Terrible news:

A prominent Jordanian writer, who was on trial for sharing a cartoon deemed offensive to Islam, has been shot dead outside a court in Amman where he was due to appear.

Nahed Hattar, 56, was charged with inciting sectarian strife and insulting Islam after posting the cartoon on Facebook this year.

The cartoon, entitled The God of Daesh (Isis), depicted an Isis militant sitting next to two women and asking God to bring him a drink.

Hattar was arrested in August and released on bail early this month. On Sunday, he was shot in the head three times as he arrived for a hearing.

Because he shared a cartoon deemed “offensive” to Islam – to Islam, which is not a person and so cannot be offended. For sharing a cartoon on Facebook he was prosecuted and also murdered.

Saad Hattar, a cousin of the victim, said: “Nahed was accompanied with two brothers and a friend when he was shot. The brothers and the friend chased the killer and caught him and handed him over to the police.”

He said the family held Jordan’s prime minister, Hani al-Mulki, responsible for Hattar’s death. “The prime minister was the first one who incited against Nahed when he ordered his arrest and put him on trial for sharing the cartoon, and that ignited the public against him and led to his killing.”

Much like the way the government of Bangladesh keeps saying how terrible atheists are, thus igniting the public against them and encouraging all these murders.

In a statement, the family called on the government to hold accountable all those who had incited violence against Hattar. “Many fanatics wrote on social media calling for his killing and lynching, and the government did nothing against them,” they said.

The government prosecuted him for a cartoon dissing a fundamentalist form of a religion, and did nothing about people inciting murder.

Hattar had insisted that he had not meant to insult Islam by posting the cartoon, but wanted to expose how Isis “envisions God and heaven”. He accused his Islamist opponents of using the cartoon to settle scores with him.

A controversial figure on the left of Jordanian politics, Hattar has faced charges before, including for insulting the country’s king, Abdullah II. He has also been a prominent supporter of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, and advocated depriving Jordanians of Palestinian origin of their legal and civil rights.

Those last items seem dubious, but that doesn’t mean he deserved to be murdered.

Bonya Ahmed, again.

Originally a comment by iknklast on If not at a Center for Ethics, then where?

The school where I did my masters slipped in my mind when they caved to the demand of a donor that they censor an art exhibit. Students being told their art couldn’t be hung because it offended someone who walked through the building with their nose in the air, holding a fistful of cash in one hand and the leash of the university administration in the other. What lessons do those students learn? They learn that they will need to conform to a lifeless, commercial art if they want the chance to be seen, to work in the field they love.

I watched our local community theatre rewriting a play to take out the parts they worried would offend the local population. I sometimes catch myself hesitating in writing my own plays, wondering, if I write this, will anyone ever put it on? When I catch myself doing that, I slap myself on the wrist, go get a cup of hot coffee, roll up my sleeves, and write what I think needs to be written. Someday I may find someone with guts enough to tackle my women of the Bible series, or my piece that spits in the eye of our local masters of the universe.

And when I teach my class, I say the word “evolution” loud and proud. I refuse to go through life with my head down just because some donor doesn’t think we should teach actual science in the science classes. I hope I have the guts to continue to do that if they threaten to fire me just a few years before I am eligible to retire.

Paul reports that the panel discussion on free speech and safe spaces was…lively.

Thoroughly opposing the notion of safe spaces was Maryam Namazie, forcefully declaring that the rise of safe spaces is due almost entirely to identity politics, and that they are really a form of censorship. “Universities should be unsafe spaces for ideas you might not be comfortable with,” she said, arguing that identity politics have a homogenizing effect in marginalized communities, stifling dissent from within.

Twitter featured a lot of strong feeling on this one.

More clarity about the lines of disagreement emerged when the discussion addressed the dis-invitation of certain speakers, something Namazie has had first hand experience with. Namazie and Haider advocated for protest as a way to express opposition for unwanted speakers, though Brewster wondered aloud whether students’ demands for dis-invitations are not themselves an example of free speech. And there seemed to be an agreement that students have the right to ask. (Or, as Ashley Miller the moderator put it, “Isn’t telling someone to shut up speech?”) Burkholder raised the point that protest isn’t a blanket solution, particularly when it comes to black protests on campus, which are often met with hostility.

Everyone seemed to agree that universities are places where debate needs to happen, where protest and argument and challenging ideas are vital, but the clash comes when the discussion turns to where or whether partitions can go up to contain and protect certain identities and/or ideas. At what point does speech morph into, well, something else that warrants cordoning off? And who decides?

How about Gordon Ramsay?

One more Fidalgo post for now: Wendy Kaminer on free speech.

A free-speech stalwart herself, authoring a magazine piece on atheism as “the last taboo” that was formative to this writer, Kaminer tells this conference full of the irreligious that free speech and freedom of and from religion are “inextricably linked,” and warns that there exists now there is a “progressive retreat from free speech.”

Yes about that magazine piece; same here. I’ve admired Kaminer’s writing for decades. I sometimes disagree with her, but I always see her point.

It’s an extremely touchy issue here, I’m not going to sugarcoat it. Straightaway, it was clear that some folks in attendance were in full agreement with Kaminer, and others were aghast. Everyone, I think, has similar aims: a free exchange of ideas without anyone being oppressed or harmed. How we get there, well, there are some very different ideas about that, and the emotions on this topic run very high in both directions. One way to think about these differences that Kaminer posited was new to me, that those who seek social justice are results-oriented (working toward a specific, tangible end), while civil libertarians, the free-speech absolutists, are process-oriented (more concerned with the structure within which goals are pursued).

Another way of putting that is that free-speech absolutists can be oddly blind to the results, aka the consequences. Many of them simply assume things like “truth will always win in the end” and “the best answer to bad speech is better speech.” The trouble is, bad speech often wins, and the consequences can be horrific. For me the classic example (therefore you may have seen me say it before) is Radio Mille Collines in the days leading up to the Rwandan genocide. Radio Srbska is another. There is no “end” in which truth wins for people who are slaughtered in genocides that have been fomented by various forms of speech.

Things became even more interesting when celebrated veteran journalist Katha Pollitt, who will be speaking later herself, asked Kaminer to take into account the “constant barrage of low level harassment in public society” that women face, harmfully affecting their everyday lives in practical ways. How, Pollitt asked, are they expected to deal with this? Suck it up?

Kaminer agreed with Pollitt’s characterization of the state of things, and said she was less concerned about policing of real *macro*-aggressions as opposed to people, particularly women, being told in advance, “You will be traumatized by this, you will be intimidated by this. and if you are not, you are in denial.” And the only way out, Kaminer said, was to make this coarsened behavior less socially acceptable.

Yes, with the result that there is less of it, so that kind of behavior is less “free.”

Another talk courtesy of Paul: Gulalai Ismail, Founder and Chairperson of Aware Girls…which she established at the age of 16. I learned of her the day Malala was shot, and we’ve been social media-friendly ever since. She’s wonderful.

She particularly highlighted Pakistan’s hostility to women, which she sees as a direct product of its rejection of free expression and secularism in favor of the Islamisation of society. Dr. Ismail discussed the Council of Islamic Ideology, which advises and guides official parliamentary legislation based on fundamentalist religious beliefs. It recently pushed for the rejection of a law written protect women from domestic abuse, something that seems like an obvious good.

Not to them. Instead they offered a new version, allowing a husband to “lightly” beat his wife if she refuses to dress as he wishes, refuses his sexual advances, interacts with strangers, and the like. This is a case in point, said Ismail, that “in nonsecular countries, laws inspired by religion are against women.”

She says “free woman” is an actual pejorative in Pakistan – I guess the way “slut” and “skank” are here.

It is Pakistan’s blasphemy law, said Ismail, that serves as a kind of keystone to the entire anti-woman, pro-fundamentalist apparatus now operating in Pakistan. “Pakistan is literally governed by blasphemy laws.” This is a sobering assertion.

But it bears out. From the Islamisation of education, to the assassinations of politicians who oppose the blasphemy law, to the persecution of religious minorities and nonbelievers. “Blasphemy is being used as an easy-to-get-away-with excuse to hamper freedom of thought and expression,” she said.

And women bear the brunt. “A woman is respected only when she is a mother, or obedient wife, or obedient daughter,” she said. “Secular women are seen as a threat, and their lives are always at risk.”

But take some heart. Ismail wants us to know that as we struggle against this kind of oppression, telling us, “We have amazing secularist women who beat the shit out of patriarchy.” Clearly, she’s one of them.

God I love her.

Paul Fidalgo blogs Melanie Brewster’s talk which also sounds terrific, on the subject of why there aren’t more women in atheism. Brewster is an assistant professor of psychology and education at Columbia.

She cited many older studies that asserted some kind of biological or psychological traits of women that prime them for religious belief, but then revealed that these studies were done with no actual examination of the biological components, and often they came from sociologists working from explicitly religious universities such as Baylor, Brigham Young, and Holy Cross.

But these dusty studies still serve as the foundation for popular understanding of these perceived differences, even among seculars, and she cautioned us to bring our own prized critical thinking to this question. “It’s lazy,” she said, for our own community to glom on to these incomplete studies, and we can do better.

She’s showing a slide of Sam Harris looking (as usual) smug, with a cartoon bubble of that ludicrous “estrogen vibe” explanation that annoyed so many of us a couple of years ago.

Also incredibly important, Brewster noted that the media only presents an extremely narrow view of atheist thinkers and leaders, almost all male, and the vast majority are white. “We need to start asking people in power to start forcing representation in the media,” she said, asserting that those who have that kind of leverage should insist that women and people of color get the air time they might have gotten themselves.

Or we could just wait a few more generations, by which time the planet will be under water.

The fourth Women in Secularism is happening this weekend, and Paul Fidalgo is blogging each session. Maryam spoke yesterday.

At a time when the wearing of burqas and their beachwear variants is an incredibly heated topic, Namazie wasted no time, and withheld no ire, lambasting the enforced veiling of women in Islamic societies.

“Many feminists,” said Namazie, as well as other progressives and secularists, “defend the right to be veiled, but never the right to be unveiled and then live to tell the tale. What a betrayal.”

Secular Coalition tweeted:

.@MaryamNamazie shows a shocking billboard in Iran promoting the hijab, translation: "No one wants to eat the leftovers of flies." #WiS4 pic.twitter.com/I0Omdq8Sj7

— Secular Coalition (@seculardotorg) September 23, 2016

Fidalgo continues:

“The veil, and the segregation that follows, are merely the most public manifestation of putting women in their place,” said Namazie, also saying, “Your refusal to disappear is an act of dissent.”

The veil is part and parcel of the larger marginalization and containment of women in Islamic societies, that emerges in countless other ways, among them being segregation, the absolute power of husbands over their wives, the rules about what size of rock is appropriate for stoning a woman, and the notion that the veil is really for the woman’s own protection.

Namazie impressed upon us that in these societies, “It is a crime to be a woman, and a woman who refuses to be disappeared.” Those women need us as allies.

Be an ally.

An item from Daily Nous:

Wednesday afternoon, Gordon Hull, associate professor of philosophy at University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and director of the school’s Center for Professional and Applied Ethics, put up a post on the Center’s webpage about the recent police shooting of an unarmed black man, Keith L. Scott (see the bottom of this post for that text).

The central message of the post was summed up in its conclusion:

I do not know exactly what happened last night, but even more than I hope that the CMPD will conduct a thorough and transparent investigation, I hope that something triggers white America to care about the deep structural racism that permeates so much of our society, and about the incalculable damage that racism does to real people, real families and real communities, every day.

The next morning Hull received an email from his dean, Nancy A. Gutierrez, ordering him to take the post off the site.

He did, and then he wrote about it at NewAPPS:

We live in a world where University Ethics Center directors are not allowed to attempt to exercise moral leadership in the communities they serve, even as those universities claim to commit and recommit to their communities. And where Ethics Centers are forced to be strangely silent on moral issues like HB2 and police violence.

Gutierrez told him he’s free to say whatever he wants elsewhere, but not at the university’s Center for Professional and Applied Ethics.

So he can profess and apply ethics any way he likes outside the university, but inside the university, where he directs a center for doing just that, he can’t. That seems perverse. It’s not the Center for Professional and Applied Ethics Within Certain Limits to be Determined by the Administration, at least not in the title. Surely professing and applying ethics as he thinks right is what he was hired for.

Back to Jason at Daily Nous:

It is not unreasonable to think that it’s well within the responsibilities of the director of a university ethics center to comment publicly, in that professional capacity, on ethical matters of current concern. To speak in that professional capacity is not to speak on behalf of the university. Rather, it is to make use of the expertise for which one was hired to express one’s professional opinion on a subject well within the scope of concern of the institution. If a school is going to bother having an ethics center, ought it not respect the academic freedom of its employees to speak to the public about ethics?

It certainly seems so to me. In fact it seems just a tad fraudulent to have a university ethics center if you’re not going to allow its staff to apply ethics without your oversight and control. UNC isn’t a “university” like Trump “University,” that’s just a fancy name for fleecing naïve customers – it’s a real university, which should act according to the ethics of academia.

H/t David Koepsell

Wouldn’t you think editors and subs would learn to stop generating headlines like this? Especially after that conspicuous fuss about the Chicago paper that headlined “Football Player Name’s Wife Wins Medal”?

Tom Waits, his wife, John Prine receive songwriting awards

They just don’t even think we’re human, do they. We’re pets, or The Help.

H/t Jen Phillips

Michael De Dora writes:

Whatever you believe about police and race and racism in the United States, consider this: unarmed citizens who pose little to no danger to society or law enforcement — and, in some cases, citizens in need of help — are being killed in the streets by the very people responsible for keeping us safe. Leave aside for a moment the question of “why.” The bare fact is, this does not happen with such regularity anywhere else in the world. This should disturb as conscientious humans, frighten us as fellow citizens, and concern us very deeply as Americans. Because I can tell you from first-hand experience that in the international halls of power, in the highest human rights bodies in the world, countries from around the world use these events — as well as the ensuing crackdowns on legal protests in response to these events — to discredit the moral power of the United States. Let there be no doubt: every killing of an innocent American civilian at the hands of law enforcement needlessly leaves dead another member of our society, fosters a more dangerous situation for all members of our society, and threatens the stability of the entire world. There is no need to accept this as our destiny; in fact, we must not. For if this is our destiny, we are all doomed.

Do we want Saudi Arabia or Zimbabwe pointing to our abysmal human rights record as a reason to ignore anything we can say about theirs? I don’t think so.

In a NY Times op-ed Lionel Shriver frames the moral panic over her Brisbane Writers Festival talk as a matter of conformity.

Viewing the world and the self through the prism of advantaged and disadvantaged groups, the identity-politics movement — in which behavior like huffing out of speeches and stirring up online mobs is par for the course — is an assertion of generational power. Among milliennials and those coming of age behind them, the race is on to see who can be more righteous and aggrieved — who can replace the boring old civil rights generation with a spikier brand.

When I was growing up in the ’60s and early ’70s, conservatives were the enforcers of conformity. It was the right that was suspicious, sniffing out Communists and scrutinizing public figures for signs of sedition.

Nah. That’s not right. There was plenty of sniffing out then too. There was plenty of disagreement and orthodoxy-enforcement. And if you jump back to the previous heyday of the left, the 30s, they fought like cats in a sack.

There may be more of it now, it may be more obsessive and nitpicky, there may be more posturing, but the enforcement of conformity itself is far from new. It couldn’t be, really, because any political position needs some conformity, or else how could it be a position?

I’m dismayed by the radical left’s ever-growing list of dos and don’ts — by its impulse to control, to instill self-censorship as well as to promote real censorship, and to deploy sensitivity as an excuse to be brutally insensitive to any perceived enemy. There are many people who see these frenzies about cultural appropriation, trigger warnings, micro-aggressions and safe spaces as overtly crazy.

Cue a frenzy about her ableism and demonization of the mentally unwell.

I think she’s overgeneralizing a little, but I also agree with her that for instance it should have been possible to disagree with her talk, or with parts of it, without making a big show-offy moral performance of it. Her talk was not so horrifying that it needed anyone stalking out stamping her feet noisily. It was not so horrifying that it required two angry women to accost her and call her “racist” and “a disgrace” the next day. We should be able to disagree without brawling.

In an era of weaponized sensitivity, participation in public discourse is growing so perilous, so fraught with the danger of being caught out for using the wrong word or failing to uphold the latest orthodoxy in relation to disability, sexual orientation, economic class, race or ethnicity, that many are apt to bow out. Perhaps intimidating their elders into silence is the intention of the identity-politics cabal…

Oh there’s no perhaps about it. Of course that’s their intention, and they say so loudly and often. We’re all stupid and rotted in the brain, so we need to fuck right off.

And in conclusion –

Protecting freedom of speech involves protecting the voices of people with whom you may violently disagree. In my youth, liberals would defend the right of neo-Nazis to march down Main Street. I cannot imagine anyone on the left making that case today.

Goodness she does like to overgeneralize. It’s not the case that 40 years ago all liberals, and certainly not all lefties (she doesn’t distinguish between them enough), would defend the right of neo-Nazis to march down Main Street. Some would, others wouldn’t. It’s the same today. The ACLU would (and did), other organizations wouldn’t. There are arguments either way.

But all that aside – I think she’s right that the fuss about her talk was grotesquely out of proportion.

Trump doesn’t want debate moderators pointing out lies. Well he wouldn’t, would he. He lies the way the rest of us breathe, so naturally he doesn’t want reality-based people pointing out all his lies, not to mention his pig-ignorance.

Trump says it’s up to the candidates themselves to call out their rivals when they are wrong. Trump spoke Thursday in a telephone interview on “Fox and Friends.” He says the candidates should “argue it out.”

NBC’s Matt Lauer has received criticism for not pointing out factual errors by Trump at a recent forum on national security.

Errors and also lies. He tells lies. Big, glaring, shameless lies.

Trump says there’s pressure on NBC’s Holt ahead of Monday’s debate at Hofstra University. He likens it to the pressure former Indiana University basketball coach and Trump supporter Bobby Knight used to put on referees.

Trump says: “A lot of people are watching to see whether or not he succumbs to that pressure.”

This isn’t a game, Pepe. This isn’t a game or a joke or a sport or even an investment opportunity. This is a choice between a centrist insider and a fascist, and you’re the fascist.

From Amy Dickinson aka Dear Amy at the Washington Post:

Dear Amy: You used the word “mansplaining” in your reply to “Perplexed.” I don’t think it means what you think it means.

Mansplaining is a sexist word used by feminists to shut down any debate with a man if they think they can’t win with their argument.

Your use of it in your column is offensive to anyone who is capable of a logical discussion.

Mark R. Bates, National Coalition for Men

Mark: Others complained that I had misused the word “mansplaining,” but you are the only person to mansplain while doing it.

“Mansplaining” is a slang term used for when men co-opt ideas, thoughts or concepts generated by a woman and then reexplain these concepts back to her in a highly patronizing and “expert” way. (See above.)

Mansplain that, logic king.

Janice Turner in the Times:

I have complained to the BBC for the first time in my life, about an episode of Radio 4’s iPM in which Jennifer Tracey interviewed a ten-year-old who we were told “identifies as gender non-binary”. The mother said she’d spotted “signs” her daughter wasn’t truly a girl: aged three she wanted a pirates (not princesses) birthday party, disdained dolls, liked Peter Pan, Iron Man and Wolverine.

Instead of buying books on lady pirates, declaring girls can like superheroes — indeed girls can like, do or wear anything! — this mother “did a bit of research on the internet”. Whereby she concluded her daughter was a trans-boy and asked what name she’d like to use. “Leo” said this tiny child, so they called her that, used male pronouns, put her in “male” clothes. But later the child said she wanted to keep her Barbies, so the mother read a few more websites and decided her daughter “didn’t have a male brain” but was between genders.

In the entire 30 minute program, Turner says, Tracey didn’t challenge anything the mother said.

Not whether asking every day “are you a boy or a girl?” was good for her daughter’s mental health. Not whether it was appropriate to ask your ten-year-old “if you were a man would you be gay or straight”? Not whether posing her periods as “problematic” or talking about puberty-blocking hormones was driving a still-developing child towards a lifetime of sterility-creating drugs and surgery.

What is wrong with everyone? Have they all simply forgotten the whole point of feminism, which is that your sex should not dictate what you do with your life or what you wear or whether or not you can travel by yourself?

The BBC is allowing to enter the mainstream, unquestioned, a pernicious ideology that demands parents patrol their children for gender crimes — boys who like dolls, girls who climb trees — and then seek a label and treatment.

Boys can like dolls. Girls can like climbing trees. Let them grow; they don’t need pollarding.

This is a useful compendium of Trump’s bad actions, by Keith Olbermann. Mind you, the first item on the list is a dud, because it’s “he attacked the pope.” Verbally, I presume, and I think the pope richly deserves verbal attack. But after that it’s a good list. I’ve been wanting a master-collection, and this is one.

Trump is a guy…

Who lied about why he wouldn’t release his taxes, because he was being audited and proved himself a liar by saying he would release his taxes if Hillary Clinton released her e-mails; who lied about how much money his father gave him or helped him get, coming out of college; who lied about sending his private jet to ferry stranded U.S. servicemen; who lied about talking to the Attorney General of Florida, who declined to investigate Trump University after she was given acampaign donation; who lied about his business in Russia; who lied about meeting Russian president Putin; who lied about offering child care to his employees, when it was child care for his hotel guests; who lied about “some people” wanting a moment of silence for the murderer of five Dallas policemen; who lied about seeing thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating 9/11; who lied about 9/11 hijackers sending their wives and girlfriends home to Saudi Arabia.

…

The Republican Party has actually nominated for president a man who has proposed that Russia or China should enact a Watergate-like hacking of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails; who has proposed banningMuslims from entering the country, then said it was only a suggestion, then proposed it again; whose running mate has proposed banning members of other religions; who has proposed open racial profiling; who has proposed banning people from “terror nations,” saying, “Look it up, they have a list”; who has proposed “ideological certification” for immigrants; who has proposed worse than waterboarding while praising how Saddam Hussein, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong-unhandled protest and terrorism; who has proposed that American civilians be tried by military commissions at Gitmo; who has proposed killing the families of terrorists or suspected terrorists.

A man who has proposed teaching mandatory patriotism in schools; proposed that his supporters appoint themselves as election-day voting monitors; proposed making American protection of fellow NATO members C-O-D; whose campaign proposed purging the governmentof all Obama appointees; proposed avoiding government debt byprinting more money; proposed reducing national debt by paying lessthan we agreed to; proposed forestalling newfinancial regulations by executive order—and then in the same speech proposed eliminating…someexecutive orders.

There’s much much more.

H/t Dave Richards

Sarah Ditum wrote in the New Statesman today about being genderqueer as a child. No I’m just kidding, she wrote about being a child who thought her favorite cartoon character was a girl.

My reasoning went like this: I am the most important person in the world and a girl, therefore the most important person in my favourite cartoon must also be a girl. And many happy games of Muskehounds were played by me, in my dungarees, oblivious to the unlikelihood of a children’s cartoon having a female lead in the first place, let alone giving that female lead the lovely Juliette as a romantic interest.

Then she realized her mistake, and grew up to be a feminist. I recognize that trajectory. A lot of us do.

But it could all have gone another way. On Radio 4’s iPM this week, the mother of a 10-year-old called Leo explained that one of the reasons she knew her female child must be either a boy or non-binary was that Leo’s fictional idols were always male: Peter Pan, Iron Man, Wolverine.

Another piece of evidence was that Leo prefers pirates over princesses as a birthday party theme. And then there were the Barbies that Leo never played with. All of this, according to Leo’s mum, showed that Leo couldn’t really be a girl but must instead be either “male mind who happened to be born in a female body” or (in the family’s current favoured explanation) “a non-binary mind who happened to be born in a female body.”

Yeah well guess what, we’re all non-binary minds who happen to be born in either a female or a male body.

(Don’t any of these credulous parents remember their own childhoods? Were they all so tranquilly “cis” that these failures to match the stereotypes simply never happened at all? Not a single yearning glance at pirate adventures or tea sets?)

Accounts of trans children consistently return to these stereotypes. Long hair or short hair. Trousers or frocks. Blue or pink. Children’s preferences are filtered through an adult rubric of gender and used to decide what sex they “really” are, despite the fact that we should know by now that sex is nothing more or less than our bodies. Our sex is a fundamental fact of who we are and how we are treated, but its ultimate truth is not decided by where we fall between the rigidly maintained domains of pink and blue. And thank goodness, because as much as I liked being a cartoon dog, I’m glad I know I’m a female human.

And a female human, furthermore, who doesn’t have to comply with the stupid stereotypes, and knows she doesn’t have to.

Laurie Penny said no that’s all wrong on Twitter.

@NewStatesman @sarahditum this is a reductive interpretation of what it means to be genderqueer/non-binary. Yes, lots of reporting is sexist

the more interesting question is why cis writers feel such a need to deny the experience of trans/NB people.

What I want to know is how Laurie Penny thinks she knows what “the experience of trans/NB people” is, and how she thinks she knows it is experience as opposed to just new words people have decided to use. What is experience and what is a label?

Sarah starts off with her own experience, which is valid. But it doesn’t invalidate other experiences.

I consider myself a genderqueer woman. I was never a tomboy growing up. One of my sisters was. She’s cis.

Penny naïvely takes those labels to be transparent and reliable, when they could be just different words to describe exactly what Sarah is talking about. What does she mean by “a genderqueer woman” and what makes her so sure it’s different from “a female human”? How does she know her sister is “cis” and that that word accurately describes anything?

I’d like to know, but I doubt I’ll ever find out.