Down with this sort of thing
A guy who writes for Forbes on “LGBT life, identities and being queer” wants us to know how wrong the Spectator is on trans issues.
Being transgender was declassified from the international classifications of diseases by the UN’s WHO body last year, and numerous trans activists have pointed out their lived experience is not a debate.
That doesn’t tell us much. Maybe the WHO was bullied into the “declassifying.” The second item is hand-waving bullshit. If someone’s purported “lived experience” relies on a belief system that defines women in a way that most women don’t want to be defined, then the belief system damn well is open to debate. Women get to say we’re not a feeling in a man’s head, and our “lived experience” is relevant too.
Stop Funding Hate, a U.K. based organisation that campaigns to brands and organisations to pull funding from media with hateful editorials have been focusing on the Spectator recently. They had posted celebrating the person who complained and “highlighted the magazine’s toxic track record of transphobic coverage.”
But is the coverage “transphobic” or analytical? I say it’s the latter. It’s not “phobic” to dispute fanciful truth claims.
“As a parent of a trans child, I’ve been aware of the trans-hostile reporting by the Spectator for quite some time.” Helen, who runs the trans advocacy Twitter account @mimmymum tells me.
Forbes is consulting mimmymum now. You couldn’t make it up.
This bothers me, too. Skeptics and rationalists have a wealth of experience coming up with more plausible explanations for “lived experiences” than those held by the people who lived the experience. “What you saw was probably not a UFO spaceship, it was more likely an X; your psychic episode need not have been ESP, it was more likely Y; when you experience God, it is more likely that Z, than that God exists and contacted you.” It’s a scientific approach and it’s fair. We human beings have problems with unreliable memory, biases, fallacies, delusions, and assumptions. We can — and do — fool ourselves about ourselves.
Why the hell would “I know how it feels to be the opposite sex in the wrong body” suddenly become something that not only can’t be mistaken, but a statement similar to “I was raped.” Question it — provide an alternative possibility— and you’re an aggressor on the attack, destroying credibility.
Wow, that sums up the whole issue quite succinctly.
(I am 100% sincere; no sarcasm intended.)
I think the only answer to Sastra’s question is “Because of a sustained energetic relentless campaign of bullying and ostracism and ruining people’s lives.”
If we accept that as true, then what use are women to men?
/sarc
May I add a bit of context for those unfamiliar with the Spectator? It’s often seen as a very right-wing magazine, and it does occasionally publish articles by Taki and others that push the boundaries of acceptable speech. But it also has an excellent track record on issues of individual liberty. It was the first mainstream publication in the UK to support gay rights, as they weren’t then known, at a time when it was a deeply unfashionable issue – homosexuality was bound up with treason after the defection of Burgess and Maclean to the USSR. So its principles are very far from reactionary, even if that’s not true of its writers. On the off-chance that anyone’s interested, there’s more here: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/persistent-buggers-how-the-spectator-fought-to-decriminalise-homosexuality
In short, if the Speccie is “transphobic” (whatever that means) it’s a carefully considered rather than a kneejerk response.
In other words it’s classical liberal aka libertarian (in US terms).