Wrong hymnbook
How to turn feminism inside out and gloat in public about the clicks you’re getting as a result:
Liv Hewson clearly has no idea what “misogyny” means. It’s not hatred of women to say that teenage girls who get their breasts cut off for a fad belief in magic switchable gender are making a mistake. I don’t hate the girls who make that mistake, I hate the ideology and its advocates who urge her to make that mistake.
As for calling medically unnecessary mastectomies “mutilation,” the issue isn’t how “nice” it is, the issue is what a drastic mistake such mastectomies are.
Cutting healthy breasts off is not “medical intervention.” It’s horrifying quackery and abuse.
Sometimes the truth hurts.
No, because most surgeries are medically warranted.
All the surgery in the world is never going to turn you into a “they/them.” They won’t change your sex, or turn you into a human who is neither male nor female. You can’t “escape” your femaleness any more than you can “escape” being a mammal or a vertebrate. It’s just what you are. Rejection of the sexist roles to which girls and women have been relegated for too long does not require the excision of healthy organs and tissues. If someone told you it did, they were wrong.
That photo is a slap in the face to women and a potent reminder of just how incoherent things have gotten. Nipple on a woman? For shame! Punish the whore! Oh but if you call yourself a not-woman it’s all good and you can do whatever you want. Ladies and girls, renounce your femaleness and be free! So progressive, much brave :-/ (…Weirdly, this cyanide&happiness comic also showed up on my Facebook feed today: https://imgur.com/gallery/0CAgv)
(…that photo shoot, I mean. I know no nipples in this photo, but the one in your previous post.)
“We” absolutely do treat people who have unnecessary elective cosmetic surgeries this way… Calf implants, nose jobs (the like of which really messed up Michael Jackson though I dunno if that was the result of necrosis or what), etc… usually just with mockery. Angelina Jolie got her tits cut off because of high breast cancer risk, what’s this twerp’s excuse? To make herself physically unappealing? Is that brave or just imprudent?
Getting an elective mastectomy because you think you can change sex is guaranteed not to deliver the goods. You can’t change sex. Otoh, I’ve always hated my breasts, I never had any inclination to reproduce (i.e., “knew” then, and have not [yet — 60 years later] changed my mind now, that I’d have no use for them), and I find them burdensome (literally) and in the way (literally). Since elective mastectomy was never an option for me, I never investigated the risks of such surgery. I know vaguely that there are detriments to chest muscle structure from removal, and at my current age, I’m somewhat less inclined to indulge in wholly elective surgery. Neverthless, from what I know of myself now, I might easily have done elective mastectomy when I was much younger, just to get rid of these stupid, uncomfortable burdens. Female participation in sports drops off significantly after puberty, in part because damn breasts get in the girl athletes’ way, and it’s embarassing. I personally might have been overall happier to have gone through life without them. That doesn’t mean I’m not female.
Sure, but it is also just a bad tactic. That term is a virtual guarantee to make people bristle when what we really want is to discuss.
Let’s be honest, shall we? The urge to cut off breasts is a form of body integrity dysmorphia, and should be categorised as such. It is just as absurd to cut off breasts as it would be to cut off limbs, and should be an indictable offence.
@ Eric MacDonald, #7
I call bullshit. It’s so easy for a guy to declare “no problem” about a problem he doesn’t experience and doesn’t know about because he’s not female. I’d wager that I’m far from alone in regarding my unused (literally useless) appendages as burdens and interferences with freedom of movement. That’s not the same as amputating limbs.
I can see that, but making accommodations for “preferred” language is a major reason we’re in the mess we’re in right now. It also depends on your target audience. Activists are going to bristle regardless, but if we’re talking over their heads to either their prospective marks or the general public, being honest (if shocking) is important. What genderists are proposing, demanding, and supporting is shocking. trans ideologues take great pains to hide things like mutilation, sterilization, and lifelong medical debilitation behind innocuous, benign-sounding phrases like “gender affirming care,” and insisting that this “treatment” is “life-saving,” rather than potentially life ruining. (It’s ironic that activists are one of the sources of suicidal ideation in their target demographic. “If you don’t get what we tell you you need, threaten to kill yourself!”)
So much of the debate (such as it is) is hidden behind euphemism and obfuscation. Word games are one of the main weapons in trans activism’s arsenal. They have to hide the truth in order to make their “arguments.” Without linguistic camouflage, they have little to commend or justify their position. Giving away “transwoman” rather than using “trans identified males” was the thin edge of the wedge. How many media stories about women’s prison’s, women’s hospital wards, women’s rape crisis centers, etc. would be completely different if they did not use “transwoman,” and she/her to describe men, but made it clear that the persons in question demanding access to these facilities were in fact male? The intended confusion arises by surrendering accurate, honest language. If the word “mutilation” is seen as shocking and disturbing, it should be; the “treatment” should be moreso.
On Quora I just saw someone calling sex-change operations “sterilizing the mentally ill”, and saying eugenicists would approve.
I’m not sure I can find anything to disagree with in that statement.
YNnB: Hear! Hear! Pronouns and euphemisms seem like such small things, but of course they do. The thin end is by definition small and innocuous. That’s the whole point.
I gotta say, they don’t seem like small things at all to me. Pronouns especially, because obeying that rule would require constant hypervigilance about one’s words. Pronoun rules are not like rules against sexist or racist epithets, they’re like rules that you have to say “inshallah” every 8 words.
@Jim Baerg #10:
I’ve made that point a few times, but even while I agree with that and am perfectly fine with idiots doing it to themselves if it involves a doctor violating their Hippocratic Oath it can’t be countenanced. Similar to that body integrity disorder thing: go lay down on the train tracks if you like but don’t ask a healer to involve him or herself in your destruction.
People have been known to grow out of juvenile idiocy.
These were passed off as “small things.” (There’s a two panel cartoon I’ve seen online a number of times. The first panel has a TiM requesting that a women use his “preferred” she/her pronouns. The woman says “Sure, that’s not too much to ask, I can do that.” The second panel shows the TiM following up with an overwhelming torrent of demands bowling the woman over, all stemming from that aquiescence and submission to pronouns.)
Who would have imagined that a unilateral, ideological, ideosyncratic, reality-denying, obfuscatory retooling of the whole language would hide itself in the guise of “courtesy,” “kindness,” and “politeness?” That this hijacking of the common tongue would almost immediately become embedded in media style guides and corporate mission statements like some kind of barbed, poisoned dart. (It might end up as the “semantic gentrification” of the language, which was noted some days ago, but it starts out as a combination of home invasion and kidnapping.) Look what followed; the Trojan-horsing of huge swathes of the trans agenda through backroom deals that bypassed the normal processes of scrutiny, consultation, and consent.
It didn’t have to be that way; it shouldn’t have been that way. There was no reason that the media had to go along with this. What actual power did the trans lobby have to enforce its way? The media could have said “No.” They could have referred to their public duty, and the ideals that they would claim to uphold to report truthfully, accurately and impartially.* Instead, they threw all of that away and took a side on a wide-ranging public issue while pretending not to, blithely accepting the physically impossible and repeating it without comment, essentially becoming lobbyists for, and agents of, transactivism.
Think of the scores and scores of stories noted here by Ophelia where the true facts have been hidden or obscured by reporters, editors, or both using trans activism’s preferred euphemisms and camouflage. What other political pressure group has ever been granted this kind of unquestioning, obsequious servility and kid-glove treatment so quickly? Other movements might have recieved an objective, detached, even-handed “both sides” coverage, but in the vicarious spirit of “NO DEBATE!”, opponents of trans activism (women particularly) have been routinely portrayed by mainstream media as right wing bigots, going so far as to use the genderists’ slur of TERF in their reportage. This isn’t just “polite” or “sympathetic” reporting, this is crude, brutal partisanship. Who could have predicted that? Without that initial surrender to the seemingly innocuous linguistic demands, trans activists would have been left with having to deal with reports about men and boys, referred to as “he” and “him.” That wouldn’t have flown very far at all, because people would have understood what was at stake, particularly for women. Boys and men on girls’ and womens’ sports teams? NO! Men in women’s washrooms? HELL NO! Men in women’s rape shelters and prisons? FUCK NO! WHO’S PROPOSING THIS SHIT?! Resistance would have been strong and swift. Of course it was strong and swift, but that resistance was painted as bigotry, and was much less widespread than I believe it would have been in a regime of honest language and reporting. As it is, the side of women’s rights and reality are still playing catch-up, still waiting for honest reporting, or sometimes any reporting at all. Which is odd, because any one of these issues (whether it was the impact on all of these aspects of women’s rights, or the near-universal surrender of the media to trans activist ideology) would make a great story. Why aren’t there dozens of reporters falling over each other to be the first to tell it? What’s keeping them from writing it? Who’s keeping them from writing it? Why yes, that too would make a great story.
We’re waiting.
*Ideals more honored in the breach than the observance to be sure, but even Fox News claims to be “Fair and Balanced.”
#9 Bruce
There is surely a middle ground that is being excluded here. Something that is not acquiescence to the euphemistic word coddling demanded by TRAs, while also not coming off as abrasive arseholes. I’ve spent time in the trenches of infant circumcision arguments, and I’ve found ‘mutilation’ to be particularly counterproductive.
It *is* mutilation though; call a spade a spade. You won’t persuade someone who thinks otherwise, so why bother?