You don’t get to
Dillahunty is turning out to be quite a rich source of fatuities. Sinister fatuities.
We “don’t get” to treat men as a [potential] threat, so that means we don’t get to have any kind of refuge away from men at all, no matter the circumstances or history. We “don’t get” to be aware of the statistics, we “don’t get” to know how many sexual assaults there are and how few of them lead to an arrest and how few of those go to trial and how few of those get a conviction. We don’t get to know what we have known since puberty, which is that adult males are much stronger than we are and can batter us any time they want to. We don’t get to know that some men do want to. We don’t get to take precautions of any kind.
We have “no right” to exclude men. That’s it then. Open season.
Well, given the premise I suppose that’s the logical end.
Men should be allowed everywhere that takes their fancy, whether it’s toilets, changing rooms, nunneries.
They’re usually only granted this right during wartime eg the Red Army in Berlin.
Well, there always was a large chunk of the skeptisphere that didn’t want a bar of the Schrodinger’s Rapist. Now we know unequivocally that Dillahunty is one of them. I’ll add MRA onto the list of his not very flattering descriptions.
OK, he just showed his true colors. I mean, we on B&W have known that the whole week, but it’s only now that he has come out and explicitly said that not only “trans women”, but also all other men, shouldn’t be viewed as a threat in women’s spaces.
Total MRA.
I would normally say that it’s something of a cautionary tale when a person ostensibly dedicated to rationalism and science goes off into the weeds like this, but honestly, Dillahunty only ever seemed to really be dedicated to bullying people, and his fans loved it. His dial-in radio show thrived on the occasional kooks who dialed in, and his treatment of them. So really, this is just more of the same. The real lesson here (which probably most people don’t need to learn) is to never trust someone who speaks with absolute certainty about everything. He’s as certain that “transwomen ARE women” (PERIOD!) as he is that he had a slice of toast for breakfast.
Yep, there it is, clearly stated. No sex-segregated anything.
I’ve known a few “woke” people who mused about how everyone should be fine with all unisex bathrooms, and how there should be no sex-segregated sports. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone explicitly state there should be no sex-segregated anything before.
Given this viewpoint, what possible rationale can there be for spaces segregated on the basis of gender identity? With unisex toilets, what affirms the gender identity of trans-identified men? With unisex sports teams, what incentive to male athletes have to pretend to be women? With all prisoners housed together, why would male prisoners bother to claim to be trans? If they aren’t going to be treated any differently, what would be the point?
(Yes, of course there will be some who would still feel dysphoria and want to transition, but there is evidence that a number of these trans-identified males are opportunistic.)
And this, of course, is discarding protections afforded women. Rather than protecting the house against incursion by rodents, destroy the house, then the rodents won’t be interested anymore.
James, I’ve known more than I care to admit of the atheists whose life goals include a daily “pwning the religious idiots.” And they were fans of Matt D. Ceri Black seemed genuinely surprised by this, and she had seen him as someone she looked up to for several years. It was a bit of a surprise to her, the exchange they had on twitter. And now she’s had to face the police who read her rights and left her with the open question of whether the CPS in NI will drag her into court.
Here is the conundrum. We are told we “don’t get to” view men as potentially dangerous. So we don’t, and we get raped or murdered. It will then be our fault for being in a place where the men could be potentially dangerous. I imagine Dillahunty would be fine with that, too. Girls, stay out of bars, the men could be predatory. (And, of course, it is “girls” who go to bars where dangerous “men” hang out.) Girls, you were walking on darkened streets where predatory men hang out. Girls, you were exiting the grocery store where a predatory male might be hanging out. Girls, you were going to church where the priest might be predatory. Sucks to be you, I guess, but you should know better.
In short, they will not be happy until women cease to leave the house, but just stay in bed with their legs spread for men to appreciate when they come home. But only after the woman is done with the house cleaning and the sandwich making, because, hey, he doesn’t want to live in a pig pen and he’s always hungry.
“It will be our fault for being.” Period.
This line has come up repeatedly on his call-in shows in recent weeks, with other hosts affirming it. And it’s nonsense. Humans can distinguish males from females at a glance, and from that know what someone’s genitals are.
I’ve never listened to his dial-in show, but the bullying air was what jumped out at me about him at his talk at the American Atheists convention in Austin. Big loud guy telling everybody what’s what. Did not appeal at all.
@Steven #9:
The odd thing is that all these claims about how we “can’t tell” men apart from women, or transwomen apart from “Cis” women, are clearly testable. Take 100 males, 100 females, and an additional 25 each of transmen and transwomen. Cover their hair, scrub their faces, put them in short robes, and film them walking, turning, and looking at the camera. Now ask a sufficiently large number of subjects to guess who’s a man, and who’s a woman.
Now tally accuracy. And look at whether trans are counted with the sex they identify as, or not. Publish.
The only reason nobody has done a study like this in the past is that the results seemed obvious. And the only reason this study won’t be done now is that it would make people “uncomfortable.” Dillahunty and others can easily prove me wrong by first clamoring for this test, and then surprising everyone with the results.
How often does a fellow live out his sex life in public, disguised as ideology?
I know what Matt Dillahunty’s genitals are.
Transmen are something else, but even then there are plenty of signs. As a rule passing transmen tend to look like Jason Alexander.
#5 Sackbut
Hemant’s blog has a post on Dawkins signing the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights, and numerous people are declaring their support for ending sex segregated spaces as we speak.
Ah, yes, the “friendly” atheist, who seems to be remarkably unfriendly towards women. Seems to be a common theme among that lot.
#9
In the overwhelming proportion of cases, yes, we can, but there are a tiny minority of cases where one isn’t quite sure, though to be honest I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t sure. My wife, sisters, daughters and granddaughters are all unambiguously female. A lot of the problem is the woke insistence that the rules should be based on the rare exceptions.
Sastra,
The reason trans activists aren’t clamouring to prove us wrong is that it’s a smokescreen that serves several useful purposes. There’s the “they have always walked among you” argument: trans women, they say, in a blistering piece of gaslighty retcon, have always used women’s spaces and nobody has noticed because women can’t really tell who’s a man. Then there’s the argument that since you can’t tell whether someone’s trans, what difference does it make what spaces/services they use? And the one that says you can’t really say what sex is because it’s a whole bunch of overlapping characteristics (let’s call this the Myers Gambit) as evidenced by the fact that nobody can really tell who’s male or female.
There are probably others.
But notice how yet again the TRA position rests on a particular answer to this smokescreen (hence their lack of enthusiasm to test it) and the GC one does not. If someone ran the test (properly) and it turned out nobody can tell men from women, I’d think “oh, fancy that” and it wouldn’t change a single thing, because all those arguments are smokescreens.
So many of them are.
Rob,
The idea of Schrödinger’s Rapist is a funny old one, at least in its implications for logical consistency. The premises are undoubtedly true, as far as it goes — other things equal, asking a vulnerable person to treat the unknown as benign is asking for them to become a victim of some kind of predator. That is likely the very reason fear evolved in animals in the first place, possibly even in single-celled organisms, for an organism that feels no fear is an organism that will be eaten before its fearful brethren.
One of the things I find interesting about some of those who initially championed the concept of Schrödinger’s Rapist, such as Reverend Myers, is how they condemned Sam Harris’ (yes, yes, Sam Harris, boo, hiss; let’s take the eye-rolling on either side at the mere mention or reaction to the mention of his name as read and move on) musings over profiling during airport security screenings as rank bigotry. I recall the two phenomena occurring relatively closely in time, and though I didn’t really connect the issues then, it occurs to me now that one might refer to unattached young men as Schrödinger’s Terrorist, and profiling after the Harris method as a way of collapsing that uncertainty without pretending that it doesn’t exist.
Though I do not wish to drag us back to 2011 and recapitulate that particular argument, it is indicative, I believe, of how we got here. Reverend Myers and Brother Dillahnunty would likely still give a full-throated defence of Schrödinger’s Rapist as an instructional concept, even as they scaffold the entire concept of gender with gobbledygook and moral pieties that allow them to dismiss the entire conceptual framework which led to the articulation of Schrödinger’s Rapist in the first place. This articulation, in fact, contains within it a fundamental pillar of gender critical thought; it is not a wonder that the priests and the laymen of the trans church have done away with it in all but name.
It is quite likely that Rebecca Watson would make similar noises; she might well throw out a bunch of rapid-fire nonsense out about how it only applies to cis men, and how cis men would never invade a woman’s space under the guise of being a trans woman, and how trans women are supposedly always and everywhere the victims of the worst kinds of violence and bigotry imaginable.
And, in the end, they will have all talked themselves into the abolition of sex-segregated spaces while still claiming to uphold the notion of Schrödinger’s Rapist, all the while.
Some sophisticated theology, that.
Durchwanderer
Despite your (worthy) wish not to plunge back into the arguments of 2011 (and I won’t), the terrorist example isn’t the same because the risks are completely different and racial profiling is security theatre. They are only conceptually similar if the balance of risks and consequences was also similar, and they’re not.
But your point is spot on.
latsot (is it lowercase-ell-atsot or capital-aye-atsot, by the way?),
Yes, the particulars of TSA profiling’s efficacy are not really of concern to me, but rather the notion of whether being wary of an unknown risk is accepted as legitimate. What interests me is that the one case can be instantly dismissed as obvious bigotry, while the other is (or at least was) given a sympathetic treatment and ultimately a full-throated acceptance, only for that acceptance to be eroded over time until it is at best nominal.
It seems clear to me that both cases involve some of the same a priori moral commitments, which themselves haven’t necessarily been sufficiently examined. Specifically a commitment to fight and (possibly over-)identify bigotry as a prime directive for living righteously and, correspondingly, as a foundation for moral reasoning. In the Harris profiling case, many elements had already been established to conflate the issue at hand with bigotry and this dismiss it; in the case of Schrödinger’s Rapist, that work occurred largely after the fact, as the consequence of the ever-loosening definitions of bigotry and phobia with which social-justice-driven “skeptics” have adopted in the intervening years.
It’s lower-case-ell but I don’t offend easily: I’ve been misspelled and miscapitalised by the best ;)
I understood that the particulars of the comparison were not important and I got your point. I rather doubt PZ has done risk analysis of airport security as I have (although he did once link to a post by Bruce Schnier on the subject, I think) but it seemed to be obvious in advance to him that Harris’ case was bigotry and Schrödinger’s rapist was not. I rather suspect his opinion was formed as much by his previous opinion of Harris as by objective analysis and the link to Schnier’s post re-enforcement of a prior conclusion.
We’re all susceptible to that, of course, big-time (former) capital-s-skeptics or not. Well, as we can plainly see.
What you’re saying is interesting. I have another thought about it flitting around which I’d hoped to have grasped hold of before I got to this point in the comment. To my embarrassment, I haven’t. I’ll get back to you when I have.
latsot, I was equally confused about your nickname until I discovered very recently that it stands for ‘look at the state of things’, and now I am no longer baffled.
I think that the difference in response between Schrödinger’s Rapist and Harris’ Brown People Could Be Terrorists’ was the power imbalance. Until the recent explosion in ‘trans’ demands, it was accepted by the ‘sceptical community’ (horrible phrase) that men were always and everywhere in a position of power over women. Thus it wasn’t, and couldn’t be, ‘bigotry’ for a woman to assume all strange males were likely predators.
The power balance goes the other way in US airports. It is the white majority who hold all the power, and already direct it in making brown people’s lives uncomfortable at best*, so the assumption that any young brown man could be a terrorist was a position influenced by bigotry. It also goes against the facts – the vast majority of terrorist acts on US soil have been carried out by white men.
For the last ten years it has increasingly been the case that those who accepted the former and castigated the latter positions have been trying to reconcile their beliefs with the novel (and false) idea that ‘trans women are the most marginalised’. Obviously, it’s not logically consistent to accept that a woman is both right to be wary of any male attempting to cross boundaries, and bigotted to be wary of any male attempting to cross boundaries if he says he’s a woman.
___________________
*I have close relatives with a Persian surname, and they get ‘randomly’ selected for searching every time they fly.
Especially since saying he’s a woman has already crossed at least one boundary.
Exactly, iknklast. Unfortunately, we seem to be so trained up to believe in a separate mind/soul, that it is easy for a man to persuade far too many people that he’s a woman trapped in the body of a man, and elicit sympathy instead of suspicion.
We have stories about this kind of thing going back millennia, and yet we never learn the lesson.
Actually ‘look at the state of that’, but close enough. Originally the name of a company I used to own. Seems particularly appropriate now.
I’m sure power imbalance is a factor in the different attitudes to the different scenarios, yes. Both racial profiling and Schrödinger’s rapist are statements about power imbalance:
Airport security is a statement about power imbalance from the top down, from the perspective of the oppressors.
Schrödinger’s rapist is a statement about power imbalance from the bottom up, from the perspective of the victims, the oppressed.
tigger_the_wing,
The addition of “power dynamics” to social theories has had an absolutely devastating effect on anyone who tries to make sense of the world from the standpoint that people are fundamentally equal. Around the same time as Herr Schröder’s metaphor was being extended to the defence of a woman’s right to refuse men the benefit of the doubt, the academic theory of “racism = prejudice + power” also started rearing its head around the Skeptosphere.
Under this theory, it is literally impossible for a person of a subordinate position to be racist, or commit a racist act, because by definition racism is the elaboration of prejudice through power structures. These days, it is taken as a given by many young people that there is no other kind of racism; a few with whom I have spoken have even insisted that discrimination can only be systemic, in a logical extension of the thesis.
And while the working definition of “Problem X = some antecedent of X + power” is fine to adopt in limited contexts, for the purposes of analysis of structural problems in a particular power structure where the notion of power under consideration is well-defined, it is a terrible predicate of general moral philosophy. Not least because it is fantastically easy to pull a bait-and-switch and, for example, condemn Appalachian meth-head trailer trash for their interpersonal expressions of racism and then go hunting for some power axis where they enjoy some theoretical privilege, falling back to the very fact of their whiteness itself if all else fails, and use their power-backed racism as an excuse to pretend they haven’t been alienated and exploited and rendered hopeless by the very same power structures which have alienated and exploited and robbed the hope of communities of all ethnicities all over the world.
There is much more I could blather on about this topic, but yes, I think it is fair to say that this sort of power-differential thinking has been a key ingredient in the derangement of our moral intuitions. Coupled with the aforementioned falsehood that trans women are the most vulnerable minority to ever have existed, it gives people every incentive to abandon any principles they may have set downstream of it, particularly when it comes to the rights and realities of being a woman or a girl.
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Sackbut@5,
This just happened: