Define your terms, Zippy
This guy should be booted off Twitter for constantly lying about gender skeptics.
That’s just a lie. People who don’t believe in magic gender are not “working to remove” anyone’s rights, we’re working to protect women’s rights. Trans people don’t have a right to shove women aside and replace them with men in lipstick. Pinheads like Thomas Willett need to stop burbling about “trans rights” without ever defining them or explaining why they get to cancel women’s rights.
You have to admit though, it’s a really effective strategy. All these TRAs present themselves as if they are experts on the gender critical feminist position, and then lie through their teeth. No one ever checks up on the source material independently. Not the average person on the street, not the politicians, certainly not the media. And of course others in the trans movement, who damn well know different because they have seen the source material, are not about to reprimand one of their own because they are being effective in advancing the cause. it’s a form of low politics that is practiced by the left and right, theocrats and secular alike. The only people who avoid it are those who care about facts and accuracy as values in themselves, and that’s a pretty small subset.
You’ve hit the nail on the head, Rob: they openly lie because it works. It’s a weird kind of double bluff, almost like they’re saying ‘You can easily find the source material to fact-check what we just said; we’ve even supplied the links to it. Feel free to check. But do you really think we’d lie to you when we could so very easily be found out?
@AOS
That was a technique pioneered by the climate denialists – provide a link that doesn’t work or leads to an article that doesn’t say what they’ve claimed but which is too long for most people to bother to read. So people will think “all these people sincerely believe this – there must be something in it”. The TRAs don’t even put in that level of effort. Instead they like to lie by implication. “I can’t understand why those terfs believe B when A.” and the uninformed are supposed to think “well, if it’s so obvious. . .”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance
And right on cue PZ posts an example of exactly that (and possibly libels JK Rowling into the bargain).
Rowling responded to a tweet that claimed the Nazis burned books on ‘trans healthcare and research’ by asking how it didn’t occur to the tweet’s author to fact check before posting about what may have been a fever dream.
‘Nuh-huh’, says PZ, they absolutely did do that and here’s a link to prove it.’ The link goes to a story of the 1933 burning of 20,000 books from the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sexology), a privately operated research space for studies of human sexuality, and is specifically about how one Rubin Mass rescued just two sheets of scorched paper from the ashes – apparently the only surviving remnants of the burning. The two sheets are likely – not ‘are’, as PZ states – from a book titled Sexualpathologie, by the Jewish German physician and sexologist, Magnus Hirschfeld, and per the article linked to by PZ, “[i]t appears that the book was dedicated to psychoanalysis or sexual education – subjects that were considered “Jewish” by the Nazis and worthy of being cast into the fire.” There is no mention whatsoever about trans-anything in the entire article except for an update concerning the possible i.d. of the book and its author, about whom it states that he was a “pioneer in sexual research and among the first to advocate for LGBT rights“, though I strongly suspect that the ‘T’ is a recent addition. And on this complete lack of evidence supporting the original tweet, PZ has declared that the Nazis did indeed burn books on trans healthcare, despite there being no information on what any of the other 19,999 books might have contained.
Which leads to PZ making this somewhat reckless claim:
Does JK Rowling’s pointing out a possible (probable?) error of fact equate to her wanting to bring back the death camps? PZ seems to think so, enough to not bother with couching his claim in more cautious terms like ‘it’s almost as if..’ or ‘does she want to..’. It’s almost as if (see what I did there?) he learnt nothing from his last brush with a libel lawsuit.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/