About those lavish and unusual apologies…
McLaughlin is the founder of MeTooSTEM.
More apologies. It’s a retort as opposed to a serious statement, but still. More apologies? After that stream of abject prostrate lachrymose apologies they’d already issued?
Flippant dismissal of the concerns of women, from the woman who founded MeTooSTEM. What did they do to her?
They get “folks” asking if a group that opposes sexual harassment of women in STEM can change the subject and be about trans people instead – and the founder of the group thinks this is a good thing.
People have lost their damn minds, I swear.
Comments
7 responses to “Your message seems to include a dogmatic refusal”
So ‘metoostem’ has nothing whatsoever to do with women who have been sexually harassed in STEM careers?
What does it stand for, then?
MElodramatising narcissist running a
TOOthless anti-assault organisation, which is actually
Supporting the very same
Trans bullies and
Egotistical
Men who are pushing women out of STEM.
tigger, feel free to locate the nearest microphone to you, read your post out loud, then hold the mic out in front of you and allow it to fall to the floor. Now, take a bow and allow the applause to wash over you.
Oh, almost forgot to say; excellent comment :-))
I feel like there’s a way to combine hashtags along with the #MeToo hashtag to examine this whole exchange in that context but I’m just not clever enough to make it work.
This again:
Well, good. But who said they did? Who even suggested that anyone might? Is there a no-true-scotsman caveat in the “asking for our services” clause? Who knows, but what is apparent is that BethAnn McLaughlin, PhD is pretending that concern that an organisation might have abandoned the people it was formed to protect is fear of transfolx.
I witnessed an argument just the other day that ran almost exactly the same way. One person was saying that the issue with women’s safe spaces being invaded wasn’t that trans women are a specific physical threat to women, but that it reduced safety overall for reasons that are so obvious I distrust anyone who feels they need to be spelled out at all.
The reply? “So what you’re saying is that trans women are a specific physical threat to women?” (I paraphrase)
There were three rounds of this one person – far more patient than I – carefully stating the problem and the reply every time was a slight variant of “So what you’re saying is that trans women are a specific physical threat to women?”
This is the sort of ‘argument’ all serious criticism of TRAism receives. It seems both acceptable and respectable among people who would shoot it to pieces in any other situation.
It reminds me of something I’ve mentioned before. I’m using David Futrelle as an example only because his case seems (to me) so high in contrast. It also applies to others known around these parts. When David writes about incels, MRAs, PUAs and so on, he does so with due contempt but with a heavy dose of sarcasm. He’s pointing out the ridiculous things they say and say they do. It’s funny. It’s compassionate to the women they’re a threat or annoyance to. It’s full of regret that the world still has to deal with attitudes of this kind and occasionally sympathetic to the MRAs etc because they are so emotionally stunted and locked into a hateful world view.
But when he writes about ‘TERFs’, the tone is entirely different. Less mocking, more directly contemptuous and – to my mind – hateful. When an incel says something idiotic about women it’s pathetic and amusing. David and his audience roll their eyes and laugh at the idiot. When a TERF says something (ridiculous or not) it’s hateful and must be shut down immediately. David also makes gross and crass generalisations about ‘TERFs’ that he doesn’t make about his other targets.
It’s as though he feels that attacks on men are hugely more personal and significant than attacks on women…
Of course, I could easily be imagining a difference in tone.
It seems both acceptable and respectable among people who would shoot it to pieces in any other situation.
That – the “any other situation” bit. It applies also to most or all of the core claims – like “we have the right to be accepted as who we say we are.” The absurdity of such a claim would be obvious IN ANY OTHER SITUATION but in this one all the rules are set on fire.
Even if they did, I don’t think You have to be particularly bigoted at all to feel unsafe around people who spend a significant part of their time engaging in violent rhetoric against women whose views they don’t like, telling them to “die in a fire”, justifying punching them in the face, posting pictures of themselves posing with baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire etc.
Ophelia @5
Yeah, we all got a taste of that during The First (possibly second) Great Schism, which happened because… well, because men didn’t want to treat women with respect at conferences. We now see that the same fingerprints were smeared all over the coverups of abusive behaviour of many male people at conferences and then – as became apparent – in their daily and professional lives.
The hyperskepticism approach was to treat every statement as equally unreliable, but only when it came to statements the hyperskeptics didn’t like, such as “it’s shit to treat women as prey”. Other statements such as “it’s all totally fine” were not subject to the same level of scrutiny.
If there’s a difference between that and the current schism. it’s one of scale. The traditionally progressive suddenly feel as though some people are finally listening…. so for some reason default to the signature bullying tactics of their opponents. They don’t seem to remember that they previously opposed those tactics.
Bjarte Foshaug @7:
I entirely agree.
But the point in this case was that every argument, no matter how much to the contrary, was proof to the antagonist that anyone promoting safe spaces for women believes that all trans people are a threat. He would not adapt his argument – or even acknowledge any counter-argument – because he had already decided not to think.