Which twin gets the backlash
I’ve been stalling on this one because I know it’s going to annoy me so intensely. Via guest, MK Fain’s exchange with Kaitlyn Tiffany while the latter was working on her “Radical Feminist Women Are Evil” piece for the Atlantic.
First of all, KT is deceptively polite for someone who’s going to talk the lying shit about Fain that she did talk. That’s what journalists do, but given the dishonesty and venom of KT’s article I think it’s unethical.
But what really gets up my nose is her insistence on how hateful the radical feminists are, given the vast quantity of revolting obscene misogynist garbage directed at gender critical women (and at opinionated women in general). I’ve never seen feminists say anything even close to the familiar “I hope your disgusting dried-up cunt bursts into flames you bitch cunt hag” singalong aimed at JK Rowling and the rest of us. I’m betting KT hasn’t either, since she didn’t mention having done so when MK asked.
For example:
K.Tiffany to M.K.Fain:
– I know we talked about this a little bit already, but how do you respond to Reddit banning r/GenderCritical for hate speech?
M.K.Fain to K.Tiffany:
3. I think Reddit banning r/GenderCritical for hate speech demonstrates that male-run, centralized, and proprietary platforms can not be trusted to have women’s best interest at heart, and that we must create our own solutions. It is also a symptom of wider misogyny in our society that women speaking up for their sex-based rights, the very rights our feminist foremothers fought for, is considered in any way “hateful”. This is made even more clear when compared to content that is allowed on Reddit, such as violent pornography.
Whoosh, went right past the recipient. She still portrays feminists as hateful and trans women as their victims.
Tiffany:
— I just want to dig in a little bit more on the last question from my previous email. Speaking to a trans scholar on the topic, she pointed out that trans-exclusionary feminism is also feminism that wants to eliminate trans women by stopping surgeries and therapies and recognition of their identity, etc. I understand that you don’t consider this hateful, but was hoping you might be able to explain that a little bit more. I don’t want to mischaracterize your beliefs.
It’s not “elimination” to fail to agree that a man is a woman if he says so. The man is still there. The man is still at liberty to think of himself as a woman. The man has no right to try to compel women to endorse his conception of himself, especially when it’s a personal fantasy as opposed to reality.
Tiffany:
In my own recent experiences on Ovarit, I’ve seen quite a bit of what I would consider hate speech.
Interesting. Anything at all close to this sort of thing?
So that’s how that went.
Oh, my stars and garters. This is so painfully disingenuous it’s difficult to unpack. Sure, stopping trans-women from getting therapy and surgery would, arguably, be attempting to ‘eliminate’ them–but having been on this site since the Great Divorce from FTB, I’ve never seen anyone attempting to make that argument here. I’ve seen the argument that therapy should be better designed, and surgeries held off, for children, but that is only applicable if she had said ‘trans girls’.
At the same time, there is an effort to debate what ‘recognition of their identity’ is supposed to entail, and this site’s commenters have expressed a fairly broad spectrum, there. Some balk at the pronoun issue, some at women’s spaces and sports. But of course, recognition of trans women as trans women (rather than as women) doesn’t ‘eliminate’ them; it leaves them in a spot on the alleged spectrum of sex-identity that is someplace in the middle, with individual societal and legal ‘recognitions’ up for healthy, reasoned debate.
The whole “TERFs want to eliminate trans people” canard is standard fare for the Critical Theory types. Trying to help people lose weight? Fat genocide. Heal blindness and deafness? Extermination of the differently abled.
It’s almost astounding that educated people make such arguments, but then I remember that educated does not entail intelligent.
Of course, by the RTAs’ own deviant logic, they want to exterminate TERFs. And KT is eager to assure us that TERFs are a teeny tiny sliver of a fringe, while the trans umbrella is purportedly voluminous. So they’re punching down against a marginalized minority. Therefore, they are immoral bigots.
Like, this whole edifice is self-negating.
Nullius, that urge seems to go back a long time. I am thinking, for instance, about Equus (the play). The doctor comments on how he is doing a wrong thing by curing the young man of his delusions; he is seen as more real, more alive, and he has worship. The doctor seems to presume he is doing him a disservice. Yet this young man is extremely unhappy, to the extent that he blinded a stable full of horses. He can’t have relationships with females, though he clearly wants to.
Another example is from the play Experiment with an Air Pump (which is really just an argument – in two acts – against abortion, though convoluted enough that you have to unpack it a bit. In this play, someone is talking about their uncle, who was a lot of fun and built a treehouse for them when they were a kid, even though they were schizophrenic. The character who represents all that is bad (I found her the most sympathetic, myself) asks him what happened to his uncle. “Oh, he committed suicide.” So the uncle was unhappy. But the character talking about him believes that the fact that he was a lot of fun and built a treehouse overrides that unhappiness; to cure him of his schizophrenia would be horrible, because…well, that is so poorly argued, I just told you exactly the argument. He was fun.
It is right to have an aversion to stigmatizing people for disabilities. It is wrong to assume that means we should do nothing to help treat a disability that is making people unhappy, or not allowing them to fulfill all the potential they dream about. It isn’t “abelist” to attempt to do away with blindness, deafness, or other impairments that restrict a person’s role in the world. It is illusory to assume we will ever cure that totally, but it is not a bad thing to try.
By the same token, curing society’s obsession with gender roles (also difficult, and maybe illusory, though I hope not) so that people can live the way they want without being tied to performance of gender based on sex is not anti-trans, it is not transphobic. It is pro-woman, and in many ways, pro-man, since it also removes the male need to perform masculinity.
This is one of the areas where the new wokeness goes too far. Everything is ‘normal’ and anything that goes against this idea is deemed to be wrong, with nobody being allowed to suggest ways to improve quality of life without being called out for causing offence. Just one example is the current obesity crisis, which the woke are countering not with encouragement for the morbidly obese to lose weight (which no rational person would think a ‘bad’ idea) but with the promotion of ‘body positivity’ and the rejection of sound, scientifically-proven medical advice on the grounds that it is ‘body-shaming’, despite the inherent risks that come with obesity: heart problems, diabetes, increased risk of certain cancers, increased risk of life-threatening complications during surgery, decreased mobility, increased stress on the joints, breathing problems, etc. But, no, none of that matters to the uberwoke, all they are concerned with is affirming ‘normality’. They seem unable to understand something so basic as the idea that encouraging a morbidly obese person to not lose weight because they’re ‘beautiful as they are’ is as dangerous as telling an alcoholic not to give up the booze because they’re so much fun when they’re drunk.
I’m not advocating for a world of perfect bodies, by the way, there’s nothing wrong with carrying a little extra, after all. I’m just saying that encouraging others to maintain clearly unhealthy and often dangerous lifestyles is clearly a ridiculous, self-serving way of doing things, endangering others for the sake of woke points and a feeling of smug superiority over those ‘body fascist’ doctors and clinicians.
I think the fat acceptance thing is complicated, partly because losing weight can turn out to be literally impossible for some people. I read up on it a little once, and I forget the details but the gist is that the body sees dieting as an emergency so it goes into emergency mode to make it stop. The body doesn’t know the difference between dieting and famine. It’s hideously frustrating, and if you have that issue it must be horrendous to have the world giving you Advice to stop having that issue.
Suppose there’s a disease that comes in two forms that differ only in that one is curable while the other is not. Ought we treat the one and encourage those who are afflicted by it to seek treatment? Or does the existence of the untreatable form, and the necessity of accepting those who have it, require the opposite? Is it possible to balance accepting the untreatable while working to treat the rest, or is there something inherently intractable in that?
I don’t have answers to these questions, of course, merely intuitions.
I understand the difficulties around losing weight, though even the body’s reaction to diets not only varies from person to person, it is a temporary reaction – the body can only retain fat for so long before it needs to start using the energy it contains. It also tends to occur more when there is a severe change in diet, so somebody trying to drop overnight from a multi-thousand calories-a-day, high-fat, high-sugar diet to a low-calorie, low-fat and low-sugar regime will trigger the ‘famine’ response more readily than if the same person begins slowly, cutting out small parts of their usual daily intake one item at a time.
But understanding the difficulties with dieting is different from woke-folk actively encouraging people not to try. As with other problems of a similar nature, the individual has to want to make changes and be sufficiently motivated to do so, and it really doesn’t help them if they’re being told that change isn’t necessary, that happiness can come from learning to love themselves as they are. My beef isn’t with the people with problems, it’s with those who will encourage them to not to even attempt change because that’s the woke’s misguided way of doing things.
And my experience has been that the woke deny that there are any health risks with obesity. That’s just propaganda, according to them. Yeah, so it’s just coincidence that the majority of adult onset diabetics are overweight, right? And that I never had any problem with my blood sugar until my BMI exceeded a certain level? And that my mother didn’t have problems with her blood sugars when she dropped weight? (Which she did sensibly, starting as AoS said, so didn’t trigger the famine response.)
Shutting one’s eyes to evidence appears to be a pre-requisite for being woke.
Oh, and one of the worst things they do is vilify those who suggest they might like to have their life different. If I suggest that I would like to get rid of my depression, I’m being abelist. I don’;t want to be unhappy anymore, so I am somehow hurting others who apparently want to be unhappy? Or something?
One time on WHTM, I made the mistake of referring to myself as underweight when I had anorexia (I weighed under 100 pounds at 5’10), and got a severe beating (virtual, of course) for daring to suggest that there could be such a thing as “too skinny”. It was my body, and must be all right, because…reasons.
The obesity thing is complex, above and beyond the ‘diets don’t work for some people’ issue; there is strong evidence that many attempts to help those struggling with excess weight actually make it worse, triggering stress-eating and other related issues. Finding the exact point where useful encouragement crosses the line to counterproductive criticism is a bit like determining the exact amount of chemotherapy drugs to kill a cancer without harming the patient, but only if the chemotherapy drugs were also carcinogenic–the cure can, in many cases, be literally worse than the disease, or at least worsen the disease that is already there. And it’s worsened because human psychological tolerance is even more varied between individuals than human physiological tolerances–which can mean that in some cases, there’s no ‘safe dose’ at all, as anything strong enough to effectively motivate will invariably be strong enough to trigger a psychological downspiral.
This is not to say the Woke approach (or, more precisely, non-approach) is any better. Honestly, I suspect it’s a bit like alcoholism in that way–what research I’ve seen comparing everything from AA to self-motivated cold-turkey to careful weaning to less 12-steppy therapy to medical approaches seems to have roughly the same success rate (roughly 5%). Which would suggest that it’s a crap-shoot. It’s perfectly possible, honestly, that some folks actually do respond to body-positivity messages, becoming comfortable enough ‘as they are’ to decide they want to change on their own without having the fragility that causes minor setbacks to turn into a complete washout. And others, hearing the same message, end up continuing to eat themselves into the grave.
Freemage, I didn’t know that the success rate for alcoholics was as low as 5%, so thank you for that information, it makes me even prouder of my wife. After a couple of false starts, through self-motivated cold turkey, a strong will and a lot of familial support she has now been eight years sober as of last month.
Acolyte of Sagan: Yeah, it’s not an easy thing, for anyone, and your wife has my respect for managing it.
The big question, which may be unanswerable, is whether different people are more/less likely to be successful depending on which approach they take (in which case finding the right approach for the right person could push up the success rates across the board), or if it’s simply that only 5% of sufferers can actually be cured, no matter the approach, and it’s just the right person making the right decision (to stop drinking, however they approach it) at the right time in their lives.
I know that this is something of a tautological answer but the ‘right’ approach has to be the one that works for the individual. However, the most important factor may be that the decision to combat the problem has to be the addict’s own, uncoerced decision. Friends and family can stage all the interventions in the world, they can reason, plead, nag, even threaten: doctors can tell them about the damage they’re doing to themselves until they’re blue in the face, but those approaches are almost certainly bound to fail.
It wouldn’t surprise me if those who made the decision to quit by themselves and for themselves showed a higher success rate than those for whom the decision was made by others, whether forced onto them or otherwise coerced.
Once a person has decided to quit and is determined to do so for their own reasons, and if that person has the right support network in place, motivation will be greater and in a sense the approach becomes secondary – there’s nothing to stop them from exploring several approaches if necessary so if one method fails, they can try a second, a third, and so-on.
Of course, I’m not an expert in the field so this is just my personal opinion.
The self-motivation factor makes sense to me. Several years ago I was in a cover band and for the first couple years our guitar player was a mess, though he tried a few times to quit, sometimes trying AA. Then his son (~10 IIRC) started getting involved with sports after school and he just quit everything, and as far as I know he is still sober (sadly the band is no longer :( ). We still played in bars and he never seemed to be tempted, though he did occasionally admit to missing it a little bit.