Fay and Fluffy are out
The scene at Meghan Murphy’s talk yesterday evening was revolting. I’ve seen several video clips of it and it’s repellent.
The Globe and Mail has one account:
People exiting a speaking event at a small Toronto Public Library branch were met with a chorus of boos as they descended the staircase at its front entrance on Tuesday evening. The branch has been at the centre of a firestorm over the line between free speech and hate speech.
Except that Meghan Murphy isn’t offering “hate speech.” It’s not “hate speech” to say that men are not women.
Hundreds flocked to the TPL’s Palmerston branch in protest after weeks of heated debate over the library’s decision to allow writer Meghan Murphy to speak Tuesday at an event put on by a group dubbed Radical Feminists Unite.
Or, less sneeringly, by a group called Radical Feminists Unite.
Funny old world when people on the left are accusing radical feminists of hate speech.
LGBTQ advocates have been harshly critical of the library’s decision to let Ms. Murphy speak, and they launched petitions, a phone campaign and a flurry of social-media posts preceding the protest, which took place at the same time as the speaking event.
Because they think men can magically become women just by saying so, and that it’s evil and “hate speech” to think they can’t. That’s how weird things have become.
“I hope that the Toronto Public Library realizes that trans people matter,” Gwen Benaway, a transgender poet who won a Governor-General Award on Tuesday, said at the protest. “Hosting transphobic speakers that promote intolerance in Canadian society is damaging and against the work of the Toronto Public Library.”
But Meghan doesn’t “promote intolerance.” That’s a lie.
Also Tuesday, drag artist duo Fay and Fluffy, who hold a popular storytelling event for children at several TPL branches, announced they have severed ties with the library over their decision to play host to Ms. Murphy.
Again with the slyly subtly denigrating word choice – the library didn’t “play host” to Meghan, it rented her a room for an event.
“I could not call myself an ally and fighter for my community if I continue a relationship with a space that will host someone who is actively fighting to take away my legal rights as a human,” wrote Kaleb Robertson, one half of Fay and Fluffy, on the duo’s Instagram page. “It’s heartbreaking to be put in this position by a place I have loved since I was a child.”
Meghan is not fighting to take away Robertson’s or anyone else’s legal rights as a human.
Despite the fierce opposition and public rebukes from prominent figures, including Toronto Mayor John Tory, city librarian Vickery Bowles backed the event because the TPL has “an obligation to protect free speech.” She said earlier this month that Ms. Murphy’s event was not in violation of the library’s room-booking policy, which allows the library to cancel events that “[promote] discrimination.”
That’s interesting – so it is a substance argument as well as a free speech argument. That’s how I see it too – they can say no to the KKK because the KKK does promote discrimination (and exclusion and violence). Radical feminists who think men are men are not comparable to the KKK.
Ms. Bowles also said that Ms. Murphy has never been charged with or convicted of hate speech. Toronto city councillors tabled a motion Tuesday calling for stricter room-booking policies at TPL branches, to “ensure that activities enabling discrimination and tolerance, including transphobia and transphobic activity, are given all due consideration as a human rights violation.”
So if that passes the TPL will be refusing to rent rooms to radical feminists in the future. Nice job, Toronto city councillors.
It still amazes me how quickly misogyny has come roaring back, and how shameless people are at proclaiming it.
Two hours before the event, a crowd of about 100 gathered in the heart of Toronto’s gay village for a preprotest rally organized by Pride Toronto and The 519, a local LGBTQ resource centre.
A mural depicting a diversity of LGBTQ people towered over the crowd as former Ontario MPP Cheri DiNovo led them in a chant proclaiming that “trans rights are human rights.”
Rah rah rah, but what are trans rights? What rights are specific to trans people and not to anyone else? Are they all “rights” to be endorsed and “validated” as being of the sex that they’re not? Because if so, that’s a very peculiar “right,” and one that’s in tension with other people’s rights.
It’s time to stop saying LGBTQ and start saying GBTQ, since many lesbians do not consider themselves represented by the movement that includes transwomen at the expense of lesbians, and that is willing to advocate that lesbians should accept a partner with a penis as long as said partner says they are a woman.
I’m not so sure it ever went away. In my part of the world, it didn’t even go into hiding, though at times people would use cover language (hey it was a joke) (I didn’t mean all women) if some legal right came up and threatened to bite them in the butt.
It definitely didn’t go away altogether, but it became less respectable for a time. Among people who considered themselves right on it got disguised as joking (as you say) but now it’s just right out there in the open. Shut up bitches or we’ll chop you with our axes.
Referring to “drag artist duo Fay and Fluffy”, I thought drag queens were men who liked dressing up as women, so how is Meghan Murphy trying to take away their rights? They’re not trying to compete in women’s sports or use women’s bathrooms, right?
If they are transgender, then are they still dressing in drag if they’re transwomen, aka actual women? Or maybe they’re transmen dressing in drag?
What a world…
Can I stop trying to understand what the Q part even means?
Q means being some of EVERYTHING and thus being allowed everywhere and centered everywhere and lifted up everywhere.
I gave up long ago. I’ve got more important things to do with my time than trying to keep track of the meanings of the ever-expanding alphabet soup of “identities” that have magically, wokefully appended themselves to the original Elgeebee.
This is not always practical or safe. I strongly would advise against being lifted up anywhere in close proximity to ceiling fans or idling helicopters…
Now do “centered.”
Shouldn’t that be “trans rights are women’s rights?” They’re not going to say “trans rights are men’s rights” since one, trans men aren’t trying to get into men’s safe spaces and two, ‘men’s rights’ don’t hit any of the righteous woke buttons. The women part of human is the issue.
It would be easier if the case was “men become women if they say they are.” That’s just too obviously a class at Hogwarts to gain much traction. Instead, it’s about male infants being born with a part of the brain which somehow received signals to grow with a female “identity,” with researchers assiduously looking for anything which resembles the target sex. They find niggly little things all over the map, none of which are thought to contradict each other and all of which are touted by activists as definitive proof that trans women are women in the same way blond, tall, myopic, and, of course, black women are women. The only thing uniting them is that inner sense of womanhood.
It seems to me then that the people in the protesting crowd are vicariously partaking in an opportunity to tell those stuffy, snobby, bigoted members of the Daughters of the Revolution exactly what they think of their denying Marian Anderson an opportunity to sing. They don’t see feminists, nor misguided feminists. They see the DAR and another revolution. And this time they’re there.
Therretically easier to specify under geocentric or heliocentric models compared to a Big Bang regime, but as the first two options result in being inside the core of a planet or star respectively, so not that pleasant to those thus “centered.” In our current expanding universe, Big Bang way of seeing things, everywhere appears to be the center of the universe’s expansion. Choosing this option leaces you, most probably, given the distribution of matter in the universe, in a vacuum. Also not recommended.
Which is impossible to define, and is not the same for different women. For instance, I suspect my experience as a woman is different than that of Rachel McKinnon. But then, I allso suspect my experience as a woman is different than that of Ophelia Benson. Which of these is not like the other?
The thing is, I don’t have an inner sense of being a woman. I just happen to be a woman, and I hate it when I am “treated like a woman”, because that means ignored, condescended to, committed violence upon, sexually assaulted, treated like an object, or asked to make coffee. The only one of those that works for me is making coffee, but only if I’m making it for myself and not for a group of men who are sitting around waiting expectantly for the “woman in the room” to serve them.
So if women don’t have some “inner sense of being a woman” that is similar to the “inner sense of being a woman” that is felt by the trans women, then there really is nothing uniting us. I can find common experience with Ophelia Benson, or Hillary Clinton, or women of color, or lesbian women, though there will be points of departure, of course. What I cannot do is find common experiences (other than those common to humans in general) with Rachel McKinnon, Morgane Oger, Jessica Yaniv, Laurel Hubbard, or any of the other “women” who were not raised women and have not experienced the totality of what it means to be a woman in a misogynistic world.
Because I was born female (not assigned at birth), I was expected to wash dishes while my brothers watched TV or played. Because I was born female, I was required to study Home Ec, and discouraged from studying Chemistry. Because I was born female, my father taught me how to mow the lawn, but not how to turn on the lawn mower. Because I was born female, my parents expected me to get married instead of going to college (I did go to college – I am the black sheep of the family). Because I was born female, I have had to deal with the scorn and contempt of my male colleagues (and some of my female colleagues), even when I have better credentials than they do. Because I was born female, I was sexually molested and abused by the men around me who thought it was their right. Because I was born female, I was harassed at work by men who thought I owed them sex. Because I was born female, I was the one who had to have a procedure and undergo anesthesia when the birth control failed. Because I was born female, I was raised to serve others, and think of myself only after everyone else was taken care of – which they never were. There was always one more person to take care of.
Because I was born female, I am now expected to put aside my own wants, needs, and desires, and those of my fellow females, to work on behalf of yet anther portion of the male population that wants something of me – they want me to deny that there is any difference between my experience and theirs, and accept that all those things that I just described are actually privileges rather than oppression.
All these born male females have one thing in common: they have absolutely no idea of what it is really like to be born female. They have a rosy, My Little Pony, Marilyn Monroe-vision idea of what it means to be a woman, with no actual clue about what being a woman is really like in the modern world. (And that’s with it being much better than it was in the pre-modern world).
Sorry, guys, I can’t swallow your Kool-Aid.
Those who are speaking out about barring Murphy, or changing the library room-booking policy in response to her event should be asked to do three things:
1) Quote or paraphrase the claims Murphy is making;
2) explain why or how (1) is “transphobic” or “hateful”;
3) define “Woman.”
They can define woman. It’s just that their definition is not a definition. They need to be able to define woman by objective criteria that are scientifically sound and don’t rely on people knowing themselves better than people usually do.
not Bruce, for #1 they’ll simply paraphrase Murphy the way they paraphrase every rational argument. That paraphrasing will bear no similarity to the original but instead will be distorted to fit the ‘transwimminz-are-victims-of-genocide’ and ‘cis-wimminz-are-our-oppressors’ narrative. For #2, see #1. iknkast has already taken care of #3.