Note that Johanna didn’t say that transphobic hate speech is stochastic terrorism. She said that it’s an integral part of the process of stochastic terrorism.
The same way that Islamic-fundamentalist denunciations of “evil Western degenerates” etc. are an integral part of the process of stochastic terrorism that results in specific stochastic-terrorist acts, like your example of the fatwa against Rushdie (and consequently in direct terrorist acts like the stabbing of Rushdie).
Promulgating hate speech against a group of people is a way of getting your audience used to dehumanizing and resenting that group, which makes them more receptive to actual stochastic-terrorism rhetoric along the lines of “all members of the group should just be lined up and shot”.
I’m not claiming that all hate-speech promulgators are deliberately intending to take the next step to directly engage in stochastic terrorism itself. But Johanna is right that their rhetoric is definitely part of that process.
[Moderating]
If you have an issue with the moderation the board, the proper place to bring that up is ATMB. Arguing moderation outside that forum is a violation of the board rules. Pleas avoid this in the future.
The point of proscribing hate speech is exactly to bypass debate on specific aspects of an issue. We can still debate other aspects of the issue all day long if we like.
I (as a cisgender woman, in case I need to claim any gender/sex “credentials” here) am perfectly fine with the position that denying the applicability of the term “women” to transgender women does not belong among debatable propositions in a civilized forum, any more than claims such as “non-white people are subhuman” belong there.
As I keep saying every goddamn time this subject comes up, that doesn’t mean that we can’t continue to debate all sorts of things about how the general differences between cisgender women and transgender women do or should affect our societal policies on gendered spaces and roles.
But the transphobes never seem to want any actual debate on substantive topics. They just want an excuse to keep repeating in various forms their declaration that “transgender women aren’t women”. They have no interest in engaging in constructive discussion if they’re not allowed to act as the linguistic gatekeepers of the meaning of the term “woman”.
So yeah, I’m fine with the SDMB shutting that shit down, just as we shut down racist hate speech claims like “non-white people are subhuman”.
I support the First Amendment right of transphobes to spout their transphobic hate speech without suffering unconstitutional legal (or illegal) penalties for it, naturally. But that doesn’t mean that I think a civilized forum is in any way morally obligated to refrain from restricting their hate speech more stringently than the US Constitution does.
And by the way, this is not true. Aspidistra has several times in this thread referred to various off-board transgender women as “male people”. That’s misgendering.
Yes. “Should trans women be allowed in women’s changing rooms?” is a perfectly valid discussion topic. “Should trans women be referred to as ‘men’?” really isn’t.
If transphobes were ever interested in actual debate rather than just excuses to reaffirm their linguistic gatekeeping, we could potentially have a productive debate around the unquestioned fact that not all children who identify as transgender at some point do so “insistently, persistently and consistently”.
Obviously, just as some heterosexual people being briefly “bi-curious” is a real phenomenon, and some (mostly) heterosexual people being “gay until graduation” is a real phenomenon, there’s no intrinsic reason why some adolescents being “temporarily transgender-identified” can’t be a real phenomenon. Young people especially are always trying on new identities that they end up not sticking with forever, and there’s no reason to think that transgender or gender-fluid identities aren’t part of that experimentation for some young people. Naturally, too, high-profile social controversies can affect trends in such experimentation.
What makes the chief difference between me acknowledging those facts and transphobes rabbiting on about so-called “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” is that I’m the one who accepts that medical professionals, parents and teens are the ones who should be making these calls on an individual case-by-case basis, rather than random internet strangers trying to broad-brush adolescents as a group with made-up medicalizing labels. Transphobes are the ones just looking for more excuses to keep claiming that transgender identity is intrinsically fake.
And discussing the fact that not everyone who ever identities as trans does so insistently, persistently, and consistently does not negate the fact that many do. Just as the existence of actual bisexual people doesn’t negate the fact that there are actual persistently homosexual people who really can’t develop an interest in the opposite sex.
Why yes, some people are somewhere in the middle of the Kinsey scale, and whether or not they act on their homosexual interests, or identify as homosexual, is almost certainly influenced by the social conditions they live in and grew up in. There are people who aren’t clearly and unequivocally male or female, too, and how those people choose to identify and present themselves will also depend on their social environment.
Bullshit. There’s about 100 million women in the US living with this “failing society that hurts people” and if I ask you to tell me who, exactly, has been hurt, you’ll grab one event from 15 years ago, a runner and a swimmer who got 2nd place instead of 1st and act like you’ve proven yourself right.
These are decisions that people, particularly young people, agonize over, and they are the only ones who are actually at risk of being hurt, by people like you.
@Aspidistra I’ve seen this hypothetical situation posed in the past and I’d love to hear your take on it.
Two cisgender women (that is, they were both born with vaginas) are in a single-sex space together. Woman A turns to Woman B and says, “I think you’re a man. You need to leave.” What should Woman B be reasonably expected to do to respond to this?
Lest anyone consider that hypothetical to be ridiculous, some women present as very masculine on a superficial level. Deep voice, manly features, with a masculine-appearing body and posture. That’s not really an implausible scenario.
She should say “This is a space for female bodies, and my body is female”. Then Woman A would say “Oh, sorry, I made a mistake” and they would both go about their business. This is because the actual point of having sex-segregated spaces in the first place was to provide a place where all the female-bodied people could be separated from the male-bodied people. And this is still what most people think of when they refer to “male” and “female” spaces.
So, on that topic (not to you specifically), I see that I have now been mod-noted for referring to a person with a penis as “male”. Apparently “male” and “female” have now joined “man” and “woman” as terms which are considered on this board to apply to gender identity, not biological sex.
This is interesting, since it’s less than six months since I was admonished that “no-one is saying that sex isn’t real”. So - sex is “real” and yet all the terms that distinguish people on the basis of biological sex are now being transferred over to gender identity distinctions instead?
Is there in fact any pair of terms that is currently acceptable to group all of the people with male reproductive organs in one group and all the people with female reproductive organs in another?
Woman A would say that? Even though she was convinced Woman B was a man? I find that difficult to believe. Men lie, after all. They change their bodies to appear female in order to enter sex-segregated spaces. You think Woman A should allow someone who makes her feel uncomfortable to remain alone with her?
[Moderating]
I’ve already posted once admonishing people not to argue moderation outside of ATMB. I’m not a fan of repeating myself, so bring this up again in this thread, and you’ll get a second warning.
[/Moderating]
I can’t speak for Apidistra, but most terfs would consider him to be a “confused lesbian” who has tragically damaged his female body with unnatural chemicals. His best bet would be to get off the testosterone and find a cute skirt so that women aren’t (as) upset when he shows up in the female-bodied space he belongs in.
Really, that’s what most terf rhetoric boils down to, which is that everyone (but men especially) needs to be forced to express the gender identity of the genitals they were born with. That way, men are always performatively masculine and women are always performatively feminine and there’s never any question what kind of genitals anyone has. By coincidence, this happens to be the arrangement that Patriarchy has enforced for centuries. Funny how that works.
Individual is born with XY chromosomes. Also has a genetic disorder making them insensitive to androgenizing hormones.
No uterus or ovaries, small pouch that might be identified as a vagina, partially fused skin that looks like labia or could be a misformed scrotum. Big clitoris or a small penis? Never goes through puberty.
They have felt female their whole lives, despite ambiguous genitalia and conflicting chromosomes.
Brain tells them they’re female, they have always identified as female. No ambiguity on identity (since the brain drives that and brain says female). But their chromosomes say male. Their anatomy unclear and no secondary sex traits.
Took feminizing hormones, had plastic surgery to create a functional vagina. Married a guy. Adopted kids as mom.
What bathroom should they use? When they were in middle school? Now?
