Capture
The ACLU obsessing over trans issues again/still/always:
Using people’s names and pronouns is a matter of respect.
We all want to be respected and seen for who we are. When a young person’s name and pronouns are respected, they do better in school, have more confidence, and have lower rates of suicide.
There’s no such thing as “a person’s pronouns.” The ACLU doesn’t give any source for the claim about doing better in school and having more confidence and lower rates of suicide.
“Cisgender women should be concerned whenever an alleged concern for ‘protecting’ our well-being is invoked to justify exclusion.”
There’s no such thing as “cisgender” women. There’s no need for a special word to distinguish women from men who claim to be women. It’s only women who are women; no additional adjective is necessary. It’s not cruel or unusual “exclusion” to understand that men are not women, it’s just reality.
Attempts to legislate who is or isn’t a woman are not new. Lawmakers have often tried to exclude poor women, unmarried women, Black women, and others from legal protections.
Very true, but poor women, unmarried women, and Black women are all women. Men, however, are not women.
There’s nothing wrong with saying “woman.” Just ask yourself if that’s the most specific and inclusive language you can use.
Oh gee thank you very much. What do you mean “most specific and inclusive”? Aren’t you pulling in two directions at once? “Inclusive” is less specific, and specific is less “inclusive.” Language needs to be specific and accurate before it needs to be “inclusive.” If we’re talking about tigers there’s no need to be more inclusive and add lions and cheetahs and leopards. Is “women” the most specific word for “women”? Yes, it is.
Policing what it means to be a woman hurts everyone. That’s why the ACLU fights against sexist dress code policies and practices that push women out of the workforce.
Is that right? So it hurts everyone to try to hire and promote more women at work, including at the ACLU? We can’t do that any more because it’s hurty, so if the ACLU becomes 100% male that’s just fine? To try to add women would be to “police” what it means to be a woman? If that’s true feminism can’t exist at all.
School sports are about participation and belonging. It’s wrong to deny students the chance to try out for a team.
Nonsense. School sports are also about competition, and winning. Nobody is trying to deny students the chance to try out for a team; people with a lick of sense are trying to deny male students access to the girls’ team. It’s wrong to let boys join girls’ teams and thus make it impossible for the girls to win anything.
And on it goes – the usual childish stale much-repeated rhetoric, full of distortions and disguises and fatuous baby talk. The ACLU is making itself a joke.
I take it that ACLU stands for Anti Civil Liberties Union.
It’s clear that Strangio is basically running the ACLU now, or at least setting the organization’s overall policy.
Denying women their civil liberties is not a civil liberty. Neither is compelled speech. Joke is right, a bad one.
I call shenanigans. Excluding the transgender issue itself, exactly when have their been attempts to legislate “who is or isn’t a woman?”
No, that’s excluding some women from legal protections, not ruling on whether they’re women or not. Black women weren’t told to go to the back of the bus because they were mistakenly thought to be men, or legislated into being men. There’s nothing.
This is so, so sloppy.
Seems a strange way of framing it.
Matters of “respect” in the sense they’re using here are matters of social courtesy, not legislation. I can’t think of a more important civil liberty than the liberty to not show respect for someone else’s beliefs, nor even respect for a person him or herself. Wasn’t this the very centremost tenet of the ACLU until not very long ago? Last I checked, the ACLU is still purportedly an organization dedicated to legislation to protect Americans’ constitutional rights, not public education about the latest trends in social etiquette.
To respect can also mean to obey, as in, “you must respect the law.” And I think they’re conflating the two meanings, rather unscrupulously. Imagine lobbying for the mandatory use of “please” and “thank you.” Or that a girl must curtsy before a man, and a man must remove his hat in the presence of a lady.
It’s a matter of respect, dontchaknow.
So the ACLU would similarly demand that we “respect” and “see” Trump as a Stable Genius who knows More about Everything than anyone else on Earth? How do they filter out this “identity” while ensuring we validate and affirm the equally questionable identities they’re promoting? How is the self-ID of TiMs any different from Trump’s own wildly unrealistic self-appraisal? Neither Trump nor TiM claims agree with reality.
Good point, Arty. Imagine lobbying for mandatory men open doors for women – men must do it and women must let them do it, and smile submissively and say Thank You. I once in a work situation had a man refuse to go through a door I was holding open for him even though he was carrying a bunch of stuff and I wasn’t. I call that bad manners.
You know, I could try out for a women’s sports team, and from the day I was born to the day I die, I would not make the cut. I’m clumsy at sports (and dancing). That is exclusion, based on the fact that I am not athletic and the team would probably all trip over me if I tried to play. I have been excluded from choirs on the simple excuse that I cannot sing. That is exclusion. But it is accepted, because the role of a sports team is to play a sport, not spend all their time picking up the clumsy woman, and the role of a choir is to sing, not to caterwaul.
Exclusion is a part of life. I am excluded in one way or another from many activities, either because I am not good at them, because I am not rich, I am not young…there are a lot of things where we exclude, and in some groups, we exclude all but a few people. Elite sports are that way. There are a lot more people that don’t get to play in the Olympics than that do, and those that do have to train long hours and give up a lot of other things to get there…only to find that a male bodied person who started the sport a few years ago and decided he could beat women has “transitioned” to become a woman…and we know he’s a woman because he says so.
I have been excluded from a lot of things, and have self-excluded from others. I will not be excluded from the category of woman simply because I was born woman and wasn’t cool enough to be one of the “special unique different” kids. I am a woman. I don’t have to say that. It’s evident to most people upon meeting me. Men who scream that they are women must do that because it is so obvious to everyone that they are not.
The only people “policing what it means to be a woman,” is ACLU.
This whole “matter of respect” thing remind me of a piece by simon blackburn. Ophelia commented on it twice.
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2007/what-is-respect/
and
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2006/grayling-and-blackburn-on-religion-and-respect/
Where was the ACLU when Rodney Dangerfield was around? :P
So when the ACLU was defending the right of Nazis to March in Skokie, was it out of respect? Was it because the Nazis themselves were such respectful people?
I think we don’t need to quibble over whether “respect” here is a word that in this case means “pander.” I’ll use any name that someone requests, even though I make fun of Charlie Clymer (because he’s really just a jerk,) I just can’t accept somene telling me that their pronouns are important to me, too.
I don’t thnk it’s respect, I think it’s obedience, acceptance by force of will. Something that the ACLU was founded to protect against.
iknklast @8
Are you sure it wasn’t because you’re an otter? I wouldn’t put it past them, those bigoted misotterists.
Ophelia #7
In my mind, that situation ended with you politely saying “well, fuck you then” and slamming the door in his face. And all the stuff he was carrying (I imagine it stacked in his arms so he can barely see over it to check who is opening doors for him) knocked out of his hands. I don’t care if I’m wrong. Truth matters, but fiction is more fun sometimes.
It’s okay if ACLU becomes *almost* 100% male. There’s that one pesky female driving all the misogyny and male entitlement, and the nearly complete erasure of women.
“Gender” is a linguistic term, not a biological one. Words may have a gender; something which is far more understandable to people who speak languages like French, German or Italian, where many words have genders unrelated to the sex of the creatures they refer to. “Equus,” or “Alumnus, for example are words of the male gender, regardless of whether they refer to male or female horses or graduates. There is no such thing as an equua, and the term alumna is a construct.
Whether a person is male or female is a biological question, not a linguistic one, and is capable of being answered correctly by any minimally qualified geneticist. People who promote trans ideology do so by deliberately confusing biology with linguistics. This sort of thing seems to be much stronger in England and the US than other places, because, I believe, native English speakers do not understand the linguistic nature of gender.
In the end, this attitude has given birth to a frightening toleration for bullying as a way to determine which “facts” will be accepted. We have had a five year lesson here in the US about what happens when we allow right wingers to behave this way; if the left licenses this sort of thing too, both democracy and truth will become things of the past.
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