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Comments
https://www.miamiherald.com/latest-news/article238193064.html
I haven't really wanted to bring this up, considering how it went earlier this year, but it's important.
GMH, you said capitulating to the trans rights movement (a movement I would never dare conflate with actual transgender people) was merely an issue of comfort and convenience, and I argued from the point of ideological plurality, and how that is quickly being derailed, including by law.
Well, this week J.K. Rowling tweeted this:
This was in reference to a woman called Maya Forstater who tweeted, outside her job, similar statements. For this, she was let go from her job, and an employment tribunal has now ruled against her speech as "not worthy of respect in a democratic society".
J.K. Rowling is now being absolutely dragged through the mud, insulted, and Vox has written two hitpieces on the Harry Potter series chronicling how 'problematic' it is (thus ruining any credibility I was still willing to give it).
This stuff has gotten out of hand, and it basically confirms that literally anything that isn't constant, blind affirmation is now "Anti-Trans".
At this point, I'm well... scared for the world of ideas, because the argument has been settled and the consensus is that those that don't wish to toe the line must be excommunicated from everything, including real life.
I have no idea whether that is relevant to this situation.
EDIT: No, it's not relevant to this situation.
2. What do you mean by "capitulate with"? Edit: do you mean "conflate with"?
3. I don't understand the distinction you're making, because I don't understand the latter position.(see above line)4. Why do you use the term "capitulating"?
5. What does "ideological plurality" mean here?
Can you please explain what exactly is the subject of dispute here?
Is my guess correct, that this is about the phrase "sex is real"?
What exactly did Ms. Forstater say? What were people's objections to it?
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-50858919
At issue seems to be this:
Based on what this says, I disagree with Ms. Forstater's position.
However, from what I've heard, there's not yet been clarification on whether Ms. Rowling's position is in support of this belief or simply an objection to her being fired.
Furthermore, if Ms. Forstater had actually harassed someone by misgendering them in the course of her work, then terminating her employment would be a more clear-cut case.
But it's unclear whether that actually happened or whether this is simply about stating an opinion online, which then gets into more complicated legal considerations for which I don't have an easy answer.
(I'm not a judge though, so I get to avoid passing judgement. whee~)
I mean, I may have generalized a bit, but you said changing/and or policing pronouns was at the very least good for social cohesion (frankly I think it's the opposite and may be the movement's Achilles heel).
People should be allowed to hold views we find abhorrent as long as they aren't actively trying to harm others. Of course, they may try and influence politics and the law from this position, but if and only if their position makes logical sense.
Basically.
Again, I don't think trans women should be treated, for all intents and purposes, as biological women. It leads to a lot of working systems meant for biological women being broken (women's educational opportunities, grants, or company quotas*, women's sports, women's prisons, basically all women's single-sex spaces, etc).
Plus like, I don't know, what's exactly so terrible about being described in the way you are in reality? I know the majority of trans people are not okay with this view, but that doesn't turn around and make my point wrong. You can't use your emotions to fight a battle of logic. Eventually, people will notice.
And, honestly, just practically, there are a lot more women than trans women. But if all women's sports suddenly let in trans women, barring certain endurance events, women would basically be done in sports.
So when you say "trans women are women", what are women?
Well yeah, basically it's this. There's a shaky issue floating around about her refusing to refer to a certain SNP MP as a woman, but I can't be sure they ever met in real life for this to become an event. Surely, if it were, it'd have come out by now.
*See also, that time Elizabeth Warren claimed she was 1/1234567th Native American so her school could fulfill diversity quotas (I don't agree with diversity quotas either, but if you do, at least have them work right).
By the way, I actually don't want this to become a large argumentative thing, even though this is an issue that for me has become a sticking point of modern life. All I'm really saying here is that J.K.R. is being mobbed for a decent opinion, which is definitely a step too far, don't you think?
There's a surprising amount of content (that I don't actually want to link here for fear of being accused of either radicalization or just in general, being "one of them/the far right/etc") from way before 2019, like possibly from around 2014, that I think I'd wanted to see for a while but refused to (in 2014 The Atlantic ran a piece on detransitioners and I didn't read The Atlantic again for about a whole year because I couldn't understand why they'd say such hurtful things).
Basically, people who saw this coming and nobody listened to (and well, nobody listens to).
In fact, there's no way The Atlantic would publish such a piece now (Andrew Sullivan from New York Magazine does talk about these things frequently though).
I want to make a separate but relevant point
During the fight for gay rights in America, the NOH8 campaign and it's ilk were born. Probably resulting from the fact that anti-gay violence was on the decline (which must have been a real quandary for Jussie Smolett), we were convinced that young gay men were committing suicide at an alarming rate.
Of course, at the time, I was pretty young and still thought doing casual math wasn't that fun, but I have a strong suspicion that the fact on average kill themselves more was conflated with this message.
Because, for goodness sakes, if we take the entertainment industry as representative of something, how are there so many adult and old gay men in it? How are there suddenly so many gay men in positions of power in different organizations?
I suspect, because people are resilient, and they can take it. Unfortunately, there are indeed some that can't, and overall men commit a lot of suicide.
Teenage boys kill themselves quite a bit. They don't have to be gay to do it.
Of course a lot of these were indeed suicides of despair stemming from their issues, but that doesn't discount the fact that the campaign was built on a lie. I mean, it did a lot of things I wanted to happen (though I want to say "at the time", and certainly gay marriage in America was passed in a way I don't approve of and that concerns me in terms of further legal implications for that country).
Similarly, gay men go out into the world today and face lots of annoying people or just people who disagree with their choices in general, but I don't hear a lot of magnified media-sponsored complaining, because everybody -every human- gets that kind of stuff. I mean, just this week I've read through a lot of vitriol parsing through this debate, but it was okay because I can handle it, and so can most people.
Professional LGB people kept their heads down and worked hard. Though I admit some pushed for a lot of the insanity that's led here, there's also the fact that Tim Cook gladly sells phones to China/literally 70% of the planet because it suits his interests. I mean, Richard Quest on CNN's Top 10 Places to Be seem to all be places they can legally kill him (of course he has protections against that).
If so, why has misgendering become a high crime now? Can trans people really not take it? If so, isn't that something that should be investigated and addressed in a manner that well, doesn't seem to be coming down so hard on women?
The best way to change hearts and minds is to be there and be better than those you disagree with, not become somebody who genuinely advocates shunning Harry Potter. I mean, I will admit I have skin in this game; I need that third Fantastic Beasts movie made and I need it right about now.
Another thing is I think when we tore down "Love the sinner but hate the sin" ala Christianity, we opened the door to never forgiving anybody disagreeing with you, and no modern tenet seems to have replaced it. Instead, I feel like major intellectual discourse is falling down a hole of "Every transgression must be punished with immediate, permanent ostracizing."
At any rate, I've always told myself it's not my problem and move on, but I can't help but feel that perhaps I should think more about how accomodation is not always warranted. I mean, the athletes thing...
(Would I be right in guessing that there's been divisions between the LGB and T parts of it?)
It's more so that, after a few arguments with them, I realized that it's not like I can tell people's gender on the internet, and when I thought about some more I realized that it's not like I actually check people's genes or genitalia before deciding what pronouns to use to refer to them, yet the world keeps on turning anyway.
I mean, fundamentally, I had been identifying people's gender/sex* based on a bunch of proxy characteristics anyway. I've mistaken females for males and males for females before anyway, and this has happened in meatspace, long before I had ever met anyone who is trans. And then there's even fewer guidelines on the internet to go by. Hell, at some point I thought you were the opposite gender too.
(* The distinction between these terms isn't relevant in this sentence, but
later in this replyin the next post I will make a thing of this distinction.)On this more general point, how exactly does one decide what "makes logical sense" when people disagree on the fundamental assumptions behind that logic?
The short-ish answer is "an adult person who considers oneself to be female".
(The shortest answer is that I don't usually go out of my way to talk about this.)
You can certainly have subdivisions beyond that, of course, and medical/scientific inquiry may obviously relate to these subdivisions.
This goes both ways though; fearmongering over scary child molesters in public bathrooms is a rather common meme.
(Which is particularly ironic since getting people to stop making a fuss over who goes to which bathroom would likely make it less awkward for a parent to go into a bathroom not of their gender to help their kid.)
For what it's worth, I've gotten a rather different story from another person, with regards to this.
As for now, I'm in neither the "Rowling did nothing wrong" camp nor the "Rowling is an insidious TERF" camp. I don't see a reason for myself to weigh in on this controversy. (And frankly speaking I had little specific opinion of Ms. Rowling before this anyway. Besides, I think it's entirely possible to appreciate artwork without endorsing the moral stances of the artist.)
That said, the note that Forstater is not an employee who was fired but a contract worker whose contract was not renewed appears to be accurate so far.
(I have yet to check anything else, but frankly speaking this isn't my job.)
Sidenote: Race can be sort of an odd thing in the United States. Take Oklahoma for example, which is where Warren was born. There are people there who arguably look "white" but who are official members of Native Americans tribes, including two of Oklahoma's delegation to the House of Representatives. Also look to U.S. history, where the patterns of racial discrimination used to be directed at people of Polish, Italian, and even German origin. And more contemporaneously, there's still the odd question of what exactly "Hispanic" means (last I read, it is officially an "ethnicity" label that exists separately from a racial label).
(As for Ms. Warren, I will point you to the relevant section on her Wikipedia page for further information, which largely contradicts what you've written, actually.)
I don't feel like making another gigantpost in reply.
I disagree with ostracizing people merely over "they said something bad".
I think that a lot of people are generally too plugged-in to social media and social trends and of course this magnifies the problem of feeling pressured to hold/say certain things that support or oppose specific ideas or expressions of opinions or by extension endorse or condemn. There's a lot of questionable content that appears in this realm, from innocent comments blowing up, to people fanning flames intentionally, to people making snap judgements about people and thinking of and portraying people and groups of people as one-dimensional ideas to be opposed or supported on a linear scale, to cheap clickbait, to all sorts of identity politics stuff which I think as a general point focuses too much on what people happen to be rather than what people actually do.
(If I may be candid, I think that some of this criticism -- regarding being too plugged-in -- may be applicable to you, fourteenwings.)
Meanwhile, I think it is quite fine to have an opinion but not act on it, as well as to have no opinion or stay neutral on something.
As for the specific point about gender labels, if I give both sides the full benefit of the doubt, I'm seeing this as one person with a genuine personal belief regarding their gender and another person with a genuine personal belief regarding the first person being wrong about their gender. At this point, my proposal to them is simply to tell them to get along, by (1) going with the first person's genuine personal belief about their gender, (2) pointing out to the second person that it's not like they check the first person's genes or genitalia before talking to/about them, and even if they do, real life can sometimes be very weird, (for example, this), illustrating that the distinction they think of as a clear dichotomy actually isn't a clear dichotomy but is rather just a categorization that mostly works, with edge cases to be muddled through, and (3) cursing out how the English language doesn't natively have dedicated gender-neutral third-person singular pronouns (that are conjugated consistent with gender-specific third-person singular pronouns, if applicable) like various other languages do.
Regarding athletes, I happened to think of the case of Caster Semenya. That turns out to be a rather complicated case and in relevance to this topic I should note that Ms. Semenya is not a trans woman. So if you had concerns about what would happen with women's sports if trans women are allowed to compete in them, (1) said concerns are going to be a thing whether or not trans women are allowed in, and (2) if we ever come to the weird case where someone declares themselves to be trans just to screw with the records, we'll deal with it at that point.
But meanwhile, generally speaking, I don't see why we can't simply afford trans people the benefit of the doubt, rather than fearing for what might happen if they %whatever%. Chances are, most of the cases of people identifying themselves a certain way is not to mess with other people, but a genuine self-expression/self-identification of who they are.
And I think this "benefit of the doubt" might be a key concept here. Similarly to the question of checking a person's genes or genitalia, do we have similar checks to determine what someone's race is? I'm considered a member of a racial minority here in the United States. Yet I have had zero instances when people asked me for my or my parents' birth certificates to prove my race. Particularly with regards to interactions where other people don't even see me, my race is literally just a self-reported point of trivia. (And most amusingly, a friend of mine of this same race once commented that I don't even look like this race.)
* With regards to the gender vs. sex thing, the terms are generally used interchangeably, though I've heard some people say that gender refers to one's identity while sex refers to the anatomy.
This wasn't directed at me but maybe it applies to me anyways, perhaps? I'm not on social media anymore but maybe the less savory parts of this are reaching me indirectly.
*shrug*
Basically.
The whole point of accepting trans people, as far as I can honestly say, is that presenting as the opposite sex helps alleviate with gender dysphoria (this also hasn't always been proved to work, but it certainly works for some).
I wouldn't recommend becoming too politically active on hot button issues like this, it's not fun. I only do it because I'm obsessive.
GMH, we're arguing about a lot of things here, and I feel like if I keep feeding the fire we'll just never stop ever. So, I'll limit myself to two things:
JKR and Maya Forstater
First of all, this book -if it even exists-, was written before 1997. I can't take anybody's views on LGB or T+ issues from before 2010 seriously because those were everybody's views.
J.K.Rowling does not have something against trans people, at all. If anything, she's just put more thought into the topic than the average person.
TERFs are not bad people, but not only do they not accept this label (because at this point it's basically become a slur against them) but I've heard "dog whistle" so much over the last few days I... like... argh
So what if some feminists have opinions you don't like? I accept this as part of ideological plurality, but as I've said before; nobody will win this fight by dogging on women who don't think certain things are appropriate.
Also, somehow, I am yet to have anybody explain what "gender critical" actually means aside from "everybody who doesn't say exactly what trans activists say."
Is this not allowed now? If she had a feeling that this was why her contract wasn't going to be renewed, is she not allowed to express her desire to have her issues litigated in public because that means she's faking it?
Is she not allowed to have her own views and try to fight for them?
At this point Forstater is being painted as a hateful individual entirely because she has an opinion some people want razed from the internet.
Have you actually read the ruling against her? It's insane. The ruling said her view, not her methods or whatever this person is trying to argue, is 'not worthy of my respect'. Her view is like, two rungs below my view. This is where we are, in real life.
I said it helped them 'fulfill quotas', not that she got the job because of it or that her career was advanced because of it (I mean, E. Warren has written two very successful books and I have no doubts about her competence). I mean, honestly, it's a political move I have no ill feelings about.
Sports
How many more variations of "Exceptions are not the rule" do I have to come up with?
Rarely. They will be a thing rarely if trans women are not allowed in.
Caster Semenya is a unique case. All trans women who got enough testosterone during puberty (or worse, those who just like, never bother doing anything but self-declaring) will literally just win everything, no jokes. In fact, women's sports will basically become a competition between self-declarers and those who got on cross-sex hormones late.
That means, GMH, biological women will literally be unable to secure medals outside endurance events, ever.
That's not the intention, obviously, but that's the outcome. We can't be accommodating of people exactly one way. Especially if it means we have to just look at all the women who want to win at sports and reply with a collective shrug.
You might think what I'm advocating for is unfair, but so is most policy meant to protect people.
Women
How do you consider yourself to be female? There must be a consensus on this. There are biological women, obviously. Compared to any other group, they are a monolith in this whole "female" business.
Now we have a tiny, miniscule amount of biological men who want to be identified as such. For all intents and purposes in social interactions, sure, but if biological women don't want trans women in their spaces, I don't think that's something you can force. "Being yourself" can't mean gaining access to a space, or telling somebody else to change their preferences for you.
What even is the point of female when it stops referring to something observable (part of the sex binary, which exists, no matter what else happens, please don't "but it's complicated" me again because it's not) and rather to something that is largely unobservable? (feelings? platitudes?)
Social Media
Twitter, Vox and etc may not be real life, but they influences real life way more than they should have the right to. This is where we are now, and if you want to check out, you can, but it won't make these things any less real.
Do you honestly think I was prompted by social media when I tried to ignore how much I want to discuss this topic for months on end?
I also plead that we wind this down, it's past the point of productivity now.
Anyways, I do want to thank you guys. I've gotten a lot of stuff I've been keeping in my head off my chest here.
Also, I have not researched any of the points that that person whom I quoted made. I simply copypasted what they wrote. I cannot and do not vouch for the truth value of anything you or they have written regarding Rowling or Forstater (aside from what I could see from that BBC article, maybe).
Anyhow, you're probably right that we shouldn't continue this, as I don't think we're gonna arrive at any novel realizations about the human existence from here.
I've also found that my usual approach to political issues is to shy away from ones which I feel will be endless arguments, so it always frustrates me when I basically have controversies I don't feel like I have a solid approach regarding -- particularly controversies I don't even have a strong opinion about at all -- placed onto me and demanding my response.
(I don't mean to blame you for doing this to me, but just wanted to point out that this is a thing that I'm not really comfortable talking about because (1) I don't have a good case to make regarding it, (2) I don't even feel strongly about it, and (3) I am very much aware it is sort of a social minefield lately.)
So I'll try to keep this brief:
> Is she not allowed to have her own views and try to fight for them?
If the answer to this is "yes", this then raises the question of how far this allowance ought to go. If "no" or "not infinitely", then we end up with the question of how the limits on them ought to be decided.
> What even is the point of female when it stops referring to something observable
To what extent does this reasoning imply that being female (or more generally, gender) is solely something that exists for a social dimension/purpose?
Neo-Nazis once protested a Jewish neighborhood in New York, and this was allowed, I'm pretty sure that's a decent end point.
To this I say I think of sex-based boundaries as being sex-based. Therefore, there needs to be some sort of thing you can observe to enforce them.
I mean, I can probably point to a basis or at least reasoning for everything I've said here. This mysterious book by J.K.R. is not listed on her Wikipedia page, at the very least.
Vaguely related; Have you noticed how silly Christmas piñata looks arguing about these things?
1. I've just noticed how disconnected the question of "what counts as women for the purpose of sports?" is separable from the Forstater's contract not being renewed and Rowling's tweet in support of her. They do not have to be inextricably linked. The other angles of this issue can similarly be separable. It may be a mistake to try to solve all of them with one sweeping judgement.
2. re Sports
> "They will be a thing rarely if trans women are not allowed in."
Unless I'm mistaken, trans people are rare enough as is.
Edit: I should point out that you yourself described the set of all trans women as "a tiny, miniscule amount".
> "That means, GMH, biological women will literally be unable to secure medals outside endurance events, ever."
I would just like to point out three key assumptions for this (very strongly worded) prediction (as well as the contentions in the paragraph above it, which I haven't copied) to hold:
(i) That trans women will automatically be better at sports with exception of endurance events. This seems likely to be a gross oversimplification of how the human body works. Furthermore, this neglects the wrinkle wherein some trans women choose to undergo for hormone replacement therapy, of their own volition.
(ii) That they will want to get into competitive sports in large enough numbers so as to have a significant presence. Possible, perhaps, but I'm not sure there's enough of them. (As opposed to basically being present in small enough numbers that they end up being historical footnotes.)
(iii) That this aforementioned significant presence of (ii) will furthermore produce competitors capable of sweeping the awards, which in turn depends heavily on (i).
(Come to think of it, we might run into very similar questions with regards to possible unfair competitive advantages when artificial limb technology improves to the point where previously physically-disabled persons are able to walk and run as well as able-bodied persons.)
3.
> "To this I say I think of sex-based boundaries as being sex-based."
This seems like circular reasoning...? I don't really get your point.
> "Therefore, there needs to be some sort of thing you can observe to enforce them."
Based on the interactions I've had with trans folks, their goal appears to not be "to screw with the record books" or "to mess with other people's heads" (though this is actually how I used to feel about it, what with my very first exposure to this issue being someone changing their pronoun gender choice without me knowing about it then being upset at me for misgendering them when I interacted with them in an unrelated thread), but rather their goal appears to be to simply correct the fact that their social appearance and their body aren't reflective of the gender they consider themselves to be. And part of this means making their bodies more like that gender -- hence changing their appearance, and even doing stuff like sex reassignment surgery and hormone replacement therapy. In other words, it appears that the point isn't to "pretend to be" that sex; the point is to actually be that sex.
4. As a tangent, assuming the maximum benefit-of-the-doubt of assuming that these conflicting ideas are indeed genuinely-held personal beliefs, this raises the philosophical -- yet, ironically, practical -- question of "under what circumstances should one stand down with regards to one's genuinely-held personal beliefs?".
5.
> "Have you noticed how silly Christmas piñata looks arguing about these things?"
I'm pretty sure I've done worse.
Please revisit:
Plus the fact that my last reply was just four sentences in the interest of winding things down. This is becoming a drain that's going nowhere. I had one question for you, and I'm pretty sure you answered with "I don't know enough to make a judgement either way."
Discounting the fact that the counterpoint you copy-pasted from who-knows-where contains what amounts to a conspiracy theory, I'm really just want to move on.
I didn't actually link them, but we started talking about it alongside the issue at hand. I even made an effort to put it under an entirely separate heading just a few posts ago.
Men and women, post-puberty, develop different capabilities in different areas. Men basically coast by in terms of developing muscle-mass (I have learned a lot about this stuff lately). For evidence, see how time a trans woman enters a women's event, she becomes a team ace, champion of said event and/or a record-breaker.
I did not ignore this at all:
Also:
Last I checked, the Olympics only gives out three medals per event. That's enough, isn't it?
"A tiny, miniscule amount" that will keep winning.
For example, as per the CDC, about 300,000 American high schoolers identify as transgender. If any decent percentage of that are trans women interested in sports, they can completely dominate major competitions.
You're honestly telling me this somehow parallels tech made specifically to be better than humans? If so, why don't we just let sportspeople dope themselves into oblivion?
The basic based-in-reality fact is that this is impossible. Which is why I said;
You should never look to foist your own concept of "yourself" on others.
Plus, right now, I'm quite worried about young women and this whole "be" the other sex thing. Though we think we've made progress about sexist stereotypes, I feel like they're gaining strength again. We're actually seeing women who were previously body dysphoric or anorexic disappear into gender-identity stats, and a bunch of them are actually realizing this is the case.
So, as I said before, we're past productive discussion on this, so let's try and wrap up.
By the way, I actually tried to avoid making my posts into giant messes of links before because I wanted to make my argument on merit, but I have this feeling that you're ignoring that these things are happening right now (hence the mentioning of cyborg athletes).
Also, I could speak more about ideas regarding definitions of "gender" and "sex". But at some point I'm wondering whether my thoughts on these these things might be best revisited after passions have died down regarding the issues at hand.
I've had enough awkward conversations (with people of various opinions/ideologies) about this stuff and gotten enough backlash already, and it's gotten to the point where I find myself trying to thread needles pretty much constantly to find the right words that express my perspective accurately but also don't drive people away, and it's exhausting to do so.
(And yes, like I implied in passing earlier, this is not the only conversation I've had about literally this latest controversy, and it is very definitely not the only conversation I've had on this general topic.)
Just a quick follow-up on a philosophical point:
> You should never look to foist your own concept of "yourself" on others.
There is the counterpoint question to this, though:
"You should never look to foist your own concept of others onto them."
This is kinda related to the question I mentioned earlier, about when one should stand down with regards to one's genuinely-held beliefs.
FWIW, I don't think that this forum thread will solve these philosophical questions, or any public policy questions either. I intend these as simply putting these out there as things to consider. (It would be a mistake to interpret me as endorsing a certain opinion when all I'm doing is raising points to ponder.)
Well, yeah. I mean it's not something I can discuss thoroughly otherwise.
I'll check back in 2030 (hopefully).
This is also my stance entirely, though I'm of the persuasion that we should ignore (or forgive if they so desire) of those who do.
See, we wasted two pages on a specific policy decision instead of making sure we get the IJBM Party on the ballot in every country across the world. Then we can actually have fruitless discussions on the world stage just like real politicians.
I agree with this, and I applaud your commitment to neutrality here.
Because it's getting marketed so hard I'm starting to get "Minions" feels from it
However, Star Wars and Marvel movies operate like Fate/Grand Order or other gacha games. There's a giant base of whales who will pay to see the movies immediately, then again, then buy them/stream them on home video, then dedicate the next few years to buying merchandise. These audiences exist internationally too (except re:Star Wars and China) which leads to big bucks.
But Hollywood movies are big deals, so the average person will probably check in to see what all the fuss is about.
Oh Wikipedia...
Now that's dedication.
On more horrifying news, I just learned about the Bhopal Disaster: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
Do we see so much of the unusual on a regular basis that the mundane has become the unusual and the unusual has become the mundane, in our entertainment?
It depends on the sort of stuff you watch. If all you watch is cable-style Netflix originals, then your expectations of a story will be wildly different from somebody who watches anime all day.