People don’t believe me when I say Joyce Carol Oates is stupid. No, really: she is stupid. Dense. Thick as two short planks. She does not thinkk good.
Like so:
Yes she is that stupid. She doesn’t even get that “random men” and “transgender persons” can be one and the same. She doesn’t even get that “random men” can idennify as women and proceed to commit violent acts against girls and women.
I have bumped into trans persons who are cashiers…yes, I do notice. Trans women stick out wherever they go, because they are men, and look like men.
I might have run into some trans man cashiers and not known it, but that’s never the group we’re worrying about. And it certainly isn’t the group we’re worried might harm us and/or take away everything that we built.
Is Joyce being condescending unwittingly, or just not noticing?
I’m still inclined to see this as an example of the curious phenomenon where otherwise intelligent people shut off their brains while discussing this topic, rather than general stupidity. JCO has usually impressed me with her skill as a writer, at least, up until this point.
Apart from the usual nonsense (e.g. the conflation of “transgender persons” with TIMs, the ridiculous straw man, and the base rate fallacy), I notice that Oates apparently thinks people aren’t dangerous if they aren’t noticeable, which is a new one for me.
Freemage – she was also shockingly stupid about Charlie Hebdo and PEN. Salman Rushdie and I tried to set her straight but as with this subject, it was like talking to a brick wall. Her responses were, again, not just wrong but thick.
These claims are self-refuting. First she claims they’re unnoticeable, but surely they’d have to be noticeable in order to object to them? So are they noticeable or not?
If she thinks I’m not going to notice a six-foot three cashier with an adam’s apple and a mini-skirt behind the counter, I think she’s quite off. And it’s not behind the counter where there is an issue, is it?
By that logic, we have also met lizard-people in human disguise and have not suspected anything amiss. It is just so easy to make unfalsifiable claims.
On a more pedantic note, a writer who doesn’t use capital letters to begin sentences is no kind of writer at all.
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