A reproductive justice advocate?
It’s not just a Twitter thread, it’s also an article at Rewire News.
At Rewire News Group, we hope you’re able to safely enjoy the holiday away from toxic relatives, but we also know that might not be possible. Toxic relatives come in many forms: the Trump supporter, the devil’s advocate, the COVID-19 denier.
There’s also the TERF: the trans-exclusionary radical feminist.
Let’s back up. Let’s think about this unargued assertion that Trump supporters and devil’s advocates and COVID-19 deniers are “toxic.” Let’s think about it and decide that it’s self-righteous adolescent garbage, and that it is, ironically, dehumanizing in just the way much of Trump’s rhetoric is. The views of the listed groups may or may not be toxic, figuratively speaking, but that doesn’t make the people who hold the views toxic. Calling people “toxic” is itself very trumpish.
The author of this venomous article and the venomous tweets is Caroline Reilly.
Caroline Reilly is a legal fellow with Rewire News Group. She is a writer and a reproductive justice advocate. She holds a JD from Boston College Law school.
You’d think she’d be adult enough to eschew the flippant “throw a turkey at the woman” pseudo-jokes, but apparently not.
Back to her “throw a turkey” article:
TERFs are transphobes who wrongly believe transgender women are not women, and they think feminists shouldn’t include trans women in their advocacy. But the reality is that trans women are women, and you cannot separate feminism from advocacy for trans rights. Feminism that does not include trans people is just bigotry dressed up to look like something else.
No, the reality is that trans women are men who say they are women, men who identify as women, men who explain that they “feel like” women, men who claim that they have a woman’s brain in a male body. None of that changes the physical reality that they are men. That’s what “trans woman” means – a man who identifies as a woman.
So it’s not truthful or fair or reasonable to say that “TERFs are transphobes who wrongly believe transgender women are not women,” because they believe that rightly, not wrongly.
Sometimes TERFyness is loud and obnoxious in its bigotry, tweeting away about how trans women are dangerous and letting them privately pee in a stall next to a cis women is akin to letting Ted Bundy into a women’s locker room—truly unhinged stuff. You’ll often find TERFs on Twitter yelling about young people’s genitals or some other completely invasive and inappropriate thing that would have them banished from Earth if it was about young cis people.
Speaking of loud and obnoxious, and truly unhinged stuff – that’s not a very careful or fair description.
Sometimes, though, TERFs are a little more insidious in their approach, as they scaremonger about women’s rights and children’s safety—cloaking obviously bigoted viewpoints in false concerns about the welfare of women and children.
And why are the concerns false? What makes the viewpoints so obviously bigoted? Why is it insidious to talk about women’s rights? The lawyer doesn’t explain or elaborate, she just asserts.
But make no mistake. A TERF is a TERF is a TERF—whether they’re transparent about their motives and bigotry, or whether they’re stoking fears about violence and discrimination to make their overt hatred for trans people seem well intentioned. It is not.
Again – it’s just assertion. There’s not a trace of argument anywhere to be seen. All this is in aid of advocating violence against female relatives who have a political view the lawyer dislikes.
And then she gets to the remedies.
Throw the turkey at them. If you do not have the upper-body strength to throw the turkey, you can opt for something slightly easier to lift like a handful of mashed potatoes or some stuffing. A pie also works, and offers an added comedic effect.
If you do not want to turn your Thanksgiving dinner into a food fight, you can consider a more passive (or passive agressive) approach. Ignoring them works; so does repeating everything they say back to them in a mocking tone. Think: What would your most annoying little cousin do?
You need not feel obligated to entertain a bigot with reasoned debate, but if you want to, it helps to have some talking points handy. Like—the gender binary isn’t real. And violent men can actually just walk into women’s bathrooms whenever they want, irrespective of whether we allow trans women to pee in peace there. You can also talk about how gender-affirming care is necessary and lifesaving treatment, and trans people should be entitled to it the same way you’re entitled to your colonoscopy, Aunt Karen. And you can explain to your relatives that whether or not someone has medically transitioned, and regardless of how they look, their gender is still valid.
Aunt Karen. Cue Jolyon Maugham telling us how much wiser the younger generation is than all those millions of evil feminist Aunt Karens.
If you’ve got a TERF in your holiday midst, you have a couple options. You can engage; you can ignore; or you can, as we’ve stated, launch assorted foods across the table until they retreat. What you do not have to do is make yourself feel unsafe or uncomfortable in order to entertain their bigotry. You also bear no obligation to sit quietly and politely as someone spews hatred simply because it’s the holidays and you’re supposed to get along like family—whatever that means.
It’s funny because right under that (the end of the article) is the box with the explanation of why we should support Rewire News:
We’re glad you’re here! Our work is written for readers like you—folks who care about reproductive and sexual health, rights, and justice, and understand how critical independent media is to a democratic society.
Ah yes reproductive rights and justice…except for TERFs and Karens.
For a lawyer, she certainly is quick to cede her sex-based rights to men. I suppose she’s too busy dreaming about throwing food that someone else made at people to consider that there are women athletes losing scholarships and awards and recognition to men claiming to be women, among other things.
Since when is it toxic to be a devil’s advocate? I’ve spent my whole life doing that, and often to great effect, because I have brought up points no one ever thought about. Though not often at Thanksgiving, because having my family all together in a big room is dangerous enough without throwing gasoline on the flames. They always threw a lot more than food…
No, you must make someone not just feel, but be, unsafe or uncomfortable. And in the midst of all this flying food, how many have you convinced? You’ve convinced them that you are juvenile, impulsive, and just downright nasty, especially since “Aunt Karen” hasn’t done anything nasty or hateful; she just called someone he, or made some comment that used the word “woman” instead of “Front hole” or “Uterus haver”.
And repeating what they say in a teenage mocking voice is not the way to convince anyone, either. But I suppose for someone who thinks “Okay, Boomer” is a devastating counter-argument, this seems like a good idea.
It seems to me that believing in something wrong would be “bigotry” only if the truth is so obvious that a person has to go out of their way to avoid it — twist their reasoning into knots, make things up, insulate themselves from contrary views — all motivated by a desire to hate or condemn for emotional reasons. Otherwise, it’s just a sincere error.
It may be true that “transwomen are women.” Someone could certainly reason their way into the conviction. But in order for them to believe that it’s so clear-cut and plain to the average intelligence that there’s no chance someone else could reason their way to a different conclusion, they have to twist their reasoning into knots, make things up, and/or insulate themselves from contrary views.
I’m pro-choice, and don’t buy the arguments the people who are against abortion make, which are usually couched as concerns about the welfare of women and ‘ unborn babies.’ But I’d be a bigot myself if I assumed that none of this concern was sincere. And I’d be a bigot and a bully if I resorted to violence, throwing pies at my very Catholic Great-Aunt who accompanies her disturbing pro-life stance with a kind heart and loving nature.
A lot of conservatives view the left as an existential threat, one that seeks to destroy them (and is one justification for them rejecting election results as illegitimate if they favor Democrats)… and you know what? They’re not entirely wrong…
Who wants pricks like this in power any more than Trump? ‘cuz I sure as fuck don’t.
Iknklast #2 wrote:
They don’t have to convince anyone of the obvious. The Gender Critical are apparently like someone blinking up at the sun while saying there’s no such thing. Nobody presented with trans ideology is ever on the fence.
We are all born with it.
“… if you want to (have a reasoned debate), it helps to have some talking points handy”.
Even without considering the author’s talking points, this admission tells us her idea of ‘debate’ will not be reasonable. It would not even be reasonably described as a debate!
Thank you for this. I have a friend–a good friend, at that–who fell down the Q-Anon hole. And while his support for a vile, vicious, whining crybaby is often infuriating, I can’t deny that he sincerely accepts the core claim that there’s some sort of massive pedo ring operating out of the DNC, and that Trump has been either secretly waging a war against that cabal or that Trump is being used as a figurehead to wage such a war without even his knowledge. (It’s conspiracies all the way down, like playing the old Illuminati card game from Steve Jackson Games.) And I have to admit, if I actually bought into that absurd premise, I’d find the idea of voting for Trump as some sort of lesser of two evils at least tempting.
So I know his heart is in the right place–he sincerely wants to protect vulnerable children from sexual abuse. He’s just got the wrong end of the stick, entirely, when it comes to figuring out who is doing the abusing, and the cultish mentality of Q-Anon has led to making rational discussions with him on the topic nigh-impossible. But that doesn’t mean that he, himself, is ‘toxic’. If anything, he’s a victim of toxic overdose.
I can understand the unargued assertion that Trump supporters and covid19 deniers = toxic, despite it not being strictly true, on the basis that it is true in most encounters with those types. But, devil’s advocates? Playing the devil’s advocate certainly can be used by a jerk in pursuit of being a jerk, but that alone is not a mark against devil’s advocate usage.
At its core it is a tool of argumentation, a rhetorical device to probe a question from a new direction by asking “what if we’re wrong?” This is an important thing to consider in any subject, and it does not meet with wholesale rejection in other areas of discussion because of that underlying reasonableness. Even if you have every reason to believe that your position is correct, there is no harm in reviewing the contrary position. It is a matter of intellectual honesty.
…All of which is anathema to a person adopting an intellectual empty empty stance. Doubly so if that person has tied their sense of identity to that stance. Bad arguments cannot tolerate scrutiny, and tying one’s identity to that bad argument compounds things by making that scrutiny feel like an attack. Hence, TRAs asserting “devil’s advocates = toxic”.
@holms “At its core it is a tool of argumentation, a rhetorical device to probe a question from a new direction by asking “what if we’re wrong?” This is an important thing to consider in any subject, and it does not meet with wholesale rejection in other areas of discussion because of that underlying reasonableness.”
The Holocaust was evil. Am I required to ask, “What if I’m wrong?” about that subject? I’m Jewish – my right to live is should not be up for debate. The proposition that genocide is good should be met with wholesale rejection. The harm in debating it lies in debate making genocide look morally acceptable.
Now, let’s look at a news item from France:
https://twitter.com/boun0479/status/1322985511829573635
https://www.fr24news.com/a/2020/11/french-ministers-comments-on-separatism-law-generate-negative-reactions-france.html
Gerald Darmanin, who is the French Minister of the Interior, has proposed that anyone who refuses to see a doctor of the opposite sex can be put in prison for five years. He is doing this in the name of fighting Islam.
This proposal is a gross violation of rights. Under Darmanin’s plan, the government can force a woman to see a male gynecologist, force her to let a man investigate her genitalia – and, if she refuses, the government can throw her behind bars for five whole years. This is something the “gender critical” bunch should be talking about if they are truly interested in protecting women’s spaces. I would even expect yelling if this were the case.
Instead, when I search for “Gerald Darmanin” and “gender critical,” I find nothing. No discussions by GCRFs about this. Not a single complaint from a self-declared GCRF. It’s like they don’t even care about this.
If there is even a chance that a trans woman might be in a woman’s space, GCRFs scream loudly. But when a govenment would force a cis woman to get her genitals inspected by a cis man, GCRFs are quiet. This means that GCRFs are not motivated by women’s safety; they can only be motivated by pure transphobia.
GCRFs/TERFs/transphobes are rank bigots. They should be treated like racists, or anti-Semites, or any other bigots.
Transphobes are rank bigots on the same level as anti-Semites and racists.
If that is in fact what he proposes to do, then that would indeed be hugely problematic. however, as the proposed Bill will not be released for comment until next month, and as what he has publicly said to date is…
That quote is actually in the article you link to. I suspect the devil will be in the details of the Bill, not in tweets from people misquoting what Darmanin actually said.
Also, how do you know that none of the people criticizing the proposed bill are not feminists (gender critical or not)?
I’d also be interested to know why you weren’t here back in July, drawing our attention to the appointment of Darmanin as a Minister, particularly given that it was controversial at the time – you know, as it was alleged he had committed rape in the past and feminists were protesting his appointment.
https://www.france24.com/en/20200708-french-pm-defends-promotion-of-minister-darmanin-accused-of-rape-after-feminist-backlash
Maybe since you think feminists are scum you didn’t see fit to support them. Or maybe, since this comment from you reeks of an opportunist drive by snark, you don’t really care about any of these issues, just the chance to lob stones?
My experience of real transphobes – the type of person who throws actual filthy abuse at trans people, or who will happily physically assault them, or who will seek to restrict their access to basic, legally protected human rights – is that every one of those people I’ve met is also a misogynist, a homophobe and a racist. They’re not interested in nuanced discussion of identity, gender vs sex, the protection of basic rights and safety for all. Your conflation of feminists who disagree with radical TRA’s with anti-semites and racists is just stupid, childish hyperbole which instantly renders your argument void with anyone who hasn’t drunk the kool-aid.