gemmaem
1yr ago
Right-wing media sources characterize it as an invasion of the capitol building to keep the state legislature from voting on legislation which would outlaw medical gender transition for minors.
This isn't quite accurate, since people who are between the ages of 18 and 26 are not minors, the bill that is the main object of protest would outlaw any kind of gender transition procedures or referrals for individuals under 26.
gemmaem
1yr ago
In the tumblr context, I read these people as closer to "intersectional feminist" than anything else. Specifically, I read them as "intersectional" because they are not just narrowly interested in male/female as the single axis of oppression. They're trying to take other complications into account. As such, this critique of yours is honestly pretty fair:
And even these quotes you bring up only seem to half care about the fact that this has been going on forever because of the implication it has on trans people. Like seriously? It took the implication that demonizing people like me would imply demonizing another group for you to think maybe it's a shitty tactic?
There's a whole category of semi-nuanced intersectional thinking that falls into this category. Intersectionality forces people to see that societal oppression is complicated and takes place across multiple axes that interfere with each other in weird and sometimes counterintuitive ways. Follow that thought sincerely enough and open-mindedly enough for long enough and you'll eventually see places where the thing you're critiquing is a side effect of a central unjustified criticism of a group that you didn't think was oppressed at all. Which is better than not seeing those things, but is still going to come across as half-baked at best to someone who was worried about the central unjustified criticism to begin with, yeah.
gemmaem
1yr ago
As I understand it, the word "transgender," in current usage, specifically means someone who considers themselves to actually be a gender that is incongruent with the one they were initially sorted into. So, you've got no problem with trans people's gender expression. The thing you have a problem with is that they are transgender.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Now, just for starters, I realize this is a semantic battle that's lost, but I will nonetheless keep pointing it out: "TERF" at least originally meant Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. Radical feminism is a specific school of feminist ideology, it doesn't just mean "feminists who are really zealous and strident." It's actually quite fringe in modern feminism. Rowling is a feminist, and could probably be described as a Second Wave feminist, but she is certainly not a radical feminist.
I would also dispute the "Trans-Exclusionary" label, but that's somewhat more subjective, depending on what you mean by "exclude."
I've shifted to "trans-critical feminist" for the same group. I feel like "gender critical" is confusing terminology, in that it really is transgender critical, but "critical" is more accurate these days than "exclusionary", and, as you note, a lot of these people are not radical feminists.
(I think the "TERF" terminology was originally more accurate -- the split started with radical feminists who distrusted men and therefore wanted to exclude trans women from certain kinds of feminist events. But the usage has broadened to the point where the wording needs to be improved.)
gemmaem
1yr ago
For what it's worth, I have a couple of posts on my tumblr that collects nuanced social justice leftist positions making precisely the point you're making, here -- namely, that excessive hatred of men and hostility towards trans people are related, and should be rejected in tandem.
(explanations from me in square brackets)
I know misandry is fun and all but “men are born evil and women are pure and incapable of doing harm 😌🥰” gender essentialism still leads to transmisogyny ultimately even though you include trans men and women in it
It’s the kind of thinking that leads to the idea that afab [assigned female at birth] = safe and amab [assigned male at birth] = dangerous and one of the reasons why amab non binary people and trans women are still shunned within queer spaces because of perceived “maleness” being treated like a poison you can’t fully “cleanse” yourself of like essentialism is still bad when repackaged as inclusive of trans people and something that can be exploited to turn people who aren’t transfem against us lol
(The last time I posted this, someone thought the "I know misandry is fun and all" part was serious, so I'm just going to take a moment to point out the sarcasm for anyone not accustomed to the idiom, btw.)
saying this as a trans dude: I honestly think you really can’t be a good trans ally if you’re gonna treat cis dyadic men [dyadic = not intersex iirc] as inherently evil/worse than everyone else
like yes toxic masculinity and certain socialization and being unaware of privilege can lead to a higher incidence of shitty behavior, it’s not stupid to be wary of cis dyadic men, but that’s different than believing they are inherently worse than anyone else simply by the fact that they are cisgendered men
you can’t say you don’t discriminate based off of gender identity while also saying that people of a certain agab and gender identity are inherently bad full stop.
also it Will bleed over to trans people even if you don’t realize it. if you think being amab and male makes someone shitty you’re gonna apply that to amab trans people and transmascs regardless of agab [assigned gender at birth]. any amab person who doesn’t completely dissociate from masculinity and any person who embraces it is gonna be considered shittier than everyone else bc they’re closer to cis men, unless people just ignore the parts of peoples identity and presentation they don’t like which is still garbage
and also like. even if it didn’t affect trans people it’s still incredibly shitty to think that any gender identity/agab combo is inherently worse than others
They're not wrong! Nor are they unique. I can definitely recall similar arguments from other people that I can't immediately locate right now.
gemmaem
1yr ago
One could, but the government is not a university system, so this is a hypothetical Sam Brinton rather than a real one.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Thanks to @gattsuru for important context. Given that I've made such a fuss about defining what was actually said, I should probably also give a response on the subject! Apologies if it's not quite what you were looking for, however.
I don't personally like this, as a general definition of transphobia. One response I've seen to the complaint that we're "not allowed to distinguish between trans women and other women" is that of course you can make that distinction. There's even an adjective for it: trans women. This is ... fair, but in my view it entails certain things. One of these is that people should be allowed to decide that they are not romantically or sexually attracted to trans women as a class, if that's really how they feel. This is a really personal topic, and asking people to rearrange their innermost feelings is a much stronger request than just asking them to rearrange their language and/or manners. Give people some space, and if they're not going out of their way to be hurtful to you, then don't threaten them on a subject that's as personal as this.
With that said, I don't think your particular complaint has much weight, here. If "there are in fact zero transwomen who are indistinguishable from women with a womb," then a person could simply respond that, well, feminine phenotypes are really important to me, and if I meet a trans woman who reaches my standards on that point, then, sure, I might be open to dating her if other aspects were in alignment, hooray, congratulations to me on my non-transphobia, problem solved.
I will also say that, on a subreddit, it's highly likely that the subject of "Would you date a trans woman?" doesn't come up in the practical sense. People aren't actually meeting partners there. Instead, the subject is much more likely to only be mentioned in conjunction with statements that are transphobic like "trans women are ugly" or "trans women are likely to be predatory." I can see this being a useful place to draw the line, for discussion purposes. I still don't think it's a good rule, because it will bleed out into situations that do involve actual dating, and that's not good for respecting people's preferences. But I can understand why, on a subreddit, the immediate concerns of the community might lead people to draw lines that are optimized for the specific online context.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Just because a distinction doesn't matter to you, that doesn't mean it couldn't possibly matter to anyone on a forum like this, where we aim for breadth of worldviews. Accuracy matters. I like to know exactly what I am commenting on.
With that said, I was unaware that this post had in fact been officially linked to, and have therefore apologised for jumping to an unflattering conclusion. I'll be posting a longer reaction to the substance of the matter at hand in a bit, now that I've been able to get the details I needed.
gemmaem
1yr ago
gemmaem
1yr ago
If there are existing rules posts by subreddit mods that say this, then OP should have posted one of them! Then calling it a post "explaining the rules of the subreddit" would not have been a lie, and we could have had this conversation on a sound, truthful basis.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Thank you so much!
This makes me pretty unimpressed with OP. For one thing, this isn't a post "explaining the rules of the subreddit," as OP claims. It's an opinion from an ordinary user. It's also preceded by several important caveats that make it less inflammatory than if it had started from the place where OP begins their quote. Also, it's from nine years ago -- how far did they have to dig in order to find something they could quote out of context in order to make it sound suitably threatening?
@KingKong, I don't think you posted this in good faith. You omitted important context. You didn't provide a link so people could check. And you lied about what the post actually was.
You should be ashamed. The culture war is hot enough without misrepresenting things deliberately in order to cause drama.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Well, the tech difference is at least partly because this is an empire that conquers first and develops later, right? It's located somewhere in the same space as colonial Britain or ancient Rome. Conquest is definitely the main idea, and then assimilating the conquered peoples into your high tech, highly "cultured" society is also important, because that's how you keep the empire stable, but it takes longer.
I never really thought about the conditions that would lead to the usefulness of human ancillaries, I have to admit. I mostly took that part for granted. Some of the ships/AIs do have discussions later on about the relative merits of humans and robots, and they seem to subjectively prefer the former, possibly because the former has subjectivity. I don't really remember if the whole thing was actually explained in any depth, though, and I can see it being something that varies in plausibility depending on the reader. I guess that's true of a lot of world-building, in that there are always going to be things that work better for some people than others.
gemmaem
1yr ago
I would like to see the original context. Can you provide a link, or at least give the actual name of the subreddit in question? There's more than one lesbian subreddit.
gemmaem
1yr ago
I loved Ancillary Justice. It did not deserve to get dragged through the mud just because some people were mean to Larry Correia on the internet. It certainly starts out quite opaque, but it rewards attentive reading.
Given the publicity surrounding its use of feminine pronouns for every character, you could be forgiven for thinking that this is a book about gender. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that this is really a book that is not about gender. The Imperial Radch is a deeply flawed society with a great deal of systemic injustice -- and it doesn't have gender (as we understand it) and it doesn't have race (as we understand it). So it's a book about systemic injustice that has very carefully excised the main two identity markers that we usually associate with that sort of thing. It takes away the compass that the average social justice advocate would use, and asks readers to learn to navigate anew.
I thought the body horror aspects were excellently handled, creeping up on the reader precisely because they are so normal to the narrator. I also found Anaander Mianaai's troubles with herself to be predictable in the manner of a successful Chekhov's gun -- the sort of thing where you ask "but what if..." partway through the book and then learn later (to great readerly satisfaction) that, indeed, if. On the whole, there is a general theme of throwing the reader into the deep end of some massive cultural and technological differences. If you enjoy subtle clues and tricky empathy leaps, it's a really good book.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Yeah, I come down somewhere similar. It's not that there's nothing good about these critiques, it's that the solutions currently being deployed are far too tribalist to support proper discussion between people who seriously disagree.
gemmaem
1yr ago
I don't think the reaction of decreased respect for liberal norms is unique to feminism, actually. Certainly, many centrists seem to complain about illiberalism on the left and right. But feminism is the context that I, personally, can speak to with the greatest amount of personal experience, so that is where I have put my focus in responding.
I do not, as a rule, look at Twitter unless I have to. But of course I take your point that there are also trolls on the left.
If you were genuinely finding this conversation emotionally difficult and wanted to discontinue it, I would let you. I would also not hold it against you, nor consider that to be forfeiting your position. This is because I do think that everybody's emotions are worthy of respect. Yes, that includes when right-wingers get emotional about the possibility that their children might be harmed by the influence of liberal norms.
Have you ever bothered to engage with the possibility that emotionalism is, in fact, a bad thing?
Of course. I'm very interested in this topic. I don't believe in the existence of a single set of discussion norms that will work for every group of people on every subject, and I think that disallowing "emotion" really does disallow certain sets of facts about how people feel. Emotions matter. Sweeping them aside can be counterproductive, sometimes.
However, I do appreciate that sometimes a ban on "emotion" is a genuine attempt to lower the temperature of a discussion so that people with very different views can actually hear each other, instead of just shouting past each other. Whilst I prefer a co-operative appreciation for the emotions of both sides to a terse ban on all emotional acknowledgment, I realise that different norms can be a benefit in themselves, and thus that in some contexts a ban on "emotion" may still be a useful tool.
This is fundamentally a question about "What do left-wing people believe and why do they believe it?" To answer such a question, you need a qualitative appreciation of people's belief structure, rather than pure quantitative analysis of the type you seem to be suggesting.
As someone who watched the intersectional feminist critique of "liberal debate" developing in real time, I can give you some examples of the types of direct criticism of liberal debate norms that led to decreased appreciation for such procedural rules.
-
Blog comment moderation. Early on, in the blogosphere there was a substantial (or at least noisy) "free speech" contingent that contended that all blog comment sections ought to be unmoderated for "free speech" reasons. Feminists frequently had bad-faith people showing up in their comment sections to deliberately troll; they were also frequently discussing delicate topics such as rape. Comment moderation of some kind or other was thus a fairly universal practice, and the conflation of "free speech" with being against comment moderation contributed to a decline in appreciation for the (broad, non-first-amendment version of the) concept.
-
The devil's advocate. When someone says they are "playing devil's advocate," they're often asking people to debate them as an exercise without holding them responsible for any moral repugnance inherent in what they are suggesting. Feminists got tired of being asked to calmly refute ideas that they considered personally painful and morally unsupportable. They noted/claimed that there was often an inherent imbalance in who was being asked to "remain calm" while hearing something deeply threatening to them on a personal level.
-
Tone policing. When speaking about an emotionally resonant subject, being asked to speak calmly can mean censoring yourself. Thus, while the previous two claims are about how liberal norms are too permissive, this one is about how they are too restrictive. Sometimes being visibly angry is the only way to truthfully express yourself. Intersectional feminists also claim that variation in the social norms applied to different groups of people will lead to greater tone restrictions on women (in whom anger is less accepted) and on black people (in whom anger is seen as more threatening).
-
The ban on "emotion." If I may quote myself: "Disallowing "emotion" favours noncontroversial emotions over controversial ones, since noncontroversial emotions do not need to be vividly expressed in order to be understood and taken as meaningful." Feminists tend to believe that typically male emotions are accepted, where female ones are not, and thus that they will be disadvantaged as women under such a rule. Intersectional feminists take it further, and suggest that upper-class white male emotions are likely to be the noncontroversial, accepted ones that have weight without needing to actually be expressed strongly -- and which are therefore likely to carry the day under liberal "rules of debate."
I am personally very sympathetic to most of these critiques. Unfortunately, I don't think the most common solutions on offer actually lead to better outcomes overall. Nevertheless, my explanation of the trend that you identify would be that these liberal norms fell out of fashion because they genuinely were flawed, and that bringing them back will require re-working them to take some of these critiques into account while also preserving what was important about them.
gemmaem
1yr ago
That is intuitive, I agree. The thing that makes me hesitate to sign on to it, though, is that EA as a movement is actually involved not just in taking people's money but in encouraging people to make that money in the first place. So, if someone was going to be a bad person anyway, then, yes, you might as well take their money. But if you are (perhaps inadvertently) encouraging people to become bad in order to make lots of money that they then give to you, then it gets a bit more complicated. Especially if your movement then goes around loudly praising these (actually bad) people.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Derek Thompson makes a related point, when he says:
I also think the scandal ought to compel EA-aligned institutions to be much more critical of their financiers. This movement, which is so clear-eyed about outputs and outcomes, ought to be equally concerned about inputs and incomes. Where is this movement’s money coming from? Whom is it coming from?
Thus far, EA has not been big on investigating where the money comes from -- only where it goes. That may change. We'll see.
gemmaem
1yr ago
There are many Bible verses that say that there is such a requirement for practical, monetary help. Matthew 19:21, for example:
Jesus said to him, “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.”
gemmaem
1yr ago
Hm, but why does "drawing engagement" make up for the unpleasantness of reading a post defending religious orthodoxy, for you? To be clear, I'm not implying that I know the answer to this question, but I think it's worth examining. If, for example, you feel a serious sense of grievance towards organised religion, and engagement on that grievance is a way to have your feelings acknowledged, then I can see why you would want that engagement, but this may not be the best way to manage feelings of threat and injury from someone else's ideology. Alternatively, if drawing engagement makes you feel less threatened because it means you know you've succeeded in retaliating for the unpleasantness you experienced by reading them in the first place, then I think you should not give in to that desire for retaliation; don't treat this place like a battleground.
Another thing worth examining is what kind of engagement you want. After all, you're replying to someone who says that condescension makes them less likely to engage. Personally, I have found that I often get more engagement from writing in a more measured tone and/or from developing relationships with posters who then learn that I am likely to actually listen to their replies.
gemmaem
1yr ago
The left does get a lot of unpleasant rhetoric aimed at it, you're not wrong about that. Frankly, if the norms applied to the woke left were applied across the board, this place would be a lot less pleasant for everyone (Including the woke leftists, whom I think would promptly become subject to a yet worse standard, because some inequities are unavoidable. I say this as a long-since-resigned woke leftist feminist with intersectional influences. Frankly, as someone near the bottom of the congeniality ladder I would prefer that the median not slip further down).
If this was a discussion about "Why do people not approach Catholicism respectfully?" then I think your post would be acceptable, because it would be on topic. Unpleasantness as a side effect of honest explanation is unavoidable, sometimes, around here. But this was, instead, a discussion about how to survive when your views are unpopular. Moreover, it was a discussion specifically instigated to try to help those people feel more at home and deal with it better. "Have different views" is not a good suggestion, in that context, particularly since breadth of viewpoints is something this forum is supposed to encourage.
I think it makes sense to read this as a statement about the locus of control, here. That is, Adams' views are to be determined by Adams himself. His opinions are not controlled by the newspaper, nor does the newspaper consider itself responsible for controlling them. It's actually quite an important principle, in its own way.
More options
Context Copy link