Stale as last year’s panettone
“Sophie Molly” tries his hand at argument.
Once again, a festival capitulates to the demands of transphobes. By hosting not one but two notable TERFs. The festival in question is the Oxford Literary Festival.
It’s not clear what the demands are. Did the terfs demand that the Oxford Lit Fest host them? Or did the Oxford Lit Fest simply invite a couple of feminists?
By far, the worst of them is Helen Joyce. Her book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality can only be described as anti-trans propaganda. This book and its author should not be featured at a mainstream literary festival.
But even if it’s true that the book can only be described as anti-trans-[ideology], how is that a reason it should not be discussed at a mainstream literary festival? Trans ideology is a very new and very wobbly set of beliefs and demands, and it just is not self-evident that we must not dispute its claims. “Sophie Molly” doesn’t make his case, he just rants.
Joyce argues that gender should be understood strictly as biological sex and dismisses the concept of self-identified gender. This undermines the identities of transgender people and invalidates their lived experiences.
There it is: that’s as close as he gets to arguing. He doesn’t say why “gender” shouldn’t be understood as biological sex, or why the “identities” and “lived experiences” of transgender people should matter more than, say, women’s rights. He just takes it all for granted, without noticing that he’s doing so.
The book over-fixates on trans women having access to female spaces.
Easy for a man to say. “Shut up, bitch, you don’t get to have somewhere to go to be safe from me.” Very persuasive, much empathetic.
Joyce wants to shackle us all into two neat little boxes based solely on our genitals and reproductive organs. So rigid! So limiting!
Redundant! Urgent redundancy alert! You can shackle or you can push into neat little boxes, but it’s just silly to try to do both.
Throughout the book, she is critical of gender-affirming medical treatments, especially for minors, viewing them as harmful and potentially irreversible. This once again makes out that being trans is wrong. It tells the reader that trans people should not be trusted to have agency over their bodies. All of this strips trans people of their bodily autonomy. These are not the words of kindness and compassion. These are the words of someone who just can’t accept that trans people exist.
This poor guy. He hasn’t got a single thought of his own – all he has is these ultra-stale bromides. Ooh ooh “agency” – that’ll fetch’em. Along with “bodily autonomy” it’s a surefire conversation-ender, no matter how many billion times we’ve heard it before.
Sad case.
Sophie Molly, whilst demanding that people squeeze into one of two tiny boxes based on fashion choice, whines about two categories based on biology.
Gender self ID undermines the identities of women and invalidates their lived experiences.
Fixed it.
Unsuprisingly, many accusations throughout the piece are rooted in the conflation of sex and sex-based stereotypes. (Yawn.) “Gender” is really a terribly ambiguous word.
What is less typical is the way Molly keeps hallucinating the most bizarre interpretations for Joyce’s words, while simultaneously showing these words. Usually, when you’re trying to misrepresent people, you don’t show evidence that contradicts your claims.
For instance:
[...] Joyce writes. ‘Facilities that used to be sex-separated, like toilets and changing rooms, are changing. Homeless shelters and prisons now follow gender self-identification.’ This sentence is grossly transphobic and false for two reasons. Firstly it invalidates trans people. In other words how can ”women” be safe with self-identified women in their spaces? [...]Nowhere in the citation are women or safety mentionned. Indeed, no opinion whatsoever appears within the citation; it’s merely factual. Perhaps Molly was commenting on another citation, removed it, and subsequently failed to notice the inconsistency?
Helen Joyce loves to reduce women to their reproductive parts. She says “Defining women as the people whose bodies developed along the female reproductive pathway is limiting only if you regard female embodiment as limiting.” Of course, this is limiting. Women are much more than their reproductive organs. Organs are just bits of flesh, they are not people.This is just plain bizarre. Joyce defined, in that very citation, women as “people” rather than mere “reproductive organs.” Does Molly even read what he’s citing? The citation does not even mention reproductive organs, instead referring more broadly to the female reproductive pathway.
There are however a few instances in which Molly proves more subtle, such as the following :
Biological essentialism is a core theme in Joyce’s writing. Biological essentialism is used to reinforce stereotypes and prejudices. The idea that gender relations are biologically fixed is outmoded. One stereotype claims that all women are physically weaker than men. Another stereotype suggests that women are more emotional and empathetic.I’m not the most knowledgeable about Joyce’s work: does she actually make those claims? Given the way it’s all phrased, I would suspect that she doesn’t, and Molly is attempting to make it sound like she does. But I could be wrong.
Does my being an atheist invalidate St. Teresa of Avila’s lived experience?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teresa_of_%C3%81vila#Mysticism
It’s not medecine, and minors, by definition, don’t have the maturity to make such decisions. Keeping minors from ruining their lives is a good thing, no?
I would say mutilation and sterilization are harmful, yes. How would you rate the “reversibility” of a double mastectomy?
Well, believing you are the sex you are not is a mistake, and delusional. It’s your lot who are trying to tell kids that they can go through the “wrong” puberty. This is also incorrect, delusional, and a lie. For most dysphoric children, being trans is unlikely; most will desist. But you’re all for what would normally be called “conversion therapy.” Intead trans activists (like you) have used that term to villify clinicians trying to talk children out of inflicting drastic, permanent injury to their bodies. Without DARVO, you’d be fucking nowhere.
Do what you like with yourself, but you started this paragraph with designs on children’s bodies. You should be kept away from children, as you are a danger to their physical and mental well-being.
And don’t get me started about the handedness-essentialism of all those people who simplistically reduce left-handers to their anatomy and exclude those left-handers who just happen to be more dexterous with their right hand.
Bjarte, I always find it amusing that we use dexterous to mean highly skilled, and sinister to mean potentially evil. Our language is so dependent on Latin, but religious biases over the centuries have skewed the meanings of what were simply the Latin words for right and left to give them their modern, not obviously linked, opposite value definitions.
As for the bloke who thinks that wearing delusional goggles has given him the ability to read and criticise works by intelligent and well-educated authors; well, the words Messrs. Dunning and Kruger come readily to mind.
P.S. One of the tactics I used to rid myself of that horrible little voice in my head, the one which lied to me about how dreadful I was when I was suffering from depression, and hung around even as I was recovering, was to imagine it as an ugly little gnome whom I then imagined myself locking in a sound-proof box, which I then imagined chaining up in the deepest, darkest, furthest reaches of my mind. Surprisingly, it worked. I haven’t been bothered with intrusive thoughts in many years.
Even so, it didn’t occur to me to shackle the gnome first. That’s hilarious overkill.
You can never be too careful. Look at Rasputin.
There’s a difference between a generalization and a stereotype.
Generalization: people from sub-Saharan Africa have lighter skin that people from Eurasia (excluding parts of the sub-continent). That may not be true of all people from sub-Saharan Africa or Eurasia, but it’s a reliable marker.
Stereotype: Black people have rhythm. That may be true of some, or even many, black people in comparison to white people, but it’s not a reliable marker.
So yes, as a generalization, women tend to be weaker than men. There’s quite a bit of overlap, of course, but it’s still largely true. On the other hand, women are not reliably more emotional or empathetic than men (even if culturally they’re allowed to display those characteristics more openly–big boys don’t cry, after all).
What our panettone baker seems not to realize is that men who masquerade as women tend to perpetuate the stereotypes.
Not Bruce, I’d rather not look at Rasputin; after all, he died eighteen years before my mum was born. >°_°<
But I take your point. If the gnome ever escapes (unlikely, as my depression was linked to hormonal stuff which has been gone, lo, these many years) I shall consider shackles. Iron, presumably, as the fae are allergic to it.
I have no objection in principle to men adopting feminine stereotypes – they're welcome to them, I hate most of them – but I object strenuously to the notion that women are people who conform to feminine stereotypes, regardless of sex.
I second. I have some things that would probably fit into female stereotypes, but my overall life is not one of performed femininity. That isn’t something I find appealing, even in women. Just be a person.