Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

following on from my last post, let me try to make this even clearer.

here's the shibboleth, ok? here are the magic words.

trans women are women.

if you can't say that, those four words, without feeling the need to qualify or explain yourself further or ask follow-up questions, you know, i'd say that's about equivalent to not being able to say the words "black lives matter."

the context here, the pattern i see, is the pattern i wrote about in this post i wrote last month:

https://weirdthingsonbetamax.blogspot.com/2020/06/john-cleese-would-like-to-have-argument.html

the post itself is not perfect (though i hope it might still be slightly helpful). mainly i share it because cleese follows very well the pattern i'm talking about. last month he only "had some questions". this month he's actively defending his right to not treat trans women as women.

i would be really interested to know how many of the signatories of the harper's letter would be willing to say the four magic words. i would, for that matter, be really interested in knowing how many posters to this thread find themselves not able to say the four magic words. i believe pretty much everybody here can, though i'm always ready to be proven wrong.

step two, which is rather more difficult and is what is driving me to post to this thread every fifteen minutes until people start expressing very serious and well-founded concerns for my mental health and i vanish from here for the next month, is attempting to persuade the steady drip-drip-drip of drive by posters who can't understand why anybody cares about this stupid j.k. rowling lady and the stupid bullshit she's saying, that such unprovoked and gratuitous statements of disbelief are, well, kind of clueless and ignorant. such statements remind me of a "joke" i have heard, and by "have heard" i mean "hear repeated to me on a regular basis by people who are kind of assholes":

q: how can you tell if a person is trans?
a: don't worry, they'll tell you!

...and i can't go any further on this post without resorting to being bitterly sarcastic, so it's probably time for me to stop.

Ugh, Toby Young and Owen Jones debating cancel culture on Sky News right now, thankfully I've got the volume turned down and am listening to Ennio Morricone instead, cancelled!

great posts rushomancy

Kate and budo's last few posts have been really great imo

thanks, i got a full head of steam up now so i'm gonna keep going

i see posts on this thread asking me why people are making such a big deal about this dumb writer, why anybody pays attention to her, because she's OBVIOUSLY WRONG and no RIGHT-THINKING PERSON would pay her any mind, and honestly, you know what, that's not been my experience. the shit she's spewing out is shit i used to believe, is a lie i was taught was the truth.

a long time ago i saw that film, what was it called, "the usual suspects". i don't remember it being a great film, i remember it thinking it was smarter than it actually was. and the big line from that is "the greatest trick the devil pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist".

honestly, i don't think that's a particularly great trick. that's, like, basic fucking sleight of hand there, the first thing any stage magician learns. all you have to do is redirect people's attention, and that's a really fucking easy thing to do. spend decades abusing people and all people ask is "come on, he's obviously gay, why won't he admit it?" dead easy.

you know what's a more impressive trick, in my opinion? convincing _me_ that _i_ don't exist. and that was my experience, for decades, and it seems to have also been the experience of pretty much every other trans/gender non-conforming person i've ever encountered.

and that is exactly the trick rowling and other transphobes are trying to pull. that's what "queer erasure" is. what transphobes seem to want most is for us to go away, for us to disappear, and to not have to think about what happens after that.

and that's why i yell and scream and rant and fight, while why i may not be "brave" i am certainly _loud_. if i am to go, i am not going to go quietly, and i am going to leave as much evidence of my existence behind as i can.

i guess the idea is that we shouldn't make a "big deal" about this because she's just one person, and we're all rational people here, and one person's voice is as important as any other person's voice. that's what we're taught to believe, right? rowling is nobody special, we shouldn't pay attention to who she is but just to the objective truth or falsity of what she's saying?

i mean, that belief is so out of touch with reality that i do consider it delusional at this point. it's as ridiculous to me as not believing in global warming, as believing covid is a "chinese conspiracy". it's dangerous, and it's primarily dangerous to the continued existence of people like me.

j.k. rowling shouldn't be anyone special, say advocates of "rational debate". in the meantime one of my friends this week deleted years worth of harry potter fanfiction she's written from archive of our own. for an entire generation, and i'm not part of that generation, rowling's work was such a really important part of their childhood, shaped them in such important ways, and Sensible, Rational people say "well why are you even worried about that, it's just a dumb book, Ursula K. Leguin is a better writer anyway". yes, yes, it's my friend's fault for being STUPID and GULLIBLE enough to, when she was a child, like a series of books that were OBVIOUSLY AND MANIFESTLY AWFUL, right? we all should have fucking known better, for shame. or, alternately, maybe my friend was stupid for deleting her writing, that's obviously an overreaction, can't she learn to SEPARATE THE ARTIST FROM THE ART?

and there's no reason anybody shouldn't know better now, in any case. transphobia, of course, isn't a problem us, trans people, have, it's a problem with those poor saps who are irrational, ignorant, deluded enough to be transphobes, to be unable to decode the Empirically and Rationally Correct meaning of words. when people we consider friends, people in some cases we have considered friends for decades, come to us and say that rowling "seems sincere", that her opinions on trans people are "complicated", that she's just trying to be a "good ally", well, they're obviously wrong and that's _their_ problem. it's certainly not _our_ problem that seemingly every day somebody we thought we trusted starts expressing doubts about what we are, doubts that resonate deeply with the imposter syndrome every single one of us was fucking raised with.

right, i'm gonna take a smoke break, be back in about 15 minutes apparently.

I'll read this later.

9. More thoughts on the current free speech kerfuffle: https://t.co/gLU34GMz2L

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) July 10, 2020

it's not _our_ problem if our "friends" decide to trust the writings of a talented and famous writer over what people they know personally have to say about our own fucking lives. right?

Thank you for these posts, Kate.

Kate and budo's last few posts have been really great imo

Agreed.

I don't really know what I'm talking about so please take this with a grain of salt but I feel like resistance to statements such as 'trans women are women' stems from an inability to understand womanhood (or manhood, for that matter) as an unstable category that fluctuates over time, inwards as well as outwards, which ties into what budo was saying about the subject (my soft take on that can of worms being: there is a self… more or less, as long as the caveat trumps the postulate that precedes it).

Trans people taking the fight to the post-enlightenment Aristotelian consensus more effectively than any philosopher and winning

1. I've been reluctant culture wars controversies because I they are often distractions from bigger things going on -- I mean, people are fucking dying right now, dying in droves. But as Trump reminds us this morning, free speech is under threat. pic.twitter.com/BinhEbFLbD

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) July 10, 2020

wow go to hell jeet

i mean i know he's not earnestly quoting trump but it certainly makes me wonder what his point is and if he even has one. maybe we could debate it

Pretty sure he's being sarcastic.

I don't really know what I'm talking about so please take this with a grain of salt but I feel like resistance to statements such as 'trans women are women' stems from an inability to understand womanhood (or manhood, for that matter) as an unstable category that fluctuates over time, inwards as well as outwards, which ties into what budo was saying about the subject (my soft take on that can of worms being: there is a self… more or less, as long as the caveat trumps the postulate that precedes it).

― pomenitul

it's a theoretically interesting question. i can't answer it because i can't speak for other people - my feeling is that just there is lots of diversity among trans people, there's probably a lot of diversity among transphobes. when i was transphobic, my transphobia was primarily based in my (culturally determined) inability to differentiate gender from biology. didn't make me a bad person; i was just ignorant, and fortunately for me that ignorance proved remediable.

for someone like rowling, i do _not_ think her ignorance is quite so tractable. i really do get the sense that her inability to say "trans women are women" with a straight face is indicative of deeply rooted hatred and prejudice, in the same way that being unable to say "black lives matter" is indicative of deeply rooted hatred and prejudice.

whoops i've had all the nuance drained out of me from the culture wars xp

now, what's more important to you? is it that some of us who have suffered from transphobia for years, who have learned to communicate in a toxic and abusive environment, do not always treat other people with civility and tact? is it defending the "free speech" right of a woman to spread malicious lies about a vulnerable population,

Not to be all 'Did you read what I said?' but, if what I said reads as a boilerplate freeze peach argument, then ... there has been miscommunication

I doubt we have any disagreement about trans rights or about those dangerous slanders against trans people that swirl around the internet

I think where we differ is you see JKR as having crossed a line into the just fuck off zone, where it's just not worthwhile to care about what happens to her, whereas I think that there's interest in discussing and analysing the latter

I think that operation is different to defending her position on gender or attacking people who don't like her etc

Nor am I attempting to 'police' the responses to JKR, of ilxors or anyone else

What could possibly be interesting about talking about what happens to JK Rowling, a genre fiction author who is richer than her decrepit Queen and who derives no income from posting online

Nothing will happen to her, she’s not going to get murdered in her castle by trans terrorists

Has money, won't be murdered - end of discussion!

I mean. Yeah?

Are you worried about how she feels???

Literally nothing has happened to any of these people. They’ve made bad posts online and other posters are telling them to stfu because they don’t know what they are talking about.

Some of them were targeted by fatwas iirc.

What is a fatwa but a post by another name

A fatwa is a 'formal legal opinion' in Arabic, so it checks out.

I think what is going on is more like if the mullahs issued a fatwa and everyone clowned them mercifully.

lol, mercilessly

The argument that masses of people calling you a hateful TERF cunt and saying your books should be burned, etc, doesn't count as a thing that has 'happened to' someone, sounds like an argument that words are just words which ... I don't think you really agree with

Ok I’ll revise: i literally do not care what happens to JK Rowling, I have no reason to extend her the courtesy of taking her perspective, nor do I think it’s an interesting intellectual exercise to do so

She is a terf cunt tho ppl should keep telling her that.

Every time she gets called out by her fans, which include the trans community, she just writes another essay explaining her opinion which is more offensive than the last, so...

There's a diff between ruining someone's life over an 8 year old Tweet made when someone was 12 and canceling someone who is repeatedly saying hurtful TERF things instead of having any real reflexion or withdrawing from the battle.

So yea, silby otm

Xpost

hateful TERF cunt

I mean, Rowling made a point of siding with people like Magdalen Berns:

Months later, I compounded my accidental ‘like’ crime by following Magdalen Berns on Twitter. Magdalen was an immensely brave young feminist and lesbian who was dying of an aggressive brain tumour. I followed her because I wanted to contact her directly, which I succeeded in doing. However, as Magdalen was a great believer in the importance of biological sex, and didn’t believe lesbians should be called bigots for not dating trans women with penises, dots were joined in the heads of twitter trans activists, and the level of social media abuse increased.

There is nothing reasonable about defending the 'immensely brave' Berns, who has described trans women as 'blackface actors', 'men who get sexual kicks from being treated like women', in addition to outright stating that 'trans women are men' (see Kate's posts upthread).

And this is just one example among many of Rowling's dog whistling (I'm being very generous here).

I only objected to ganging up on Rowling when the evidence was a few people on her follow list. Can't imagine trying to do so after the last 5 months

Following on Twitter = 'make a point of siding with' = 'defending' = TERF?

Did you read the essay she wrote

It's far more than defending someone

Not gonna embed the full Berns quote itt but it's considerably worse in context. You can look it up if you want.

cardamom, that indented quote speaks for itself, but read Rowling's essay if you haven't already. It's not just about 'following someone on Twitter'.

Errr cardamon.

The argument that masses of people calling you a hateful TERF cunt and saying your books should be burned, etc, doesn't count as a thing

Then the letter might have been better if it had argued that people shouldn't shout abuse at other people and should continue to buy their products.

The problem here is that calling people names is also free speech, as is making decisions about who's products to buy

We can certainly make the argument that we shouldn't go round hurling abuse at people, though that might run counter to the spirit of the letter, if they had done that

Literally nothing has happened to any of these people.

I doubt anyone will be Graham Linehan to write anything anytime soon.

... asking Graham Linehan to write anything anytime soon.

More of a “did to self” than “happened to” in that case, I daresay

Lots of people don’t get asked to write for things. If TERF-man is reduced to moaning about it at the pub, he’s merely been brought to the same level as all the rest of us. Let Harry Potter lady self publish; let David Brooks exercise his free speech in the yahoo news comments section, god knows he has no more insight than anyone else there

yeah i think if Linehan was being this much of an asshole about basically any contentious topic he'd be in the same boat, he sounds like a completely toxic person to have to interact with.

I want to write a sitcom treatment about a guy who destroys his life because he can't bear to be wrong about something on Twitter, maybe he'd go for that.

I think there's a teasing implication here that some of us (on dear old ILX and on Twitter) do, in fact, believe in freedom of speech ... when used defensively, as it were, at someone deemed to have 'shot first'.

Punishment must not be restricted by concerns about proportionality, and it's definitely retributive rather than restorative justice we're looking for. Asking for limits, 'civility', in the responses to the baddy is not the done thing.

Where I differ, I think, from the free speech letter in Harper's, is I largely get why this attitude is the attitude.

If you're familiar with online discussion, you're definitely familiar with trolling (i.e. someone in bad faith saying whatever will piss off the village, for a laugh) and mostly the safest bet is to block trolls. You can't assume there's a real person there to have dialogue with/appeal to, and most likely there isn't.

And it's difficult to fully articulate how much damage is being done irl by online hate speech, though we know damage is being done (mass shooters quoting stuff from online in their manifestos). It's murky, which makes figuring out a proportionate punishment complicated, therefore no one bothers with proportionality. And also what exactly would restorative justice look like, in the case of JKR?

Magdalen Berns also tweeted about the “trans lobby” being funded by Soros, so you know she was very decent indeed.

In fact JKR also tweeted in support of Maya Forstater, for what JKR says was being forced out of her job “for stating that sex is real?”

The truth is a bit different.

Maya Forstater’s contract was not renewed and she took her ex employer to court for it, claiming her right to free expression had been breached because of her “gender critical beliefs”.

She was tweeting terf stuff and this was raised with HR by her colleagues, she misgendered people constantly and referred to trans women as men. Basically she wanted the law to endorse her right to say whatever she wanted in the workplace over the legal right of someone to be identified as male or female. The law did not back her up and the judgement said:

“The claimant is absolutist in her view of sex and it is a core component of her belief that she will refer to a person by the sex she considered appropriate even if it violates their dignity and/or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment.”

Forstater, in her witness statement, more or less confirmed this: It “may be polite,” she acknowledged, to use a person’s preferred pronouns, “but there is no fundamental right to compel people to be polite or kind in every situation.”

And the judge also said “I conclude from … the totality of the evidence, that (Forstater) is absolutist in her view of sex and it is a core component of her belief that she will refer to a person by the sex she considered appropriate even if it violates their dignity and/or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment. The approach is not worthy of respect in a democratic society.”

Now personally if it was me, and I had to hear those things said about myself, I’d probably die of shame, but she’s just started crowdfunding and painting herself as a free speech martyr, same as the rest of them. No respect for her and even less for Rowling.