Cis authors
So much ardor, so little thought.
Hm. What she needs to worry about is being a boring writer and thinker whose brain is full of clichés.
Cis authors, eh – I guess those are the ones who actually know how.
More seriously, note the complete failure to think about what she’s saying. We’re supposed to take all announcements that our work is flawed as true and valuable? We’re not allowed to filter the bad out of the good, the clueless out of the informed? Why would that be a rule? Here she is saying things on Twitter so she knows what Twitter’s like – yet she’s telling us to listen respectfully to all criticisms, including tweets from random strangers on social meeja.
Of course she’s not listening respectfully to the criticisms of her writing on Twitter.
And anyway, whatever else you do, be sure to fund raise on the back of it.
Well, you didn’t worry enough, because you wrote this thread, in which you unselfconsciously tick off each of these boxes yourself. It would take a lot of work to get any more meta than that.
See how fast you changes your tune once you get on the wrong side of Team Trans. There’s no coming back from that. Until then, enjoy the perks and privileges of your useful idiot/willing hostage status.
If she is willing to put a statement this grammatically incorrect out in public, then no, it does not sound interesting me – or interesting to me. It isn’t fair, I know, to base conclusions on Twitter feeds, but…an author should be quite careful with social media, because demonstrations of illiteracy can really come back to bite you. I hope she remembers to only sulk in private when someone tells her that.
And seriously? She writes about sexual violence and abuse, and she doesn’t recognize the one common thread in most of it – men? Probably she does, but she accepts TWAW, which means she is ignorant and is betraying her audience. Possibly also causing harm to them, because I have no doubt she believes TW are not men, and therefore…well, aren’t men. Belong in women’s spaces? Check. Must have pronouns observed slavishly? Check. Must be coddled and petted and adored? Check.
Sorry, Ella, you didn’t win me as a patron. (I think it would be a very confused person that would be a patron of both Ella Dawson and Ophelia Benson. I am confused in many ways, I’m sure, but I don’t think I’m confused on that.)
Sure it’s fair to base conclusions on what people say on Twitter! There’s nothing special or magical about Twitter that makes it unfair to evaluate what people say there.
Especially [she added, taking a deep breath] when the people in question are setting themselves up as judges and monitors of everyone else on Twitter. Draw them conclusions, I say!
Indeed. As soon as she does (and it’s inevitable, no matter how much begging and scraping she does to make up for the “transphobic” sin that she’ll eventually commit), THEN she will truly know what it means to be “attacked” online.
Ella who?
“You are not being attacked when people don’t like your book on Twitter”? Whoops, already got into a thing with Laurie Penny.
This is one of the most common areas of self-blindness I see in this debate, and I think it is indicative of an absent theory of mind. You need to take all criticisms to heart and immediately acquiesce, because you are a person saying things I think are wrong. I do not have to do that, because I have thought my position through and believe it correct. Obviously, this neglects that we all think our own position is the correct one, for the simple fact that if we thought it incorrect, we would not have that opinion! But that credit is extended only to herself and those that agree; all others are just People Who Are Wrong.
A quick tour of a blank mind from a single tweet:
Not my main point, but this isn’t English.
Here we go. The distinction is being made between disagreement and being attacked. How long will it last?
Oops, it has been abandoned in the very next sentence.