The feminists seem to, as it were
Stephen Fry is anxious about his trans friends. (Does he have a lot of them? It seems unlikely. There aren’t many trans people, and most of them are very young.)
Stephen Fry has urged calm in the debate over transgender issues, but said he has many trans and intersex friends who are “deeply upset” by JK Rowling.
Many? Come on.
“I know that JK Rowling doesn’t want to see trans people bullied, alienated, shut out of society, made to feel ashamed, guilty, laughed at, all those things.
“But I also know that there are people who believe that safe feminine spaces and the idea of difference between sex and gender is very important, and that they repudiate with all their strength the Judith Butler – the idea of created gender and so on.”
Aha, so he does get it. That’s way more than most fans of the trans ideology will admit to knowing.
He does get it, but he wants us to just get over it.
“It is not an argument I want to get involved in because it is upsetting to both sides and I would wish them both to retreat and to consider that is possible for trans people to live full, accepted lives according to their terms in society, and for women to have all the rights and dignities they demand.”
No, it isn’t possible. It absolutely isn’t. What it means for “trans people to live full, accepted lives according to their terms in society” includes allowing men to intrude on anything and everything that is for women, thus ruining it for women, endangering women, displacing women, taking prizes and jobs and medals that were intended for women.
“But it isn’t possible if each side looks on the other as an enemy and the trans people just shout ‘terf’ (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) and the feminists seem to, as it were, undermine the dignity and rights of the trans community, if I can use the word community – it is a bit of a greasy word, but there you go.”
How fascinating that he knows very well what the trans people shout at women but can’t come up with an insult from us. The “as it were” is rather telling, too, especially right next to “seem to.” Do we really seem to as it were, undermine the dignity and rights of the trans community? Or is that just a formulaic accusation with no referent? There is no “right” for men to take women’s promotions and prizes and spaces.
The more generous reading of this is that he’s a literal moderate on the issue. So, FREX, use pronouns/names, let transwomen dress how they wish, etc. No straight-up employment discrimination, don’t ignore instances of actual anti-trans violence (much of which, of course, is actually classic homophobic violence by straight guys freaked out that they were attempting to sleep with a man). But at the same time, enforce sexual separation when appropriate (changing rooms, incarceration, sporting teams, etc). But if that’s what he’s going for, then he needs to be clearer. And of course, there are some points near that fuzzy line that need to be spelled out carefully (such as transwomen being properly identified as such during crime reporting, whether as victim or perp).
I’ll note, Ophelia, that this was, in some ways, pretty close to your stated position at the time you left FTB; look at your last post for that site again. You’ve dropped such accommodations since then, largely, I suspect, because even the most nuanced position still gets you condemned as a neo-Nazi homophobe, so why bother with nuance?
What an ignorant claim. One of the rights demanded by women (the female ones) is to have female only spaces legally protected from male entry, while one of the terms demanded by many trans advocacy groups is to not have those. I wonder how he manages to reconcile those.
And that, right there, puts JK Rowling on better footing than her TRA enemies.
Can we honestly say that JK Rowling’s opponents wouldn’t want to see “terfs” bullied, alienated, shut out of society, made to feel ashamed, guilty, laughed at, all of those things?
Can we honestly say that the TRAs treat other people the way they want to be treated?
Then their “upset” is not in good faith, and not based on facts. If trans activists and their allies can’t be bothered actually reading what Rowling actually wrote, but condemn her out of hand on the sayso of trans “thought leaders,” then their “upsetedness” is not worth paying attention to, or taking seriously. In his dangerously honest and conciliatory understanding of Rowling’s position, Fry has unwittingly outed himself as a heretic. As Ophelia has noted, in trying to place himself in the “reasonable” middle ground, or above the pettiness of it all, he has found himself without any feminist equivalent to the trans’ TERF-shouting. It must be there somewhere, seemingly, as it were. Otherwise, he can’t be in the middle. Since he now has nothing to lose, Fry should sit all these friends of his down, read Rowling’s words to them, and then ask them which parts are “hateful,” “hurtful,” or “transphobic.” If they are objecting to plain statements of reality (sex is real, binary, immutable, and determined at conception), or her defence of the legally protected characteristic of sex, then it’s not Rowling they have a problem with. It’s reality and the law that they’re objecting to. Hating on Rowling conveniently helps to conceal this fact. If she didn’t exist, they’d have had to invent her, or found someone else to vilify. Without their effigy to burn, they would have to rail against Reality itself. A wider public understanding of this would likely lose them support, as their goals are unreasonable and unjust. That’s a much harder sell than fighting against vague, better-left-unspecified “transphobia,”perptrated by “bigots.” Institutionalcapture has helped them avoid the public discussions that would normally surround the sorts of policy changes that trans activism has managed to engineer in secret. The press now treats it as a “fact” that Rowling is “transphobic,” and uses language that deliberately obscures reality (calling male offenders and athletes “she,” translating measures to protect female only facilities and positions as being “anti-trans” rather than male-excluding). This collaboration with trans activism does immeasurable heavy lifting for a movement that would otherwise fail.
It is ironic that transactivism has chosen to turn Rowling into its Emmanuel Goldstein. In scapegoating her, in trying to turn her into an example to warn others, they have failed spectacularly. To be sure, in the short term, to the extent that people believe the lies and smears they broadcast, they’ve won a tactical victory. But they did not count on her character. Certainly her wealth has offered Rowling some measure of protection, and made her Uncancelable, but there’s more to it than that. There are plenty of indviduals and institutions which fell at the first hurdle, surrendering their moral judgement to the frothing hatred of the liars and bullies. Unlike so many others, who have been subjected to little more than schoolyard taunts, she has not backed down. She has not kept quiet. She is the nail that refuses to be driven flat. She has stood firm and become a lightning rod, continuing to speak out when others could not, would not, or feared to do so. In trying to burn Rowling as a witch, she has taken this fire and become a beacon. She did not have to do this. But remarkably, she did, and continues to do so. She could have stayed quiet and comfortable. She could have mouthed the platitudes. She could have used her fame and celebrity to jump on the trans bandwagon, joining in on the attack against women defending their rights (Hello Billy Bragg!). But she didn’t. She stood up and spoke the truth. She defended women when many others who should have did not. Good on her. Shame on them.
* I actually doubt this. As far as I know, their preferred terminolgy is not “intersex” but DSD. I’ve seen a number of DSD people (or at least people claiming to be DSD), ask that their condition not be used as a transactivist talking point or gotcha. They are all still male or female, not evidence that sex is not real, or a spectrum, or that there are any more sexes than just the two. So just as Ophelia doubts that he has many “trans friends,” I doubt that he has many “intersex” ones. And what has Rowling ever said about them? Here I think Fry has fallen for the forced teaming. I suppose we should be happy he hasn’t lumped in the (presumably much larger number of) LGB friends he probably has.
And once again, if there really were that many feminists out there stirring up “hate”, denying trans people’s “right to exist” etc., you would think they’d be able to come up with a more convincing example, and the fact that they don’t is plenty revealing in its own right. Imagine waking up from a long coma back in the early 1940s and asking European Jews to explain what the problem was. Now imagine that nobody had anything to say about Hitler or the Nazis. Not a single word about the Holocaust, Auschwitz, or Zyklon B. The absolutely worst anyone could come up with was that this popular author of children’s books had said something that implied there were no God which implied that there were no such thing as “God’s chosen people”, which implied that “that which the Jews are” didn’t exist etc. etc.
It’s unthinkable. And yet something like this is exactly what we are being asked to believe on somebody else’s say-so in this case.
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