Or random assholes. Or Russian trolls. Or Trumpers trying to make trans people look bad. Or who knows? These are random internet people we’re talking about. Hundreds or even thousands of links to tweets from random internet people strikes me as no particularly useful information. Just the ubiquitous, disgusting, racist, misogynist, transphobic, etc., background noise of the internet.
In some discussions, sure. But why is personal experience a problem in this one?
I identify as a radical feminist.
It has elicited some knee-jerk hostile reaction from trans people who immediately start calling me TERF.
You are a random person on the internet. What reason is there to take your anecdotal accounts about trans-people you know more seriously than the various tweets you dismiss with a wave of the hand.
Exactly! What I’ve offered is pretty much identical to what has been offered throughout this thread, when it comes to characterizing the attitudes of trans people, trans allies, or trans activists, as a group.
Maybe it’s possible that the trans people I interact with are just unusually wonderful people, and not representative. But in order to believe that, I’d need to see some sort of actual evidence – maybe a scientific, repeatable and repeated poll that shows that XX% of trans people believe that rape threats are appropriate for JKR. But just random tweets and such? That’s not evidence. That’s just the internet. With sufficient time, I could find hundreds or thousands of people on twitter who say they’re black and who love Trump. This gives us zero information about actual black support for Trump.
I would suspect that most people you interact with are wonderful people, and trans people just happen to be part of that set of wonderful people. If someone was toxic, I would guess you would not really interact with them very much regardless of their gender identity.
I only interacted regularly with two transwomen (they were coworkers), but I would describe their communication style much more as similar to males than females. They both had the common male communication style of dominating the conversation, mansplaining, interrupting, talking endlessly without concern that the other person was not interested, etc. I’m not sure if that rises to the level of “toxic”, but I would guess that it would be off-putting to most women just like it is when it comes from men.
A person’s circle of friends is statistically unlikely to be representative of anything except their circle of friends. Perhaps you simply are not the sort of person who associates with assholes, which is of course to your immense credit.
Many of the accounts associated with these threats as associated with known trans activists.
Tell me, though. If the abuse has been sourced by shit stirring Russian trolls and other imposters, can you point me to any trans activists who have issued statements strongly and unequivocally disavowing these threats? Have they done anything to temper the feelings of those in the community who might be encouraged towards violence by these supposedly fake threats? I’ve seen nothing like this.
What about the vandalism and attempts to defund and defame the Vancouver rape shelter? Just run of the mill background noise too? Destroying a refuge for female rape victims sounds awfully misogynistic to me, and it was perpetrated by activists you’re now excusing.
You are in denial if you refuse to see this for what it is. Wake up please.
This was trivially easy to find:
There are many more such links on the first few pages of searching Google. And tons more random internet people expressing similar sentiments - maybe critical of some of what JKR said, but unequivocally denouncing threats and violence and such.
I would never excuse such behavior.
This was an article criticizing the Sun, not the torrent of “suck my girl cock, bitch” hatred directed by her by the online mob.
The Sun published a defense of violence against JKR. And these trans activists strongly denounced it.
Do you take the same view of abuse other women have reported receiving for more mainstream feminist views? That it could be Russian trolls or unrepresentative people, but anyway says nothing about men or society?
Of course not. And the threats against JKR reveal, once again, the incredible misogyny in our society. I’m disputing that random tweets tell us anything about the views of trans people or trans activists as a group, not that there isn’t widespread misogyny. Our society is catastrophically and monumentally misogynistic (as well as racist, homophobic, transphobic, and more) and it’s fucking disgusting.
I don’t see any reason to believe that twitter threads about JKR (or anything else) are any more representative than “people Andy knows”.
If I pointed to the existence of Twitter threads full of racist commentary to support my belief racism is still a social problem, I now expect that you will dismiss the significance of this observation because “people Andy knows” aren’t racist.
But excuse me for not being impressed by this logic.
Misogyny is an utterly massive problem in our society. The threats against JKR are a great example of this.
I’m unconvinced that this tells us anything about misogyny in the trans community or among trans activists (beyond that yes, it probably exists in greater than zero trans people and activists).
Do you see the difference in what I’m saying?
For another example, I know tons of racists, tons of misogynists, tons of transphobes, etc. The vast majority are white men. There is indeed a huge problem of racism, misogyny, transphobia, etc., among white men, based on my experience AND tons of polling and other factual evidence.
This is kind of a hijack, but why white men in particular? Aren’t women equally likely to be racist, men of all races to be misogynist, and any heterosexual to be homo- or transphobic? Is it just safer to rail against white men?
Not by the data I’ve seen, at least in the US. IIRC, white men are one of the few demographics that still approves of Trump.
For the purposes of this discussion I’m prepared to include ‘white men in the US who support Trump’ as part of the population sample that belongs to the set of “people Andy knows”, therefore lacking sufficient representation to support the argument in favor of the trans community being less misogynist. I dismiss it thus.