Those on the margins
So a bishop and a rabbi walk into a pub issue a joint statement:
It’s a funny kind of “statement” because I can’t find it in any form except that image, only excerpts in a few news items, mostly churchy ones. I just zipped through the bishop’s tweets for the past couple of weeks in case he’d tweeted a link but nope. He seems like a very decent man, full of concern for the downtrodden, but I still have to take issue with some of the claims in this statement.
We have noted with sadness the increasing use of the term ‘transgender’ ideology and other derogatory terms about trans people.
It’s not derogatory to say there is such a thing as trans ideology. What else can we call it? There are claims about what “trans” means and how we are to behave toward people who say they are it; what can we call those claims if not ideology?
I suppose the answer would be “facts” or “the truth.” I suppose the idea is that calling it ideology implies invention as opposed to discovery.
Ok, fair enough, but then this is the core issue, isn’t it. Much of the bullying by activists and allies is around this push to convince everyone that it’s simply true that some people are “in the wrong body.” Much of the resistance is to this push.
So, the rabbi and the bishop are apparently saying we shouldn’t resist this push to accept that a set of very shaky claims is simply true new discoveries about human…sex? Gender? Essence?
But what if the claims are in fact as wrong and confused and fantasy-based as they appear to us? What if children and teenagers really are being mutilated on the strength of this new truth-or-ideology? Don’t we need to know that? Wouldn’t it in fact be a good thing if we discovered that hopla! people don’t need to mutilate themselves after all, because the idea that we can be born in “the wrong body” turns out to be an invention and not a fact?
Then they proceed to the usual – and undisputed – announcement that trans people shouldn’t be persecuted.
As faith leaders, we believe that trans people, like every other person, have every right to be cherished, and protected by society and in the gender in which they choose to live.
Watch out! They sneaked a stinger into the tail. Every person has every right to be in the gender in which they choose to live. If it’s what they choose to live in then it’s not a fact that it’s what they are, is it. It can’t be both. It can’t be a fact about them and a choice.
Anyway what does choosing to live in a gender mean? Not a lot, as we’ve explored ad infinitum here.
They think it’s time to “soften” the rhetoric, “so that trans people may indeed be seen as people.” But trans people already are seen as people. No gender-unbelievers consider them not people. No gender-unbelievers call them not people. If we’re going to soften the rhetoric, how about not claiming or hinting that gender skeptics say trans people are not people? How about seeing us “as people” too?
The world is far richer for their contribution…
Is it? I’m not seeing the enrichment.
They end by saying let’s talk about this in a new way, “one that looks to build up rather than destroy, and to honour rather than denigrate.” Build up what, though? Build up the idea that a man who says he thinks of himself as a woman is every bit as much a woman as a woman is, and probably better than she is at being a feminist because he is both a woman and trans, which=feminist squared.
Not doing that, soz.
In the name of the parent, the assigned as son, and the holy gender ghost, amen.
Are they worried that if people see through the transgender religion, next they’ll stop thinking Mean Santa lives in the sky?
I have to try very hard not to make a man in a dress joke……
We have plenty of evidence that non-belief In Mean Santa in the Sky provides no immunity to the transgender religion, at least.
Okay, now issue the same sort of statement in support of women. Actual, adult human female, natal women. I think they’ve been waiting in line for a few thousand years longer. There are a good many more of them, too.
If they’re upset by the use of the term “ideology” in connection with trans issues, the bishop and the rabbi best not look at the twitter timelines of any publicly visible gender critical woman, lest their eyes melt out of their sockets. I suppose we should just be thankful they didn’t employ the word TERF anywhere in their statement.
One set of shaky claims deserves another.
I’d love to hear about this too, explained in non-circular terms that don’t depend upon the performance sexist stereotypes of gendered human behaviour that have been forced on people for so long.
Maybe someone could send them that charming compilation of “choke on my girldick and die you disgusting old shrivelled up smelly cunt TERF” tweets aimed at JKR so they can have a think about who should “soften their rhetoric”.
Argh, apologies YNnB, I see you have already made my point. Which makes it your point, really. I really should have gone to bed a while ago.
It’s a point that can hardly be made too often.
Points for EVERYBODY!
School of thought, operating model, perhaps paradigm. I think ideology is considered disparagement because it has religious – even cultish – connotations. Given the nature of the trans way of modelling sex and gender this is fairly apt, but I’m not surprised it rankles for the person being described that way.
And because the point can, indeed, not be made too often I’ll just say that when I read that request for a softening of the rhetoric it hit me in between the eyes like, I don’t know, maybe a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire.
I guess that’s the enrichment?
Re “trans ideology”: I deliberately avoided that phrase and tried replacing it with “trans narrative” once, and still got raked over the coals. I think some people don’t want to consider trans-ness anything other than “simple fact”, and find the implication that there’s any kind of point-of-view aspect insulting.