Those whose voices are met with few barriers
This week’s controversy about Lindsay Shepherd, the Wilfrid Laurier TA who got in trouble for airing a Jordan Peterson clip in class, has opened up the same old tired debate around “freedom of speech.” This isn’t to say that such debates are of no importance, but they often tend to focus on the voices of white, cis-gender persons who already have a platform to speak from.
Ah. White, cis-gender persons who can grab a platform any time they feel like it. So much for all those efforts to get corporations and universities and politics and basically everything to stop excluding women – that was all a mistake, because [white] women are not being excluded at all. They’re cis, therefore they are dominant and powerful and safe from being excluded or ignored or showered with contempt ever at any time by anyone.
Kidding. They’re not. We’re not.
This is evidenced in the overwhelming support and amplification that people such as Lindsay Shepherd—the TA in question who gained 12,000 Twitter followers in a week—and Jordan Peterson receive when these controversies emerge.
Oh bollocks. How many incidents of the kind are there that didn’t make it to the press and so didn’t get support and amplification? We don’t know. It would be stupid to assume there aren’t any, especially when Shepherd was pounced on for such a footling reason.
For many of us, debates centred around gender pronouns aren’t just intellectual exercises. I’m a trans woman and a PhD student at Carleton University, and little has been heard from the transgender perspective throughout this entire ordeal, despite the fact that we are at the center of this debate.
For freedom of speech to work in practice, the argument goes, we must accommodate even the arguments we don’t like. At its most absolute, this argument advocates giving voice to those who would target the basic human rights of vulnerable populations.
I would like to humbly suggest that free speech is threatened in university campuses across the nation. However, the ways in which I think it’s threatened have been obscured by the entitlement of those whose voices are met with few barriers.
There it is again. Our trans PhD student is saying women’s voices meet with few barriers. Oh really. Wouldn’t it be nice if that were true.
” …women’s voices meet with few barriers”
Clearly there aren’t enough barriers, so they’re obligingly constructing some.
Maybe someone who had been a woman for longer would be more familiar with those barriers?
Is it true that trans people are at the center of the “debate”? I thought Peterson’s deal was that he refused to use pronouns other than he/him and she/her. I would think that most trans people use those pronouns, so what’s the deal?
Or are, say, nonbinary femme-presenting AFAB people* (aka women) who insist on xe/xir pronouns considered “trans” now?
These people are so confused.
*[sic]
I wonder how many Julie Bindels there are, breezing around having their talks heard with no opposition and all…
Pssh there’s no such thing as an unknown unknown. We may not know everything going on in the world, but we know of everything going on in the world!
Unfucking believable. This entire debacle was cause because trans voices were heard, and despite trans people not being at the center of this issue. Hell, they’re barely even tangential! This class would likely have passed unremarked if it had involved Goebbels debating someone about jews, or a Klansman debating mexican immigrants. But no, it was a university professor talking about his use of personal pronouns regarding his students. Sound the fucking sirens!
I went looking for an image of the “trans umbrella”, which, last I saw, left very few categories as not “trans”. I came across this:
Um, yay? Interesting.
One version of the image is here.
I found that bottom notation interesting, that it encompasses any individual who challenges traditional gender roles (paraphrased). That would force a lot of us into the definition of trans, perhaps against our will. So once again, we don’t get to define our own identity. We are pushed and pulled through cis- and trans- definitions, without having any say at all in what we want to be called.
What do I want to be called? My name will do fine. Barring that, my title (Dr) or other names will be fine. I don’t usually answer to silly endearments by people who are not my intimates (and my significant other does not give me silly endearments, as he feels my name works just fine if he needs to address me). Hey you? I might answer to that, depending on who gives it to me. Or, if you must give me a gender identity, there is nothing wrong with woman, but I will not, do not, am not likely to, accept the forcing of the cis- in front of same.
I refuse to believe that it is somehow worse to be born a woman than to become one by choice. It is neither my blame nor my credit, it is merely a fact of chance based on which sperm happened to be able to fertilize my mother’s egg one cold January day in 1960. I am not AFAB, I am not cis-female, I am simply female. And the fact that I have a number of traits designated masculine by our patriarchal society (i.e., I love math, I love science, I don’t like pink, and I don’t particularly like dresses, among others) does not make me trans, non-binary, or whatever term they want to put on it. Until women have full and equal rights, I think it is important for as many of us as possible to acknowledge that we are women, we are competent, intelligent, and educated, and we are not going to apologize for any of that.
“…any individual who… challenges… traditional gender roles…”
Which could very well be… everyone?
I’ve said it before, but no one perfectly conforms to his or her “traditional gender role.”
I’m Ben, a heterosexual guy who doesn’t care about sports or cars, doesn’t drink, and is vegan. But I like arguing, I prefer dogs to cats, and I don’t enjoy cooking. But I cook all the time.
Behold! Nature’s misfit, the enigma, neither here nor there!
Does anybody else recall the argument that there is no 100% female or male but that we are all positioned somewhere on the gender spectrum? It always sounded familiar to me but I couldn’t place why until just now; it’s a re-hash of the Platonic ideals, where the perfect chair is an ideal that doesn’t exist, and all chairs are but imperfect representations of ‘chair’ on the ‘chair spectrum’; some closer to the ideal than others but never quite reaching the category of ‘chair’.
The only significant difference between Plato and the gender-spectrum proponents is that Plato respected the intelligence of others enough not to take the piss too much by introducing something as ridiculous as ‘chairness-fluidity’.
And once again, what does it mean to be “gender non-conforming” etc. if the only thing that makes a person “male” or “female” in the first place are the gender norms that he or she conforms to? These people themselves are the (only) ones who insist that there is such a thing as a “gender binary” separating “male” and “female” ways of thinking or feeling. Yet those who don’t acknowledge the existence of such a binary are the ones accused of enforcing it. Also, they are the ones who insist that certain people are inherently “male” or “female” to the core, regardless of any physical facts. Yet those who reject such a view are the ones accused of “gender essentialism“.
“Chair-ness fluidity”… my sides!
“For freedom of speech to work in practice, the argument goes, we must accommodate even the arguments we don’t like. At its most absolute, this argument advocates giving voice to those who would target the basic human rights of vulnerable populations.”
Yes, for example people who target women’s freedom of speech and rights to safety and privacy. We could shut down a lot of trans activism using a very similar line of argument.
It’s hard to be sympathetic to people who are trying to take away the freedom of speech, which is a basic human right, of practically everyone and then use human rights to justify what they are doing.
I wonder if these trans-activists care or even understand how much they hurt “their own cause” by this phony belligerence? Used to be, I could be kind-of-positive-to-neutral and interested in how such people find their lives. Nowadays, maybe not so much anymore. Which is probably another stone on the burden of many non-activists.
But why be sympathetic to total bullies? Sarcasm feels more natural, sorry or not sorry. No, these loudmouths are just troubled, professional troublemakers.
I wonder too.
Mind you, it does seem to cut both ways – it alienates some and it attracts some. It can look like passion and courage as opposed to bullying and aggression.
But now that we’ve had some time to digest, it does look as if the bullying and aggression are starting to turn more people off.
Rings an eerie echo to the Egyptian atrocity the other day.
It’s just another version of blood sports, IMO.
Another cheap rhetorical trick beloved of trans activists. Conflating dissent from their dogma with opposition to trans people’s human rights.
And this paragraph marks out the writer as a narcissist. To a narcissist, any attention of any flavour is infinitely better than being ignored, so of course they see the bullying of women as a plus. All that attention! Never mind the content of said attention, that’s irrelevant; they don’t actually read the comments, they just count them. She has thousands of followers, therefore the writer has every justification for claiming that she has a platform. Jealous? Of course the narcissist is jealous, that’s what all this trans activism is about. Getting attention for the Cluster Bees.
Yes. Well spotted. Note the word “amplification” – hey she had the extreme privilege of being made LOUDER by some angry bullies.
Did people support Shephard because she “had a platform”? No, that’s silly. Are trans voices silenced? No; if they were, Shephard would never have been bullied the way she was.
The beauty of claims like this is that they’re rigged. Shut up, because you have a voice and I don’t. My evidence? Look at all the people who listened and agreed with you! Then when you’ve succeeded in silencing (bullying, no-platforming, causing to get fired) your opponents, you can say, See? Nobody agrees with them. They’re just minority voices on the wrong side of history.