I don’t think they hide the fact that they are transphobic. They’ll sell you a mug which proudly proclaims it.
Which is their perogative, but don’t gaslight us that it’s is not a transphobic company that she chose to promote.
I’m no expert on feminist philosophy in general or Judith Butler in particular, but my layperson’s interpretation of her position is that the vast majority of how we understand and react to other people’s biological sex is heavily dependent on cultural factors like behavior, speech, presentation, etc. We (almost always) don’t perceive one another as detached sets of genitalia, but as people.
I don’t think so. The core issue here, as I noted above, is whether it’s right to insist on using certain unmodified general terms like “woman” and “female”, or “man” and “male”, as strictly and solely synonymous with biological sex.
Personally, I think that this insistence is unjust to transgender people, but J.K. Rowling evidently doesn’t. So I don’t see anything wrong with Radcliffe emphasizing this issue in disagreeing with Rowling and criticizing her remarks. (I also don’t see anything wrong with you disagreeing with Radcliffe and criticizing his remarks. As long as none of us are doing the abusive-language-and-death-threats thing, it’s all good.)
Nah, I disagree with your use of the term “erasure” (and I think your “bullshit for brains” remark is getting pretty close to the sort of abusive language that you complain about when it’s directed against Rowling or other GC advocates).
ISTM that “erasure” actually works like this:
Using exclusive language is contributing to erasure of minority/marginalized groups, because they are excluded by it.
Using inclusive language is not contributing to erasure of majority/dominant groups, because they are still included in it.
Some examples:
“Every Presidential candidate must release his tax returns” comes across as erasing women.
“All Presidential candidates must release their tax returns” does not come across as erasing men. Because the pronoun “their” still includes men.
“In marriage, communication between husband and wife is very important” comes across as erasing gay people.
“In marriage, communication between spouses is very important” does not come across as erasing straight people. Because the term “spouses” still includes straight people.
“Only women need to get cervical screening” comes across as erasing transgender people.
“Only people with cervixes need to get cervical screening” does not come across as erasing cisgender women. Because the term “people with cervixes” still includes cisgender women.
TL;DR: Linguistic erasure is about being implicitly excluded from a named category, rather than about simply not being explicitly mentioned in it.
Since people have the power nowadays to unilaterally redefine concepts without getting society’s approval, explain why these are any more wrong or offensive as “transwomen are women” or “lesbians have penises” or “lesbians are queer”.
These slogans are all political speech. Do they provoke feelings? Yes. That doesn’t make them wrong or mean-spirited.
As I see it, lesbians are perfectly well within their rights to assert the criticality of same-sex attraction to lesbianism. It is no more “mean-spirited” of them to assert this than it is to assert any other political boundary under dispute. I also see nothing problematic about lesbians rejecting the “queer” label or distancing themselves from a movement that is increasingly alienating them with TERF slurs and other misogyny.
Political speech is supposed to make us think, not just reflexively lash out in emotion. If you haven’t seriously considered—with an open mind—why lesbians might be alienated from LGBT, then you aren’t thinking hard enough. You probably aren’t listening to what they are saying. And you probably are failing to understand the totally unsurprising dynamics that occur when a stigmatized group is not allowed to define its own community without the interference of people socialized as heterosexual males.
“Transwomen are men” is more offensive than “transwomen are women” because it’s contradicting the way transgender women themselves choose to identify.
Similarly, saying “Same-Sex ‘Marriage’ Isn’t Marriage” is more offensive than saying “Same-Sex Marriage Is Marriage”.
Because straight people aren’t the only ones who get to have a say in what qualifies as “marriage”, and cisgender women aren’t the only ones who get to have a say in who qualifies as a “woman”.
I don’t know whether your example “lesbians have penises” is meant to imply “some lesbians have penises” or “all lesbians have penises”. IMO the latter would be wrong and highly offensive, while the former is not.
I’ve got a similar problem understanding exactly what you mean by “lesbians are queer”. AFAICT, and I’m no expert, some lesbians identify as queer and some do not. I don’t think either group has the right to make that declaration for all lesbians.
I’m very willing to listen to—and have been attentively listening to—sincere GC concerns about the unique experiences of cisgender women and girls and the importance of cisgender-female-only spaces in certain circumstances, or about the importance of not using transgender identity to prop up gender stereotypes, or about the dangers of forcing transgender identity as a supposed “cure” for homosexuality, or other serious issues.
But I’m not willing to listen to absolutist GC declarations that they’re the only gatekeepers of who may identify as a “woman” or a “lesbian”, and that other people’s identifications are invalid if GC advocates don’t agree with them.
I’m certainly not willing to listen to openly demeaning and hateful anti-trans propaganda like “Fuck Your Pronouns”. (I’m also not willing to listen to, and in fact have been consistently condemning in this thread, openly demeaning and hateful anti-GC propaganda like “All TERFs Go To Hell” and other abusive and violent language.)
When people tell you who they are, believe them. That store hawks merchandise with “transphobe” on it. Seems to me if someone (like the proprietors of that store) is identifying themselves as a transphobe, it’s fair to call them transphobic.
Hopefully JKR missed this and withdraws her endorsement.
Yeah, when I saw the T-shirt in that Rowling-endorsed store proclaiming “Man-Hater, Feminazi, Prude, Witch, Bigot, TERF”, I was like well, at least they’re being up-front about it. I’m skeptical that any of them are literally witches in the Harry Potter sense, but that’s got more to do with my beliefs than theirs.
So in plain speech, culture influences how we treat people based on their perceived sex. Just like culture influences how we treat people based on their perceived socioeconomic class, perceived ethnic origin, perceived health status…you get the picture.
I doubt anyone would dispute this, and I seriously doubt this was Butler’s point because it is not profound. If I see someone who is short in stature, wears clothes adorned with cartoon characters, and talks with a high pitched voice about superheroes, I will interact with them as though they are a child. I will do this even if I haven’t confirmed their age; I’m making an assumption based on previous experience. Most of the time pattern recognition if thus kind serves us well; the rare times it doesn’t are cocktail party stories.
If you think it’s no big deal that Judith Butler argued that cultural constructs affect and mediate biological reality, it shouldn’t require a expert to parse this, right? Concepts that are no big deal should be easy to explain. One of the problems I have with Butler is that her writing appears intentionally opaque. It’s not just the content of her ideas that make a criticized subject; the incoherence also is hard to miss.
But when transwomen urge society to call them women, they affect women’s identity by association. Not only are women getting tagged with “cis” whether they consent to it or not, they are watching the word “woman” and “female” become redefined to allow males to apply those terms to themselves, at their will. Now it’s become taboo to use those words specifically for the female sex class.
If it’s okay for women to be reclassified as something that contradicts the way they see their own demographic group, then it shouldn’t off limits to put the shoe on the other foot. It is inconsistent to argue otherwise.
You’re really analogizing same-sex marriage to
the biological and sociopolitical identity of almost half of the human population? Again?
Ok.
As a straight woman, it’s not my place to tell lesbians who they have to let into their community. Respecting their right to their own sexual orientation means they decide the boundaries for that orientation. Not people who feel entitled to their sexual receptivity.
Or maybe you’re doing modulo-2 arithmetic, in which context your statement would be entirely correct.
That’s actually a beautiful example of how somebody can naively assume that a particular statement is “obviously wrong” or “self-evidently meaningless”, etc., when in fact it does have a valid meaning based on defining some common concepts a bit differently from what they assume.
People are getting tired of being called transphobe. It’s been wielded as a weapon so much it doesn’t have power any more.
Same with TERF. Women are claiming the term as a badge of honor now and laughing in the faces of those brandishing it as a silencing tactic. Especially lesbians who are beyond fed up with justifying their preference for female bodied lovers.
I said this before and I will say it again. We are in a culture war right now. The backlash against gender ideology “wokeness” is playing out. The store you’re talking about? It’s making a shiton of money right now. Female customers see this merchandise as a way of fighting a harmful ideology. A year ago, this wouldn’t be happening. It’s happening now because women are waking up to the misogyny and it’s scaring them.
Maybe. And maybe some folks actually really do hate trans people and are glomming onto this kind of controversy and real disagreement because they want excuses to demean and dehumanize trans people. I would hope that decent people (like, hopefully, JKR) would want to take care to make sure they’re not aiding and abetting real transphobic bigots, which really do exist and aren’t a figment of trans and trans ally imaginations.
If someone proudly identifies as a transphobe, it’s fair to consider that maybe they’re a transphobe. Trans hatred isn’t imaginary.
Misogyny isn’t either.
Consider the possibility that people wearing “Transphobe” on their shirt are making a political statement about misogyny.
It’s possible. Also possible that they’re transphobes.
Like if someone wore a shirt that said “racist” or “anti Semite”, I suppose it’s possible they’re trying to make some weird political point. But I think it would be more likely that they’re racist or anti Semite.
No, it’s not inconsistent to argue that people have a better right to affirm their own gender identity than to deny someone else’s gender identity.
If a transgender woman calls herself a woman, that is not in any way telling you that you’re not a woman. Yes, her identification is based on a particular expanded definition of the word “woman”, but you’re not the one in charge of deciding whether she’s allowed to use that definition.
In fact, nobody’s in charge of that. The recognized meanings of words change over time based on the behavior of language users as a whole.
But you’re cherry-picking a particular subset of lesbians—in this case, the comparatively small GC transgender-excluding subset of lesbians—and claiming that they’re somehow entitled to determine the criteria of “lesbianhood” for all lesbians.
Once again, having the right to affirm one’s own sexual orientation doesn’t give anyone the right to deny other people’s sexual orientation. Radical GC lesbians are not “Popes of Lesbianism” who get to excommunicate other lesbians who don’t meet their preferred criteria.
Mind you, I’m not saying that specific lesbian subgroups don’t have the right to free association as a subgroup. If a particular GC-inclined lesbian community decides that they don’t want to date or be friends with or have group meetings with any lesbians who are transgender, or any trans-friendly cisgender lesbians, that’s entirely their right.
But it’s not up to them to determine whether transgender lesbians are “allowed” to identify as lesbians at all.
If identifying as a “transphobe” is making a political point, then what is that point? Seems to me it could be two things:
- Transphobia isn’t real, or if real it’s trivial and unimportant, and thus it’s ridiculous to be called a transphobe.
- Transphobia is a positive good.
Maybe there’s another option. But it’s hard to imagine one that’s not either defending transphobia or dismissing it as unimportant, neither of which are morally defensible, IMO.
Transwomen arent in charge of decreeing this either, but you seem to think they are simply because they will it so.
You can continue to insist that women have no reason to object to transwomen calling themselves women, but I am unmoved by this insistence after seeing you defend the use of “menstruators” in place of women and advocate tor calling female sports teams “Team A”. If this is the crap that comes with calling transwomen women, then yes it does affect women.
You could ask the person who made the shirt.
Well, like I said, ISTM pretty reasonable that individuals have a better right to affirm their own gender identity than to deny someone else’s gender identity.
Trying to change the subject to garbled misunderstandings of things I didn’t say, rather than addressing the things I actually am saying, is not a useful argument strategy in the long run.
Well, if somebody’s trying to make a political point with a T-shirt slogan that can’t be understood without personally asking the shirt designer for an explanation, I’d argue that that’s a symptom of a pretty crap design. ISTM far more likely that the GC-slogan and other merchandise from this Rowling-endorsed vendor is intended to convey exactly the message that it says.
So, for instance, for the buttons printed with “Fuck Your Pronouns”, ISTM the “point” is to let transgender, nonbinary, etc. people know that the wearer feels entitled to deny, disregard and insult their gender identity. The “point” of the button saying “No Such Thing As a Lesbian with a Penis” is to proclaim that the wearer asserts the right to decide whether other people’s gender identity and sexual orientation is “real” or not.
Yes, I suppose you could call all those “political statements”, but AFAICT their main purpose is just to insult transgender people and scold them for being “wrong” about their own identity, under the pretense of “defending” non-transgender women.
It strikes me as being an unforgivably stupid error. You’d think a woman with basically all the money has someone who does that.
I can’t blame lesbians for being angry about what’s been happening. They get enough shit from men who think they are entitled to their bodies, and now they’re getting it from trans women too, with the added bonus that they get called transphobic for refusing.
The point is that they are only attracted to women, biological women, and they are being told that makes them transphobes. So very well, they’ll be proud transphobes. The same way they proudly called themselves lesbians, also a term of disapproval and abuse.
Who has a better right to decide whether Rachel Dolezal is black? Black people or Rachel Dolezal?
Who has a better right to decide whether I’m an American? Americans as a group, or me?
If we decide that ‘doctor’ now means anyone who says they are a doctor, will that have an effect on doctors as a group? Of course it will!
If you tell me you’re a lesbian, and I notice that you only have relationships with men, I should be free to have my own opinion on your professed identity. The same as any other damn thing you say about yourself.