Read the room
The sheer blind stupidity and absence of thought in this stagger the mind.
“I don’t know why trans people are meant to be threatening to me as a cis male. I don’t know why Harper is threatening to me…why would you care if somebody’s happy? Why is that threatening to you? If the trans community is a threat to you, I think it stems from not being confident or safe with yourself.”
He says it himself and doesn’t even fucking notice he’s said it. Yes, bozo, you are a male, and therefore men pretending to be women are not a threat to you. That does not, however, mean they are not a threat to anyone at all. Can you figure out why? With that rather forceful nudge? Do I have to spell it out that it’s because NOT ALL OF US ARE MALE?
God almighty.
Updating to add:
“Yes. Mr Ferrell. Whatever you want. Just ask”.
Reason #213 to ignore celebrities.
Yes, Mr. Ferrell, you got it right there…not being safe. Women worked hard to carve out safe spaces without men, and now they are being invaded by precisely the type of men we need to avoid to be safe – the type of man who ignores women’s boundaries.
A Nathan Pyle cartoon comes to mind. Two eagles wondering why Mouse thinks Owl is a predator: he’s never bothered them.
https://x.com/nathanwpyle/status/1031008855210123264
Sackbut beat me to it.
No use appealing to Him. He only knows the stuff Moses taught Him. (BTW, no godesses allowed, either.)
Would Ferrell have been as enthusiastic if his friend had come out as a bear, or a lawn mower? Would he have been as keen to travel across America if Harper had decided he was a toddler rather than a woman? Would he have changed his friend’s diapers? Would he have been willing to pay that price, to carry that burden, to put up with the imposition? (Quite apart from the hit to his reputation that passing a grown man off as an infant would have inflicted. That would have been fetish too far.) I doubt it. Well, by accepting him as a women, and encouraging (insisting?) that others do so, he’s expecting women to accept him in places he doesn’t belong. He’s pushing the price, the burden, and imposition of his friend’s delusion onto women who might not be as willing to put up with them. Yet they’re the ones with a problem. Supposedly. Ferrell is essentially getting them to “change the diaper” he’ll never have to.
Loyalty and friendship are good things, but when they cloud your judgement about what is best for your friend, and what your friend is asking/expecting/demanding of others, it papers over things that may not be healthy. You can’t assume that your personal experience with your nice, loving, harmless friend mirrors others’ experience of him, because it may not be the same. You’re never going to be the women in the restroom he enters, but you’re going to use your celebrity, friendship, and loyalty to bully women to accept this man’s presence in women’s spaces. You’re not paying the price in fear and uncertainty that the women upon whom he’s intruding will. Your friend is not harmless. Even if he never assaults a women, his presence in women’s spaces is an unwanted intrusion of someone who refuses to accept women’s boundaries. Nor can you apply your experience of him to everyone else who shares his delusion, yet your advocacy for trans “rights” will help other men who are not as seemingly benign and harmless as your friend to violate those same boundaries that your friend does.
Self important celebrity heroically joins trans cult, news at 11.
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Ferrell and his friend sound almost as bad as Jamie Lee Curtis
and her p**nsick TIM “daughter” Ruby.
It’s a rather bizarre how people susceptible to this stuff are unable to wrap their heads around the idea that even if they know with omniscient certainty that some person is utterly sincere and totally harmless, that doesn’t make it okay for that person to to go into places where he’s not supposed to be. Surely Ferrell believes himself to be no danger to women, someone of moral character. So on his own terms, doesn’t that mean it’s fine for him to use women’s facilities? If his knowledge of his friend’s integrity is sufficient to justify bypassing sex restrictions, surely his knowledge of himself, being more direct than knowledge of others and privy to his own thoughts, should be that much more conclusive in justifying entry. But that just amounts to saying everyone can do whatever, because why should his self-knowledge be privileged over others’?
I posted a comment at Why Evolution is True, but Jerry hasn’t approved it yet. (He doesn’t seem to like me since he found out that Greg Laden and I are friends, at least that’s the only thing I can think I did wrong to him. Or it may be that I disagree with him on the New Zealand science standards and interpret what they are doing in a different way than he does. But that’s a sidebar for another time.)
The essence of the comment is that the dearth of skeptical treatment among many of the liberal skeptics on the trans issue, and indeed the bile directed towards those few noted skeptics who have raised serious questions about transgender ideology, has fed the conservative conspiracy tendency with enough factual data that they are justified in feeling vindicated in their claims that the woke lefy is barmy. This trans trend is impossible to defend because I don’t believe it. In this episode of “The Coming Storm,” the meme of liberals who support and defend teaching trans ideology (and mutilation by scalpel or chemistry) of teens too young to understand the social power of gender as being “groomers” was started by a man who sees it as “cultural Marxism.*”
I think Will Ferrell is like many liberals, unaware of the social cost of transgender ideology, because liberals are not allowed to question it for fear of being labeled haters. It doesn’t help when left-leaning skeptics share a post about the thousands of sexes of fungi as proof than in humans there can be more than two sexes, making fun of conservatives and TERFs. Even that is illogical because it equates sex with gender. So many people are ignorant, not necessarily by choice, but because the discussion about what it actually means is not happening in their circles. And when groups such as “Moms for Liberty” don’t want textbooks that teach kids that it’s therapeutic to have surgery or take hormones to make their bodies match their sense of self are the only ones speaking out, then it’s easy to label gender skepticism as a right-wing thing.
I don’t blame Ferrell for being wrong, but on gender there are all these wrong people writing off transphobia as ignorance, and the irony would be humorous if not for all the harm that the ideology does to women, to children, and to the men who are deluded into thinking that they are women (and are validated by most of society.) While it seems pretty damn clear to me and to the regulars here at B&W that the pressures of conforming to gender expectations have resulted in too many people believing they were born in the “Wrong Body,” it’s alarming how many people have accepted symptoms as reflecting factual, biological conditions.
I was talking with my daughter, and she knows that I am a skeptic when it comes to gender identity. She was listing all of the ways that she’s been harrassed as a woman by men, and she mentioned that men have no idea how it feels to be a woman. So I asked her if she could relate that to why I don’t believe that trans-identifying males can “know” that they are women, and she said she doesn’t want to talk about it. She has friends that identify as trans, so it causes her stress.
Something needs to break through this wall of silence so that it is possible for a broad discussion about the issue; so that feminine males and masculine females can just be who they are for once without being made to feel that their bodies need to be modified in order to fit in. So that women don’t have to accept men in their prisons, their restrooms and locker rooms, their rape support groups, and taking their awards. The ship has to eventually right itself, doesn’t it? DOESN’T IT?
* in the podcast episode I linked to, we learn that the guy who started the “groomers” meme had been alarmed that conservatives were being othered by liberals and that it would lead to genocide. I don’t think he gets that labeling people as “Marxists” and “Groomers” could lead to violence against those people.
When you know you’re absolutely right, absolutely anything is justified.
Mike Haubrich #11 :
Don’t forget that the ideology also harms children and teenagers with autism :
https://archive.is/RypdG#selection-2507.135-2507.214
There’s anecdotal evidence that some parents who are ashamed of having a gay child put the child through a “transing” process so that the child grows up to resemble a heterosexual adult.. Susie Green and Jeanette Jennings spring to mind.
That’s cognitive dissonance right there. Not picking on your daughter or anything, just saying that what you describe lines up with my experience of how Genderism spreads. It begins with seeming triviality to get a foot in the door, using people’s tendency to avoid conflict. After a while, recognition of biological realities has to be squared with having gone along with all the low-grade biological denialism. And then the conflict avoidance that allowed things to get started locks everything in place, because no one wants to have to go against the group or even a single person in the group.