A warning to other women not to speak
Some examples:
As JK Rowling faces a continuing backlash, Grint, who played Ron Weasley in the hit film series, expressed his solidarity with the trans community in a statement released to The Times.
A continuing backlash which we are contributing to with all our might.
Yes that’s nice – man tells woman “war [on women] is over, get out of your trench” – nothing bullying about that, no mansplaining there, no sign of a man telling a woman to shut up about her womany problems and listen to the men from now on.
That’s four out of the 40 in those five days, and there have been more since then.
The war is not over – this is the war, and it’s a war on women, and it’s unrelenting.
God I hate these people.
In Pink News, on James Urbaniak:
So, that’s hysterical. God, she’s such a Karen.
All the misogyny coming out of the woodwork.
Penis News is in financial trouble so they may be using going after Rowling for clickbait. That is why nobody should go directly to Penis News for any of their articles — see if anybody has archived the dreck someplace else first.
And Urbiarnak or whatever? Great, another never-heard-of-him to look up.
Including misogyny of the most childish fashion. Take, for example, one P.Z. Myers. His most recent post on J.K.R. includes a small picture to the right of the first paragraph. The picture is a head shot of a character from the Potter films, a strange looking, non-human creature called Lord Voldemort. Myers has oh-so amusingly added the caption Portrait of JK Rowling beneath the picture.
Oddly enough, it’s the Myers crowd who are – or were – very quick to pile on anybody who dares to ‘other’ somebody by comparing them to something non-human, but all of a sudden not only does P.Z. openly ‘other’ J.K. but his adoring horde haven’t so much as mentioned it. I’ve seen them tear into commenters for calling people such as Trump a monster or for describing a school shooter as inhuman; they’ll defend the right of the vilest examples of humanity not to be ‘othered’, but JK? Not even a mild tut.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2020/06/13/if-you-need-further-dissection-of-jk-rowling/
So, AoS, you read Pharyngula so we don’t have to? I’ve stopped following FtB.
Considering Dr. Venture’s relationship with women, gays, and people of colour maybe Urbainiak should shut the fuck up.
@AoS:
There Myers says:
Presumably that is the first sentence, which is:
That’s too stupid to bear? Really, PZ? Besides, he links to another of his posts where he indicates that he’s lying and indeed read the whole thing, He doesn’t argue with any of her points, though, he just calls them “gobsmackingly oblivious and stupid.” *cough* Projection *cough*.
I couldn’t make it through all the comments but the closest my scan picked up to any of the regulars condemning the misogynistic attacks on Rowling was:
That commenter goes on to say that those attacks are, in fact, fine and dandy.
How PZ can go from being so outraged by the attacks on women during elevatorgate and gamergate but accepting and even encouraging of exactly the same attacks on Rowling is beyond me. Anyone remember the falling-out PZ had with Michael Nugent? PZ said (rightly, in my opinion) that Nugent was harbouring and encouraging toxic commenters, attitudes and behaviour by not moderating it out of his comments. He said Nugent was partly responsible for any harm it might cause.
Someone posted the other day Myers’ response when someone asked him how many sexes of horse there were; ‘colt, filly, mare, broodmare, gelding, stallion, freemartin.’ So, seven. I find it almost impossible to believe an actual biology professor with a PhD would make a statement like this in public, but I guess this is somehow a reasonable and logical answer. I really, really hope I never write or say anything this dumb about anything, but particularly not relating to a subject I’m being paid to know enough about to teach to other people.
I guess I can understand someone reading Rowling’s piece and not agreeing with it. Or not agreeing with all of it. Or finding this or that point wrongheaded. But it’s hard to imagine someone actually finding it “gobsmackingly oblivious and stupid.”
Even if I could imagine someone finding it all wrong wrong wrong, it was definitely not a screed.
A castrated male is a “different sex”? An immature animal is a “different sex” from an adult?
@guest #8
@Ben #10
Even if they are different sexes, are any of them a matter of how they identify?
I came to reply to @8, but Ben at 9/10 essentially gazumped me.
@11, the critical question is do any of them identify as Unicorns? Did PZ actually bother to ask before assigning categories?
latsot:
That’s the thing that confuses me the most. It’s just so utterly inconsistent that my brain rebels, and suddenly I find myself playing backgammon in the garden against a watercolor portrait of Michel Foucault.
And the worst part is I don’t even know how to play backgammon!
Rob:
That sounds like one of the actual concerns a reviewer had regarding the Dog Park hoax paper. To wit, the reviewer was concerned that they weren’t respecting the dogs’ privacy while inspecting their genitals.
Holy fuck. The plot isn’t even a speck on the horizon for PZ.
Oh, I just realized that “screed” is Woke for shrill.
I just looked up freemartins, and the occurrence of the syndrome doesn’t appear to be recorded in horses (it seems to be found mostly in cattle, though occasionally identified in sheep, goats and pigs). So down to six sexes then….
I think, that’s part of the problem. Looking back on it, I don’t think PZ was right there.
Because right now the argument against gender critical feminists isn’t actually that they’re wrong, it isn’t really on that level. It is that by stating their positions gender critical feminists are harming the trans community and contributing to trans people committing suicide.
In other words, its a hostage negotiation not a debate.
So PZ is actually being consistent with his position on Nugent, because if Nugent is partly responsible for any harm his commenters might cause, then it follows that gender critical feminism can be held responsible for any harm that their arguments might cause.
Realise PZ’s comments section isn’t toxic to him. He’s part of that echo chamber, so from his point of view, we’re the toxic ones for saying things like “Hey maybe women’s rights requires us to have a working definition of the word “women” and feminists are quite reasonable to want a say in what that definition is.”
What is worse, is the widespread acceptance of lesser-evilism, whereby what you define as what is acceptable is just slightly better than the worst your opponent will do. PZ thinks we’re bullying trans people to death, that allows for one hell of a lot of harassment on PZ’s side before he starts seriously questioning if he’s with the baddies.
And because PZ’s no longer a skeptic, I’m not sure there is any standard of evidence or argument that would ever get through to him now. What we can do is mourn the fact that he’s fallen so low, and try and not follow in his footsteps.
I remember Slate explaining the UK’s “transphobia” as caused by the influence of Germaine Greer. GG is the grand old dame of feminism, but I would doubt she has much influence on this issue – Sarah Ditum, Glosswitch, Suzanne Moore, Janice Turner, Julie Blindel are far more read on the topic. In politics Joanne Cherry, the SNP MP, would be most listened to.
Now Vanity Fair is doing this again – a bad assessment of the UK’s anti-trans activist movement with an annoying article about JKR’s “transphobia”.
JKR chooses “ a global uprising against inequality” to make her case. I didn’t realise that everything had to go on hold for one particular issue. I don’t think climate change activists have downed tools.
So check JKR’s record – that is of a liberal (in UK, not American terms) social democrat – who can donate £1 million to the Labour party when those of us with a similar view might give them £10 per month.
“Rowling was one of the most prominent opponents of Scottish independence, and became a very vocal critic of former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, particularly in his failure to deal with serious accusations of anti-Semitism.”
How Scottish independence, a nationalist movement, turned itself from flirting with fascism, to tartan tories, to a right on leftism, is a wonder. The result is that a lot of progressive energies have got sucked into marching about waving flags and creating Utopias that must happen, post independence, while letting the current Scottish government off the hook.
Also the writer seems to think that it’s unreasonable to criticise Corbyn for the party’s at best incompetence at handling the antisemitism that became noticeable in its ranks.
So British writers aren’t falling in line with their American counterparts. And Guardian trans employees aren’t happy. The Guardian has been gruesomely uncritical of the trans movement. They’ve had about one critical article in the last year or so, by Suzanne Moore, which was greeted with hysteria and a lot of bad faith. One of their regular contributors – you covered it OB – was tying herself into knots about Yaniv, thinking that the immigrant women who didn’t want to wax his supposedly female sack and crack had a point, maybe, but that refusing to wax the thighs of the same person was a bit off.
“ Rowling, a British feminist, is soaking up these anti-trans views—she’s transphobic because everyone she reads and listens to is. Why? That’s the real mystery. Some pin the blame on many British journalists’ close ties to 2000s “skeptic” movement, largely built around dismissing pseudosciences such as homeopathy and “anti-science” views.”
Was Rowling ever part of the skeptic movement? She would have been a very big catch if she had been. Outwith her Harry Potter books, she became known as a supporter of MS charities. The is influence at 2 or 3 steps of separation.
Also there’s loads of pro-trans stuff in the UK – it’s treated sympathetically on the BBC for instance, with opposition handled rather gingerly.
The writer ascribes Rowling’s badness to the whiteness of British journalism. I didn’t realise that the transgender movement was overwhelmingly supported in the black community.
This stuff is infuriating. JKR is a literate woman – more literate than most – who is capable of reading and researching for herself. The difference is that she can speak publicly without losing her job.
The patronising idiot who wrote this doesn’t see how she herself might be swimming in her own fish-bowl of approved opinion.
This is a ludicrously bad article. And Christopher Hitchens used to write for Vanity Fair.
https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2020/06/jk-rowling-transphobia-feminism
Don’t forget Kathleen Stock, ‘Posie Parker’, Holly Lawford-Smith, Becca Reilly-Cooper, and the inimitable Jane Clare Jones.
‘Now Vanity Fair is doing this again – a bad assessment of the UK’s anti-trans activist movement with an annoying article about JKR’s “transphobia”.’ It’s more accurate to identify this women’s movement as pro-women, rather than anti-anything…or, even, feminist.
latsot @ 7
Ha. Hahaha. Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. I was there. I was there on that Skype call some time before the Dublin conference when the two of us tried to explain to him 1. why the slime pitters were not reasonable interlocutors and 2. why he was making things worse for me personally in particular because he was treating people as reasonable interlocutors who spent their time talking about me exactly the way people talked about Rowling in that collection of tweets Rebecca Reilly-Cooper collected last week. I was there when the three of us walked to the pub where Kate Smurthwaite did her (glorious) thing, and we rehashed the whole issue all over again.
Now PZ is attacking a woman who is being subject to exactly but EXACTLY the same torrent of misogynist bitch-cunt-stinking dried-up hole garbage that he found so horrible when it was poured over me.
Furthermore, I’m not at all convinced he actually believes the dogma any more than I do.
Ophelia@21
Exactly so. There is no way he can’t see that the torrents of abuse are exactly the same in content and volume.
Perhaps there’s a clue in this 30 year old recording of John Cleese: https://twitter.com/i/status/1271535485467283457
#7 latsot
I don’t think your parsing of that passage correctly. PZ says he was only ‘able to handle a single sentence’ and links to his previous post in his anti-Rowling series (more on this later), where he completely refrains from rebutting a single substantive point of hers, except for a single sentence. So what I think PZ meant by ‘I was only able to handle a single sentence’ would be better expressed as ‘I could only handle responding to a single sentence’ or more accurately ‘I could only be bothered responding to a single sentence’. So put this one down to an understandable confusion caused by his bad writing.
Incidentally, that single sentence was “Ironically, radical feminists aren’t even trans-exclusionary – they include trans men in their feminism, because they were born women.” A completely reasonable statement which Indicates JK acknowledges that trans women are still female and therefore still need to be included in feminism. But as has been pointed out by others, PZ is just unable to grapple with such thinking any more, which he gives away in his steadfast refusal to rebut anything. And so we have an anti-Rowling series of posts which, collectively, have responded to a single sentence of her blog and a single tweet.
It begins with a response to a tweet of hers in True equality at last: white women are as bad as white men (07/June/2020) wherein he:
– Calls her old, as if this was somehow relevant (she’s a whopping 54 and younger than him by the way). In a post calling white women bad, this strikes me as PZ’s timid version of ‘old dried-up pussy’.
– Calls her new books terrible with no indication that he has read them.
– Calls her old books (the Harry Potter series) “derivative and repetitive and contained a lot of problematic attitudes”.*
– Calls her the hot new woke insult for women: Karen.
Then there is the aforementioned I’m never gonna get my jaw up off the floor again (10/June/2020) containing:
– Dismissal of all but one sentence of a long blog post as “gobsmackingly oblivious and stupid”.
– Getting that sentence wrong.
– A boycott of Harry Potter books. :O
Next is If you need further dissection of JK Rowling… (13/June/2020). The main stupidity has already been raked over, but of course he still needs to slag her off a bit: “too stupid to bear”, “awful”, “JK Rowling is dead to me”, and of course some shitting on the Harry Potter books and movies.* The ostensible point of this post was to link to other people taking their shots at Rowling, but by the length of text devoted to it we can see that the real point was simply to shit on her.
Finally there is Does anyone on FtB think Rowling has a point? No. (15/June/2020) This one is basically a repeat of the previous post, minus the shitting on Rowling. Mercifully short, in other words. It’s the last in the series currently, but I doubt it will stay that way.
I like the way the title gives away the ideological capture of FTB though.
___
*What is with people suddenly finding previously-hidden flaws in the works of people upon disliking that person for their politics? Retroactive just-so stories all over the place.
Comment being held for having too many links?
How can people, whose professional careers are built around the foundations of the scientific method, be so opposed to the asking of questions?; to the request for evidence; to the opposition to revealed truth? Beat the hell outta me.
I was just thinking that. Seeing my own title – Definitions matter – when scrolling through comments, I thought “for the same reason truth matters.” The two are related. If we can’t rely on definitions to aim at truth…you get the idea.
Holms,
I considered that interpretation but it seemed a little too charitable to me, since it required reading the previous post too.
But it hardly matters either way given what he goes on to say unambiguously.
#8 guest
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat? Where was this?? I share your amazement that such a biology-unaware statement could come from most adults, let alone a biology professor with goddamn PhD.
#18 Bruce Gorton
Good point, on this topic, toxicity actually means ‘disagreement with my view’ due to disagreement being classified as directly harmful.
Case in point: PZ does not mind people wishing death upon political opponents – including feminists declared terfs – he only pushes back, reluctantly, if a person wishes death upon an opponent if the suggested method is suicide. Then and only then does he push back… not against wishing death upon that person, but against the suggestion of suicide, because that may be harmful to others with suicidal ideation. In comment 117 of “You heard the man, up your game”, PZ bans people who disapprove of murdering nazis, while accepting comment 103 in that same thread (“I think that punching, beating up, and killing Nazis is a good and morally commendable act.”); in comment 128 of another thread “Biased sources, motivated reasoning, and blithe assumptions: the TERF story”, PZ begs a commenter that he refrain from requesting terf suicides. It’s the same guy that said the “morally commendable act” stuff. Note that he wasn’t banned for asking for terf suicides, he was merely told not to request that their deaths happen via suicide. And look at the outpouring of sympathy for Sorrens’ hatred! “I understand your rage” and “I sympathise” all round.
Once more for emphasis: telling people not to murder can warrant a ban at pharyngula, while telling people to murder the designated enemy is fine but please don’t suggest suicide as a method. What a fucking vile sewer of a blog he has made. How far he has fallen.
Oof, sorry for horrible text blobs
Here you go–he hasn’t taken it down:
https://twitter.com/pzmyers/status/1209098935542767616
Noticed his Twitter bio says ‘proudly feminist’.
Text blobs? I’d fix them but I don’t know what they are. (Sorry about delay of earlier comment, yes because of links.)
Text blobs – giant, scarcely formatted posts.
Ah. Pff. Content-rich.
For the record. Note it’s last December.
I assume he’s being facetious, but then if he is…ah well. It’s all a tangle.
Oh–thanks for spotting that. I guess it’s recently come up again, as it was at the top of a list I looked at. Don’t think he’s backed off from the statement?
He may be being facetious…but why not give a straight answer, if he genuinely believes there are lots of sexes/sex is a spectrum, and wants to demonstrate to other people that this is true?
One would think he would genuinely want to convince other people that this is true, since the stakes (murder and suicide of innocent people) are so high, and he himself can reduce this risk by helping others, um, not do whatever it is they believe that kills trans people. (And now I’ve reached the three in a row post limit.)
Yes, I saw it circulating on Twitter yesterday, I didn’t look into how or why (or notice that it was an oldy!).
Is there a three in a row post limit? If so I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it.
I remember in elevatorgate, PZ was saying you should listen to the woman, always listen to the woman, if she says it’s sexism it is. I never accepted that because not all women agree, and how do you know which to listen to (Andrea Dworkin? Phyllis Schlafly? Think we might have different outcomes there). Also, some women see sexism where there is none (though I suspect that is somewhat rare, since sexism is so prevalent) while others see no sexism even where it is blatant. So stupid rule. Yes, listen to the woman, but evaluate her claims and those of other against the evidence and make a sensible determination.
Now, though, it’s don’t listen to the women, they are TERFs and their claims of sex discrimination are bigotry. Listen to the transwomen because they know what they experience, and we can’t grasp it unless we are trans ourselves.
In my experience, PZ has had a long history of simple formulas for complex problems, and I rarely agree with his formulas. “Trans women are women” was ideally suited for him, because it is a simple formula, easily promoted without thinking.
There are some simple formulas I do agree with, such as “when you interact with a woman in the workplace, if you wouldn’t do something to Duane ‘the Rock’ Johnson, don’t do it to the woman”.
This was a pleasant surprise.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/15/trans-and-non-binary-activists-write-to-sun-in-support-of-jk-rowling
Latsot #22, thanks for that, I’d never seen it. Brilliant.:)
IMHO PZ’s main problem is that he’s an old guy teaching in a tiny college, and tiny colleges are having difficulties these days (even before COVID-19) and like all employees of small colleges, woe to the ones that offend the ‘customer’.
Or to borrow a phrase, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”