A fit of pique
I keep hearing distant reports of how thoroughly David Futrelle has gone pro-trans-dogma and anti-feminist-disbelief, so I decided to take a look at the current iteration. It’s thoroughly gone.
Author and anti-trans activist JK Rowling has announced she is launching a crisis center for female victims of rape and sexual abuse. The catch? Beira’s Place, as the center is called, won’t allow trans women to use its services.
That’s not “the catch.” What a ridiculous claim. He said it himself – she’s launching a crisis center for female people. Of course that means it won’t “allow” men to use its services: its services are not for men. It says so right on the tin; Futrelle said so himself when he said “a crisis center for female victims of rape and sexual abuse.” If you set up as a veterinarian and don’t accept human patients, that’s not a “catch,” it’s just sticking to the service you’re offering as opposed to providing a service you’re not offering. A service for women is a service for women; news at eleven.
The exclusion of trans women from Beira’s Place isn’t a bug; it seems to be a, if not the, primary motivation behind the service.
There’s no need to turn over rocks looking for a motivation. It’s just what Beira’s Place is for: it’s a service for women. Why isn’t Futrelle wondering what is the motivation for “excluding” porcupines, rocks, Belgium? A service that is for one thing necessarily “excludes” all the other things; there’s no need to enumerate them all, let alone puzzle over why they’re “excluded.”
Indeed, Rowling came up with the idea for Beira’s Place; she told anti-trans feminist Suzanne Moore, in what can only be described as a fit of pique caused by remarks from Mridul Wadhwa, the trans woman in charge of Edinburgh’s Rape Crisis centre.
Actually no, our reaction to what Mridul Wadhwa said can be described in a million ways other than calling it a “fit of pique” – which is a staggeringly contemptuous and misogynist name to call women’s fury at a man berating women for not wanting a man running a rape crisis centre. A fit of fucking pique is it – how dare he?
It never ceases to amaze, the way men who five minutes ago appeared to be staunch allies of feminist women leap right back into the swamp of sexist epithets and contempt for the sake of men who call themselves women. Bros before hos indeed.
I’ll interrupt myself to take some deep breaths at this point.
if it’s a fit of pique that’s an awful lot of work and money, when all she’d really need to do is drive through the campus at Edinburgh flipping the bird at students.
Dave sucks,and I used to think he was cool.
Not all Daves!
I stopped reading when he explicitly said some months (?) ago that he’d be focusing much more on trans issues (TW, that is), but the drift had been visible for a while. It’s fascinating to see the blind spot there.
@chainring
Months? David went off the rails years ago along with most of the Skeptics Movement. I’m still baffled to this day that someone who spent so much time studying the Manosphere could be taken in by such an obviously creepy and misogynistic movement like the Trans Rights Movement. One day, if someone ever writes a book on how the Skeptic community fell for such an obvious pseudoscience (imo Transgenderism is a sub Creationism level belief), he’ll deserve one chapter along with PZ and Rebecca ‘I got creeped out getting propositioned in a lift once but women have nothing to fear from trans women using their spaces’ Watson of course.
I feel as if I’ve already written that chapter to the tune of several hundred thousand words by now. I’m not one bit closer to understanding it.
Dave @ 2: Definitely not all Daves! In fact I refuse to call Futrelle “Dave”; he doesn’t deserve it.
Dave, you’re still on my cool list.
Of course I was kidding! I just could not resist putting my line under Mike’s last line. The two lines read so funny together.
snerk well I knew that, I was kidding back.
“Not all Daves” would make a good catchphrase. I might adopt it.
It isn’t just transphobia with Futrelle, though. I was denounced once for commenting on the problems I had with anorexia. I was body shaming! Hell, it’s my body, I can shame it if I want to. If I want to say I was too skinny to be healthy (and being 5’10” makes being 100 lbs somewhat less than healthy), I have the science to back me. Not to mention my “lived experience”. Passing out before I could get to the bathroom…just comes with the territory, right?
And that wasn’t the only thing, but it was a big one. I kept reading, though, until he went off the deep end on trans. I don’t think I’ve read him in several years.