Calling all bullies
So this revolting Jason Frye dude has a public post on Facebook from three days ago, drumming up fans for his campaign to bully a teenage girl who doesn’t want leering men in the women’s locker room where she has to change her clothes.
Hello Humanists,
Tonight is an important night. Thoughts of our community have been proliferating and we have a hunger to get out into the general community and show support for deserving people and causes.
Last week a woman, Christynne Wood, was changing after her regular aqua aerobics routine and a teenager who saw Ms. Wood in the locker room went to the desk to complain about seeing a “man.”
Notice that the man gets the honor of being called a woman while the girl is genericized as a “teenager.” Notice also of course the moronic scare-quotes on “man,” as if nobody but a lunatic would call a man a man.
Christynne Wood is trans, post operative, and was minding her own business. Angered by the understandable ambivalence of YMCA staff, the teen went to express her outrage to the Santee City Council.
Wood is a man, so he wasn’t minding his own business by taking his clothes off in the women’s locker room. The “understandable ambivalence” of the Y staff is actually a failure or refusal to protect the privacy and safety of girls and women.
This resulted in two sizable protests outside of that Y location. One of our members was there on the side of equality and inclusion. He discussed this experience at last week’s Coffee & Conversation.
By “equality and inclusion” of course this foul sexist sadist means encouraging men to take over women’s spaces and force women out of public life.
The consensus of our community that arose from C&C was that there was an inappropriate act that day–patrons of the YMCA should be protected from creepy voyeurs spying on them and trying to give them trouble.
There’s the “creepy voyeur” insult, along with the ludicrous, abusive reversal of aggressor and victim.
There has been a conspicuous and marked increase in anti-trans animus and a vast proliferation of trans-specific regulations emerging across the United States. Oftentimes, and more often than not, this antisocial, vile rhetoric and drive stems from “deeply-held’ religious convictions.
As Humanists, it is our mission to stand with people who experience invidious discrimination and persecution when such affronts to dignity and compassion come from superstition and religious dogma.
Tonight Jason Frye (myself), Brian Delafayette, and others will be heading to Santee City Hall to support Christynne as she addresses the Council (during its regular business).
We will be meeting at City Hall around 5:30
That explains why there was a lot of applause and cheering for his grinning verbal assault on the teenage girl.
A woman comments “calling an underage girl who had to deal with indecent exposure a ‘creepy voyeur’ shows how morally bankrupt you are.”
Morally bankrupt, venomous, sadistic, smirking, smug – some “humanist.”
We just can’t seem to get away from ‘the evil people believe this, and I’m good not evil [almost wrote ‘I’m god not evil’] therefore I must believe the opposite’, content completely irrelevant.
So he’s post operative, and I’m assuming this means he had his penis and testicles removed. Isn’t this the last step in transing, the denouement as it were? Yet this teenage girl still knew this was a male in the female locker room. A male person without male genetalia correctly identified as a male, but let’s blame the girl. The uproar by the trans ally morons all but confirms that yes, this is a male person. If I were that girl’s father there’d be hell to pay. They’re not trying to convince us that this was a female, but that males belong in female only spaces.
How does that work?
“Is homosexuality a sin?” This is a question about religious morality. “Are people who claim to be homosexual not really attracted or aroused by others of the same sex?” This is a fact question which never really came up. Religious people took it for granted because the truth of it was established in the common ground of human experience.
“Is being transgender a sin?” Religious. “Are people born with an inner conviction of what sex they are and is this a more reliable indicator of their actual sex than their reproductive system?” Fact question from common ground which has not been established. It doesn’t matter if the religious parrot something about “God made men and women.” They think God made the mountains and lakes. Believing there are mountains and lakes is not a Deeply Held Religious Conviction if you’re not religious.
The stubborn refusal to examine concepts and arguments in order to separate religious from secular is far, far too common among atheists and humanists. The temptation to deal with opponents using the familiar, easy tactics of arguing for atheism is apparently too strong for them.
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It also means they won’t examine their own take on this issue. They might be using the tactics they learned “arguing for atheism,” but the position they’re defending is religious. How easily they slip into the robes of the Inquisitor, denouncing heretics who refuse to accept TWAW as an article of faith. Opponents aren’t just wrong, or misguided, they are evil, beyond the pale, beyond redemption. Everything is filtered through the confident belief that they are in sole posession of the moral high ground. Who else but someone thoroughly steeped in their own unexamined self-righteouness brand a distraught, vulnerable teenage girl confronted with a naked man in a women’s shower “a creepy little voyeur?”
It seems that DARVO is the only rhetoric device they know besides simply shouting slogans at people. We all know that Wood is the voyeur; Frye obviously used the word against the victim in an attempt to prevent anyone using it for Wood. “You can’t use that word, I’ve already used it for her!”
Bleh! After I stopped calling myself an atheist during the time of the Great Rifts I fell back on (or moved forward to?) calling myself a humanist, now that’s all shot to shit as well. What should I call myself now?
@Vanity’sFiend:
Call yourself an atheist and/or humanist. It’s what you are.
Rejecting the label seems too much like believing what’s convenient to believe. Besides, how can the public organizations ever change their erroneous or ideological stances if there aren’t even vocal atheists/humanists out there pushing back?
What Sastra said. The failure of other atheists to recognize that Trans ideology is sexist and homophobic garbage is not a failure of atheism, it’s a failure of some/most atheists. Your lack of belief in supernatural deities is not dependent on others.
I can understand having misgivings about the labels. A label can be a convenient description or an indication of affiliation. Certainly a lot of abuse leveled at atheists is “do you really want to be associated with…”. Same thing with expressing views contrary to gender ideology. On the other side, look how quickly people disavow the religion of miscreant Christians or the trans-ness of certain violent men. Sometimes, too, people have misconceptions about what a label means. So sometimes it’s more accurate (although more wordy) to describe rather than rely on a common understanding of what a label means.
Sackbut #10
Exactly. To use my go-to example I see “god(s)” exactly the same way I (and practically everyone else) see the Midgard Serpent. I don’t call myself an “amidgardserpentist”, so why should I call myself an “atheist”? If anyone honestly wants to know what I think, they’re going to have to stick around for the actual content. And if they don’t have time for that, then no real understanding is going to be conveyed by me giving them a label. This is also part of the reason* I no longer call myself a “feminist”. Julie Bindel and Laurie Penny are not different kinds of “feminists” any more than Kate Smurthwaite and Eddie Izzard are different kinds of “women”, or fruit bats and baseball bats are different kinds of “bats”. These are homonyms, not subsets of the same larger set. Saying that “feminism” is, say, “a movement that fights the oppression of women” doesn’t really tell us anything when we can’t even even agree on the meaning of “woman” or “oppression”.
I think most people – including self-described “atheists” and “skeptics”** – naturally gravitate toward the latter interpretation. Taking a stand based on ideas, values, principles etc. requires a lot of tedious thinking and will not always align neatly with the views of your “friends” and “allies” (as someone once put it, where everyone is thinking the same, no one is doing much thinking at all). Going with whatever passes for the official “atheist™”, “feminist™”, “leftist™”, “progressive™” etc. position requires zero thinking and automatically puts you on the “right” side of every issue even if the “right” side today (“Four legs good, two legs better!”) is the polar opposite of what it was just yesterday (“Four legs good, two legs bad!”).
* Besides not wanting to come across as claiming to speak for women.
** As became abundantly clear during the Deep Rifts.
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