9 Responses to “Their purpose is genocide”

• #1

  Lady Mondegreen

  November 6, 2015 at 9:46 pm

  I wonder if people are going to look back on this idiocy as a moral panic akin to the Satanic Panic and False Memory Syndrome of the ’80s.

  Those happened partly in response to increased recognition of a real problem–the sexual abuse of children. Likewise, public recognition of trans people, and of the discrimination they face, has never been so widespread.

  In both cases effective advocacy is needed–not overwrought nonsense. (You’d think that would go without saying.)
• #2

  quixote

  November 6, 2015 at 10:53 pm

  This differs in a fundamental way from the moral panics about, say, pedophilia. Then they fingered random scapegoats and went after them.

  To make it equivalent to the TERF witchhunt, the pedo panic would have targeted those trying to teach the kids what they need to know to articulate creepiness. Sex education teachers, maybe.
• #3

  Steamshovelmama

  November 7, 2015 at 4:22 am

  The trivialisation of actions that lead to a real genocide is stunning and offensive. There aren’t enough facepalms in the world.

  While I totally understand trans people resenting and disliking what some radical feminists say I really *don’t* understand why they don’t reserve their greatest anger for the people who are *actually* beating, raping and killing them. People who are not radical feminists.
• #4

  John

  November 7, 2015 at 5:10 am

  While I totally understand trans people resenting and disliking what some radical feminists say I really *don’t* understand why they don’t reserve their greatest anger for the people who are *actually* beating, raping and killing them. People who are not radical feminists.

  Yes, it would seem that few if any radical feminists have ever beaten or killed a trans gendered women. And what a mockery these people are making of the term ‘genocide’.
• #5

  Holms

  November 7, 2015 at 5:28 am

  Oh, according to the UN definition? With a handy link too! This must be rock solid if it inspires such certainty.

  Legal definition of genocide

  Genocide is defined in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of genocide (1948) as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

  The first hurdle is that the trans people are not a nationality, ethnicity, race or religion, and hence action against them cannot meet the UN definition of genocide, no matter what that action may be. No doubt this Morgan M Page considers that reading to be too narrow, and that a group along any demographic demarcation may be the target of genocide. The claim was that TERFs meet the UN definition, which it doesn’t, but fine.

  The next component then is the actions taken against group X.

  6. Genocidal acts

  Issues to be analyzed here include:

  • Acts that could be obvious “elements” of the crime of genocide as defined in Article 6 of the Rome Statute, such as killings, abduction and disappearances, torture, rape and sexual violence; ‘ethnic cleansing’ or pogroms;

  • Less obvious methods of destruction, such as the deliberate deprivation of resources needed for the group’s physical survival and which are available to the rest of the population, such as clean water, food and medical services;

  • Creation of circumstances that could lead to a slow death, such as lack of proper housing, clothing and hygiene or excessive work or physical exertion;

  • Programs intended to prevent procreation, including involuntary sterilization, forced abortion, prohibition of marriage and long-term separation of men and women;

  • Forcible transfer of children, imposed by direct force or through fear of violence, duress, detention, psychological oppression or other methods of coercion;

  • Death threats or ill treatment that causes disfigurement or injury; forced or coerced use of drugs or other treatment that damages health.

  This, I think, is where the main effort is spent: attempting to link ‘gender critical’ essays and such with, I’m guessing, the death threats point. As we know, Ophelia is a horrible TERF because she participated in a gender critical discussion on facebook (whatever the fuck started the shit against her) which will probably besaid to contribute in some small way to the general air of anti-trans prejudice, which in turn will be argued to be directly harmful to trans people.

  That last link is the only one that isn’t preposterous. Yes, a general air of hostility towards X is harmful to that group in that their quality of life; a person does not have to be the target of violence to be miserable. Yet to equate ‘being gender critical (or whatever the transgression may be)’ with ‘intentionally creating an atmosphere so bleak they commit suicide’ to fulfil the the requirement for fucking genocide is to throw away the idea that words have generally agreed-upon meanings.

  Being scornful of a group (and here I am indulging the assertion that Ophelia thinks this in the slightest), disparaging it and the like, is bigotry. That’s the word for it. It’s not a good thing, but – and I can scarcely believe that this needs pointing out – it is far far short of overt action directly intended to exterminate.
• #6

  Screechy Monkey

  November 7, 2015 at 11:00 am

  This is just another version of the Ben Carson tactic of comparing everything to slavery and/or the Holocaust. Ironically, many of the people screaming “TERFs are committing genocide!’ probably think themselves vastly superior to Carson.
• #7

  Lady Mondegreen

  November 7, 2015 at 11:54 am

  This differs in a fundamental way from the moral panics about, say, pedophilia. Then they fingered random scapegoats and went after them.

  OK, bad examples. My point isn’t that TERFmania is exactly like the specific panics I mentioned; I used them as examples of moral panics in general. Going after random scapegoats is not an inherent feature of a moral panic. Example (also related to pedophilia): fear of child abduction by “sex offenders”:

  Critics often point out that, contrary to popular media depictions, abductions by predatory offenders are very rare[24] and 95% of child abuse offenses are committed by a someone known to the child; studies by the U.S Department of Justice found sex offender recidivism to be 5.3%[25] which compares as second lowest of all offender groups, only those convicted of homicide having lower rate of recidivism.[26] Critics claim that, while originally aimed towards the worst of the worst, the laws have gone through series of amendments, often named after child victim of a highly publicized predatory sex offense, expanding the scopes of the laws to low level offenses.[24] The media narrative of a sex offender highlighting egregious offenses as typical behavior of any sex offender; and media distorting the facts of some cases,[27] has increased the panic leading legislators to attack judicial discretion,[27] making sex offender registration mandatory based on certain listed offenses rather than individual risk or the actual severity of the crime, thus practically catching less serious offenders under the domain of harsh sex offender laws.

  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic
• #8

  Ariel

  November 7, 2015 at 2:48 pm

  Lady Mondegreen:

  My point isn’t that TERFmania is exactly like the specific panics I mentioned; I used them as examples of moral panics in general.

  What is still missing is the peculiar politically charged, internal character of the conflict. After all, it’s so bitter exactly because it is internal and politically charged, don’t you think? In such internal fights there are all these groups within the movement which promote their own programs and interests on the way! Here you’ve got the young versus the old, second wave versus third wave, identity conceptions against… well, against an amalgamate of everything else. No, it doesn’t look to me like an ‘ordinary’ moral panic. It is something worse than that; hence the language – “genocide” and so on.

  [Apologies: on reflection I see that the above is probably not very clear and it’s something which I still have to think about. In fact, Stalinism and Trotskyism is for me the paradigm of an internal fight and the source of my conviction that such fights – with all the political interests and group identities formed on the way – can be particularly cruel and bitter beyond imagination. E.g. I have this feeling that the main difference between Bindel and Yiannopoulos was really that no-platforming Bindel is a part of the (oh-so-engaging!) internal fight, while excluding Milo is not, so who cares, really (shrug). Still, at the moment I’m not able to propose a good formulation for these intuitions.]
• #9

  Ophelia Benson

  November 7, 2015 at 3:28 pm

  The Stalinism-Trotskyism fight used to fascinate me. It’s true about the similarities.