the James Damores and they probably figure at least somewhat in the incels and MRAs. Many of them now look down on the jocks and note that the jocks are often used car salesmen and insurance agents, and therefore inferior to the superior brains of the geeks.
The thing with geeks is that they don’t actually have an inferiority complex; they have a superiority complex, but jocks fail to recognize their superiority. I haven’t found geeks to be any more sympathetic to women or minorities than jocks on average, though of course everyone will have examples of otherwise in both groups.
Are we to understand, with all the blame for alleged transphobia being laid squarely at the door of the white middle-classes in general and white, middle-class feminists in particular, that all of the various POC communities have accepted the T-onwards part of the letter salad with open arms? Is there no alleged transphobia from within those communities or is it there but still the fault of white, middle class people because of colonialism or somesuch?
Acolyte, the TRAs are doing us all the favor of speaking for the various POC communities.
Or, to put the same thing another way, there is a lot of what TRAs would call “transphobia” in POC communities, but those folks have insufficient privilege to be heard.
Lotta food for thought in these comments.
To pluck just one item that made me nibble – Enzyme’s @ 8 –
What is the shitty time exactly? I think generally what’s meant is social interactions with strangers and slight acquaintances more than close relationships (which are too complicated to be boiled down to politics alone). What is shitty about the interactions? Similar to homophobia, I would think, only more so.
But the thing about that is…what trans people are implicitly expecting from such interactions is for strangers to join them in their fantasy. Right? Have I gone astray here? They want to be treated AS the sex they’re not. There isn’t usually much scope for treating people as their sex in stranger-interactions…but then that will be why the examples tend to be about things like public toilets and forms of address.
But my point is (if I have one – I’m trying to figure this out) – it’s asking a lot to expect adult strangers to play along with the personal fantasies of fellow adults. Children, sure, that’s easy, and fun, but adults – that can feel creepy.
I think that’s always going to be the case. Just for one thing we have good reasons not to want to play along with the fantasies of adult strangers, because we can’t tell how sinister or malevolent they are.
So it’s kind of baked in. Trans people probably get funny looks a lot, and sometimes explicit challenge, and sometimes violence. The “activist” campaign wants to train us to play along with the fantasies at all times no matter what, and…that’s asking a lot.
Bjarte@11:
That is almost exactly how I would tell the tale. For many of the splitters* there was a line of sorts, though. Not a line between OK and ~OK, but past which they seemed to refuse to apply the powers of reason many claimed as the very foundation of their lives. Take Elevatorgate and the Policy Wars, for example. These people pretended not to see that “guys, don’t do that” was a piece of harmless advice rather than an all-out attack on their very beings. They pretended that everyone would be worse off if some minimal guidelines were drawn up about safety at conferences. I say “pretended” because having talked to many, many, many of them, that’s the only conclusion I can reach. These absolutely weren’t issues of freedom of speech or expression, they were suggested guidelines of very basic humanity. But the hyperbole! The histrionics!
At the time it seemed like a lot of people had found a new excuse to out themselves as misogynists with the approval of respected authority figures and weight of numbers. Looking back now, that seems all too familiar, doesn’t it.
And like you say, once a concession was made in that direction, it was all to easy to slip down that slymy slope.
iknklast@12
HEY!!! I’m right here!!!
Although as the biggest geek you’re likely to encounter, I can say with some authority that you’re probably right.
* Unless we were the splitters, of course, it all got a bit confusing. “Splitters” is a contraction of “slyme pitters” so let’s go with that.
OB,
I don’t think that harassment of trans people just boils down to “not playing along with their fantasies.” (And I don’t mean because sometimes it turns violent — I know you don’t condone that and were implicitly excluding such things from your comment.)
My understanding is that a lot of it is the same kind of resentment that someone isn’t conforming to gender norms that we would have no trouble criticizing in other contexts. I assume that you agree that it isn’t really anyone’s business how someone else chooses to dress or style their hair or wear (or not wear) makeup. (I mean, we’re all entitled to opinions — I can think that someone else’s outfit looks absurd, or that the 60-year-old trying to dress like a teenager just looks sad, etc. — but actually “informing” people of those opinions is a shitty thing to do.)
I really doubt that the kind of person who sees fit to mouth off about a stranger’s appearance is really voicing a principled objection on epistemological grounds. I think they’re just the kind of jerks who think it’s fun and appropriate to insult people who are different, and that we don’t need to go looking for ways to legitimize their behavior.
Yes, fair point. I agree that that’s a big part of the picture…but then that’s more or less what I meant by “similar to homophobia, I would think, only more so.” Homophobia from strangers and slight acquaintances is “the same kind of resentment that someone isn’t conforming to gender norms that we would have no trouble criticizing in other contexts.”
But I wasn’t claiming that people who mouth off about it are voicing a principled objection on epistemological grounds, but rather that they’re balking at being expected to play along with someone else’s fiction. There’s an array, or “spectrum” (has that word been permanently ruined now?) of possible behaviors, from a slight eye roll to shouting insults. Shouting insults should be off the table, I agree…but people doing eccentric things in public can inspire alarm as well as [instead of] anger or contempt. It can be difficult to know what they’re up to, what they’re signaling as it were. I think that’s part of why the problem may be intractable, and that bullying women is just displacement behavior for frustration at the intractability.
AoS @13
This is probably just the (almost blindingly white) trans activist community doing what white people quite often do … and that is to ignore PoC communities unless they are to be conveniently used for the white activist’s own causes. For example, see “black trans lives matter”.
Shorter … they’re not blaming these communities. They’re just not listening to them at all.
Alternatively, what is said in #14, which is even shorter. That’ll teach me to not refresh a page.
Sceptics, huh? They can at least talk the talk even if the walking part has gone somewhat off the beaten path.
PZ today:
Until we want to apply critical thinking to those subjects deemed off-limit to sceptical examination, eh? Then we must all put thinking on hold and just be nice.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2020/07/14/my-job-has-always-been-toppling-idols/
Ophelia @15:
Yep: I take all that.
I was just thinking – again, with perhaps a little transatlantic arrogance – that a lot of the TRA “denying trans people’s rights” rhetoric seems to assume an American backdrop, with the US’ employment rights and so on taken as the default. My sense from a lot of GC people over here in the UK is that we’re generally pretty happy with things like the Gender Recognition Act as they are; and those who aren’t exactly happy are willing to play along for the sake of civility. It’s a weakening of the protections there that we’re resisting. But if someone hasn’t realised the legal terrain over here, and sees UK people pushing back against GRA reform, then it *does* look more hostile. The general point is that, by and large, trans people in the US probably are more vulnerable, and less well-protected, than under other regimes; but that’s substantially because they’re a subset of all people, and all people are less well-protected.
I’m simplifying, of course. YMMV.
I wasn’t disputing anything you said, by the way, just trying to pin down some thoughts prompted by what you said. (I did leave out job discrimination altogether, which was dumb.)
@Enzyme
#8
For us USians, that’s cigarette paper, right?
Yes. Fag=cigarette in UK. (Also used to mean younger boys who were the as it were servants of older boys at Eton – made them tea, did errands, etc. I don’t think that’s still the case.)
Colin @24
Ha! Yep. Separated by a common language an’ all that…