What’s most glaring
A nitwit writer for Jezebel writes the 40 millionth piece on JK Rowling the transphobe blah blah:
We can certainly quibble over how much Rowling needs to be defended from random Twitter users, especially considering the violence associated with her transphobia and the transphobia of her supporters (who haven’t hesitated to defend Rowling with threats of their own). But here’s what’s most glaring about Rowling’s responses: Her insistence on framing this as gendered violence against women, perpetrated by men. Rowling cannot accept that the transgender women who have clowned her, who have told her to “go die,” who have been the loudest critics of her TERF agenda, are women. It’s easier for her to simply dismiss them as men, and regard their anger as male violence directed at her, a “real” woman. It’s a convenient misreading of feminism that positions Rowling as the vulnerable victim of dangerous men.
Ah yes it’s so very glaring that JKR recognizes male entitlement and male contempt for women and male aggression when she sees it. It’s so glaring that she doesn’t politely nod and agree that these men are women if they say they are. It’s so glaring that she considers herself a real woman and men as not real women. It’s such a misreading of feminism to see dangerous men as dangerous men.
More than that, it’s a sly way of misgendering that acts as a dog whistle for the many people who celebrate Rowling’s “bravery.” But Rowling’s sex and gender essentialism isn’t brave, it’s the status quo.
Well status quo isn’t the opposite of brave, for a start, but more to the point, not everything that’s the status quo is wrong or evil or in need of reversal. Women are women and men are not women, and that’s not like a fashion in hats or a taste in music, it’s just reality, status quo and all.
I wonder if this Jezebel post isn’t self-defeating. The ranting of its author seems so irrational next to the good sense of the JKR tweets she quotes in full.
The author admits, and excuses, every hateful thing JKR says the TRA brigades have done. Sure, we’ve sent death threats and bomb threats to her, but she should just get over it. Sure, we’ve posted pornography to children. But they should stop following her if they don’t want to get porn-bombed. Sure, we’re transing children, but not like millions of them. Rowling called transwomen MEN! That justifes all this and more.
Once upon a time, my mother said that she sometimes judged political disputes by who was screaming louder: that’s the person whose argument has failed. Ashley Reese has failed.
It certainly seems self-defeating to me, but many will nod at every word.
But is it exceptionally crude and stupid? Yes it is.
So the article is saying that the real danger doesn’t come from men, but from trans women?
I’m not entirely convinced I would count that as a win for their side.
The “threats of their own” link is…. weak, to say the least.
No, they/she are/is saying that by misgendering the therateners JKR is denying that women are as prone to violence as men. Because TWAW, Dammit!
@Mike, men are the real victims here, aren’t they?
It’s not even the status quo any more. A former friend of mine was absolutely shocked that I would “misgender” celebrities, and cancelled me a few days later. The status quo is now to nod and agree and affirm.
@papito Yes, even Bill Clinton feels our pain.
This is why I’m not so encouraged by all the polls that claim America is becoming less religious. Religion is just a subset (historically a large one, I’ll grant you) of revealed-truth belief systems. Trumpists, antivaxers, and sex deniers all employ religious thinking – unquestioning faith in an unprovable tribal dogma that separates the righteous from the evil. Apostates beware. Nothing is off limits in the defense of virtue.
Better the devil you know, then?
I grew up around some really crazy Christians. The burn a cross on your lawn type, Jews have horns type. My neighbor boy told me he couldn’t play with me because I was going to hell. (Two syllables, “hay-yul”) People would tell their kids to beat us up at school because we were not Christians. There was a lot of hate, crazy hate, going around, directed by bizarre, illogical pronouncements about supernatural hoodoo, directed at us. And that seemed normal, and acceptable, and righteous, to just about everybody else but us.
I agree with you, Pliny. Haters gonna hate. Maybe people will leave their brimstone-preaching churches, but some will just find new victims to feel righteous about hating. Sometimes the same victims, just with new reasons. Women deceived Adam with that apple -> women are TERFs. Homosexuals are evil sodomites -> same-sex attraction is bigotry against transpeople. Transgenderism, as a new religion, is not much of an improvement on the old ones. A holy war doesn’t get prettier because it’s painted pink and blue.
“Sex is a spectrum.” “Sexuality is fluid.” “Sex is a social construct.”
These nonsense claims need to be evaluated against the reality of male violence against women.
Among the other things that Rowling said in her eminently reasonable statement was to take account of the reality of sex.
For that, TRA’s responded with rape and death threats. (Thus proving Rowling’s point.) But wokesters pompously babble about Rowling’s “sex and gender essentialism” and make excuses and rationalizations for the rape and death threats. Everything they say seems to be stupid bullshit.
Another reason I don’t take any comfort in the pronouncements of religion dying is that those same predictions were being made at the beginning of the 20th century. A lot of people at that time thought religion would have dissipated by the 21st century. Instead, it got stronger and has entrenched people in positions of power.
While I don’t much give credence to the “god-shaped hole” hypothesis there’s *something* going on… Sure there are some true atheists but most of the Nones are still looking for something…
I fucking exploded here. What violence? All the violence and threats thereof are coming from the other side!
Of course there is real violence against trans people (albeit nowhere near as much as TAs make it out to be). As I have previously written, at least to an excellent first approximation 0% of it is perpetrated by feminists, or even by people who have anything but contempt for feminism. If trans activism in its current form were a real social justice movement, close to 100% of their time and effort would be spent fighting toxic masculinity rather than bashing feminists, but instead nearly all their time and effort is spent bashing feminists while actively engaging in toxic masculinity.
Even before reading Helen Joyce’s Trans, I had mostly abandoned the idea that trans activism in its current, “TERF-bashing” form, had all that much to do with traditional notions of “femininity”, or “girly” boys who prefer dolls and dresses to cars and jeans, etc. As I keep saying, the last thing the TERF-bashers can be accused of is displaying too little toxic masculinity, too little raging entitlement, insufficient need for dominance, or, for that matter, being to nurturing, caring, sensitive, modest etc. This has a lot more to do with autogynephilia, and straight men wanting to be their own jerk-off fantasies, and the hyper-sexualized, hyper-objectified image of women presented by pornography. It’s hardly an accident that accusations of “TERFism” started to be heard (more often than not from the exact same people) around the same time as “SWERF”, “sex negativity” and “kink-shaming”.
As Joyce points out, there are indeed a subset of boys suffering from
gendersex dysphoria who fit the “girly” or “sissy” boy narrative (most of them grow out of wanting to be girls and grow up to be gay men), but they are not the in the driving seat of the TA movement as it exists today, and are being poorly served by autogynephiles who use them as an alibi while working to make same sex attraction a hate crime.Well said. And obviously, there is violence against trans people, just virtually none from the people they’re accusing of violence.
It’s much easier to attack women, attempting to intimidate them into silence, than it is to try to persuade men to change their behaviour. The latter would mean actually doing something to address male socialization and patriarchal power.
I wonder how many so-called trans “activists” are not anywhere under the “trans umbrella” but have latched onto the movement because it allows them to be cheered on as “allies” for being misogynistic shits. Not just beardy wokebros like David Paisley, but guys like whatsisname Pullman, too. They have nothing at stake, risk nothing, and piling on costs them nothing, except perhaps their reputations, once the towering edifice of lies and smears they have helped to build and protect, inevitably implodes under the relentless, unyielding pressure of material reality.