Guest post: These are Utopia problems

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Underlined.

Lady Mondegreen #9

I hear this from gender identity activists, but I’ve never seen a single screenshot.

Sorry for sounding like a broken record, but to me this was one of the earlies warning signs that the trans agenda was of a very different nature from the feminist or anti-racist or LGB ones. When I started paying attention to social justice issues (with a special emphasis on feminism) in the aftermath of “Elevatorgate” and the ensuing Anti-Harassment Policy Wars, the women being targeted by MRAs never had any problem providing endless specific examples (in the form of direct quotes, screenshots etc.) of obvious, unambiguous cyberbullying, harassment, hatespeech, and threats. My most vivid memory from that time is watching Caroline Criado-Perez’s mentionings on Twitter fill up with the ugliest cyber-bullying I had ever seen quicker than the Twitter feed could load them. I would click “refresh”, and by the time my browser (not a particularly slow one!) was finished loading the tweets, there were already 15 new ones waiting in line. These attacks could go on for hours at a time, every day for months or even years*.

When I started hearing about the diabolical “TERFs” (supposedly at least as bad as the MRAs sending rape and death threats to CCP) it was a very different story indeed. No screenshots, no direct quotes, nothing but the TRA’s own words. One of the most bizarre conversations I’ve had in my life was when a TRA PM’ed me on twitter to interrogate me about why I was following a certain feminist blogger who, by his own admission, had never said anything explicitly transphobic. Apparently it was “implied in very subtle ways” that only trans people could detect, and I was not qualified to question their judgement. It was about time I started to realize that the genocidal “TERFs” I kept hearing about included roughly half the feminists I was following, and once seen the glaring contrast between these women’s actual words and the words put into their mouth by the TRA could not be unseen. There was no going back after that.

In one episode of the original Cosmos series (there is a point to all this, I promise), Carl Sagan talked about how there were at one time people speculating that the surface of Venus was a swamp and maybe even inhabited by dinosaurs. When you looked at Venus through the best telescopes available at the time, it appeared to be completely featureless, so apparently the thinking went something like:

I can’t see a thing on the surface of Venus. Why not? Because it covered in clouds! What are clouds made of? Water! Ok, so there must a lot of water on Venus. Well, if there’s a lot of water on Venus, it’s probably a swamp. And if it’s a swamp there’s A and if there’s A, there is B […], and if there is Z, why not dinosaurs?

I think the way TRAs get from “this feminist said xyz” to “phobias”, “hate”, “denying our right to exist”, ” violence”, “murder”, “genocide” etc. is very similar to the way those people got from “I can’t see a thing” to “Dinosaurs”. As I keep saying it’s never about what the alleged “TERF” actually said. It’s only ever about what the thing she said supposedly implies as seen through the distorting lens of a million unstated premises and only at the other end of a long chain of impossibly sloppy inferences and extrapolations (involving word-magic, mindreading etc.). Yet when people like Jones report on the latest internet showtrial against feminist thoughtcriminals, they invariably skip right past the million unstated premises and impossibly sloppy inferences and go straight to the “supposedly implies” part as if it had already been established more firmly the the laws of thermodynamics, such that the only question left to consider is how severe the punishment needs to be. As Not Bruce keeps pointing out, if they had any real examples of feminists spouting “hate”, denying trans people’s “rights” (including the “right to exist”), advocating “violence” and even “genocide”, etc. they would use it for everything it was worth. The reason they keep focusing on – never mind “first world problems”, or even “luxury problems”, these are “Utopia” problems! – like the technically accurate use of pronouns (!) or a popular author of young adult literature writing one of the least hateful things I have ever read*, is because that’s all they have. That’s the nothing that their dinosaurs ultimately boils down to.

* All that effort just to make the point that sexism was a non-issue…

** Certainly orders of magnitude less hateful than anything I have ever read by a TRA.

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