Worried about a climate of fear
Rowling writes about her reasons, starting by explaining why she is interested in trans issues.
I mention all this only to explain that I knew perfectly well what was going to happen when I supported Maya. I must have been on my fourth or fifth cancellation by then. I expected the threats of violence, to be told I was literally killing trans people with my hate, to be called cunt and bitch and, of course, for my books to be burned, although one particularly abusive man told me he’d composted them.
What I didn’t expect in the aftermath of my cancellation was the avalanche of emails and letters that came showering down upon me, the overwhelming majority of which were positive, grateful and supportive. They came from a cross-section of kind, empathetic and intelligent people, some of them working in fields dealing with gender dysphoria and trans people, who’re all deeply concerned about the way a socio-political concept is influencing politics, medical practice and safeguarding. They’re worried about the dangers to young people, gay people and about the erosion of women’s and girl’s rights. Above all, they’re worried about a climate of fear that serves nobody – least of all trans youth – well.
She didn’t expect the avalanche, because we don’t see much of this kind of thing, and we don’t see much of it because…of that very climate of fear. People are afraid to say it in public because they don’t want the inevitable monstering. We’re caught in this horrible loop. If we point out the horrible loop we are instantly told all about our crusty dusty stinking holes.
[A]ccusations of TERFery have been sufficient to intimidate many people, institutions and organisations I once admired, who’re cowering before the tactics of the playground. ‘They’ll call us transphobic!’ ‘They’ll say I hate trans people!’ What next, they’ll say you’ve got fleas? Speaking as a biological woman, a lot of people in positions of power really need to grow a pair (which is doubtless literally possible, according to the kind of people who argue that clownfish prove humans aren’t a dimorphic species).
…
We’re living through the most misogynistic period I’ve experienced. Back in the 80s, I imagined that my future daughters, should I have any, would have it far better than I ever did, but between the backlash against feminism and a porn-saturated online culture, I believe things have got significantly worse for girls. Never have I seen women denigrated and dehumanised to the extent they are now. From the leader of the free world’s long history of sexual assault accusations and his proud boast of ‘grabbing them by the pussy’, to the incel (‘involuntarily celibate’) movement that rages against women who won’t give them sex, to the trans activists who declare that TERFs need punching and re-educating, men across the political spectrum seem to agree: women are asking for trouble. Everywhere, women are being told to shut up and sit down, or else.
Everywhere, women are being told to shut up and sit down, or else they will be told they are Karens, bitches, cunts, whores, stinking dusty dried-up holes.
I’ve read all the arguments about femaleness not residing in the sexed body, and the assertions that biological women don’t have common experiences, and I find them, too, deeply misogynistic and regressive. It’s also clear that one of the objectives of denying the importance of sex is to erode what some seem to see as the cruelly segregationist idea of women having their own biological realities or – just as threatening – unifying realities that make them a cohesive political class. The hundreds of emails I’ve received in the last few days prove this erosion concerns many others just as much. It isn’t enough for women to be trans allies. Women must accept and admit that there is no material difference between trans women and themselves.
And I’m just not going to do that. I can’t, and I also don’t want to. I can’t because it isn’t true and I see no way I can convince myself it is true…especially since I don’t want to in the first place.
But, as many women have said before me, ‘woman’ is not a costume. ‘Woman’ is not an idea in a man’s head. ‘Woman’ is not a pink brain, a liking for Jimmy Choos or any of the other sexist ideas now somehow touted as progressive. Moreover, the ‘inclusive’ language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘people with vulvas’ strikes many women as dehumanising and demeaning. I understand why trans activists consider this language to be appropriate and kind, but for those of us who’ve had degrading slurs spat at us by violent men, it’s not neutral, it’s hostile and alienating.
And the activists’ way of persuading us otherwise? To spit degrading slurs at us! To rant and rave that we stink, we’re crusty, we’re dusty, we need to shut our crusty dusty lips.
It’s funny, in a way (not really haha funny) that they do this, because it betrays the fact that men (all too many of them at least) have a visceral disgust and loathing for women despite wanting to fuck them. Ooh that creepy hole, the one we all get pushed out of, the one straight men like to put their dicks in, but at the same time the one that…who knows…maybe it has toads in it, or rats, or maggots, or razor blades, or rotting smelly fish. Maybe we could genetically engineer it to get away from the horror? Make it smell of lavender or orange peel or cedar shavings?
Just one from Rebecca’s compilation yesterday:
What I wonder now is how people who see themselves as progressive, woke, pro social justice, on the left, reconcile that with the whole “cunt bitch whore skank does ur pussy stink” theme.
I mean I really wonder, not just I say it rhetorically and move on. I really wonder and I would love to know. A lot of former friends of mine who were targets of abuse of exactly that kind, and did not for a second see it as progressive or woke in any way – how do they line these things up in their heads?
From what I’ve seen, the woke response to this highly misogynistic abuse is “Yes, But.” Yes, it’s wrong … but trans people have been pushed to the brink. It’s too much. Their lives are on the line. Their right to exist and breath freely is threatened. It’s as if they’re defending the anti-racism riots.
Ah, is it. That won’t wash. Anybody could say that, and anybody does. Would the woke say it’s ok for white people pushed to the brink to tweet degrading racist insults? Of course not.
Well you said that already – “It’s as if they’re defending the anti-racism riots.” Indeed.
Heh…
The first time I tried Twitter, I couldn’t make any sense out of it, and I gave up after a few days.
The second time I tried, I followed a few people, and then a few more, and I ended up following about fifty people. I followed it for some months until I realized it was making me jittery and I gave it up. The killer was Maggie Haberman. She’s a fine reporter, but if you click through everything she links to you just drown in the sorrows of the world.
I came back a third time specifically to follow Paul Krugman, because he migrated his blog to Twitter. Now I follow just Krugman and a handful of other people who are significant to me for one reason or another, and I do OK with it.
Twitter, OTOH, is decidedly not OK with this. They very much do not want me to follow just a few people and then get on with my life. They very much want to be my life, and they are constantly doing screwy things with their interface (like flipping me from Latest to Home) in an attempt to trap me in an endless scrolling morass of Twitter…stuff. So I have to be careful, and it is a bit of an ongoing struggle.
It’s more than that. For a lot of us, there is a strong possibility of losing our job. My school has already fired one person for “insensitive” comments about trans. His comments were said to be extreme; I do not know what they were, so I cannot judge.
Vagina dentata?
Steven, I have that trouble with YouTube. (I don’t use Twitter). I want to go listen to Randy Rainbow, or find links to plays for my theatre students, and it keeps throwing more and more at me. Fortunately, I am really good at ignoring most of it, because I am too interested in the things I’m doing to be sucked in. But that thing about drowning in the sorrows of the world? I so get that…I have that problem from this site, which is the only one I follow regularly, plus occasionally checking in on Jane Clare Jones and a couple of others I found from this site. My depression and anxiety level goes through the roof, and as someone who has struggled with suicidal thoughts (and attempts) in the past, I know to stay off Twitter.
No, of course not, because white people are at the top of the intersectional totem pole and definitionally can’t be pushed to the brink. I think they actually believe that the intersectional hierarchy is an immutable, eternal fact of the universe, like Plato’s Forms or something.
Substitute any other race, and the answer changes. Would the woke condone racist insults from black people pushed to the brink? Yes. Asian? Yes. Inuit? Yes. Indian? Native American? Australian aboriginal? Yes, yes, and yes. Substitute any group, and as long as they’re punching up across the Eternal Intersection, it’d be Woke-Approved.
The thing I find interesting is that hurling said insults is apparently permissible under Wokeism regardless of one’s own positionality, as long as it’s in support of a Woke-Approved cause. So straight, white men can (and should) insult women when supporting trans folx against women.
But are white people at the top of the intersectional totem pole? All of them? White women for instance? White lesbians? White lesbians with a disability?
The thing about the intersectional totem pole is that the rules aren’t all that consistent. It’s admitted that women are oppressed in some way or other and yet…it’s always permissible to fling shit at them anyway, because there’s always some intersection that excuses it.
I have been in at least one job where the major division was men vs. women. Black men were WAY above white women there (I realize it is not a universal in our society, but as an intern who would have died for a permanent job in my dream agency, it irked to see them creating non-existent jobs for every male due to end his internship while cancelling actual, real, existing jobs every time a woman was the next one up – and reposting it as soon as said woman moved on and was no longer in line for that job). Yes, white privilege is real, and yes, I benefit from having white skin when I walk into a store. But in any area where people only care about presence/absence of a penis, and not what color that penis is, there will be a somewhat different totem.
Life’s messy. Prejudice is messy. Everything’s messy. I have a systematic brain, and I hate it when things are messy. (I’m told that is a male brain, but it is actually my brain, so cannot therefore be a male brain, since I am not a male.)
Lovely (essay I guess?) by Rowling… which is of course why I get some blinkered fool in my Facebook feed spamming an avclub article that takes about two minutes to read and dishonestly cherry picks it in the approved GoodThink fashion.
Would really be nice to have a social circle a bit less nasty.
Ophelia @ 7: I”m not entirely sure that I’m reading you right. Are you saying that, despite the fact that intersectionality explicitly puts “white” and “male” at the top end of the hierarchy of evil, secretly or in practice “female” is up there somewhere?
If that’s what you’re saying, it’s a hypnotically fascinating idea that I hadn’t considered. To wit, what if the de facto hierarchy diverges from the de jure hierarchy within the whole edifice of critical theory and not merely with some limited subset of adherents? What if this hidden hierarchy is actually embedded everywhere in the critical theory literature and public discourse? What if its fundamental structure is not at all like many spokes radiating from a single point? What if both the explicit and implicit hierarchies can apply simultaneously to different degrees?
That’s some heady stuff. I really want to see what more people who’ve read deeply into the breadth of critical theory (e.g., I bet James Lindsay would get a kick out of it.) what they think about the idea, because it potentially has some serious explanatory power. It would obviously make sense of how nominally marginalized group (women) can be ignored or treated as oppressors, but it would also explain other apparent inconsistencies, like attitudes toward the burka & Islam or lesbians & transwomen.
I’m now quite curious to try to diagram how the relationships between identities work out in the real world. It likely includes some functional oddities. For instance, allyship might be a predicate modifier, like Ally(i), so that “ally(trans) straight white male” is not just given license to treat women like shit, but is functionally more marginalized than “straight white female”.
Now that I think about it, the functional modifier idea makes waaaaaaaaaay too much sense. Much more than the spoked wheel of intersecting identities. It completely captures how women are less important than transwomen, because “trans(straight(white(male)))” [Man, that looks like a LISP/Scheme function.] becomes a new identity with a new place in the constellation of oppression, not merely an intersection of identities, so its Marginalization Score can be completely dissociated from the MS of a straight white male.
Nullius @ 10, yes, that’s what I’m saying. It’s one of those under the surface things, as far as I can tell – people don’t do it avowedly, they probably don’t realize they’re doing it, but they do it. It’s what I mean when I point out there’s no male equivalent of a “Karen.” That’s odd, isn’t it? Wouldn’t you think white men who oppress people of color would have a higher oppressor-score than white women who do? Because of the intersection? And yet there’s no “Kenneth” or similar.
And there’s no male equivalent of TERF. And men don’t get anything like the bullying women get for disputing some of the tenets of trans ideology.
And so on.
I mean, I was aware of the misogyny of woke people, but I hadn’t considered that it is actually baked into the woke belief system itself.
You absolutely would expect that white men would have a higher OS than white women, according to the literal ideology. That they don’t certainly suggests the way intersectionality is presented is not intersectionality as it is internalized. Kinda makes me think of those cults that describe themselves one way to the outside world and to new converts, holding the truly batshit stuff back until the convert has already invested too much of their time, money, and personal life to avoid a sunk-cost, cognitive dissonance crisis. (*cough* scientology *cough*)
Re: TERF. It appears to be applied to men, too. Do you think that’s akin to the class of insults that function by saying a man is too womanly/insufficiently manly?
It can be applied to men too, and the activists of course say it’s applied every bit as much, but the reality is it’s applied to women far more than to men.
Of course, because they’re women and women are supposed to be caring and kind and nice and, most of all, subservient when told to give way for men.
Nullius:
it’s been a long time since I last saw anyone mention LISP.
Cheered me up, perversely.
Ophelia:
Yeah, the impression I get is that they’re saying “men can be TERFs too…. BUT…”
The default TERF and the TERFiest TERFs are women, no question about it,
This nonsensical annotated “rebuttal” to JKR’s essay crossed my feed today.
https://boingboing.net/2020/06/11/annotating-jk-rowlings-bonke.html?fbclid=IwAR3_HeDej9dhTlrHlA1XXnRmBWX4ZDSCyf74qz1rkWeTd261dKt0Zo9K0uE
Applying the TERF acronym to men also runs into the problem of the view that men can’t be feminists but perhaps only TERFs believe that so PROBLEM SOLVED!
Sackbut:
Yeah, I had the misfortune to see that too. That’s some military grade well-poisoning by Thom Dunn, before even getting to the annotations themselves, which are… weak.
The comments might as well have been generated by ML.
latsot,
A “friend” posted it in reply to an article (predating the essay) about the abuse JKR had seen that spurred her to write the essay. In other words, he posted a rebuttal to a different article. I disputed a few of the points in it, and I attempted to discuss the issues, what is “transphobic”, what is “phobic”, how it’s possible to have serious disagreement with someone while still respecting their right to be treated humanely, and so on. No engagement, just posting of another article, showing (in his view) that Forstater is “transphobic”. I rebuffed that effort as well, and now “friend” is no longer a “friend”.
I simply cannot understand the outright refusal of otherwise intelligent people to address questions as basic as definitions in this topic. You don’t mouth the right doctrines, you’re a terrible person and must be shunned. What nonsense.