Projection
That’s quite the broad sweeping incloosive lie.
Not deprogram, not persuade, not silence, not rebuke, not contradict, not reason with, not quarrel with, not shout at, not remonstrate with, not convince, not turn around – but exterminate.
Jonathan Willoughby is a disgusting human being.
Once you understand that “exterminate” is Transperbole for “not give us everything we want all the time for free” it becomes a little less dramatic.
How the hell do you get “exterminate” out of that? That’s the opposite of “extermination.” Humpty Dumpty language strikes again. Or, he could just be lying.
Ya he doesn’t get it out of anything, he just tells whoppers.
What is the “Gender Critical movement”? Is there such a thing? At this point, many different parties with different beliefs are branding themselves as “gender critical.” There is no cohesive gender-critical ideology, much less an united gender-critical movement. Notice that the screenshot specifically mentions conservative politicians.
There are certainly some individuals who are advocating for the extermination – the physical, gruesome kind of extermination – of “trans people.” The comment sections of far-right news websites are ripe with examples of such individuals. It is just as certain that some are calling themselves gender-critical. More broadly, the term has been increasingly co-opted by conservative politicians and ideologues. But then, there’s also been efforts by progressives to defend/reclaim it. In practice, I’ve mostly seen left-wing people shy away from the term due to its increasingly problematic connotations, but I would guess that the same phenomenon occurs on the right to some extent. The latter probably happens much less overall, though, simply because of the relentlessness that people like Willoughby put into equating “gender-critical” with ignorant, religious, far-right, violent totalitarianism. Reality is of course much more prosaic – it’s a pair of words with muddied meaning, which no longer imply any particular stance.
If Willoughby was truly worried about extermination, I do expect that he would do a better job of identifying the people working towards it. Claiming that it is “the one goal of the Gender Critical movement” will divert attention away from the truly threatening parties, as well as alienate potential allies (many so-called GCs would be all too happy to help fight against the far-right and its distinctive brand of nonsense), and more generally damage his credibility. Surely he realizes that his denunciation is less than helpful, if not outright absurd. If I might venture a guess, he’s probably doing this only to fuel the feud he’s determined to have with J. K. Rowling.
Willoughby is certainly a disgusting human being, and would easily express these same views without the assistance of ChatGPT, but it is worth noting that he is concurring with ChatGPT here. It bothers me that ChatGPT reaches these conclusions.
Re extermination: I read it as a common form of linguistic sleight-of-hand. Express the view that there aren’t any actual people who are “born in the wrong body”, and it would be best if everyone understood this, and people will think, “Of course there are transgender people, and obviously you want to execute them, as that’s the only way to get rid of them”. This same sleight-of-hand is used when talking about eliminating certain forms of disabilities, and people assume you want to put those disabled people in front of a firing squad.
Of course, as Mosnae noted, there are people who do want to exterminate trans-identified people. It is distressing that people are unable or unwilling to understand different objections.
I came across a 2020 article by Holly Lawford-Smith: What Is Gender Critical Feminism (and why is everyone so mad about it)? I have not yet read her book, Gender-Critical Feminism, but it sounds excellent.
Sackbut: Willoughby frames his tweet to make it appear as if the ChatGPT text is in response to a prompt about GC beliefs, but neglects to include the prompt and the ChatGPT response only talks about the conservative/ right wing position.
It isn’t clear at all what ChatGPT is responding to.
@Sackbut, I think it’s deliberately disingenuous in both cases. When people talk about eliminating poverty (remember the Make Poverty History campaigns?), nobody accuses them of wanting to kill off poor people.
Hold on, Willoughby calls “denying healthcare, restricting public presence, erasing legal recognition, fueling public hostility, forced assimilation, dehumanisation and in extreme cases, elimination” a policy of “extermination”, without bothering to note that his movement did all that to women, and it didn’t bother him.