Needs and wants: discuss
Rachel Veronica has the new year spirit.
Again – so sloppy for a philosopher.
Who is “you”?
Why is a generalized population supposed to care what Rachel Veronica needs?
What business is it of Rachel Veronica’s what a generalized population is willing to do?
What are transphobes?
What business is it of Rachel Veronica’s what friends other people have?
What benefit of the doubt is he talking about?
And the last item is just classic male bullying.
All in all pretty gruesome for a working tenured philosopher.
Wouldn’t it be lovely if we had a word for “trans person with a phobia?”
If they’re going to co-opt the word “woman,” then we should be allowed to co-opt the term “transphobe.” As in “Gosh, that Dr. Ivy sure is a paranoid transphobe.”
Geoffrey Grigson in ‘The Englishman’s Flora’ describes veronica as ‘a sinister little plant’ (otherwise known as ‘speedwell’, which seems suitable in view of VI’s liking for beating people, so long as they are female, in bicycle races), and ivy as going together with ruins and owls. We have ivy in the garden and it creeps everywhere, feeds parasitically on trees, and smothers everything it can (a Scots word for it is ‘bindwood’.) In North America, of course, you have poison ivy which causes your skin to turn red and itch – and certainly I get an itchy feeling every time I read one of VI’s tweets, not because I suffer from transphobia (gender dysphoria clearly exists), but because of the strong dislike I have for anyone, of whatever sex, gender, or sexual inclination, who behaves in the way VI does, a way that is unhelpful to VI’s cause, not to mention the causes of others.
He reminds me that a good New Year’s resolution would be to push back, wherever possible, against gender ideology. Gently, politely, patiently. Even in small ways.
For example, I do not have “gender pronouns.” Someone else might, but I don’t. So I will leave that blank. Anyone who needs to use a pronoun for me can take one look at me and use a pronoun that refers to my sex.
I was misgendered a lot at school because I valued intellect which, as we all know, only girls do. Except when men need to explain things, of course, in which case it’s more of a guy thing.
I can’t say that the misgendering had much of an effect on me although the sustained bullying certainly did. I’m fairly sure it would have had more or less the same effect if I hadn’t been accused of being a girl every day for years, as though it were an insult.
But, you know, I get it. Gender is more important to some people than others. I expect some boys are offended and hurt when they’re called girls. It’s a calculated insult based on the idea that being a girl is bad. Pop culture is littered with it. Pretty much every second line of The Big Bang Theory is an accusation of girlishness applied to a man. All the other lines are accusations of manliness applied to a woman. From this one paragraph you could procedurally generate every BBT script. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what they did.
But my point is that misgendering is extremely common. Is there a single person here who hasn’t been deliberately misgendered as a bullying tactic?
But misgendering is not in itself all that bad, is it? It’s bad because it’s symptomatic of widespread and systematic misogyny, of course, but, you know, sticks and fucking stones, right?
So why is it evidently so much worse to misgender someone who is trans? Why has nobody who isn’t trans complained about being misgendered other than as an aside in describing bullying, as I have?
A few years ago I was employed as an antagonist on a computer science project that wanted to use computers to analyse conversations between patients and GPs. My role was to find unintentional privacy violations in sharing medical records (spoiler: it’s a fucking nightmare). One of the first things the linguists and statisticians on the project found was the use of language (by both GPs and patients) to emphasise and try to take control of a point. For example, the difference between:
and
In my roundabout way I’m suggesting that trans activist types are doing the latter. Why is misgendering uniquely violence to them and not to others? Why wasn’t I violated by being called a girl for years at school but they are when a random person happens to say men aren’t women in a place they didn’t have to look in the first place?
I don’t mind being called “man” or “he”/”him” by people to whom a sentence like “Bjarte is a man” only says something about superficial anatomical facts and nothing more. When it’s turned into a claim about what’s going on inside my head, then any “gendering” what so ever is misgendering far as I’m concerned.