Guest post: Not even the threadbare legal fiction
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on The persistent framing.
As much as I sympathize with Hutchinson, I wish everybody on the gc “side” would stop bringing up whether or not TIM have had surgeries, taken hormones etc. as if it made a difference. Even if he had, it still wouldn’t make him a woman, nor make it any more acceptable for him to enter women’s changing rooms.
I agree, but sometimes I think it’s important to spell out for the naive and clueless (like me from a few years ago) that things are worse than they seem. How many are aware of the fact that most TiMs have not undergone surgical “transition”? I wasn’t. Under self-ID there’s absolutely nothing, not even the threadbare legal fiction (i.e. lie) of a GRC to keep any and all men from identifying into women’s facilities. They’ve completely gutted the perfectly reasonable and prudent safeguarding concept of “Schrodinger’s rapist.” Make them explain how this works, and how they can tell the “safe” males from the “unsafe” with such precision and reliability that the former can be let in while still keeping the latter out. They can’t of course, yet they believe they have some power to do so, and that identifying “as a woman” somehow magically renders men who do so completely harmless. It’s all bullshit, and they know it. They don’t care about women’s safety. Women don’t matter. Women have already paid too high a price for this willful malevolence disguised as a “human rights” campaign. Women have been pushing back for years, but are still portrayed as hateful bigots for doing so. How dare McGovern push and prod and browbeat women to force them to accept men into women’s spaces? How dare she try to force Hutchinson to submit to and use the Newspeak redefinition of “woman” against her own interests? How dare she feign any kind of pontificating, judgemental superiority, and claim to hold the moral high ground when she’s the one who is essentially defending and promoting the “right” of sexual predators to enter women’s spaces? She should be sacked.
Hutchinson could have put it differently, or better, but I think that using surgically “transitioned” males as a rhetorical, “best case,” “steel man” scenario is useful. The fact that they’re willing to accept the carte blanche to predators that is self-ID, shows just how shitty the genderists’ position is. Taking this approach spells out what transactivists are willing to defend, and shows what they’ve already been able to force upon women. The fact that this open invitation for predators under self-ID stands even if TiMs are as completely harmless as they are claimed to be (which of course they are not), demonstrates how extreme the genderists’ position is. It shows their continuing, unrepentant, bloody-minded commitment to keep on sacrificing women’s safety in its pursuit and defence. Exposing that is worth something.
The counter-argument is usually that dangerous males will enter the women’s room even if it’s single-sex. Of course, it’s also claimed that TIMs have to use the women’s room for their safety. It doesn’t seem all that coherent to me.
Even assuming that aggressors don’t enter the women’s facilities, the whole “safety” argument isn’t convincing. If it’s unsafe for you to share a washroom with other males, making another washroom open to males and going there instead won’t fix anything. And if you assume that people won’t overstep their boundaries, then you have no reason to be worried in the first place.
I agree back, but most people are not that careful with how they express themselves. Too often people make it sound as if the lack of medical “transition” were the problem, and if not for that there would be nothing wrong with TIMs entering women’s spaces, competing in women’s sports etc.
I am making the same point in a post I am working on. I have come to think of it as the “Wolf in Trans Clothing” argument.
Of course, making a point of whether or not someone has a GRC is, if at all possible, even worse. I also hate it when people frame it in terms of “commitment”, or willingness to make “sacrifices”, or putting in the “effort”. As Helen Joyce correctly put it ( from memory), womanhood is not a reward.
I’ve heard it argued that men will not identify as women to access the facilities, because that would threaten their manliness. Only the ‘real’ gender identity ‘folx’ will be willing to say, “Hell, yes, I’m a woman”.
Couple of problems with this.
Has no one ever stopped to realize how eager most young boys would be to get into the girl’s room without getting in trouble? A wink, a nod, and the other boys realize he is being a solid predatory male, simply taking advantage of opportunity.
Also, it seems like most of the places where they are installing men in women’s spaces are in the ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ at full tilt. To suggest someone is male and in the women’s room is considered abhorrent bigotry and dangerous genocide. This remove the necessity for anyone to ever have to say “Hell, yes, I’m a woman”. All they have to do is go into the ladies room, knowing any one who suggests they leave is going to be the one persecuted, and no one will make them say they are a woman.
Then, of course, there are the AGP….
Of course we’re also told that any trans-identified male who does commit sexual assault is not really trans but a “cis” man pretending to be trans to prey on women – precisely the thing that supposedly never happens! Despite this, the perpetrator must still be allowed to serve in a women’s prison, the victim must still be forced to refer to her rapist as a “woman” (who committed rape with “her penis”), and the rape must still enter the public record as committed by a “woman”. The level of Doublethink is truly staggering!
‘Schrödinger’s rapist’ – Schrödinger was of course a paedophile himself. It’s not a pretty story.
I suppose I should add that the fact that ES was a paedophile does not alter my recognition of him as a great scientist – I have long admired his ‘What is Life?’ It does affect my feeling for him as a person.
Yeah, Tim, that was something I had to continually reinforce for my students. If a person is an unpleasant person or has some unpleasant tendencies, that is not evidence that his/her findings are untrue. You don’t have to idolize them; just accept the evidence and move on.
They struggled with that. This is what ‘be nice’ is doing to education. The idea that if one is not nice, one is wrong.
(Obviously OT, but I always thought Schrödinger’s Rapist was a terrible metaphor anyway. A good metaphor explains something that’s hard to understand by analogy to something that’s easy to understand. To explain a trivially simple idea by analogy to something that no one understands is not clarifying to say the least. The point of Schrödinger’s thought experiment about the cat* wasn’t simply that you can’t know whether the cat is alive or dead before you look For the analogy to hold, it would have to be the case that a man is in a superposition of being and not being a rapist until he observed being one or the other.
* Schrödinger’s point wasn’t “look how weird and mysterious quantum mechanics is!”. He meant it as a reductio ad absurdum of the Copenhagen interpretation.)
I’m sure we’re all familiar with the 3 great untruths from The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. In its “sequel”, The Cancelling of the American Mind, Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott add a fourth great untruth:
Or, as I like to put it: The world’s population is split into those who are right about everything and those who are wrong about everything. One of the first lessons of critical thinking is that a person’s arguments have to be judged on their own merits [1] rather than who he or she happens to be. Nothing is true because an authority said so, and nothing is wrong because we have problems with the person who said it.
Woke standpoint epistemology turns this logic on its head: All that matters is who you are. If you belong to an officially “privileged” (and therefore morally inferior) group, your views can be safely and conclusively be dismissed in advance, without ever getting to the actual substance of your arguments. [2], and they don’t have the right to disagree, question your judgement, or even ask for reasons (to do so would be an act of “epistemic violence”). It’s “not the job of marginalized people to educate you”, remember! If you belong to an officially “privileged” (and therefore morally inferior) group, your views can be safely and conclusively be dismissed in advance, without ever getting to the actual substance or arguments. After all, according to woke orthodoxy, there is no such thing as “objective truth” anyway, and any appeal to “evidence” or “arguments” is just a naked exercise of power with no justification other than upholding the existing dominance hierarchies.
Lukianoff and Schlott describe how the “Perfect Rhetorical Fortress” of the woke left [3] allows wokesters to discount any argument or opinion coming from anyone accused, rightly or not, of being conservative, as well as whites, males, straight people, “cis” people (ugh!), anyone who has ever said or done anything deemed offensive in the past, anyone who has tried to defend others from cancellation, anyone who has ever lost his/her cool in response to woke bullying etc. etc. Long before you reach the end of the list, practically every person on the planet has been disqualified from consideration by virtue of something (unless, of course, they already agree with you).
[1] Not as straightforward and simple as many movement skeptics like to pretend, admittedly, which is why we can’t do without some degree of trust.
[2] Unless, of course, your views deviate from Critical Social Justice Theory. Then you are either suffering from internalized bigotry against your own kind or siding with the oppressor in exchange for a more favorable treatment. Your views can therefore be safely discounted. No true
Scotsmanmember of a marginalized group disagrees with Theory.[3] The “Efficient Rhetorical Fortress” of the Right is simpler, but basically serves the same function.