You are simply not stating facts and are deliberately misrepresenting what others are saying.
…I’m telling you how I felt. I’m not misrepresnting how you made me feel.
Fair enough. I’ll cede that RationalWiki might not be a very good cite. I had assumed that it was something like Talk Origins.
Nevertheless, if you’d read more on the case, you would have discovered Meghan Murphy, who is exactly one of those TERFs you claimed do not exist.
From Wikipedia:
AHunter3.
Please use words here. Linking to your blog is OK so long as you don’t do it too often. But just linking to it? Not OK. Provide an argument next time.
Or he could go to WoLF’s own website. Astonishing that people who don’t actually exist can maintain a website.
By the way, while I’m here, one question. How the hell does the existence of trans-people harm you, personally? What tiny difference does it make in your life–your real life, not some bizarre hypothetical–to be asked to treat a few of your fellow human beings with dignity and respect? Hell, you don’t even have to mention or discuss them at all. I mean, I’m a bog-standard cisgendered straight white dude, and the only time I ever think about these things is when I foolishly let myself get sucked into some idiotic internet “debate” like this one. Just live your own life and be polite to people, for fucks sake.
Also, just so TPTB know, you’ve all driven at least one more board member off, one that I know for sure. Maybe others.
This is it for me in this thread.
It doesn’t. No one in this thread has said the existence of transgender people harms them.
Then why be shitty to them, like J.K. Rowling is? Leave them the fuck alone. And yes, that includes threads “debating” whether they are “really women.”
So you’re just misgendering and attacking them for fun?
monstro, when you find yourself creating bizarre hypotheticals, it’s a real good time to step back and ask yourself, what are you doing? Because this isn’t remotely how things actually go down in the real world. It’s not at all a good approach to dialogue.
Vaguebooking is profoundly uninteresting. If you actually have something to say, I encourage you to say it; this sort of “haha you made a point you didn’t mean to make” juvenalia is downright soporific.
Left Hand of Dorkness, is that scenario really that bizarre? Are my questions really THAT crazy?
I give up.
Yeah, it’s really that bizarre. Have you ever known someone who has a moustache and a goatee and a bald head who says, “I’m just as much a woman as you”? That’s a pernicious caricature of transwomen.
Type less. Read more. You’ve got some really weird assumptions on this issue, or else you wouldn’t make such bizarre scenarios. But I don’t think you’re doing it maliciously; I think you’re someone who’s persuaded by data. So read more.
I’m fortunate that someone with lots of experience with gender discourse has decided to engage me through PM. I really do hope they will be able to see through the “bizarreness” of my questions and not totally dismiss me. If they do, OK. I’ll take that as a sign that this topic isn’t for me and I just need to stay away from it.
It’s weird that you’re telling me to “read more” but you aren’t telling me what to read. You’re assuming I haven’t already read a lot, haven’t tried hard enough. My posting history belies both notions, IMHO. I’ll try not to take offense at your shitty insinuations, though. Cuz I like you as a poster.
She wasn’t. You have to do something transphobic to be transphobic.
Straw man nonsense doesn’t impress me. This bizarre “everyone who slightly disagrees with me is evil and I’ll accuse them of stuff that never happened” thing is irritating as hell, but perhaps worse is that there’s a legitimate discussion to be had here that’'s being tossed away by weird, over-the-top accusations.
Then stop using it.
Strawman. Nobody’s said anything close to that. You did misgender and horribly insult at least one non-binary person. Don’t pretend you didn’t.
Yeah. My fucking discussion that you’ve argued in with pretty much nothing but bullshit strawman arguments and unadulterated transphobic venom.
If I could block you, I would block you. May do it anyway through the miracle of browser coding.
I like you as a poster, too. If you genuinely need some direction on what more to read, I’ll try to point you in some directions, but I’m no expert; I’ve just been reading previous threads and listening to what our trans members (or trans ex-members, mostly, at this point) have said.
In my experience, trans women don’t groom and dress themselves to accentuate cultural masculine features like goatees and moustaches. They don’t go out of their way to whine about mansplaining or take other MRA-style positions. And they really, really don’t introduce their gender by saying “Don’t start with me! I’m just as much a woman as you!”
If there’s a single transwoman on earth who’s behaved in anything like this manner I’d be astonished.
Why not try a scenario that’s likelier to occur? You could have a college student who’s recently started living as her gender, and who’s terrified of being misgendered. You could have the student tentatively say something in class that indicates that she’s female, and you could have other students, male or female, mock her. You could have the professor use her pre-transition name and pre-transition pronouns and refuse to change them. You could have her face violence from some shithead who was making a pass at her before he realized she was trans, and who has to beat her up to salvage his fragile masculinity.
These are the kinds of experiences that I’ve heard about from trans women. Wearing a goatee and moustache and attacking the concept of mansplaining? Not so much.
Ignorant question perhaps but should those who identify as non- binary or fluid be under the trans umbrella?
It seems to me that trans women and men are dealing with different existential issues than are those who identify as fluid.
That’s fair. I could have presented a more likely scenario. But the rare scenarios are how axioms get tested and refined. The really interesting stuff always happens at the edges, not in the middle.
I gave the poster who is working with me via PM some context that I didn’t provide in my earlier post. Apologies in advance for going back to race:
There is no unified “black experience”. But at least among progressive circles, it is widely understood and appreciated that racial discrimination is an important part of the black experience. To wit, whenever I find myself in the presence of a lot of black folks (with no white folks present), the conversation almost always turns to discussions of racial wrong-ness and fuck-uppery. Being followed in stores. Being wrongfully pulled over on the highway. Being treated “less than” by bosses and coworkers. Being racially harrassed by rando white folks. Things we’ve heard other people talk about. Things we’ve experienced ourselves.
Now, I’ve had my fair share of racial weirdness and microaggressions. But can I say I’ve been racially discriminated against? No. So usually in these discussions, I’m a listener rather than a talker. No one wants to hear how it gets on my nerves when my boss speaks jive talk around me. That just doesn’t compare to being called a “black bitch” in rush hour traffic.
But let’s say one day I decide to be a “talker”. And I decide to say: “You know what? No racial shit like [whatever is being discussed] has ever happened to me. I’m starting to think y’all are exaggerating, no offense.”
(I would never say this!! But I have heard individual black folks say something like this before. I’m related to some of them! So maybe that’s why my scenario doesn’t seem all that bizarre to me.)
Now if I did say something like this, I know what would happen. The folks that I’m talking to would tell me to pump my brakes and check my privilege. They would point out that I don’t really look black–with my yellow complexion and ambiguous facial features. I could easily pass as “non-black”. They wouldn’t deny me my right to identify as black. But they would let me know that being black while looking “non-black” is a very different experience than being black while looking black. They would remind me that racial perception is more important than self-identification in the context of mistreatment.
So perhaps you can see why the scenario I laid out in the sociology classroom isn’t THAT inconceivable for me. Perhaps there would never be a case like that, so apologies for all the creative license. But I can totally see how someone could (willfully or no) disregard the privilege of their perceived gender because doing otherwise would threaten their self-selected gender. We know that people can be willfully blind to race, abelist, and class privilege. However, in those arenas it is socially acceptable to point out the obvious. If my black friends were to say, “You probably don’t face racial harrassment because you don’t look black”, no one would call them hateful. The sentiment might be debatable, but it wouldn’t be condemned as racist. “Not looking black” is not a controversial thing to talk about. Both white and black folks know what “looking black” means. We also have some idea of what “not looking black” is.
Now take this response to a male-presenting woman who downplays the existence of sexual harrassment to women: “You probably don’t face sexual harrassment because you look like a man.” Is that a transphobic, TERFy thing to say? As BigT said upthread, we could just call that person an asshole and not say anything about how they look or identify. But an ad hominom attack doesn’t help anyone learn. The racial analogue to this does not sound racist to my ear, so perhaps that is why it doesn’t sound inherently transphobic or TERFy to my ear. I can see how it could trigger hurt feelings in a sensitive person. But does that mean we should never “go there”?
Perhaps a respectful, non-knee jerk answer to this question can help me figure out where the line between shit and non-shit is (which was the purpose of the scenario in the first place). The other questions I have are not as important.
The interesting stuff may happen at the edges, but only at the realistic edges. This response (“you look like a man”) can happen in two scenarios:
- It can be said to a woman–trans or cis–who looks so much like a man that literally nobody ever takes her for a woman.
- It can be said with foolishness, hostility, or more likely both to a woman whose features aren’t stereotypically feminine.
#1 is what I find profoundly unlikely, so unlikely that it can be safely dismissed as worth discussing.
#2 is what’s likelier, and it’d be a bizarro wrong thing to say. No trans woman who gets misgendered as a man faces zero sexual harassment. That’s not the way the world works.
If #1 somehow happened in the world, though, why would it necessarily happen to a transwoman? I think it’d be much likelier to happen to a cis woman who didn’t give a shit about projecting femininity. And if it did happen, it’d prove the larger point, that men tend not to sexually harass those people that they identify as male (or at least don’t do so to the degree or in the same way that they harass people they identify as female).
It could just be ignorance. Changing gender seems…unlikely since it is not in our common experience. There is a reason Jurassic Park used the idea of the dinosaurs spontaneously switching gender as a plot device because most people would think such a thing is not possible and it was a surprise. There was an “oooh” factor when we get that revelation.
That is not the same thing as a man marrying a man since marriage is a social construct and is whatever we choose to say it is.
That said Rowling may well be aware it is possible and is just transphobic. I have no idea. I am merely suggesting it is not necessarily so.
Sometimes I just cannot believe this place.
Monstro put forth a scenario, and maybe it’s unlikely, but it’s not all that unlikely.
Here is an actual, real world scenario, that happened. A man tried to sue a hospital for misgendering him. The lawsuit was quickly shut down as the hospital basically told him to go pound sand, although much more nicely than that. Because in order to collect damages you have to have damages, and he didn’t have any, other than hurt feelings.
But honestly, when you’re in for a workup about whether you can have a hysterectomy now, or whether you should wait, because you just gave birth and you’re still breastfeeding and you plan on doing that for at least a few more months, and someone writing in your file refers to you as “her”? Come the fuck on. If this complainant could not see how that could be an honest mistake then I just don’t know.
I am not transphobic, but I do have lines that I draw, and one of them is that men don’t give birth. If you just gave birth then medically, you are female. You didn’t just make medical history. Maybe you present as a man, maybe in your head you’re male, maybe you and your male partner are in a same-sex marriage, but you better hope your physicians have a good grounding on the female body because that’s what you have in this case.
The other line is the whole “these are my pronouns” thing. “She,” “he,” “they”–these are third-person pronouns, used by people talking about you. Not to you. To demand that people use your name (or your preferred name, as they would undoubtedly say) when talking to you is one thing. It’s reasonable and polite to do so. It seems arrogant and fatuous to demand that people use certain words when they discuss you outside your presence, just as much as it would seem arrogant and probably useless to demand that they don’t talk about you at all.