Catastrophism
Well, no.
Where to begin. “Gender affirming care” isn’t a medical thing, it’s a political thing disguised as medical. There’s no such thing as “gender affirming care.” Saying he means it “in the most literal and serious sense” is ludicrous: not prescribing cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers can’t possibly be seen as literal (and serious) genocide. It’s not even literal withholding of life-saving medical care, which itself couldn’t be called genocide without a lot of other factors added. It’s not even that, and on the contrary, it’s intended to avoid risky interventions in natural puberty. There’s a heated debate about whether cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers are harmless or not, about whether they’re harmful or not, about whether they help struggling adolescents cope with puberty or make it worse, about whether the psychological relief they provide to some who get them is worth the risk they pose to all who get them, and so on. There’s already plenty of evidence that some people who take cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers go on to regret it. Withholding cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers is simply not comparable to deliberately murdering an entire population. It’s not comparable to Stalin’s genocide in Ukraine, it’s not comparable to Hitler’s genocide, it’s not comparable to the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda or the genocide in Darfur. It’s not like that.
Dr. Tess Tanen is trans. Dr. Tanen is wrong about genocide.
Godwin’s Law.
It’s just another way for people to award themselves the “most oppressed” badge. I get accused of genocide surprisingly often and I’m fairly sure I haven’t genocided anyone. You’d think I’d remember.
Yeah, because every time someone fails to validate their precious gender identity something inside them dies. That’s genocide too, you know…
I’m pretty sure that’s not how this works.
Given the large percentage of dysphoric youth who, under “watchful waiting,” will desist and end up being gay, you might just want to reconsider exactly which demographic you claim is being “genocided.”
Given the trans sunshine and rainbows depiction of “re-education camps,” I can understand his confusion.
Lesbian? Of course. Where there’s one willfull misconstruction, there are likey to be more. I’m curious though. A word from the judges: Does “peering over glasses” count as a head tilt or not? They’ve missed out on the pouty lips too, so there are bound to be points deducted.
Yep, they’re still playing a semantic shell game with existence.
Wanting to cure cancer > wanting there to be no people with cancer > wanting people with cancer to cease to exist > wanting genocide of people with cancer.
They do it with everything from obesity to blindness to learning disabilities to gender identity integrity disorder. It’s dumb and stupid no matter the subject.
Way back in the mists of time when my age was a single digit I had a teacher who, whenever she thought a pupil was being dishonest would recite Every time a child lies, one of God’s sweet angels dies. Time for an update, maybe? One that plays along with the emotional blackmail bullshit and suicide ideation they pull.
Every time you give us strife, an innocent trans-child takes their life.
I’ll apologise now, because that is sure to be appearing as a valid argument in a TRAs tweet sometime soon.
Being a Jew doesn’t give you a special knowledge of genocide (well maybe Israeli Jews depending on your point of view), being a Holocaust survivor (most of which were Jewish IIRC) does… this individual hardly looks to be the right age.
And yet these same people thought Gina Mandalorian was so much in the wrong for making the same comparison with Republicans (she was, but doesn’t really matter).
latsot@2
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Latsot would have us believe that his memory doesn’t fail, and yet SOMEONE forgot to feed Fortran her dinner all those times. Are we to believe that he could forget something as important as a cat’s dinner, and yet perfectly remember every single one of the thousands of orders he issues to his lackeys each year? Is it not at least plausible that, while starving and otherwise generally abusing Fortran, he might have inadvertently genocided not just one, but several innocent groups of people. I’m not saying that he did, I’m just asking you to think about the possibility.
Pfft, you don’t know Fortran very well if you think I’d be permitted to forget her dinner.
As for the genocide, you have me half convinced.
Does any cat permit their human slave to forget their dinner? I know ours doesn’t. And she has claws to enforce her demands…and teeth.
But I agree; I am sure if latsot is being accused of genocide by disagreement, he almost certainly would have committed that, because trans allies never get it wrong…
That’s beautiful! Now we just need to compose a tune!
This will be the basis for the Tarrantino remake of It’s a Wonderful Life.
not Bruce, only if he can make all God’s sweet angels women…and shove them in refrigerators.
There are a lot of adult males-claiming-to-be-women saying that trans kids will definitely kill themselves if they don’t get get immediate and unconditional affirmation of their gender identity. All of these adults are very much alive. Does that mean the claims about suicide are not true? Or are these adults not really trans?
Nullius
The same argument has been made as Wanting to cure downs syndrome > wanting people with downs syndrome to cease to exist > wanting genocide of people with downs syndrome.
There are organisations around the world that are fighting to preserve babies being born with downs syndrome. I am sure if there was a pill to make a foetus downs, many of these people would use it.
I’m not a Jew, but I think I probably understand genocide better than Dr Tess Tanen does. I may be mistaken, but my impression is that Jews were treated worse in Nazi Germany than men who say they are today. Incidentally does anyone know where he earned his doctorate, and in what field? Most of the hits that a search for Dr Tess Tanen yields are to Butterflies and Wheels. No information about where he practises (assuming he does) or what expertise he has.
It wouldn’t work: once you’re a foetus your karyotype is fixed. I suppose there could be a pill that would cause the symptoms of trisomy 21 to be exhibited.
That’s what really gets me, the number of people who seem to think parents of a child with downs are somehow luckier, more blessed, than parents of a child that is healthy in every way. And they insist that children with downs are happier. I once read an argument in a play that we shouldn’t fix people with mental disorders, because this uncle of this guy was so fun and great to be around and built the guy a tree house. At some point, he admitted that the uncle killed himself, but still, he was such great fun and joy to be around, so we should do nothing to cure people like that. I found it ugly and disgusting, but the author seemed to genuinely believe it, and used it as what she apparently saw as an unassailable argument against stem cell therapy.
Then there are things like Equus which, unlike the other one, has the upside of being a good play, which posit that when we cure people with mental disorders, we are taking something away from them, making them “ordinary” and “boring” with no worship, no joy, no awe. Which of course was projection of the author/character of their own experiences onto everyone, but still…the kid in question was miserable, could not have a relationship with a woman in spite of the fact that he wanted to, and had just driven stakes into the eyes of an entire stable full of horses. He was portrayed in the musings as somehow healthier than the rest of us…and how? I never got it.
As someone who suffers from severe emotional issues myself, I can say that many of us want to be “normal”, which doesn’t mean living an endlessly boring life full of routine. There are many ways to live in the world, and living in misery and despair so you don’t take something away from us…or you…well, that’s just sick.
Re #16
A “pill to make a foetus downs” could not take an existing non-Down fetus and make it Down, but perhaps the hypothetical works earlier in the process, to ensure that any fetus that did come into existence had Down Syndrome.
Re #17
There do seem to be lot of (especially) religious people who seem to relish adversity as some sort of honor or blessing. Your comment reminded me of a relative, generally quite liberal, who for some reason shared an article from an anti-abortion news site that was decrying abortions for fetuses with Down Syndrome. The article was equating abortion for Down fetuses with killing people with Down, and my relative was dutifully sucked in; people with Down can live wonderful lives, don’cha know, and how cruel of these prospective parents. The article was, of course, advocating that such abortions should be illegal. I don’t recall it mentioning any other means of reducing the likelihood of Down Syndrome, and I doubt it did; it’s all about shaming people for abortion decisions.
Athels Cornish-Bowden, #16:
It is highly probable that Tess Tanen / Tanenbaum’s doctorate was earned under his original name rather than his nom-de-trans, just as Dr. Veronica Ivy’s was awarded when he was using either his previous trans identity (Rachel McKinnon) or his original name of Rhys, as would have appeared on his birth certificate.
As far as I’m aware, it is not possible to have a degree earned under one name to be re-issued under a new name, so unless a trans-identifying person goes back and re-takes their degrees under their new names (which would require a double-retake for McKinnon) then their certifications and education records will forever be in their ‘dead’ name.
Personally, I believe that those trans-identifying people who consider their pre-transition selves to no longer exist (hence ‘dead name’) should not then be permitted to claim the qualifications of those non-existent people as their own. Changing name after marriage or simply obtaining a new name via deed poll is fine, in those cases it really is just a change of name easily explained by use of nee or formerly known as, but when the claim is that their original name belonged to a person who literally no longer exists, and especially when any use of the ‘dead name’ is strictly forbidden because the new identity is supposed to be seen as a completely different person, one who never was that other person, then they should have no rights to claim that other person’s achievements as their own: by the trans-identifying persons own logic those achievements were earned by and belong to someone else, so to claim them as their own would technically be fraud. If Veronica Ivy /Rachel McKinnon is getting by on qualifications earned by Rhys McKinnon, he should be made to explain why he’s claiming a dead man’s doctorate as his own.
If you Google Tess Tanenbaum (see Twitter handle) you find lots. Field is informatics.
AoS, where you wrote previous trans name, my mind converted it to penis name. So maybe that’s what we should call it – Rhys is his penis name, Veronica is his pretend name, and Rachel is his…once upon a time name.
In the Miscellany Room 6, Post 240, http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2020/miscellany-room-6/#comment-2855358 I posted links to a campaign, of which Tanenbaum is a part, to have such prior academic work retconned to the new identity.
Again we have the Rehearsing of Oppression and Fraughtness. What they’re asking for is permission to rewrite history. They wrote those papers, got those degrees, as a particular individual. If you shared classes with them, you knew them as such, not as Dr. New Gender Identity. The original publishing record and academic history “belongs” to history, and those who witnessed it. If Somebody who went through highschool as an overweight teen with thick glasses and crooked teeth, you can’t demand that pictures of Trim and Fit, Contact Lens and Straightened Teeth You now be inserted into everyone’s Yearbooks and class photos. You might not like how you look, and it might be a painful reminder of cruelties visited upon you by school bullies, but that’s what really happened.
Question. Under current practice, would a divorced, female academic, whose husband had abused her, be allowed to have citations and credits for her previous work, published under her married name, changed to her maiden name? I’m guessing “No.”