Peoplewho
Gender Heretic wrote up the JK Rowling shock-horror.
…the calls of “TERF!” and “transphobe!” did not begin with anything Rowling said about trans people.
No, Rowling’s great sin was to push back against the erasure of the word “women” and its replacement with “people who menstruate.”
Let’s think about that. Let’s think about why feminist women would object to the fact that we are being deleted from public conversation. Why would we object to that? Is it because we’re Karens?
I don’t think so. I think it’s because, if we can’t say “women” when we talk about women’s issues now, how can feminism even exist? Shouldn’t feminism be deleted from public conversation too? (Many are working on that very project even as we speak.) Shouldn’t we be required to say peopleism instead of feminism now? Now that the word “women” has been declared exclusionary?
If women’s issues have been found to be not exclusive to women, then it turns out feminism has been a big mistake all this time, right? Especially since after all, if women don’t like it, all they have to do is be men. That’s way easier than trying to get people to understand that women aren’t uniformly stupid and helpless and inferior.
Oppression begins with language.
When the meaning of the word “woman” includes men, and the women become “menstruators,” then women lose the power to speak clearly about their lived experience of oppression.
Imagine the Black Lives Matter movement being told to stop using the word “black” and start referring to themselves as “melanins,” and you have some idea what has happened to feminism lately.
Actually what women are being told is starker than that. The analogy would be the Black Lives Matter movement being told to stop using the word “black” and use the word “all” instead. It’s interesting how activist types despise that demand but love and obey and enforce the equivalent that’s addressed to women.
Of course, the odious Giliell has things to say. True to form she has disregarded the actual arguments in favour of her own dishonest inventions which she presents as actual ‘cis’ feminist ideas. She is pretending that girls who begin menstruating at an early age – 9 – 10-yrs – are classed as adult women by ‘transphobic’ feminists because they insist that women are adult human females and that only women menstruate. Even the title of her post is just cringeworthy, not to mention the ‘whataboutery’ she opens with.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/affinity/2020/06/08/people-who-menstruate-or-why-the-transphobic-insistence-on-women-is-both-creepy-and-wrong/
Oh, and she seems to have forgotten that just a couple of weeks ago she was claiming to be trans-something or other, because today she says that she is writing the post from a ‘cis perspective’ and supplying links for the arguments from the perspective of trans men and non-binary ‘folks’ (what, are they not people?).
Don’t be silly. “Non-menism” will do just fine.
I am sure she is trying to be inclusive of trans-otters. Though I will say that I am deeply offended by having my identity as an otter dismissed as being “folks”. I am an otter, damn it! Trans otters are otters! (Repeat six times to make sure it’s true).
The blog Intransitive had a similarly silly take on the Rowling thing.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/intransitive/2020/05/30/a-terf-turfed-rowling-is-a-three-time-loser-this-week/There are the usual revisionist tricks; blatant slander (“Definitely something to keep a close eye on. In recent years, Rowling has made it clear that she can no longer be trusted around children.“) becomes “an innocuous comment”, JK warning that person that slander has legal penalties becomes “threatining Spurling into silence”.
But I rolled my eyes particularly strenuously at the finishing touch: “Did TERFling have another “senior moment”, as she calls it? Was she tired when she wrote it? Or was she perhaps feeling emotional after her bigotry was twice pointed out in a week? (Those are questions, not accusations or statements.)”
An actual, literal, ‘just asking questions’ excuse employed to defend snide remarks phrased as questions. Classic.
Holms, not just asking questions – asking questions that are loaded with sexist and ageist innuendos. “Senior moment”. “Feeling tired”. “Feeling emotional”.
We could easily “just ask questions” of the TERF-propounders, the TERF-hunters, but we prefer to ask substantitve questions. Like “define what it means to be a woman”. “How do you know you feel like a woman?” “Why are you entitled to have me validate your identity when you refuse to accept mine?” “How is it that men get to bully their way into women’s spaces just by saying they feel like a woman?”
Those are all questions they do not (probably cannot) answer. Instead, they call names, recite mantras, and deplatform. They scream at any research that doesn’t find what they want it to find, and demand it be stifled. This sounds sort of familiar…wait, I think I’ve got it. Do they sound like (a) religionists; (b) toddlers; (c) Donald Trump; or (d) All of the above?
Just another woman-hating dude in earrings.
Dang that post by Giliell is stupid. Too stupid to bother with.
Giliell is a real contender for the most intellectually dishonest person who has ever lived.
The real tragedy is the Giliel is shitting all over the legacy of Caine. Allowing her (or is it him, I don’t know) to take control of that blog was an horrendous mistake.
Caine and I had quite a lengthy email correspondence over dealing with cancer, and she also taught me things I never knew about the lived experience of Indigenous Americans. Although we never met IRL, her death had an enormous effect on me, and I am saddened to see what has become of what was once a well disciplined, but welcoming place.
Is there anything, anything at all, that TRA’s don’t make worse?
Ya know, I never cared for the Harry Potter books. Thought they were derivative trash cribbing from the greats. My view of J. K. Rowling was thus not particularly grand.
However, the way she has handled and is handling this shit online has impressed me immensely. Estimation of JK hereby inverted. I will now proudly display the Potter paraphernalia presents (like my Slytherin spatula) I’ve gotten over the years.
Nullius, I’m afraid I have no Potter paraphernalia to display, myself and my son both having aged out of the Potter years by the time Potter burst on the scene. I may have to create a Rowling kicks ass t-shirt, or something.
Even if she isn’t my type of writer, she is winning my respect in this situation.
#1, #7
I just had a look at Giliell’s post and… dear god, I don’t blame you for skipping it.
What’s with the complaining about how little JK has spoken about Breonna Taylor? I had to google the name as I had not heard of it… why is JK expected to talk about the shooting of an American? Is she expected to talk about every murder, or just every murder of a black woman by US police? Why is JK apparently obliged to comment on the pandemic instead of erasure of women?
If JK is obliged to talk about those issues ahead of trans politics, why is it fine for Giliell to talk about JK talking about trans politics? I saw no mention by Giliell about Breonna Taylor in her entire post history… until upbraiding JK for not mentioning the event. So, total hypocrisy confirmed; that is clearly just a manufactured outrage based on an opportunistic criticism.
And the list of bizarre asides goes on and on, until the post ends. The post so lacked a coordinated narrative, it was so packed with non sequitur asides, that I was reminded of Donald Trump. Just a stream-of-consciousness babble, untethered to any point.
10 & 11 – same here. I’m not at all keen on Rowling as a writer, and I think the wild popularity of mediocre writing is kind of unfortunate, but thank fuck for what she’s doing now.
Holms, I actually see it as a point in her favor (Rowling’s, not Giliel’s) that she doesn’t wade in on every topic even when she has no expertise. Some topics are best left to people who understand them. Which is why men who think they are women probably shouldn’t be talking about what it feels like to be a woman, IMHO.
Which is alarming given her day job, which brings me to…
I have to disagree here. The real tragedy is that Giliel is a teacher (or teaching assistant: she’s quite vague on the specifics) of children who are, as far as I can tell from her posts, in the 10-14yrs age bracket. One dreads to think what shitty ideas she’s filling their minds with or, given her favourite tactic of dishonestly representing others’ words in order to discredit her perceived enemies, how much unnecessary trouble and unfair punishment she’s caused for pupils by exaggerating minor incidents. I suppose it’s possible, of course, that her on-line persona is the opposite of her real-life one and she’s really a ray of sunshine in person, but I’d need to see a lot of evidence in order to believe that.
So let me see if I have this straight. There are two groups of people: one who wants to use the term “woman” to refer to adult human female; and another group that thinks that’s awful and wants othoto use the epithet “people who menstruate.”
And folks from the second group offer as an argument that the terms of the first group would include a prematurely pubescent girl of nine or ten.
I must have that backwards.
Not only that, Papito, they also argue that the ones who prefer “women” to “people who menstruate” want to reduce people to their Biology.
I have been through so many irony meters since starting to follow this stuff. I need comprehensive irony-meter insurance.
OB, #6
Who is that?