More carefully, this time
Congratulations to @rachelvmckinnon on her amazing accomplishments! And fuck the haters.
By “haters,” sadly, she means the people – especially the women – who simply don’t think men should compete in women’s races, even if they do “identify as” women.
I’m now absolutely convinced Kate Manne doesn’t understand her own book.
Because I deplore white cis women like you making #downgirl moves to trans women? Um, no. Read my book again. More carefully, this time.
Oh yes, “cis” women objecting to being shoved aside by men who say they are women – those are the women philosopher Kate Manne deplores. In other words all women are privileged and suspect; it’s only men who claim to be women who get her approbation and solidarity.
You couldn’t make it up. Imagine any black activist ever expressing contempt for actual black people while heaping solidarity on white people who “identify as” black. It wouldn’t happen. If a few outliers did do that they would be viewed the way Omerosa Manigault and Paris Dennard are, not the way Kate Manne (author of Down Girl) is.
It turns out feminism was just an interval, and now we’re back to situation normal women are worth nothing.
Wikipedia:
Literally the feminist who coined the term himpathy is congratulating Rhys “Rachel” McKinnon for cheating women out of medals in their own sporting events. Jaw, meet floor. Indeed, you cannot make this shit up.
Here’s to the inevitable morning after, when everybody sobers up and has to reckon with the mess they made. This one will be a particularly embarrasing little tidbit, I predict.
If that bloke in the picture above is a woman, then I am the Archbishop of Canterbury.
I had to tell a friend off today for using the phrase “TERF bangs” to describe Zuckerberg… Obvious reference to butch lesbians there…
#3 Blood Knight:
You’ve got a serious typo in that last sentence (but I confess it made me laugh).
God I love/hate my smart phone… Oy…
I spent the last couple days with a gay friend of my mother, one who leads his (F500) company’s “inclusion” brigade. The whole time I was trying to find ways not to offend him by stating anything totally banal and anodyne, the same way I try not to offend people I know subscribe to a particularly retrograde religion. He seemed completely oblivious to the a priori tension between gay rights and gender ideology.
Because it’s never influenced me, could someone explain this “moral peer pressure” thing that seems to drive the TQI2S+ support? Specifically how people reason (or feel, as appropriate) about the subject? What is it about the the TRAs’ case that seems cogent? Is it a matter of simply not thinking about the claims? Or is it that people do think, but some malicious code is fucking their shit up?
I’m actually dead effing serious. My social anxiety disorder is so long-standing (hurray for >31 years of BS) that I’m about as good at understanding people as someone with Asperger’s. The paucity of the TRAs’ logic is too obvious for me to think that anything other than an emotional/social appeal is involved.
A lot of it has to do with this:
http://plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html
In an inspiring story from the world of professional cycling, a motorcyclist who identifies as a bicyclist has crushed all the regular bicyclists, setting an unbelievable world record.
In a local qualifying race for the World Road Cycling League, the motorcyclist crushed the previous 100-mile record of 3 hours, 13 minutes with his amazing new score of well under an hour.
Professional motorcycle racer Judd E. Banner, the brave trans-vehicle rider, was allowed to race after he told league organizers he’s always felt like a bicyclist in a motorcyclist’s body.
https://babylonbee.com/news/motorcycle-that-identifies-as-bicycle-sets-world-cycling-record
I can tell you how I understood trans to be part of the Pride rainbow, and I suspect it’s the same for many others:
I wasn’t paying attention to what was going on. In my mind, I always had a vague discomfort with transsexualism’s connection to gender stereotypes, but told myself not to think too much about it because I didn’t know what their experience felt like and I couldn’t judge, analagous to how homophobes don’t know what being gay feels like and don’t understand that it’s not a choice. And besides, these people were gender-role outsiders like us but only more so, coping with homophobia in their own way: very butch lesbians and very effeminate gay — and disproportionately nonwhite — men. (E.g., ’80s drag ball “vogue dancing” culture from the movie Paris is Burning or the TV series POSE.) So I had a rough sense that it was about being not just gay but doubleplus gay and also often discriminated along another axis to boot (woman; ethnic minority). These were very vulnerable people pushed to the furthest edges of society who often couldn’t find work outside of prostitution. And people like that absolutely exist — some trans people do fit that description.
From there it was kind of a boiling frog effect as my understanding of trans slowly broadened to include heterosexuals and not-particularly-gender-nonconforming-seeming males (e.g., Caitlyn Jenner; the dad in Transparent) and it never occurred to me that they weren’t any less oppressed than the first group of trans people even though they weren’t gay or women or nonwhite or poor or homeless or prostituted. Slowly the sympathy I had for the first group transferred to the latter, and I started to see trans people as oppressed simply because they are trans — because of the clothes and pronouns they prefer, and not because of underlying things like being extremely gender-nonconforming while female or nonwhite — and I didn’t readjust my thinking about whether or why this group of people is automatically more vulnerable than me. Their demands got louder (eg “trans women are women, period”) and the frog slowly boiled. Now I was expected to train myself to picture trans people as visibly more-or-less indistinguishable from “cis” people — anyone around you might or might not be trans and how would you even know if you haven’t asked them or seen their genitals! — but at the same time they were still the most oppressed people in the world. (But if they’re indistinguishable from everyone else, how are they oppressed, a little voice said. The answer: because a group of radical feminists won’t accept them as their adopted sex even if they’re indistinguishable from their “cis” counterparts. These feminists are working to unmask innocent, covertly trans people and force them back into their natal sex roles. Or something. I didn’t really bother to check.)
It was gender-neutral bathrooms that started me questioning things. At my workplace it didn’t make sense that we had to get rid of the women’s washroom altogether to accommodate transwomen. Surely we all agreed that women need separate spaces from men — surely the “woke” activists believed in feminism — and surely there were better ways to let (innocent, undetectable or minimally detectable, or more like suspectedly-but-we-dare-not-ask) trans women know we’re not going to challenge them if they use the women’s washroom. Surely if trans women were women, they’d be just as uncomfortable with men in their washrooms as “cis” women would be. Surely they’d be just as opposed to gender-neutral washrooms as any other women would be. But they aren’t — because they are not women. This is where I climbed out of the boiling water and my comrades kept cooking. For them, gender-neutral washrooms were just the beginning of gender-jumbling everything. The less trans activism made sense the more the kids started dismantling everything else in order to accommodate it. Now the very idea of distinguishing women from men is suspect. Now I’ve got female colleagues responding to my issues about the gender-neutral bathrooms with, “Well, I don’t have a problem with men in the women’s washroom.” (Implying that any woman who does is somehow inferior or wrong and not doing her duty to make room for transpeople.)
The behaviour of the bloggers at a certain supposedly progressive website (wink-wink) floored me, and then I really started looking into things and was shocked at the naked misogyny and male-entitled behaviour in trans activism. And the mass trans hysteria surrounding children and adolescents terrifies me. And now I’m watching more and more people begin to peak-trans as the whole thing starts to spin apart.
What does “white” have to do with any of this?
Skeletor, didn’t you know? White always has something to do with it. Being a white cis- heterosexual homo sapiens AFAB female identifying binary woman means you are the lowest of the low. You literally oppress every single other person on this planet.
Seriously, I suspect throwing white in there is an effort to connect women who don’t accept trans dogma with a group that literally has oppressed a lot of people for a long time. It’s meant to connect feminist women with the KKK and the John Birch Society, as well as with white supremacism in general. Plus, it’s a way of pretending they aren’t including black women, because of course all black women, being oppressed themselves, accept the oppression narrative of all oppressed minorities. And since there are undoubtedly a lot of black women who don’t accept trans ideology, they are trying to point out to them why they should.
It’s like lumping environmentalism into being an obsession of the white middle class. If you can make it about white people, you’ve automatically won the oppression sweepstakes – even though a lot of the transwomen creating all the fuss are white, male, and middle class.
@guest: I hadn’t read that post in a long time. It does seem relevant.
@Artymorty: Interesting analysis. This bit seems the most telling: “[I] told myself not to think too much about it because I didn’t know what their experience felt like and I couldn’t judge”, especially combined with frog-boiling concept creep. That’s a pretty plausible account of how most people relate to trans issues.
I guess with someone like Kate Manne it’s the logical progression of that process. TWAW has become axiomatic—the frog has already boiled, so to speak—and so any reasoning to the contrary is a priori and prima facie wrong.
[…] a comment by Artymorty on More carefully, this […]
Iknklast: “It’s like lumping environmentalism into being an obsession of the white middle class. If you can make it about white people, you’ve automatically won the oppression sweepstakes – even though a lot of the transwomen creating all the fuss are white, male, and middle class.”
Very well put; as is the rest of your post #11 too.
I tried to read Down Girl. I gave it up.
In an interview with Vox, Manne explains her view:
Yes, sexism is the ideology–and we really didn’t need Manne to point that out…but then she supports gender ideology.
Kate Manne:
Also Kate Manne:
Trans women are women! “Woman” is a gender identity!
Explains why she wrote a book about “misogyny” without (that I recall) mentioning hostility toward women’s bodies, our sexuality and our reproductive functions.
https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/12/5/16705284/metoo-weinstein-misogyny-trump-sexism
So close. So very close.