Punishable beliefs
Sometimes, I hear, people get reported to their employers for “transphobia” – but what exactly is “transphobia”? And why is it reportable? People don’t get reported to employers for misogyny do they? Not that I ever heard of. There has to be an action. People get reported for sexual harassment, but not for misogyny.
So, puzzling over these ambiguities, I hit the Google machine and found the Cambridge Student Union explanation of what transphobia is.
Transphobia has been defined by the Crown Prosecution Service as “the fear of or a dislike directed towards trans people, or a fear of or dislike directed towards their perceived lifestyle, culture or characteristics, whether or not any specific trans person has that lifestyle or characteristic. The dislike does not have to be so severe as hatred. It is enough that people do something or abstain from doing something because they do not like trans people.”
I still don’t see why that’s something that can be reported to an employer. It describes what’s in people’s heads as opposed to what they do, and how can the contents of our heads be reportable to employers?
As with all other prejudices, transphobia is based on misconceptions and negative stereotypes about a group of people (in this case the trans community or those who are perceived to be trans) that are used to “justify” discrimination, harassment and even hate crimes.
That may be, but that still doesn’t make it reportable in the absence of any action.
But don’t worry, they go on to give examples.
The following are a few examples of transphobic attitudes:
- The belief/insistence that trans women are not “real women”
- The belief/insistence that trans men are not “real” men
- The belief/insistence that non-binary genders are invalid
- The belief/insistence that transsexual people are gay people in denial and wish to have sex reassignment surgery to attempt to restore ‘heteronormativity’
So it really is a matter of making “beliefs” subject to reporting and presumably sanctions.
What makes that worse is the extreme poverty and flimsiness of ‘not “real women”’ and ‘not “real” men’ and ‘non-binary genders are invalid.’ That’s a caricature of the subject which skips over all the important questions, which are questions which we should all be allowed to ask and discuss. They should not be treated like red-hot stove burners that no one should go near, much less something that should get people punished or fired.
Clearly those are all doubleplusungood thoughtcrimes. To even ask *why* they are thoughtcrimes is a thoughtcrime! Can you not bellyfeel goodthink?
And Wrong Belief can and does get people reported to their employers. Welcome to Transland, the great frontier of The New Socialjusticeyleft.
That’s what worries me, too. Where do I go to get checked out for incorrect thoughts, before I get chucked out: or chucked in (to say, a cell all to myself) as the case may be?.
Oh, the worry of it! Now my whole day has been spoilt.
I don’t know whether I believe “non-binary genders are invalid,” because I don’t think I understand what they are.
But give it up for the trans lobby. I’ve never heard of anything like this with respect to other groups of people.
“If you have this nasty belief about women or people of color or…”
That’s just it, it’s not like rules meant to protect other groups from bullying and other forms of inequality-enforcing. It’s a whole new different kind of protection to do with protecting ideas and claims about a small set of people’s “identities.”
Next up: people who promote homeopathy and vaginal steaming and organic jade eggs up the bum will make it a reportable offense to believe/insist that that’s a crock of shit. Any day now!
Re #4 and why trans activism has to delve into thoughtcrime accusations –
Traditional activism for minority rights addresses treatment of minorities; attitudes are targets for change, certainly, but it’s ultimately because the treatment is going to vary depending on the attitude, and where or to the extent it doesn’t, if bigots want to cling to bigoted attitudes that don’t actually affect anyone else, it’s not a concern, not worth the expenditure of any activist capital.
With this strand of trans activism, the trouble is that it’s about the recognition of an identity based solely on what someone thinks and feels inside their own head – specifically, that they’ve got a sexual identity that (1) is entirely independent of every public, observable fact about their anatomy, history, lifestyle, and presentation, and (2) actually clashes with the best or obvious guesses anyone else may make about their sexual identity based on all or any of that. It’s a demand that that identity – which may, ultimately, strictly, have only supporting it the sheer, brute stipulation of it by the hypothetical trans person – be recognized by one and all. That recognition, that belief, is the only thing that is adequate.
It’s not the only possible sort of trans activism. I suspect most trans people just want support and fair treatment, and don’t insist on expunging any concept of sexual identity X from the minds of everyone about them except the specific one in which trans X is X. (Dunno what that leaves “trans” to mean, even.)
Okay, so, this is a problem. If we are all accepting of non-binary genders, then why worry if trans women are “real” women or something else? It seems to me that the trans activists are the ones trying very hard to enforce the binary – i.e., you feel like a woman, or you feel like a man, without recognizing that many of us just feel like people (the only time I “feel like” a woman is when I’m being condescended to, mansplained, ignored, or abused). Meanwhile, they simultaneously claim that “your gender can be pizza”, which gives me real heartburn to think about what sort of pronoun I might accidentally misgender a pizza-gendered person with!
Insisting on this box called “woman” that trans-women fit totally into, or this box called “man” that trans-men totally fit into is the exact opposite of non-binary. Suggesting that gender isn’t essential and that all of us have behaviors that are commonly attributed to the other gender, that’s non-binary. Suggesting that gender IS essential, and that you are whatever gender you feel is quite binary in many ways. I mean, body dysphoria, I can sort of understand that, but this has gone way beyond the entire body dysphoria (which I realize is a real thing, and doesn’t seem to be what most of these folks are talking about most the time, until they accuse someone of denying the existence of that to score some sort of point).
In short, the entire language around trans-activism is so confused and convoluted that it could very well be impossible not to commit a thought crime, often totally by accident.
Here’s an…er…..interesting take on the recent kerfuffle at the LSU; https://medium.com/@thylacinereport/the-wlu-lindsay-shepherd-controversy-was-never-about-free-speech-9fe3442da3c3
It’s quite a dreary screed, but a couple of things caught my eye. First up, Shepherd is apparently a white supremacist because the professor who led the reprimand is a person of colour, and Shepherd engineered and carefully led the conversation with her seniors in order to draw down fire on the professor. The ‘proof’ is that she secretly recorded the conversation.
Then a novel concept is introduced. Because there are trans people of colour, questioning or criticising trans people is racist. Now there’s a way to totally sabotage the reputation of a young TA; it’s not enough to label her as transphobic – too many people might not see the problem with that, but ‘racist’ is too often a career-killing tag, and we’ve seen all to often how they try to ruin anybody publically failing to follow trans doctrine, however slight the ‘offence’ may be.
Oh, and apparently Shepherd invited the class to ridicule and humiliate trans people – by showing some of the debate and extending the discussion to the students (she had an agenda and the foresight to know how the students would behave; a genuine seer, by God!)
So there you have it. If your complaint isn’t attracting enough sympathy or support, whip out the race card. It matters not whether actual racism occurred, the accusation is enough by itself.
Again, it depends on whether you’re talking about “real women₁” or “real women₂”. Saying that people with innate physical traits more representative of fathers than mothers are not real women₁ isn’t any kind of phobia. It’s just the plain and simple truth. If, on the other hand, you are talking about women₂, it’s pretty much true by definition [1] that trans women are real women₂ while some (most?) women₁ are not. However no amount of word-magic can make women₂ as a category the same as women₁.
Just substitute men₁ and men₂ for women₁ and women₂, respectively, and the same answer applies. I am a “man” only in the “man₁” sense, not the “man₂” sense. If any person with innate physical traits more representative of mothers than fathers is a “man”, then I am not a “man” in that same sense of the word, and no amount of renaming is ever going to make an ounce of difference.
As iknklast rightly points out these people themselves are the ones who insist that there are distinct and identifiable “male” and “female” ways of thinking or feeling, and that this is in fact the only thing that makes someone a man₂ or woman₂ in the first place. By that criterion, I suspect most alleged “TERFs” would say that everyone’s “gender” (if there is such a thing) is non-binary. Or they might say that there is no such thing as “gender” in the sense that the trans twitter mob is talking about [2], which makes the accusation technically true (how can “non-binary genders” be “valid” if “gender” as a concept is not?), but not in the sense that gender apologists have in mind (i.e. that radical feminists think “non-binary” genders are less valid than the “binary” ones).
Wait a minute! Are we still talking about transgender people, or transsexuals? Is there a difference? I would be greatful if silentbob or any other “trans allies” could provide a non-circular definition of “transsexual” (and specifically how it differs from “transgender”) without entering into “TERF” territory.
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1. Since the closest we get to a real definition of “women₂” pretty much boils down to “people who think/feel about themselves the way trans women do”.
2. I should probably start distinguishing between gender₁ and gender₂ as well (come to think of it, I already did): “Gender₁ (what radical feminists are talking about) refers to a difference in the way women₁ and men₁ are viewed/treated in a society. “Gender₂” (in Genderspeak) refers to a perfectly valid and vitally important difference in way that people think/feel about themselves. It makes certain people “male” or “female” to the very core of their being, regardless of any objective, verifiable facts. Yet anything other than unconditional and unqualified acceptance of such claims about what’s going on inside the heads of whole groups of people is “gender essentialism”. Go figure.
Acolyte of Sagan #8
Of course some alleged “TERFs” are also people of colour, so by that same logic…
Iknklast #8 on accidental thought time. I say this not to be a smartarse, but in pure exasperation: trans ideology is so chaotic, I’m sure the only way not to commit thoughtcrime against trans-identified genderists, is to not think about gender at all. Which is pretty much impossible for feminist women.
Bjarte #10 Oh no, you see TERFs are known to adhere to White Feminism, and thus are essentially…White cis feminists, even if not actually white.
… so attacking TERFs is always righteous and never racism (further to #12)
Fldteslalivia #12 #13
Yeah. As I like to put it, whenever white people accuse other white people of adhering to “White Feminism”, what’s implied is “I speak for all the non-whites”. Because obviously people of color all agree with gender ideology…
To return to something I have previously written about in a different context, trans activism, at least in its most visible form, seems to be an extreme example of what I identified as the second of two very different lines of thinking on the left:
• On the one hand there’s a line of thinking that says we’re all “the same on the inside”, tries to get away from boxes and labels, and seeks to render our various group identities irrelevant with respect to how people are treated.
• On the other hand there’s a line of thinking that says it’s OK to be different, celebrates diversity, and seeks to affirm marginalized identities as valid and worthy of respect in their own right.
As I’ve previously written, these perspectives aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. My personal view is that there are healthy and pathological versions of both, which is why formulas can never replace actual thinking about the specifics. Modern gender apologists seem to represent the second perspective in it’s pathological form in which different rules apply to different groups of people and equality is redefined as everyone having the same right to be treated according to the rules appropriate to their particular group identity. My understanding from reading people like Nick Cohen is that this is indeed what distinguishes “identity politics” from a general commitment to equality and social justice.
“There has to be an action.”
Speech is an action. Presumably if someone is reported for transphobia it is because they are alleged at least to have said something. And the CSU seems to agree that there has to be an action, since they say “It is enough that people do something or abstain from doing something because they do not like trans people.” Though I agree completely with you that saying trans women are not real women (etc) should not convict me of a phobia.
I think the definition of a phobia is usually in terms of “what’s in people’s heads”, though of course we can’t know that unless they say or do something.
I see two big problems if this particular definition (or something very like it) is adopted as a guideline for what is or isn’t reportable behavior in work contexts.
.
1) It’s not just an action that’s reportable, it’s the lack of an action. Not using the bathroom at work, not having tea at the breakroom, not stopping for a chat at the watercooler, anything. It’s not enough to engage in a discriminatory action, an inaction can be seen as discriminatory as well. I fail to see how this would not lead to massive policing of all behavior at the work place.
2) The reasons for doing or not doing something are internal, one may infer them from statements or other behavior, but the reasons themselves can’t be observed. So how is it determined that an action or inaction was caused by not liking trans people? More importantly, who gets to do the determining? These are especially difficult questions when it comes to inaction. If I turn back at the bathroom door, was it because there was a tarnsperson in there or because I remembered something I wanted to do? If I don’t stop at the watercooler, was it because I don’t like to chat at the watercooler or because the wrong person was there? If I have tea at my desk instead of the breakroom was it because of a transperson or becayse I wanted to read an interesting article?
This would be either completely unenforceable or a completely capricious policing operation. Either the ultimate defense would be essentially “nope” or it would allow others to decide on a person’s internal state of mind.
Not to mention, what if I just don’t like the transperson because I find him/her irritating as a person, regardless of their trans status? Is that not allowed either? And if I dislike a transperson, how do I prove that it’s the person I dislike, not the transness? Mind you, I think there already are signs of this in the air in social contexts. As has been pointed out, criticising a trans person for anything seems to be considered transphobia in some circles.
Incredibly, this idea has been extended to sex. It has been said that a heterosexual male or a lesbian who would not have sex with a non-surgically transitioned transwoman (or heterosexual woman/gay man with n-s-t transman) is transphobic.
Imagine that being included in a law!
We need to abolish terms like ‘mother’ and ‘maternity’ says the new head of La Fedération des Femmes du Québec. Watch. Your. Pronouns!
http://www.journaldemontreal.com/2017/12/02/prets-a-tous-les-accommodements
And as I pointed out in a previous post, there are many women that have been physically, emotionally, verbally, and/or sexually abused by men. The bathroom is a place where one is quite vulnerable, literally caught with their pants down. The idea of a male-bodied person in the bathroom with me is one that I cannot (and will not) accept, because I have had terrible experiences. I can deal with men in work situations, fully clothed, where I can easily get away if necessary, but even when my boss closes the door to do my evaluation in private, it makes me no end of nervous.
If I see a person who has surgically transitioned, I’m not going to think twice about it. But if I see a person who has the body of a male, and I do not know that person, do not know that they are trans, I am going to bolt. If I do know they are trans, but they still present in a societally approved male form? I can’t say I won’t bolt, since at this point, that hasn’t happened. The fight-or-flight instinct is strong, especially in one who has many scars (whether obvious or not) from previous encounters with males.
In short, we may start penalizing women for having PTSD. The minute she offers her defense of bolting as being fearful of men, having a PTSD, she has “outed” herself as a TERF by her very words, her very use of the concept that this person appears to be male.
@iknklast #20
I think the appropriate phrasing would be we may start penalising women full stop. At that point it wouldn’t matter if there was PTSD or abstent mindedness involved, even the lucky women who haven’t been victims of abuse would potentially have their behavior put under a microscope. Neither would it matter whether the situation was a vulnerable one or not. Anyone at any timewould be a potential target, whether they bolt frightened from a bathroom or just neglect to go at all. And I’m willing to bet the targets would mostly be women.
Remember James Damore? You wrote about that extensively. He was fired for violating Google’s code of conduct by circulating a memo disparaging women (as a class). Now the action was circulating the memo, but obviously disparaging opinions have to be expressed in some way before they can be reported, no?
You just quoted, “It is enough that people do something or abstain from doing something…”. The latter would refer to, for example, refusing to serve a customer in a shop because they’re trans.
The best response to this is your own writing with regard to the Damore case:
It would be the same in the (as yet entirely hypothetical?) cases of employees being punished for transphobia. The concern would be to create an environment where fellow employees are not subject to discrimination. At any rate, in the present climate, when one can hardly open a newspaper without being confronted with yet another anti-trans scaremongering piece, there don’t seem to be very many people worried about being fired for expressing transphobic views.
Silentbob – As you say, the action was circulating the memo. The CUSU explanation of what transphobia is doesn’t say anything about circulating memos or talking in the break room; it simply says “belief/insistence.” That was my point. They go on to say that beliefs may be used to “justify” actions, but the fact remains that they are calling beliefs reportable transphobia.
And you’re doing the same thing with “one can hardly open a newspaper without being confronted with yet another anti-trans scaremongering piece” – I think you’re including discussions of what we mean by gender under the “anti-trans scaremongering” label. You’re buying into the bizarre new idea that only trans people can talk about gender, and the rest of us have to just shut up and nod solemnly in agreement. Fuck that. We’re all stuck in this cultural habit of imposing gender rules aka patriarchy, so fuck this attempt to force women to stop discussing it in our own terms.
In the New Zealand media I haven’t seen an anti-trans article in years, if not decades. In fact, trans-positive articles appear every couple of months. Never once questioning what is meant by gender or identity and what this means for everyone else. I grind my teeth every time I read a trans women declaring that they always knew they were a woman because they liked makeup and dresses. In my mind being a woman is more than performing hyper-femininity. Here comes the TERF label I guess.
A trans women was recently selected for the New Zealand women’s weight-lifting team. They won a silver at the World Champs. Having competed as a man until age 34, it’s hard to understand how that history of musculoskeletal development and training does not create an imbalance. While I applaud their dedication to the sport and individual success, I feel for the other competitors and even more so for New Zealand top female weight lifter in that class, who had to drop a weight class to remain competitive and be selected for the team.
Given the number of trans athletes is to Small to have meaningful competition a separate class isn’t the answer, and complete exclusion from sport feels wrong too. I don’t know what the fair solution is, but the current status seems inequitable.
Not only is being a woman more than performing hyper-femininity, it is not even necessarily anything to do with performing femininity, hyper or slight. Femininity is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a woman.
Here’s the thing: The CSU has helpfully offered examples of forbidden thoughts:
So expressing any of these opinions would be enough to get one in trouble.
“Trans women are not (“real”) women” is a reasonable opinion. It is not an inherently hateful one. Disagreeing with trans dogmatists about the ontological sex status of trans people is not the same as insisting that they are inferior to non-trans people. It is not the same as asserting that Group A is inferior to Group B. It is a different category of belief.
“Real women” is crappy phrasing though. Typical, but crappy – typical more or less by design. (More or less because I doubt people realize how evasive and deceptive it is.) The issue isn’t reality, and putting it that way plays into that other trope, that skeptics “deny trans folks’ existence!!” Nobody denies the existence of trans people and nobody claims they aren’t “real.”
Also, “real woman” has often meant…the opposite of feminist woman; sexually appealing woman; dainty submissive feminine woman; etc. If that’s what it means I’m not a “real woman” and I don’t think I know any “real women.”
Ophelia @24, yes quite. Point taken. I guess I was making the point about the hyper-femininity because the sub-text is always one of ‘see, I’m so undisputedly feminine that I just have to be a woman’.
I wasn’t correcting, just expanding. “Yes, and.”
And yes about the subtext. That’s why we putative “TERFs” keep trying to correct claims that we are enforcing the old rigid gender binary. No no NO – it’s the other way around.
Are you trying to pretend that the recent LSU / Shepherd thing didn’t happen? I’ll point out that you replied in that thread, leading me to believe that you are in fact well aware that punishment for transphobia is decidedly not hypothetical.
I’m sure you just forgot.