I’m leaning toward the Hulkian rage
Gee. It’s only taken them ten or fifteen years.
But the realities of human biology raise legitimate questions about any notion that trans women should always and everywhere be treated exactly like cisgender women.
YA THINK??????????
Jesus fucking christ we’ve only been saying that at the top of our lungs for literally years only to be branded terfs and transphobes and cuntbitchwhores. Why did it take the Washington Post bigwigs all this time to discover what we’ve been shouting at them since forever?
After his party’s election defeat on Nov. 5, Rep. Seth Moulton (Massachusetts) offered some blunt advice: “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. … I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
Mr. Moulton’s remarks sparked an immediate backlash within his own political camp. His campaign manager quit. A state legislator accused him of “scapegoating transgender youth.” A city council member in Salem, Massachusetts, called for him to resign. The Bay State’s governor, Maura Healey, opined that Mr. Moulton was “playing politics with people.”
Guess what, Governor: the people who insist that men must be allowed to compete against girls aka run over them on a playing field are also “playing politics with people” only the politics they’re playing are ruthlessly unfair to women and girls.
Even Tufts University briefly got in on the act when David Art, chair of the political science department, reportedly called Mr. Moulton’s office and told him not to contact the university to recruit interns in the future.
Tough shit for any political science students who might have wanted to intern with Rep. Moulton, yeah?
Trans women’s participation in sports raises thorny questions about fairness — but that should not preclude Mr. Moulton from speaking his mind. Trans people deserve to be treated with dignity, and the law should protect them from discrimination in areas such as employment and housing. But the realities of human biology raise legitimate questions about any notion that trans women should always and everywhere be treated exactly like cisgender women.
As we’ve been saying. And saying. And saying.
…unless the data show that transitioning can fully erase the effects of male puberty, the country will also need a frank and open debate about the trade-offs between inclusion on the one hand and safety and fairness on the other. And yet too often, efforts have been made to avoid or prevent discussion of those trade-offs by labeling debate inherently transphobic. This is not how a healthy democracy makes decisions.
By labeling debate inherently transphobic and by labeling women who debate monsters, bitches, transphobes, cunts, Karens, evil cruel arrogant sadistic right-wing pieces of shit. That is not how a healthy democracy or a healthy left wing makes decisions.
There really aren’t any tall buildings in Washington, at least not any that would be worthy of a Hulkian rage.
And I would ask him to please stay away from Arlington.
As a Democrat, it would be a great idea to remove transactivism from the party platform. It is not a “progressive” movement. Its tendencies are illiberal and authoritarian. Your current treatment is not a policy discussion, it’s a heresy trial, an excommunication. Not only is it vital to show that genderism is regressive, it is imperative to show that opposition to its aims is not hateful or bigotted, and is in fact more progressive than its enactment. Unfortunately, removing genderism from the Democratic Party is going to look less like a divorce, and have more in common with radical surgery or chemotherapy. The key is whether the self-examination taking place in the aftermath of the current electoral disaster is used to disengage with trans ideology, the support of which was used by the Republicans as a bludgeon. Why give your opponents such an useful weapon?
Even here there’s far too much deference and not enough honesty, brutal or otherwise. “Formerly male athlete” suggests that “transition” of whatever degree turns males into something other than male, when it doesn’t and can’t. This is the point that critics of “inclusion” have been trying to make all this time. Humans can’t change sex. Suggesting they can gives up half the battle before you’ve even begun. There’s no need to do that. The truth needs no apology. Don’t apologize for it. If it hurts someone’s political position or their “feelings”, that’s too damn bad. If defending your ideas rests upon preventing debate, by intimidating and shutting up your opponents, then your ideas are the problem, and not the solution to anything. Find a better, honest position to hold; one you won’t be embarrassed defending. The ones who should be afraid to say anything are the liars who’ve been given a free ride all this time.
Here’s an idea: let the snowflakes melt If the support of those who are now turning away from you was contingent on your unquestioning, uncritical acceptance of the claims and demands of gender ideology, I say good riddance. They weren’t really on your side. They weren’t hoping for any kind of informed debate to determine policy, they wanted a willing hostage to their outrageous agenda, one that withers and dies in the light of public scrutiny. On this issue, your obligation was to obey. As soon as you say “Wait a minute…” you’ve become their opponent, whether you intended to or not. They will now turn on you as a reflexive act of self-preservation against the very backlash to which they will now eagerly subject you. It won’t matter how much else you share, how much you have in common. Trans activism’s totalism demands your excommunication for the slightest doubt.
Transactivists think they possess the power to render you an unperson. The more who stop and say “Wait a minute…”, the more that power fades and weakens. I’ll take the Washington Post’s belated sea-change as a welcome sign. Who knows what editorial room shouting matches there were, how much rancour from gender-committed staff there was. I first step is better than no step. If it takes, so much the better. More steps, please. Maybe they can stop saying “transwomen.”
Similarly, calling trans identified males “transwomen” cedes too much unearned’ undeserved territory to gender activists, who get to claim that “women” are being pushed out of female spaces, when what in fact what women are trying to do is to keep men out. Force the gender extremists* to defend their actual position, not one that claims high ground they shouldn’t be allowed to occupy. The onus is on them to make their case. But they won’t, because they can’t. Instead, they defend the territory they’ve carved out for themselves at the expense of women and girls.
*Any support for the belief that humans can change sex, and/or that “gender identity” should ever override sex in any context where facilities, opportunities, and activities are divided by sex, is an extreme position. Forcing women to accept men in these contexts is an extreme position. Lobbying for the acceptance of men as women in these areas is an extreme position. That women’s need, desire, and effort to keep men out of their spaces has been branded as “hateful” and “extreme” is perverse, and shows how much trans activism has controlled and distorted the framing of this issue, short-circuiting “debate” and presenting their own position as some sort of desirable, compassionate, default one that deserves unquestioning acceptance and protection. It is not a “neutral” stance, or a “level” playing field, but a male foot in the door that women deserve to be able to keep closed. In reality, genderists’ demands are dangerous, narcissistic, and aggressive. It is not hateful or bigoted to call their delusional, reality-denying stance “extreme.” Because it is extreme.
My concern is that it will cause a different form of movement. The amount of GC feminists that are now right-wing ideologues, or at least are celebrating Trump’s victory, could push a lot more leftists toward the trans position, because it will look to them like all opposition to gender ideology is right-wing bigotry. That’s one of the most important reasons that the GC should never have accepted the bargain with the devil. It could end up making things worse.
Of course, I might be wrong. I hope I am.
That’s been my observation as well, iknklast. I can name a dozen or so GC Feminists on my Facebook friends list who have moved so far right because of the way the liberals have treated them, and it’s hard to blame them for it. And it also facilitates the well-poisoning tthat prevents any sort of dialog about the trans issue. I have had a few friends on the “left” agree with me that the idea of males taking women’s sports makes them a bit squishy about the issue but that’s as far as it goes.
I think if we can get people to understand why Title IX was established in the first place. If boys and girls were able to compete athletically at the same level, then they would have been playing sports at all levels together all along, and in fact women had to fight tooth and nail for sports funding that created opportunities for them because we don’t compete at the same athletic level. And no, this was not based on the internal identity that women and girls express, it’s based on physiological differences unique to each sex.
But, you know, I’m a transphobe so of course I would think that.
iknklast:
This ties in to something that I’ve been trying to understand about the leftists’ apparent eagerness to accept trans ideology. Why are so many otherwise rational, intelligent people seemingly incapable of seeing that the entire trans movement is built on nothing more than misogyny, fantasy and wishful thinking? Why are they so viciously ostracizing those of the same political leanings who dare to utter even the mildest criticism?
I suspect – am almost certain in fact – that the vast majority of those ‘allies’ don’t believe the mantras and empty slogans they have been taught to recite parrot-fashion when asked for proof of concept. They do so precisely because the issue has been politicised; the loudest – and often genuinely bigoted – opposition to the movement comes from the right so the left feel obligated to defend it, and in doing so will label anybody questioning it as being ‘one of them’. This has led to the situation we now have, an epidemic of moral cowardice, a fear of voicing doubts, of asking questions that will see them tagged as anti-trans, as bigots and Nazis. They’re not actually supporting the trans, they’re opposing the right. They’re using the trans issue as a way of proving their own political purity; they vilify the gender critical within the left because, as the old saying goes, if you ain’t with us, you’re against us. Leftist trans allies are not pro-trans, they are anti anti-trans, because they daren’t not be.
AoS, it also speaks to how they so easily captured the movements devoted to defending the first amendment, like FFRF. The religious are opposed to something, we must be for it. I agree that we should not make our decisions on such things contingent on religious arguments, and that we should shy away from anything that goes into the ‘Bible God Allah’ says so premise.
But in doing so on this issue, the atheist/skeptic community (if I may be permitted the word to shorthand; I can see we are definitely NOT a community) have ceded the scientific side to the religious zealots and right-wing bigots. They have also given the nastiest elements on the right the ability to claim to be the supporters of women and their rights and safety. That’s what moved a lot of former liberals to the right; the problem is, this is not an issue that exists in a vacuum.
The right would also strip rights from the LGB, from women, from workers, from immigrants, in fact, they are more than willing to throw anyone under a bus who is not a right-wing million/billionaire. The cognitive dissonance must be enormous among those who call themselves feminist but threw their vote to Trump.
I used to live in Massachusetts. I used to live in Moulton’s district.
It is really dismaying to see the Mass Dem political establishment react like this.
“The Left” pushing the Gender Critical toward the right reminds me of people like Ayan Hirsi Ali being similarly pushed toward ‘right wing’ Christians because she was deemed “Islamophobic”.
I suspect many GC are becoming more sympathetic to the right because of something Bjarte Foshaug noted in his excellent comment:
To that I would add that a good number of Republican Trump supporters also seem to be moderate center-Right. They don’t like Trump, but he’s the only Republican game in town. You follow them on social media, you notice a lot more nuance when “right wing positions” are articulated by (or perhaps reinterpreted by) those you’re learning to trust. It’s not so much that the GC are changing their minds about their basic values as finding those values shared by people who weren’t supposed to have them.
What Sastra said.
The elephant in the room that is going to make it very, very hard for democratic politicians and the party hierarchy to change course is the fact that I can guarantee they all have multiple friends, family, and co-workers, volunteers, etc., who have transitioned one (or more) of their children. It isn’t just a matter of feeling like they have to push back on “the Right”, it is being surrounded by people, people you may love or care about deeply, people you depend on, and know you are going to take a position that is telling them they have harmed their children.
I am not publicly GC (and I use that term in its true radical feminist meaning, not the Matt Walsh “I know what a woman is” meaning) in large part because I do not know how to cope with the personal fallout it would create. I need more than both hands and feet to count up the friends I have who have “trans” or NB kids, quite a few who are well into medical transition. Maybe it is cowardice, I’ll own up to that, but it will be a real Humpty Dumpty moment for me personally and the Democratic party generally to figure out how to put itself back together again. People talk about this issue as if it is all abstraction, not politicians with possibly multiple staffers with trans kids, with donors and major supporters with trans kids. I find it really hard to believe that I have more people in my life with trans kids than the average Democratic politician, and it will shred my social relationships if I openly shared my views on gender identity, especially pediatric transition. I believe I have already lost friendships, or at least had people distance themselves, after the few times I tried to talk about trans issues, largely in terms of TIMs in prison getting women pregnant. Even questioning that was too much for some people to handle.
Hmmmmm. I find it very hard to believe that you can guarantee that. ALL Dem politicians have multiple friends, family, and co-workers, volunteers, etc., who have transitioned one (or more) of their children? That seems extremely unlikely. Trans allies, yes, but have transitioned one or more of their children, no. The stats don’t indicate anything like that.
Maybe some from really rural areas don’t, but even that would shock me because they have DC staff (I’m talking about Congress). And TRA parents often get involved with their local politicians if not as staff as volunteers. Reps Premila Jayapal and Marie Newman both have trans kids, if 2 D3mocratic reps have trans kids, I dont think it is a stretch to think the rest of the congressional Democrats have people in theor orbit with trans kids. I grew up on the East Coast but did all my higher education in the midwest and I have multiple friends from all of my educational institutions that have trans kids. Whatever the statistics are nationally, Democratic politicians and members of the DNC aren’t typical of the general population. I can’t be that much of an anomaly among Democrats my age (close to the age of the average Democrat in Congress) that I have over 2 dozen people I consider more than mere acquaintances, some I consider close friends, who have trans kids, and these people live all over the country, not just in my little blue enclave. That doesn’t include my peers who have trans siblings, there are a handful of them as well. Maybe I am some anomalous vortex who pulls people with trans kids/siblings into her orbit, but I don’t think that is the case.
Even if it isn’t all of them, if it’s 25%, or 50%, (I think it is higher) that is still a huge hurdle to overcome.