And yet female is being treated like a dirty word too.
I get the sense that you think this is a “meh” concern not egregious enough to complain about, but it’s part of the reason “transphobe” shirts are getting purchased right now. Women who refuse to be handmaids for their own erasure are being called transphobe.
And here’s another reminder that it’s not just women who are pushing back on the gender movement. Gay men are finding it oppressive too. Let’s see if Rupert Everett will be threatened with beat downs and rape for his views.
Well, I see someone wearing a shirt that says “white people are smarter than blacks, duh” and that person spends a lot of time on the internet discussing individual mentally deficient black men and posting pseudo-scientific studies about how whites are smarter than blacks and in response to criticism posts a picture of mentally deficient black man and says “no one with two brain cells to rub together could think this person is as smart as a white guy, SO THERE…
…yeah, I’m going to think that person is a big freaking racist, no matter how much they try to justify or deny it.
They aren’t denying they are transphobic. They refuse to let the word be used as bully club against them anymore, so they are claiming it the same way they claimed dyke.
Your failure to understand and appreciate the protest buried in this statement obviously isn’t keeping them awake at night, and in fact, it’s probably yielding a good many guffaws. I too am chuckling at the earnest “if someone shows you who they are, believe thems”. Good lawd.
Likening them to racists is like likening 18th century Native Americans to racists when they tried fighting off colonizers Manifest Destining them off their own lands. If you want to draw parallels, try that one please. The story we are living in right now is older than time. The people y’all are demonizing are the subjugated, not the oppressors.
Y’all are terrible with analogies.
There is no movement of black people (or allies) yelling at white people for not seeing them as white people. There is no movement of black people calling white people “racist” for choosing to date people they are personally attracted to rather than black people who feel entitled to white validation and affirmation. When black people start doing this, y’all have my permission to wear whatever offensive t-shirts you want about black people.
Think of it like this: If Incel men were calling lesbians “sexist!” for not being attracted to them, would you have a problem with them wearing a “SEXIST” t-shirt? Or would you feel like lesbians have every right to appropriate this slur since it’s being hurled at them for a stupid, ignorant, hateful reason?
That’s what “TRANSPHOBE” is in this particular context. It’s lesbians reclaiming a term that has lost meaning. It used to mean “person who hate trans people.” Now it’s being used as a cudgel for anyone who dares to talk about their sexual attraction rather than “gender identity attraction”. This aspect of the discourse poses an existential threat to gays and lesbians, who have fought hard for sexual attraction to be treated as a real, immutable, intrinsic characteristic of an individual.
If a lesbians are supposed to be attracted to a woman’s dress, speech, and mannerisms and ignore the fact she’s got a penis, a beard, and male pheromones, then doesn’t that mean sexual orientation isn’t real? If a dress is all that’s required to turn a lesbian into a penis-lover, then aren’t lesbians just very particular straight women? That’s the logical conclusion of “transwomen are women”. Lesbians have every right to call out this bullshit, because it is bullshit that affects them more than anyone else.
There’s a faction of transwomen who sound very much like Incels. They have the same sense of entitlement that Incels have and they threaten violence the same way that Incels do. They don’t go after folks like Ruper Everett. They go after people like JKR. They go after lesbians who are brave enough to tell them “no”. Do I think lesbians should go there with “TRANSPHOBE”? No, because it’s making them look like the bad guy to folks who aren’t inclined to sympathize with them. But their reaction is 100% understandable, IMHO. When you’ve got people trying to cram their “girl dicks” down your throat and all the people you’d think would be against that seem to be cheering it on, then maybe reclaiming “TRANSPHOBE” is the only way you can get people to pay attention to you, so that maybe you can pick up support from other women who are sick of the misogyny underlying this entire discourse. Maybe if enough people start wearing “TRANSPHOBE” t-shirts, then the trans movement will look inward and realize it’s losing the very people it should be trying to woo.
I wonder how gay menfolk will react when their numbers start to decline as effeminate gay boys turn into transwomen and their male lovers identify as straight men. I know conservatives will absolutely love this.
Another way to look at it is literally. Someone who is saying they are transphobic is saying they are afraid of the trans movement.
Yes, I think that’s what they are going for.
In a way they do. They go after people like the child Rupert Everett used to be, the little boy who wanted to be a girl, and say those kids are trans and need puberty blockers, followed by cross sex hormones and surgery. Because it helps support their claim that everyone has an inborn, immutable gender identity, which is so important it must completely replace biological sex in language, law and society.
ALL people concerned? Even transmen?
Now that another man has weighed in, I’m convinced!
I’m just joking of course, and i feel his lived experience is relevant to gay rights. His concerns are his to own and express, and I doubt he’ll get death threats- though he was nowhere near as incendiary as JKR. I am against death threats, period.
No, but there is a movement yelling for white people to see black people as people. People who matter.
And every analogy will be flawed in some way. There aren’t, as far as I know, activists that yelling at white people for not dating black people, but there are white and black people who get angry when people “date who they are personally attracted to” if they are different races.
Do you not see the difference is not wanting to date someone who has darker skin tpme than you (and espousing your dislike online, for everyone to see) and a lesbian saying they don’t want to date someone with a penis (which should just go without saying, but apparently that’s not the case anymore)?
If people were just saying “transwomen are people just like you”, then it would be easier to discern who is and isn’t a transphobe. The transphobes would be the people who would disagree with this statement. But that’s not the slogan. Reasonable, non-hateful people can disagree that all transwomen are women. And reasonable, non-hateful people can be afraid of what society would look like if TWAW is treated as gospel.
If (for the sake of argument) we were going to go that route, I think it would require not only condemning a preference for only dating the light-skinned folk but also condemning a preference for only dating the slim folk and a preference for only dating the dimpled freckled tall ones with a mischievous crinkle in the corner of their eye. It would mean “you should not pay any preferential attention to a person’s morphology; you should select your dates strictly on the basis of their personality and beliefs and behaviors”.
That seems to me to turn sexual access into a favor that one doles out to people as a reward for appearing to one as a good person, and discards carnal lust as politically unacceptable. Has a certain “full circle” feel to it, doesn’t it?
My example was more geared toward people being angry that someone IS dating someone of a darker (or lighter) skin tone than is. If no black women are ever angry that a beautiful black brother is with a white woman, or black men never slam a gorgeous black women for dating white, well, I’ll happily admit the bigotry is all on the white side of things.
In one way, yes, it should go without saying lesbians don’t want penis. In another, I’m attracted to a person, not their genitalia alone. I’m not going to attack anyone for not wanting some particular part of the whole package, though.
JKR’s comments were no more incidendiary than his, and actually I think he was more provocative.He called the trans movement New Puritanism and joked that transitioning would be a boon to his career. Sounds like he’s likening the movement to religious authoritarians, which JKR didn’t do. Sounds like he also dismisses the idea of trans oppression, which JKR also did not do.
RE is allowed to talk about his lived experience as a gay male, because it’s seen as his right. When JKR talks about her lived experience as a woman, she’s called “incendiary” and painted as a TERF.
Very curious.
But that’s the wrong example to be making. I’m in an interracial marriage and I have little patience for anyone who would judge me not sticking to black men. People are free to love whom they want.
The conflict happening between lesbians and transwomen is more akin to the conflict that has existed between lesbians and straight men…since forever. “It’s wrong to reject this penis” has been a message relentlessly pushed on them; the horror of it doesn’t change just because the penises now belong to transwomen.
Bringing up race needlessly complicates what really is an extremely straightforward problem to understand.
Very curious. He made a reference to new puritanism, JKR quoted someone who referred to transitioning as a contagion. He made comments/jokes about how it might have helped his career (which yeah actually is a shit comment) she made jokes about how women and women only get periods. She"liked" tweets about men in dresses, foxes in henhouses, and went hard for TERF, even promoting an antitrans online shop. (This witch won’t burn IS an awesome shirt, though…) She said she’d march with trans people IF they were being oppressed (I’m so glad that never happens!)
I do think there’s a misogyny problem in the world, and women are way more likely to catch shit for comparable comments. But men do get caught up in language policing, too.
I did happen across a bit a kerfuffle in the gay community, about whether or not “queer” is a word to embrace. Some gay men used it happily, others for mad. There was some rancor, but outside looking in, I didn’t see how bad it got. My friends involved were pissed, but I stayed out.
I see a lot of slippery slope arguments, and what about when that happens or this or the locker rooms are full of male predators, or whatever. I also see people who hurt, and some of them are people I care about. And I see a lot of mixed messages. Men shouldn’t have an opinion unless they agree with me, haha, and women should care but somehow don’t, and transwomen are women except when they’re not, transwomen are men, woman is a biological term, same as female, now female is a biological term until it wont be.
I think Barbie Kardashian will be a danger or in danger no matter what. Even if Barbie were a ciswoman, she would be in danger more than a man in prison, since women are assaulted more by fellow inmates than men are.
I don’t know, this thread has exhausted me.
He made a reference to new puritanism, JKR quoted someone who referred to transitioning as a contagion. He made comments/jokes about how it might have helped his career (which yeah actually is a shit comment) she made jokes about how women and women only get periods…
You’re really committed to demonizing JKR, aren’t you? It makes no sense to equate the downplaying of trans oppression with saying only females have periods, but look at that. You just did that.
A few years ago, Rupert Everett called Caitlyn Jenner a cross-dressing man, but I’m sure JKR did something extra worse than this. I mean, we have to try to convince ourselves of this because otherwise we might have to admit misogyny is behind a lot of her excoriation and that’s hard for some of us to do. So lets come up with something to falsely equate this to…oh I got it! She just published a book that has a cross-dresser in it! That’s much worse than what RE said. Punch that TERF!!!
When someone wears a T-shirt saying “cis people are smarter than trans people” or ANY OTHER slogan implying trans people are inherently inferior, I will happily call them a bigot. Let me know when you find an example.