Guest post: If they had any real examples
Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Mission creep creeps again.
YNnB? #20
Exactly, it’s roughly analogous to saying “I am entitled to get for free what you have to pay for”.
If they had better arguments, they would use them.
Indeed, and as you have correctly pointed out several times already, if they had any real examples of feminists stirring up “hate” against trans people, denying their “rights”, advocating “violence” etc. they would use it for everything it was worth. It should be a huge red flag to anyone when an ideological pressure group keeps making such outrageous accusations without providing any specifics apart from the words that they themselves put into the mouths of their opponents (like the corrupt cops often portrayed in gangster movies who plant drugs or weapons on an innocent person just to give themselves an excuse to have him/her arrested).
Funnily, when I got into feminism in the aftermath of “Elevatorgate” and the ensuing Anti Harassment Policy Wars, the women who were targeted by MRAs (including Ophelia) never had any problem with providing endless concrete examples of obvious hatespeech, bullying, and threats. Not that any more examples were needed. One of my most vivid memories from that time was watching Caroline Criado-Perez’ mentionings on twitter fill up with the ugliest cyberbullying I had ever seen, including the obligatory rape and death threats, faster than the twitter feed could load them. I would click “refresh”, and by the time the tweets were finished loading there were 15 new ones waiting in line. These attacks could go on for hours at a time, everyday for months or even years.
When my twitter feed started filling up with horror stories about the diabolical TERFs (supposedly at least as bad as the MRAs going after CCP), it was a very different story indeed. No direct quotes, or screencaps, or retweets of the alleged “TERF’s” actual words, only the TA’s own account of what her words supposedly implied as seen through the distorting lens of a Million unquestioned assumptions and ideological dogma, and only at the other end of a long train of impossibly sloppy inferences, extrapolations, mindreading etc.. In fact the only actual examples of hateful and violent rhetoric seemed to come from their own side. It wasn’t long before I realized that the diabolical “TERFs” they were talking about included at least half of the feminists I was following. That’s when I realized that this was a pseudo social rights movement with more in common with “incels” than feminists or anti-racists.
It didn’t have to be that way. There could have been a legitimate movement for people genuinely suffering from gender sex dysphoria, indeed there should have been, but that’s not the trans rights movement we have now. Feminists didn’t cause me to think this, TAs did. If this were about fighting real transphobia, then at least to an excellent first approximation 0% of their time and effort would be spent fighting feminists while 100% would be spent fighting toxic masculinity. Instead as good as 100% of their time and effort is spent fighting feminists, and rather than fighting toxic masculinity, they are actively engaging in it.
Killer point.
Examples of terfs advocating violence tend to be like this:
“Demanded,” “forced,” “inevitable” — we’re clearly agents of violence, with the actual perpetrators sounding like a pit of snakes, doing the snake things that snakes will do and which those assigned “snake” at birth (presumably by the Sorting Hat) most certainly will NOT do, not even as a hypothetical. We push them in.
To be fair, Not Bruce has already said it better than me at least twice:
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2021/the-instigators/#comment-2866808
If there were GC feminists who actually did want to round up trans identified people and have them all put to death, we would have heard about them already. Ad nauseum. TAs would be able to quote them, and would do so. It would be the gift that keeps on giving. Any such quote would figure prominantly in every gender ideologist’s website, every charity’s “About” page, every trans-cheering newspaper article. It would be part of Chase Strangio’s pinned tweet. It would be one of the most useful weapons they could possibly have in their campaign to center trans rights. But they can’t produce such quotes because they don’t exist. Only one side of this “discussion” uses violent, eliminationist imagery and speech. Only one side threatens, intimidates and villifies the other in order that their arguments remain unheard. Only one side weaponizes suicidal ideation as a bullying, blackmail tactic, to the detriment and continued emotional anxiety of the very people it claims to support and speak for.
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2020/miscellany-room-6/#comment-2867552
*sigh* blockquote fail…
The only thing I recall seeing was people occasionally bringing up the fact that ‘a speaker called trans people parasites’ (often with a helpful accompanying closeup of lice or something). IIRC the speaker made the point that one of the explanations for the hegemony of the gender ideology movement is that it has been ‘parasitical’ on the successful LGB civil rights movement.
Sastra, I also think the language (stretched to the limit and beyond) is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, e.g. “Denying I’m a woman ≈ Denying the existence of the woman that is me ≈ Denying my existence ≈ Envisioning a world in which people like me don’t exist ≈ Advocating genocide etc.. etc..”
guest, while I was on twitter there was one particular commenter that seemed to equate the very existence of trans people with rape. This struck me as clearly over the line at the time and still does. Still, that’s one account (possibly even a sock-puppet for all I know) against the thousands upon thousands of MRAs saying much worse things about women. Hardly proof of rampant, endemic, out of control levels of genocidal hatred of trans people among feminists, and the fact that so many feminists who had said nothing even remotely similar were non the less portrayed as being among the worst of the worst should be seen as a major red flag in itself. Indeed, as I have mentioned earlier, one of the earliest red flags (and one of the most bizarre conversations I have had in my life) was when a TA PMed me on Twitter to interrogate me about why I was following a certain feminist blogger, who, by his own admission, had never said anything explicitly transphobic. Apparently, it was “implied in very subtle ways” that only trans people could detect, and I was not in a position to question their judgement.
#5 Bjarte
Yes, it is all a lengthy chain of equivocation. Which sceptics used to be good at spotting.
Holms, and this is where the utter shamelessness of the obligatory comparisons to the treatment of Jews under Nazism is nothing short of breathtaking. If you were a Jew in Nazi-occupied Europe, you did not have to resort to this kind of language-games, or far-fetched interpretations, or stretching of word meanings beyond the breaking-point, or lengthy chains of equivocation, or bad puns, to explain what the problem was. Zyklon B doesn’t give a crap what you call things.
Re #6
I believe there are plenty of far-right Christians who say bad things about trans people, calling them abominations and so on. (Although now that I look at the details in a recent Friendly Atheist post, I see that the Bible quote is about transvestites, not transgender people, which speaks to the deliberate confusion regarding language in this area.) What don’t exist are quotes from gender-critical feminists saying such things. It’s all guilt-by-association: the GC feminists agree with these far-right Christians on this one aspect of the topic, therefore they agree with them on all aspects of the topic, and so on.