It is bigoted to say “most reasonable people would consider a trans woman a man.” I don’t think you should be fired over it or anything, but this is exactly where the virtue signaling complaint falls apart. You want to be able to express bigoted opinions without people calling them bigoted. That’s not a terribly sympathetic plight.
That sounds harsher than I intended, but I don’t know what the alternative would be. What do you think is the appropriate response to hearing an opinion you believe is bigoted?
If that’s all it was, I’d agree. Someone has a shit viewpoint you don’t like, or says something horrible? You should be free to say that. What (generic) you shouldn’t be free to do is find out where that person works, then organise a public harassment campaign against their employer along the lines of “Do you want this bigoted piece of shit working at your business?? Huh? HUH???” and getting them fired from their job as a result.
That’s not bigoted, it’s a statement of fact, broadly speaking. Step out of the woke bubble and go and ask a Russian or an Arab or an Indonesian or a Chinese farmer how they’d classify someone who has male genitals and looks like a man, but thinks they’re a woman.
Just off the top of my head would be what happened to Israel Folau, who’s gone from being one of Australia’s top rugby players to playing for a backwater team in the UK because of his views on homosexuality (For the record, I vehemently disagree with his views but also think they’ve got nothing to do with his ability to play rugby).
There’s also that Google engineer from a couple of years ago who got fired for writing a 10-page anti-diversity memo (Again, I disgree with the person’s viewpoint) and here’s a story from the New York Times talking about people speaking about getting fired for having the “wrong” viewpoints.
It’s not a “myth” or “made-up”, in other words, and there’s also other countries besides the US where this stuff happens too.
Either doing absolutely nothing at all (especially if it doesn’t affect you personally), or telling the person “I think that’s a shit viewpoint because [reasons]” in a situationally-appropriate way.
I think this is a normal phase of working through any kind of difficult experience, the problem is some people get stuck there and certain social elements reward being stuck. Not saying it’s always trauma, but one of the hallmarks of PTSD is obsession with and over identification with the trauma. If someone seems to be stuck on one particular kind of victim identity, then trauma is probably a factor. Then we get into tricky things like collective trauma or secondary trauma where one may have these symptoms even if they were not directly impacted by that issue. This is a real and documented phenomenon, and it’s arguable that our constantly plugged in culture exposing us to violent images and upsetting stories on the daily has actually succeeded in making what would ordinarily be an individual trauma into one big collective trauma for many.
One example is the 9/11 attacks. Group trauma interventions such as debriefing of WTC survivors post-9/11 were shown to make PTSD worse for participants. What appeared to happen is that people got their own stories mixed up with everyone else’s stories to the point they had actual memories of things happening that they didn’t personally experience. Sharing the experience collectively made it worse.
I think this may be happening for many right now. It’s one of the reasons people seem to be more deeply affected by what seem like minor things, and one reason so many people are upset over things that “don’t even affect them.”
It seems you’re confusing “average” with “reasonable.” Reasonable people are those whose opinions are influenced by the evidence, who make an honest effort to educate themselves about the issues involved before spouting off about them, and who use expert consensus as guidance. The average person is neither reasonable nor correct.
Absolutely none of what you said there changes reply or addresses my overall point.
OK. You want to be bigoted against trans people without worrying that you’re going to lose your job. Probably not an issue. Beyond a handful of high profile cases I don’t see that happening on any kind of meaningful scale. As you yourself pointed out, the vast majority of people don’t care about supporting trans people.
As for the idea that getting people fired shouldn’t be allowed… I’m not sure what the alternative would be. Businesses would be required to retain employees that harm their bottom line? What kind of law would you like to see passed?
One that makes it illegal to fire (either directly or constructively) someone for their clearly expressed as personal opinions, if those opinions are not relevant to the person’s job, and doubly so if the company only becomes aware of them due to people on the internet launching “Hey company X, did you know this person who works for you has opinions we don’t like?” actions.
For example: A front-facing customer service representative who thinks LGBTQI people are evil and should be disappeared wouldn’t be able to keep their job, because being a hateful homophobe directly affects their ability to engage with customers (and other team members). Someone whose job is to move boxes in a warehouse and is mostly on their own? Doesn’t really affect anything in the warehouse if they’re a hateful dick as long as they move the boxes efficiently. Vice president in charge of QA thinks transgender people are dangerously deluded and should be subjected to forced electroshock treatment? Awful viewpoint, not at all relevant to ensuring Quality Assurance processes are followed.
One big thing, to my mind, is differentiating between an “bigoted” but un-acted on opinion (eg someone who thinks transgender people are mentally ill but is still civil to them and uses their preferred pronouns in public), and a bigoted opinion that the person is actively working to further in a practical sense - for example, being a racist who is also a KKK member and deliberately avoids hiring minorities in their department.
The UK has a law making it illegal to fire people for their religious or philosophical beliefs (in the UK employers have to have a good reason to fire an employee, there is none of this at-will employment business), and a court recently ruled that believing humans cannot change sex is such a protected belief.
That means you can’t be fired for eg expessing this opinion on social media, but could be fired if you started misgendering your colleagues or customers. Seems like the right balance to me.
Ah thanks for the examples. This is what I was asking for over and over in the other thread.
I don’t have time to investigate right now but will post thoughts later. Oh and I thought of another example – Colin Kaepernick (not “fired” as such, but he’d be working now were it not for his political views).
I agree. I think it’s a fair approach to the issue.
Here’s a few examples I can think of:
- Donald McNeil, reporter fired for saying the n-word in quoting someone else, plus a few other comments which he says were misinterpreted.
- Chris Harrison, TV host who ‘stepped aside’ after defending a contestant who had once attended an ‘Old South antebellum party’.
- Adam Rubenstein, NYT editor who was forced to resign after publishing an opinion column by a US senator.
- Gina Carano, actress fired for comparing being a Republican in 2021 to being Jewish in Nazi Germany.
- Emmanuel Cafferty, San Diego Gas and Electric employee fired for making the ‘OK’ hand gesture.
- David Shor, data analyst who was fired after tweeting about research showing riots reduced Democrat vote share while non-violent protests increased it, during the BLM protests.
- Sandra Sellers, professor fired for saying her poorest-performing students are disproportionately black. (David Batson, the colleague she was speaking to, was placed on administrative leave.)
- Norman Wang, physician removed from Program Director role after publishing a paper criticising affirmative action.
- Hannah Berliner Fischthal, professor fired for reading aloud a Mark Twain passage containing the n-word.
At the risk of engaging in both-side-ism, the left does the same. The “Get a brain, moran!” meme is still alive and well when liberals want to take a shot at the right-wing maniacs. Frankly, it’s a toss up of whether liberals love the “poorly educated” more than Trump does when it comes to exploiting them for their own ends.
This is where the left vs. right rhetorical political cold war is right now. The demonization of one another using exploitable trivialities. And while I’m firmly on the political left when it comes to social policy, I also recognize that the left has embraced the fragile victim culture far too firmly for its own good, making itself the easy target for right wing nuttery. We can’t change the QAnon fringe lunacy of the right or how many conservatives fall for lies. But we can change how much legitimacy we lend to our own left-wing extremism by signaling the virtues of classic liberalism as opposed to promoting the language or victimhood and fragility.
I’m not saying that doesn’t happen, especially at the social media level. The individuals in the Twitter trenches give as good as they get on both sides.
But if I turn on the evening news, their headline is NOT going to be “Ohio Republican can’t spell Moron”, whereas Fox will do an entire segment on “Ohio Democrat shames neighbor for not wearing Pride pin” and Newsmax will make it the lead story.
Joe Biden’s not bringing up the Republican that can’t spell during an interview, whereas the last guy might’ve spent an entire interview babbling about the Pride pin. Dozens of Democratic congressmen aren’t going to speak and write Op-Ed’s about the Republican that can’t spell moron, but the Republican congressmen are going to milk the Pride pin incident for all its worth.
Yeah, the social media skirmishes are free-for-alls, but I’m more attuned to the behaviors of the people that influence the masses…….and there’s no equivalence there.
That said, I agree with your basic point about the return to classic liberal values. One think that frustrated me to no end during the Trump Era was the stories like “Trump has toilet paper stuck on shoe”. It was amusing, but it wasn’t helpful— there so many real reasons to dislike the guy, but stories like that one made the dislike seemed petty and delegitimized it little bit.
Agreed. I remember 75% of the time when I saw a Trump-related headline, my reaction would be, “Why is this news?” There was an awful lot of coverage that wasn’t relevant to politics.
I’m not sure I agree that there isn’t a ton of cable news about how dumb Marjorie Taylor Green or whoever is. It sure seems like I can’t avoid her, despite never purposely reading or watching any political news. Somebody is reporting on her. And it seems to me that those two points could be related–the mainstream media reports a lot of “idiot Republican thinks we can control the moon” stories on a daily basis, sometimes in good faith and sometimes not, and Joe Biden doesn’t. But he doesn’t really need to if there are already NYT reporters tweeting about it.
There are even those, I’ve heard, who suggest that the hyper-focus on these kind of cultural and identity and personality-based signifiers, like Trump being an utter dipshit who can’t really do anything but is still a raging, out of control abuser, is helpful to politicians who benefit from the resultant lack of focus on the extent to which actual material policy is going to be consistent. If there are sufficiently fascinating media hits about how Trump was foaming at the mouth and incoherent in the meeting in which he decided to explode the physical body of a bunch of Iranians, you don’t have to worry so much about the fact that you, also, would have blown those people up, because I mean, you wouldn’t have acted like that when you did it.
(Which is, in my opinion, what’s bad about virtue signaling)
This, I think, is one of the reasons for such intense resentment against PC culture - that the people “setting the rules” for others don’t particularly have a legit authority to do so.
We (generally) are okay with obeying laws set by our elected government, because the legislature and governor/president were elected or at least hold some mantle of power, so we recognize those laws as legit. But when or if some “gaggle of sheltered children” start lecturing you or I, saying, “You’re not allowed to use that word, we decided you can’t use it” - it’s natural to rebel, “Just who are you to tell me what to do?”
I do think that telling a survivor she isn’t personally a survivor is different enough from telling Fred in accounting not to say slurs that they should not be compared, though.
But MTG is an elected official, not a random citizen. And Trump certainly isn’t a random citizen. We bash Trump, you bash and dox a young volunteer who was seen scanning ballots on a manipulated video. Both sides, amirite?
I think they give MTG way too much oxygen, but it’s not the same as making a random dumbass schoolteacher that offended a white kid by pointing out that his ancestors engaged in atrocities the top story of the day.
No one’s perfect and no one has to be. I still maintain that this is an abuse dynamic. People that are abused sometimes get their own punches in and sometimes their reactions to the abuse are inappropriate.
But you can’t mediate an abusive relationship. “I’ll work on not beating the crap out of you if you work on folding the towels better” is not a legitimate approach to an abusive dynamic. Lying and blowing minor offensives out of proportion in order to convince people that your victim is the dangerous one is a common abuse tactic, and one that’s dangerous. The attempt to blame the Capitol violence on “Antifa” is an example of such a tactic. It was a lame attempt, yes……but if counter protestors had shown up with any force, it might have worked.
Just yesterday, I saw a Twitter thread outlining how a right wing group had created dozens of virtually identical “Antifa” Facebook pages, full of the kind of stuff conservatives like to pretend liberals say.
Yes, some liberals fall way too deep into “wokeness”, and pettiness, and it’s frustrating But I’m careful where I vent my frustration because of the dynamic.
Here’s an analogy I’ve used before. I become aware that my neighbor is psychologically abusing his wife. One of the abuse triggers is her lack of cooking skills. Now the wife is usually a decent cook, but sometimes she misses the mark. One day she serves me a lunch that is absolutely horrendous.
I’m going to keep that to myself, or be very careful who I express that opinion in front of, simply because I know she will suffer disproportionate consequences if her husband finds out I didn’t like the lunch she served.
If you really think both sides are the same, think back six months. Then realize that Republicans are trying to claim the Democrats refused to acknowledge Trump’s win to the same extent that Republicans refused to acknowledge his loss.