If you loudly announce
Saying it before doesn’t make it true.
No it doesn’t work the same way with trans issues. At all. Especially if by “date” he means “fuck,” which I think it’s safe to assume. People are allowed to have a preference for one sex or the other. If they’re not allowed to have that, then sex becomes indistinguishable from rape. Straight people are allowed to prefer the opposite sex and gay people are allowed to prefer the same sex. That means no one is required to have Affirmation Sex with a trans person whose sex is not the preferred one. No one. Not even women!
So if you just keep your refusal to date Jewish people to yourself, you’re no longer anti-Semitic? His analogy fails all over the place.
What I hear from LGB people in the dating pool is that they’re being given mixed messages.
“Of COURSE you’re allowed to have a preference for a particular sex organ and of COURSE nobody is telling anyone who they should or shouldn’t date it’s CONSENT not force and nobody, NOBODY in the trans community is saying otherwise — that’s a transphobic myth … but.
Don’t you think your “preference” might be showing some deep down prejudice on your part? That you don’t really believe transwomen are women and transmen are men? It’s hearts, not parts. You might want to consider trying to overcome those residual effects of transphobic conditioning … because it is transphobia, you know. You’re not just hurting yourself, you’re hurting some very vulnerable people. Unless you’re okay with that, and don’t mind being a bigot.
Totally up to you, of COURSE.”
Maybe not so much a mixed message, as gaslighting.
What Hitchens called the bit where they say it and the bit where they take it back. (I think it was Hitchens.)
I see. So lesbians and straight men are misandrists, and gay men and straight women are misogynists? Asexuals, presumably, are just flat-out misanthropes.
Arguments like this are so terrible, and so transparently insincere, that they simply discredit the speaker. No rebuttal is even necessary.
@Screechy Monkey,
No, you’ve got it wrong. Lesbians and straight men* are mistransogynists, and gay men and straight women are mistransandrists.
*Such as John Cleese or Zeppo Marx.
Wait until this one finds out about JDate …
Doesn’t this guy work for Prostasia – the paedophile advocacy organisation?
I can’t say I’m surprised to hear he’s not a fan of loudly announcing the objects of one’s sexual desires.
And if you don’t want to date (fuck) Jewish people, so what? It’s absolutely no one’s business. It wouldn’t even be a valid argument if it wasn’t about trans shit.
Yes, he’s their Communications Director.
It’s probably unfair to call them a “paedophile advocacy organization.” Their stated objective of balancing the protection of children with civil liberties sounds reasonable enough. I’m all for “sound scientific research on CSA prevention.”
I am however skeptical that their embrace of so-called “sex positivity” will help matters. Employing a stupid Communications Director won’t help, either.
https://prostasia.org/about/
They are leaving out significant factors, such as rapey, misogynistic personality disorders. Mind you, I haven’t “dated” anyone since 1986, but I absolutely exclude narcissists, bullies, people with controlling or passive-aggressive behaviors, and similar, from the pool of people I even want as friends, much less potential partners. No high maintenance people. Not worth the misery and grief.
MD @10 Good point. I think I could easily disqualify over 99% of the population for some reason or other, all the ones you mention being only part of that. Sometimes it boils down to proximity, ffs. Call me xenophobic or misanthropic, but really, don’t we all have some standards? :P
Re #8, I agree. Just for one set of examples, people might not want to “date” people without the possibility of a long-term relationship including marriage and procreation and child-rearing, and those people might intend to raise kids in some religious tradition that is not Jewish. I doubt that Christians get called antisemitic simply for intending to raise their kids in a Christian tradition. Certainly it’s common enough for Jewish people to pursue serious romantic relationships only with Jewish people, for similar reasons. I cannot for the life of me understand why this is seen as a problem.
No. No, it’s really not. That you believe it is says more about you than about the person who doesn’t date Jews.
Or Christians.
Or Muslims, Hindus, Scientologists, Satanists, Republicans, Democrats, blond(e)s, soulless gingers, Buddhists, Taoists, metalheads, soccer players, cat owners, Asians, vegetarians, Europeans, deer hunters, or any of the literally infinite other things that people can do or believe or be or like. Not wanting to date anyone for any reason whatsoever is entirely fine. Not everything is a Manichean opposition of oppressors and oppressed. Viewing everything through that lens is unhealthy in a way very similar to scrupulosity and with similar funhouse mirror results.
What Oliver-Ash (?) is trying to say is that gays and lesbians are people who are attracted to people of their own gender — but same-sex attraction is acceptable as long as you keep it in the closet.
Berlatsky muddied the issues by making it “If you loudly announce” – which is something people don’t much do anyway. Oliver-Ash just mentioned “dating preferences” but Berlatsky changed that to “loudly announcing” them. In many contexts it would be odd and probably invidious to “loudly announce” that you won’t “date” Xs, but then that wasn’t the issue until he did his translation, so…as usual, stupidity makes everything even worse.
Nullius, my husband and I met because the people who introduced us couldn’t find anyone else who would date an atheist. Does that make them bigoted? Maybe. But…if they are unwilling to date an atheist, I don’t want to go out with them. Why don’t people understand this simple fact? People have things that matter to them.
For what it’s worth, I’ve dated Muslims, Jews, and Christians, and managed to find something in common with all of them, but ended up with an atheist anyway, not because he was an atheist, but because he was the one I was attracted to.
The more I think about it, the less I like the facile equivalence implied between “dating” and “having sex”. People do explore relationships without having sex, and they do have sex outside of exploring relationships. The issue for trans people is sex (including when exploring relationships gets to the point of considering sex), not so much friendships and closeness. Someone who refused to befriend a Jewish person might be bigoted; someone who did not prefer a Jewish person as a potential life partner and fellow parent, that’s not evidence of bigotry. Sex might or might not be part of this analysis.
“Dating”, for what it’s worth, implies to me some kind of formal structure, going on “dates” rather than just getting together with a friend, perhaps having an “official” relationship, perhaps not. I don’t know that I’ve “dated” anyone, by that metric. I’ve married twice, once to a Jewish woman with whom I raised kids in a nominally Jewish tradition, and later to a Catholic woman, where we both acknowledge we wouldn’t be together if we were going to raise kids.
Having things that matter to you is immoral. Your “things that matter” prioritize your own desires and comfort above those of marginalized communities. How could you not know this? Jeez, that’s some serious privilege you’re displaying in not even being aware that you have privilege. Do better, bigot.
At least, that’s how the rhetoric works. If something can be conceived as bigoted, cruel, etc., then it actually is bigoted, cruel, etc. Consider the way “problematic” gets used. Calling something problematic makes that thing problematic, because being problematic is not a matter of the thing itself. It is a matter of what could be said of that thing. In a way, it’s like PR. A political entity (e.g., politician, position, organization, etc.) becomes tainted by accusation, such that the truth of the claim is irrelevant. “Foo has been accused of bar,” is often sufficient justification to avoid connection to Foo.
On the subject of Prostasia, a short thread that raises some red flags…