Seeing what isn’t there
“Absolutely ‘You’re taking a ‘real’ woman’s place,’ that’s the part of the argument that’s still extremely transphobic. I see trans women as real women. What you’re saying automatically in the argument—you’re sort of telling on yourself already—is you don’t believe these people are women. Therefore, they’re taking the other spot. I don’t feel that way,” Rapinoe told TIME when asked if she’d be okay with a biological man playing with her on the national team.
It doesn’t matter what you “see” people as, and it doesn’t matter what way you “feel.” You can see horses as airports and cars as flowers if you like, but that doesn’t change the reality. You can “feel” that peaches are snakes and hammers are root vegetables, but you’ll be wrong. It’s not “phobic” to know that men are not women.
“I don’t want to mince words about it. Dave Chappelle making jokes about trans people directly leads to violence, whether it’s verbal or otherwise, against trans people. When Martina or Sage or whoever are talking about this, people aren’t hearing it just in the context of elite sports. They’re saying, ‘The rest of my life, this is how I’m going to treat trans people,’” Rapinoe told TIME when talking about Dave Chappelle, Sage Steele and tennis legend Martina Navratilova.
Rapinoe should take a hard look at the things people say about tennis legend Martina Navratilova, and JK Rowling and Julie Bindel and the rest of the long list. She should ask herself if some of those things might lead directly to violence.
Boy, am I glad to have that sorted out. Here I was arguing that it’s telling people to punch people in the face that leads to violence but it turns out that it was jokes all the time.
(Seriously, there’s plenty of nasty and mean-spirited attempts at comedy out there but if you think Dave Chappelle’s work is the sort of thing that leads to violence you’ve completely lost the plot.)
Well, she covered herself with defining violence as “verbal or otherwise.” Humpty Dumpty would be proud.
If I define “genocide” as “the systematic killing of an ethnic group, or the winning of soccer championships,” then Rapinoe is guilty of genocide. When will she apologize for that?
Violence means physical contact, or threats of. It does not include verbal disagreement, no matter how sensitive your feelings are. Doubly so when the verbal disagreement arises from someone telling a simple truth, such as ‘women are female’.
Yet this is a long established tenet of trans theory – disagreeing that a trans woman is a woman for example causes displeasure, displeasure adds to their mental health burden, mental health is a subset of general health, intentionally inflicting harm is called violence. Therefore all disagreement with trans theory is literal violence. The whole thing is made of equivocation.
@Holms
I tend to disagree in principle (though not in this particular instance). I have seen a person who was a victim of a narcissist’s gaslighting and became physically ill from that. The brain is part of the body, things like gaslighting do severely affect the brain. Psychological torture is still torture. (Of course, what TRAs claim to be “violence” is not, on that part I agree.)
Sonderval, I agree, having been subject to both physical and verbal abuse in my life. The verbal in some ways is worse. At the age of 62, I still struggle to overcome the effects of the verbal abuse while the physical healed long ago.
Verbal abuse is NOT saying “you’re a man” to a male-bodied human. Verbal abuse is much, much worse than that, and it shows the privilege of the trans community that they believe this is verbal abuse.