Nobody cares what he believes
Smug creep condescends to women who don’t think he should be the keynote speaker at an event to commemorate the murder of fourteen women for the crime of being women.
The choice to invite him wasn’t controversial because he’s trans, it was because he’s not a woman. He should, obviously, have declined the invitation and told the people who invited them that it’s a horrible idea to invite a man instead of a woman for this particular commemoration.
I don’t care. I don’t care what he believes. I don’t care what he believes deeply. I don’t care about him in any way. The people who invited him are far more to blame than he is, but he did accept the invitation and he should have politely declined it. That’s all. He himself is not significant.
Yes, that pretty much covers it. Your point? You accepted the invitation (you could have, and should have said “No”) and deliberately chose (disgustingly) an occasion intended as a memorial to the victims of a horrific mass femicide to erase and talk over the deaths of these women (there’s the vileness and misogyny) and instead blather on about yourself (narcissism) and the imaginary crime of “transmisogyny.” You’re a man. Get over it, shut up, and fuck off.
Sacrilege! Watch out or they’ll be saying you’re questioning his right to exist. He might disappear in a puff of rainbow sparkles.
It would in fact be just like inviting Rachel Dolezal to give the keynote address on MLK Day, or me to be the key speaker commemorating the victims of Pol Pot or Stalin. Sure, we both believe perfectly laudable and correct things on those subjects, we’re just wildly inappropriate as keynote speakers for those events. Only a narcissist would feel otherwise.
If that photo is of him delivering the speech, then using the occasion to plug his own book adds a whole new level of opportunistic assholery.
“The choice to invite him wasn’t controversial because he’s trans, it was because he’s not a woman.”
A man who was not narcissistically committed to talking about his own issues, and who could address the topic of these murders in particular and violence against women in general, would have been a better choice. So I’d say that the fact that he is trans likely makes things much worse, and in fact did make things worse, given his talk.
On that point:
“It would in fact be just like inviting Rachel Dolezal to give the keynote address on MLK Day”
People forget that Dolezal was an effective and well-respected leader within the NAACP. She thought she was black, and she ran with it; she didn’t spend all her energy and talking time trying to prove she was more black than other people. She would have been perfectly reasonable person to give a keynote address on MLK Day, because she’d address the topic at hand and she knows the material.
Sackbut, I had, and still do have, some sympathy for Dolezal on that front. As it turned out she knew she wasn’t black, but really identified with the culture and as you say was an effective activist and worker for the NAACP. What did for her in the end was the dishonesty. Also, in reality, if the NAACP had known she wasn’t black she wouldn’t have had the role she was in because there were appropriately qualified black people who would have been more logical choices. Dolezal was coming from a genuine place, but that’s not all that matters.
Fundamentally, to represent a special interest group you need to be a part of that group, not just a sympathiser or a larper. An outsider can and should be the representative only when a member of the group really can’t do the job for some reason, and then only by acceptance of the group.
What sort of arsehole write “MSW, Msc, Qmed” after their name on a Xwitter post? I suppose that MSW means
Master of Social Work, MSc I know, and Qmed apparently means QueerMed (maybe QuackMed would be better). None of them very grand, anyway. Who is supposed to be impressed?
Athel @6 Some people find it necessary to list their accolades in their twitter/X bios to add legitimacy to what they say. I mostly ignore it because it’s no indicator of whether what they say is garbage or not. In the case of self important egotists, it usually is.