A person I know who was researching gerrymandering of a this certain state that I know, was told to STOP because the board of regents was getting mad, at this public university. Despite tenure, etc! I was shocked.
Is there a git repo with notes on how to scrape the public data sources? Doing that before officially stopping would allow pretty much anyone to continue.
Sympathies btw, being told to stop something you care about is awful.
This isn't meant as pressure or guilt-tripping or anything, more that I just don't really understand how academic jobs work. What happens if that person says "I've got tenure and this institution has some formal commitment to academic freedom; I'm going to keep researching gerrymandering as much as I want to"?
They can cut funding/positions from the department.
4: They can make tenured life unpleasant in lots of ways. Teaching assignments (unless in the employment agreement), office assignments, funding, etc. Not sure whether a department could assign some miserable committee work, but I bet they can make you serve as something like department chair, which eats a lot of time and lots of people hate doing it.
Finally mailed out wedding invitations today! Cutting it pretty close, but everyone who's likely to come has known about it for several months anyway.
1: Sorry that they're snapping at you, Ladybird. Do you think it'd be okay with admin to thaw out the paper in a year, when Gerrymandering is (mostly) done for a decade? Setting it aside temporarily would allow you to keep your progress while helping dodge the board of regents interest.
The fact that it's a public university suggests it may not actually be LBJ herself getting the pushback.
A followup: got kid vaxxed at 11y10.5m. No issues. Now 12, at annual checkup pediatrician asked when we are getting them vaxxed. We said it's already done, he said oh it's not in the system, go give the card to the receptionist. Receptionist entered it under kid's proper records with correct birthday and all other info. So everything is done and correct except there's a vaccinated imaginary kid out there with a different birthday.
My kid just taught me the correct way to pronounce the name of the king from Shrek.
9 is true. I was just shocked on someone else's behalf. The person in question is in fact desisting out of not wanting to go into battle. And they did deliver data to someone at a private university (also not me).
So, once again, the real burden on academic freedom is left wing cancel culture.
I almost joked that LB was channeling Snarkie.
God, I can't bear the way it has become a matter of faith that left-wing cancel culture is made up. Is it the most important important thing in the world? No. Is it anywhere near as bad as the right trying to overthrow the government? No. Does that make campaigns of harassment and the period example of someone getting cancelled unfairly okay? It does not.
Most obvious example right now in this country is Kathleen Stock.
The MIT EAPS talk cancelation was weird. Topic was unrelated to what he had said that was supposedly so offensive, although I can't even find a straightforward description of the offensive part beyond criticizing diversity policies. I guess the Newsweek article mentioned where he used a Nazi analogy?
16: Yes it gets so little attention.
And so charming to imply that 13 and 14 are saying left-wing cancel culture is made up.
Never heard of Kathleen Stock, but based on a Guardian article, her case seems complicated and not black and white at all.
17: The MIT EAPS talk is the most recent example.
20: Why bring it up, except to signal that it doesn't matter? Here we're not even talking about someone getting cancelled, just an inappropriate request by the administration with unknown (and possibly nonexistent) consequences. There was a serious campaign by right-wingers to get Erik Loomis fired a few years ago, which is also terrible, but it had the consequence of him being not fired because he has tenure, and he's now more of a public figure.
19: Something had a link to the guy's offensive statements -- it was roughly "in my experience, affirmative action has gone too far" with a couple of examples of higher percentages of women than men getting selected for something. If I got the story straight, though, the talk that was cancelled was a public outreach talk, and the guy was invited to talk to the EAPS department about his research, which seems like a measured outcome: your research is fine, so we're happy to hear you talk about that, but your beliefs on affirmative action are contrary to our positions so we don't want you doing public outreach for us.
And I opened this up by making a crack about it, and I agree there's more than nothing to the gripes about left-wing cancel culture -- the fact that there's more, and weightier offenses against academic freedom and free speech on the right doesn't make problems on the left non-existent.
24: I was probably overly pissy about it. I've just seen too many variants of that joke used to pretend there's nothing to it.
23: I think it's a genuine scandal. The standard for giving a public talk on your area of expertise cannot be "has never made a public statement that activists object to". His thoughts on the topic were dumb, but he wasn't invited to talk about the topic. It's a talk by an academic -- in the best case the effect on public outreach would have been close to zero. Instead, the effect of MIT's public outreach became hours of free content for Fox News about cancel culture, so I don't think it was a net gain for MIT's public image.
It's not the biggest thing in the world, but it still made the world slightly a worse place.
The Carlson Lecture is an annual outreach event to communicate new results in climate science to the general public and to engage with area high school students, with the aim to inspire young people to consider careers in the geosciences, and in STEM in general.Yeah I can see the argument that he's not the best face to inspire kids to go into science. "Hey kids go into science and you can work with people like me who will say you were probably accepted to the program because of affirmative action!"
I don't think you can live a decent life in any kind of public capacity without at some point providing fodder for Fox to shit out as content.
Complaints about political correctness or cancel culture and whatnot remind me of complaints about Biden or Clinton after the Democratic convention. Yeah, sure, they suck, but is that what's really interesting in the world right now? These complaints -- the impact, if not the intent -- is to distract from the actually bad stuff. Griping about Hillary distracts from Donald Trump and complaining about cancel culture distracts from the things that we actually can't talk about in polite society. Fox News, as Walt says, totally gets this.
The conversation over, say, transgender rights is much less politically correct -- in the real sense of political correctness -- than it used to be and that's good. Strong objection to Kathleen Stock is natural and appropriate, even though it is nonetheless wildly inappropriate that she should be made to fear for her personal safety. I'd like to see people arrested for threats, but I'm onboard with the criticism.
Right. MIT deciding that it doesn't want the face of its public outreach to high school students to be volubly opposed to MIT's policies for helping more than half of them get a foothold in the science world seems very reasonable to me. And you can't give Fox News a heckler's veto on this kind of thing -- their reaction is completely unrelated to whether anything wrong actually happened.
" The conversation over, say, transgender rights is much less politically correct -- in the real sense of political correctness -- than it used to be and that's good."
I don't even remember what the real sense of politically correct is anymore.
It's turtles being assholes all the way down.
Various bits of somewhat old news.
xelA raced in the annual mini-marathon my London borough runs for kids. We were a bit worried he'd get disheartened or struggle. Not because he's not fit enough--he's a fairly fit 8 year old, so running a mile isn't a problem--but just because a lot of his friends are serious athletes/footballers who train all the time and are super-competitive to the point where it verges on unhealthy. But ... he came 20th, out of approx 220 kids his age. Genuinely incredibly pleased for him because it was a nice boost to his confidence. His class mates all did great, too.
Mrs ttaM, who is applying for teacher training next year, has been working as a classroom assistant/assistant teacher for a month or so now, which is hard. Partly because I now have to do literally all of the child care, Monday to Friday, as she leaves before he gets up, and gets back after I've already collected him from school, and I have a very demanding job. But also because the teacher she is working for is a horrible bully. I'm always shocked at the behaviour that gets accepted in education, both schools and universities. There's just no way anyone in my line of work could talk to a colleague or employee like that without getting their arse fired, or worse. I'd also expect any of my staff to tell me to fuck off to my face if I spoke to them like that. But, in schools ... no problem.
So instead self-proclaimed activists have a heckler's veto. Heckler's vetoes are fine, as long as we're the hecklers. Gotcha.
31: This is me talking in my own mental shorthand, in which actual real-world political correctness is the thing that keeps us from being able to discuss, say, an atheist president. Not long ago, it was politically incorrect in the real world to express solidarity with transgender people -- to say out loud that they should have rights to gender expression, to say that mockery was inappropriate. That is less true now, and the fact that it is less true has resulted in people talking about phony political correctness -- how the bigots' right silence people is being trampled.
34: The self-proclaimed activists have no power and are basically just people complaining.
34: In general, when you find yourself saying, "You know, Fox News has a point," you need to figure out where you have gone astray. That might not always be right, but as a heuristic, it has served me well.
I think exactly that is a bad heuristic. Fox News' take on anything is worth nothing, but taking it as a negative guide is overvaluing it. Their goals are always bad, but there's no reason to believe they wouldn't say something true if it served their bad goals.
Don't pee on an electric fence is another good one.
People are backing away from too many challenges.
It's not like spit. You can put force behind it.
41: The whole Tide Pod thing was a generational shift.
We just had powder. Not very appetizing.
37: You have actually used this as a heuristic? Like, you weren't sure what to think, until you saw Fox News' take? Thank God you have Fox News in your life, then.
I've made conservatives for years for doing things just because liberals said not to. Christ, you can see them doing it now with the vaccine, with predictably stupid results. I'm sure as hell not going to start imitating them.
Made fun of conservatives, I meant. If I've actually made any conservatives, I hope lightning strikes me now.
I get the point of not following their tactics, but if students are only allowed to bitch about their school after the elders agree they are doing it right, it's just not going to work.
47: No, students can bitch all they want. MIT should have ignored them. It's MIT's blunder here.
MIT is supposed to be run at least in part for the students.
Obviously, you want people to talk/think about your guest speaker's content, and not their prior acts or general character as inferred from prior acts. What I think a lot of institutions are having trouble with is that due diligence in selecting guest speakers needs to go considerably deeper, because amateur sleuths have way more information way more readily available.
The corollary to 'if you fuck a goat just one time' is that anyone sponsoring you for anything needs to make sure you never fucked a goat. Otherwise, no matter what you talk about, the audience is just going to be thinking about goats.
And it's even more fraught when it's not goat-fucking, but something which the institution might plausibly endorse. Like, if the issue was literal goat-fucking -- the guy had a career in bestiality porn -- MIT would be in a strong position to say "nothing to do with his professional life, nothing to do with us, if you feel unclean watching him give a lecture on science that's your problem." Someone who's taken the position that women and minorities are probably being advanced through affirmative action in a way that's more than they deserve, on the other hand, that's a position that MIT might endorse, and so there's more of a need to clarify that it actually does not.
The goat-fuckers club has been having trouble.
And so you can't ignore attention-seeking assholes just because they are attention seeking assholes. You have to decide whether the thing they raise is going to be too distracting.
The conservative judgment that no one should be distracted by certain allegations -- and this is what underlies their complaints about cancel culture -- aren't any more worthy of deference than anything else they argue. People care about what they care about, and a speaker's prior remarks about race or gender, especially if they reflect outmoded attitudes, are going to draw attention, whether you think those attitudes should be considered outmoded or not.
Whatever happened to Mickey Kaus, anyway?
45: I didn't really know anything about the MIT controversy except the Fox take, which you offer here:
the effect of MIT's public outreach became hours of free content for Fox News about cancel culture
So what lesson do we draw from this? We could do the research and figure out what exactly is going on here, if we judged it worth our time. We could look at the situation and say "Fox News has a point." Or we could rely on a heuristic and guess that, in the absence of other evidence, Fox News is likely to be full of shit.
Heuristics are admittedly lazy, but I would argue they are necessary. As I said in 37, distrusting Fox News has been a useful heuristic, even if (like all heuristics) it's fallible.
But okay. No more heuristics. Let's do a little homework. Turns out this goofball was kept from doing university outreach to high schoolers after comparing the university's diversity and inclusion efforts to the Nazis or the Soviet famine.
This sort of thing from Abbot is the reason that, in all venues for civilized discourse, analogies have been banned.
Turns out that Abbot will still offer a presentation on his research to students and faculty -- just not as outreach to high school students.
(After seemingly being misunderstood, I looked up the word "heuristic" to make sure I was using it correctly. It means what I thought it did: "mental shortuct," basically. Not a rigid intellectual requirement.)
51 Yes. Also, it's dumb to bring in a goat fucker to talk about macroeconomic policy when you can bring in someone with as much expertise who never fucked a goat.
Especially when you have students, the world over, saying 'again with the goat fuckers? we're starting to think you have a thing about goats.'
54: Wikipedia says "In 2020, he stated that he had voted for Trump in 2016, but would prefer a more electable Trumpist." You fuck the goat you have, not the goat you wish you had.
55: I think it's a perfectly fine weak heuristic -- no one should think something's important just because Fox News thinks it's important, for example. And distrusting Fox News's take on anything is dead right -- I wouldn't trust them if they told me the sky was blue, I'd go check. I was just pushing back on the idea that finding yourself in agreement with Fox News on something specific was meaningful evidence you were wrong.
54: Something that goes largely unremarked is that, while it's a pretty good heuristic to suppose that Kaus is mockable on any given matter, the incident that spawned the goat-fucking allegation was one where Kaus was correct.
I have completely forgotten. Was it the John Edwards affair? I was an Edwards voter and doubted that one until it was undeniable.
53: You are basically endorsing the idea that anyone who has anything other than median Unfogged opinion cannot have a platform. Why have anyone speak on anything at all, when you can find someone who's just as good who has median Unfogged opinion. I used to think that conservatives were full of shit when they accused liberals of wanting to silence anyone in universities other than liberals. Apparently that was our policy goal all along, and I was too gullible to notice it.
54: There is literally nothing objectionable about that, other than that it's a stupid thing to say, the kind of stupid thing to say that only a conservative would say. What's surprises me is that we're no different than the historical Catholic Church's position on politics. Error has no rights. There is no right to speak, if you might say something wrong.
It's not that error has no rights, it's that error has legions, many paid. Life is short, I'm busy. I look for reasons I don't have to worry about a problem and "students complain to administrators about a professor" isn't one of them.
It's that some people are shocked to have to deal with the kind of adversity most people just expect to have to encounter when earning a living.
61. Yeah, it was Edwards. Kaus was way out in front on that, and Yglesias had some legit gripes. But Kaus was right -- and not, I would argue, in a stopped-clock way. He legitimately had it figured out.
I never liked Edwards. Probably for the same reason I didn't like Bill Clinton. They just talk like they're trying to pull something.
I never liked Kaus. Probably for the same reason I never liked Anne Coulter.
I don't really remember much of what Kaus wrote. I was more of a News Quiz fan.
My state votes late. In 2020, I felt deprived of the opportunity to vote for Bernie. In 2004, I was spared the embarrassment of voting for Edwards.
62.1: The median Unfogged opinion doesn't even get all that much respect on Unfogged.
I heard about the MIT situation because a Cal scientist resigned as director of the Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center rather than endorsing the same position. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about this, but I do have a semi-examined belief that deplatforming is a ratchet. It feels very logically inconsistent ever to back down and become increasingly permissive, so activists are gonig to tend to be increasingly vigilant. Right? And I'm generally sympathetic to Walt here, but I'm not giving a second of consideration to any free-speech advocate who won't grant that the right does the same shit much more often than they're willing to admit.
Kathleen Stock is pretty disingenuous, but I honestly don't know how the conflict over gender ideologies can get resolved. People are never going to agree, but they have to coexist somehow, and this one seems not quite to break down along the traditional political lines of bigotry and tolerance.
LGM links this thing from Yale which I think interacts with Walt's argument in an interesting way:
I used to think that conservatives were full of shit when they accused liberals of wanting to silence anyone in universities other than liberals. Apparently that was our policy goal all along, and I was too gullible to notice it.
I can agree with the position that I attribute to Walt on this: Objecting to "trap house" and "Popeye's chicken" on racial grounds is nonsense.
But I also have to cop to being the sort of liberal that Walt is complaining about. People are pissed off about "Popeye's" because they can't address the real issue: The Federalist Society is -- in any decent academic environment -- properly regarded with scorn. The Federalist Society is the legal vanguard in this country for white supremacy and oligarchy.
But we can't talk about that. It ain't politically correct. So frustrated, undisciplined people end up lashing out at "trap house." Like Walt, I wish they didn't do that, but I wish they could talk about the actual problem instead.
50: Nick Christakis recently said that as a matter of principle he felt that universities should never withdraw invitations. (This goes nicely with Conor Friesendorf's incredulity at the thought that Netflix executives might make judgment calls about what to air.)
We can talk about the Federalist Society being ghastly, and people do. We can't get to consensus on that, because there are lots of crazy people who agree with them, but there's no barrier on saying the Fed Soc is a bad thing.
And yeah, the Yale thing was bad, both the complaints and the administration's reaction. I wish they hadn't done that.
There was if you wanted a Trump appointment to the federal bench.
"A Massachusetts boarding school ($67,920/year ) invited -- and then disinvited -- Nikole Hannah-Jones as a speaker."
74: That's right. I didn't fully convey the nature of my liberal extremism as effectively as Walt did. I think the conversation at Yale should be about kicking the fuckers off campus. About suppressing their views in law journals and whatnot.
62: 54: There is literally nothing objectionable about that, other than that it's a stupid thing to say, the kind of stupid thing to say that only a conservative would say.
It appears the guy went out of his way to publish op-eds do YouTube videos and be interviewed on the subject. So it is not just this one time, or unartful phrasing, it seems to be a hobbyhorse of his which he has deliberately sought attention for. And so he got it, and I think it makes the department's much more understandable and justifiable. I myself, would probably not have counseled the disinvite(/other invite) but I think it pretty fucking weak sauce like many such "outrages."
Just this AM I got confronted with a couple of out-of-context BS stories about everyone's favorite DFHC (from a now conservative alum). I refused to engage. Perhaps shamefully. but mostly due to lack of interest.
It's all fucking trolling as far as I can see.
Stupid net nanny at work would never let me visit the Daily Stormer (which apparently no longer exists?). Today it wouldn't let me look up "trap house" in the Urban Dictionary. But it's just fine with the Federalist Society web site.
Did Gannett come in and make it a weekly?
77- Bedbug Stephens is on the board of trustees, is an alumni, and gave a graduation speech a couple years ago.
I opened this up by making a crack about it, and I agree there's more than nothing to the gripes about left-wing cancel culture -- the fact that there's more, and weightier offenses against academic freedom and free speech on the right doesn't make problems on the left non-existent.
I agree with this, but I find myself waffling on how to define the problem. I think this is a tempting, but ultimately incorrect way of framing it:
47: No, students can bitch all they want. MIT should have ignored them. It's MIT's blunder here.
If our assessment of the situation is, "activists can ask for thinks, some of which are justified, some of which unjustified or poorly thought out. The institution decides whether to accommodate them or tell them to shove off. Institutions are being too accommodating." That leads directly into an argument about, "how common is this?" Because I'm sure there are plenty of cases where the institution does say, "shove off." But the arguments I see are generally trying to convince politically engaged people (unfogged commenters, for example), to take a position of whether the activists were justified or not (more or less "we have to be willing to criticize people who are 'on our side' when they are being stupid") But that doesn't sit comfortably with the idea that the only people with agency (that matters) are the decision makers in the institution.
I think there is an argument going on that certain structures of moral argument ("it is wrong to participate in injustice, as defined thusly . . . ") are pernicious and should be discouraged.
I don't have a clear definition of how those should be categorized but I would offer a very banned analogy. Imagine a conversation between an activist and somebody advocating for cautious (which I'll call a popularist, because it fits how some of these arguments sort out online, but I don't think it directly reflects Shor, for example).
Activist: Economic inequality is a huge problem.
Popularist: I agree, we should attempt reforms to reduce inequality.
A: Morally we should recognize that the beneficiaries of the current system are culpable in great injustice. "Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."
P: Practically speaking, I think we need to avoid criticizing wealthy people for being bad, simply because they're wealthy. We should probably take the current property ownership as legitimate and try to ameliorate over time.
A: That may be practical, but it concedes a great deal. I do not think all current properly ownership is legitimate.
I think both of those arguments are correct; it is deeply impractical to try to de-legitimize current properly ownership, but accepting it as legitimate concedes a lot.
I would make an analogy to arguments about moral legitimacy. There's a practical argument that people who are, basically, playing fair by the existing moral rules of the game should be treated as morally legitimate -- that it would be wrong to say that their current standing of social legitimacy (often including fame, fortune, titles, etc . . .) are based upon past crimes and should be treated with suspicion.
But, again, that risks conceding too much.
I don't know if the analogy offers much illumination. It's not a perfect fit, because you have people making fairly clear-cut arguments about property rights, but far less clear-cut when talking about moral legitimacy.
But I found helpful in tracing my own mulling over the question.
62 Now that's horseshit on multiple levels. I'm not saying the guy should be locked up, or prevented from getting on Youtube, telling Joe Rogan what he thinks, getting a column in the New York Times, or anything remotely like that. He has all the rights of anyone, subject to reasonable time, manner, place restrictions. What I'm saying is that an institution with a limited number of slots it wants to fill for particular institutional purposes has a right to decide who to fill those slots with, and avoiding speakers who are going to be much less effective because of external factors is prudent administration.
The alternative model is stupid: I can decide I want to address MIT students, in an organized institutional setting, and if they say no, oh my god, I'm being cancelled. Or an equally bullshit model: once an invitation is extended, it may not be withdrawn, no matter what the organizers come to understand about the efficacy of the speaking invitation. My explicit suggestion is that people issuing invitations are going to have to work harder to avoid getting themselves into these things. Can they? Yes. Should they? What kind of idiot thinks they shouldn't?
The biggest horseshit of all -- the tell that you are operating in bad faith and need to look in the mirror -- is the invocation of median Unfogged opinion. Nothing I said is even remotely susceptible to the assertion that I, or we, are the arbiters or hold the yardstick.
Too tired to argue but just going to leave this here as a counterpoint to the constant media narrative that one side is suppressing "free speech". https://twitter.com/graceelavery/status/1450549612293545985?s=20
I cannot stop reading Grace's stuff. It's interfering with my work!
Oh but wait, are these fights so nasty because the stakes are so low? That doesn't quite seem right.
Rape and death threats against a female academic are sort of where I draw the line. Kathleen Stock has received both.
Anyone defending this creepy line of attack is just a hard-core misogynist, imo.
jpj, curious - did you read the link in 85?
I totally agree that people sending rape and death threats to Kathleen Stock are hardcore misogynists. Unfortunately this is the norm rather than the exception for a woman in a high-profile controversy (and trans women get plenty of them too) -- I can only imagine what horrors fill the daily inbox of Marjorie Taylor Greene.
But as I said, I don't see how this ends. There are real issues at stake, in particular the issue of how trans identities are recognized in British law, from which a host of real-life problems ensue (including for university students, I'm sure). Stock seems to equivocate constantly about what she believes: in particular, as Grace Lavery has pointed out, she signed a manifesto calling for the replacement of the current Gender Recognition Act, but now claims that she upholds the Act. It seems pretty clear to me that, in practice, she would be content with a wide range of exclusionary political outcomes despite her stated support of trans people -- she's positioned herself as an adversary of "trans rights activists" and a standard-bearer for "gender critical feminism," and her allies in the latter camp include people with much more extreme views. How much does she really want to act as a force of moderation on those people? Her activism and advocacy work seems important to her both personally and as a corollary of her academic work. There aren't a lot of bright lines here around purely academic controversy or purely professional behavior or protected speech.
Personally I'm naive and idealistic, and I want to believe that it's possible for ideas like Stock's (perhaps shared by you, JPJ, and by NW and others) to coexist with ideas like my own, such that there doesn't need to be an existential fight over who belongs at the university or what counts as hate, hostility, bigotry, etc. But I don't believe this. I don't think the competing theories of gender can coexist. I don't know exactly what that means in practice (beyond, like, everything you see before you now), and I wish I could extend more charity to Stock. She puts a kindly face on her views when she feels the need. I don't think there's a chance in hell that that would be the true face of a "gender critical" triumph in culture and law.
P.S. lourdes read only my comment and decided to sit this thread out. "I'll let you handle it!" This is a very reasonable division of labor since -- bonus check-in thread content -- she is working something like four jobs simultaneously this month and I am just dealing with the goddamn hydra of trying to stay off Twitter.
I don't think I'd have a problem with legislation establishing death/rape threats as IIED per se, with punitive damages available.
I know we've discussed it before multiple times, but I remain confused about why this TERF-y gender ideology stuff is so prominent on the British left. I'm sure it exists in the US too, but as much more of a fringe phenomenon. American transphobia is rampant but much more associated with the right, which at least makes sense.
Also, I recently finally broke down and joined Twitter. I haven't yet tweeted anything or even filled out my bio, but being signed up does make it a lot easier to access content on the platform. My impression so far is that it's annoying and unpleasant in exactly the way I expected it to be, but at least that's a different way from how Facebook is annoying and unpleasant.
90 is an absolute blinder of an example of the "ignore everything before the 'but'" rule.
84: We personally don't hold the yardstick. People like us do. When we dismiss what happened at MIT, we are dismissing a consequence that will never be brought to bear upon us, or anyone like us.
Seconding 95, of course. Skipping to the meat after the "But", in what sense do you believe that these ideas "cannot coexist"? All kinds of opposed ideas coexist all the time. That's why we have arguments.
And why in fuck's name do you think Kathleen Stock is disingenuous? I take it you haven't read her book, of course.
But perhaps you mean that two policy positions cannot coexist, a perfectly reasonable point. I think that lesbian philosophers should not by hounded and bullied out of their jobs for doing philosophy as lesbians. You perhaps support the opposing policy. I agree that no compromise is possible in this particular case. Either she is supported and keeps her job or not. Either way, the ideas will continue to coexist.
[Deleted by Heebie upon request plus sincere contrition]
96: we are dismissing a consequence that will never be brought to bear upon us, or anyone like us.
Ah. So you really don't believe there are similar (and often supported by the state) happenings that go the other way.
Jeezus.
We have a lot of lesbians in the US too, the vast majority seem to be very supportive of trans rights.
I think this thread needs more heterosexual men explaining the lesbians' views.
That does seem to be the only way for them to be heard, yes. If they try to explain their views themselves, they get death threats.
98: I think he's saying that people like us post anonymously in the comments section of a blog that no one reads.
98: Of course I do, you stupid fucking dumbshit. There was one in comment 1, and I mentioned the Loomis example. But there is no chance that left-wing activists are ever going to decide anything we say means we need to be deplatformed, because we are securely in the mainstream of opinion that left-wing activists find tolerable.
I think that gets to the nub of it. Finally, our side can act as badly as our enemies. For some of us, this is a glorious moment of triumph, because we can get the revenge we so richly deserve.
It still seems odd to me that British feminism is so terfy while American feminism is not.
105: American feminists may receive more credible death threats.
Can everyone remember that there are trans women and trans men who comment or have commented here, and a whole lot of commenters who care about them, and try to stay kind and civil?
Or just more credible threats, full stop. If it's generally accepted as OK in the US to inflict professional harm (no-platforming, etc) on people who voice certain opinions, then you are not going to hear those opinions as much. That's the point of doing it in the first place! But you can't then say "huh I guess not many people in the US hold those opinions, I certainly rarely hear them in public".
lk i'm at a loss, just here to express sympathy & solidarity. i've zero interest in engaging with the bile spewing out above, it all just feels nauseatingly like when frowner & others before either disappeared for long stretches or forever so far as i can tell. hoping you do whatever is best for you.
106, 108 this is baseless speculation. American feminists are very outspoken yet there has the situation in the US is very different
Oh, sure. We live in constant fear. I mean, I was at an American university nearly continuously from 1989 through 2019 and never saw anything remotely cancel-y. But maybe that's because I zoned out during some of the online training.
And by here I mean in the US as I am not currently there
I have speculated that the difference between US and UK politics on trans issues was the controversy over the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival restricting attendance to "womyn born womyn" in the nineties. At that point, trans issues weren't very salient for the general public, so it got hashed out as an issue internal to the left, and there was something like consensus already in place when the issues heated up that trans-inclusive thinking should be a general leftist norm (rules of thumb, nothing's universal, but most US people who think of themselves on the left will gravitate toward the trans-inclusive side of most controversies they become aware of).
In the UK, I think maybe that sort of internal-to-the-left controversy didn't get hashed out until much later, when the general public was already paying attention?
115 seems right. Combine that with that the US right is more extreme than the UK right and so there's more of a sense of "we're all under attack" in the US which leads to more solidarity. E.g., the Tories aren't going to ban gay marriage in the UK, but the Republicans are reasonably likely to do so (at least in many states) in the US in the near future.
The thing that I find really frustrating is that I do think it's difficult to talk about issues around the gender revolution society is going through (not about trans-acceptance specifically, but stuff like how it feels like some of the societal changes we're going through make it hard to fit in if you don't have strong gender identity), and I'd like to be able to talk about it more freely. But you can't have a more free conversation when someone is going to show up and say something vicious like 97 which shuts down the conversation. People who say things like 97 seem to think they're standing up for having a more free conversation, but I feel like it's exactly the opposite, it's exactly this kind of remark that makes it impossible to have an open conversation.
Like irl I had a conversation with a lesbian this week about feeling uncomfortable about having to put pronouns in Zoom, nametags and email footer, because it forces introductions to center gender so strongly, which is uncomfortable if you don't feel like gender is an important part of your identity. But we could have this conversation in private because we knew neither of us wanted to be mean or unaccepting to trans people. You can't have this kind of conversation in public while trans people are under attack from so many people. I think it's a shame not to be able to talk about this, but it's the way it is unless you can assume a base level of acceptance and care towards trans people.
Right. I think the fundamental value most people who think of themselves as in some sense on the left, like me, are trying to support is respect and affirmation toward trans adults and children who are under attack from so many hostile people. Where the emotional temperature is so high, everything feels like a "with us or against us" issue, which means that intellectualized discussions of minor issues around the fringes are going to feel impossible to have without difficulty.
I'm sorry for the last part of 97. There really was a sign saying "suck my girl dick" at one of the anti-Stock demos, and I was carried away by anger at the memory of it. Feel free to remove it, FPPs.
Just popping in to say thanks for expressions of civility upthread, and also to agree with 117. Compulsory pronouns (I mean, rarely actually compulsory, but you know) are also awkward if you happen to be in a place where you're not sure what your pronouns are. So there are good reasons not to love the norm; at the same time, this is a way that the big, clumsy, bureaucratic university which is my employer is ham-fistedly trying to signal that base level of acceptance and care, and perceiving that intention makes an enormous difference.
perceiving that intention makes an enormous difference
This is helpful to hear, thanks. I've long since added pronouns to my Zoom thingie, but I sometimes feel awkward saying "he/him" aloud as part of verbal introductions. I already had the sense I should get over myself, but I wasn't entirely certain. I'll now get back to work on getting over myself, I guess.
I avoid awkward introductions at work by only ever working with the same dozen people.
I glanced over this thread after waking up, got Elke ready for/dropped off at school, came back ready to engage everyone's arguments, and the arguments sort of evaporated as I looked at them, and I've thus been kind of at a loss for the last hour. Maybe I'll just take stabs where I can in multiple comments until people conclusively get me to STFU.
NW, yes, I mean "coexist peacefully" without this sort of conflict, and furthermore have that coexistence supported by some kind of compromise in policy. Here I think two questions are salient: one, what would appropriate support for Stock's career look like; and two (apparently), whether extreme views and behavior, including misogyny and threats of violence, are so baked into either the movement for trans rights or the gender-critical movement that appeasing either one is dangerous. (And I suppose my completely, scrupulously honest answer to the second question is that I don't really know. Humanity is fucking terrible!)
I've read pieces of Stock's book quoted in the media and various essays she's posted on Medium and so on. I've glanced at her Twitter feed once or twice.
"suck my girl dick" at one of the anti-Stock demos, and I was carried away by anger at the memory of it
Aw Jesus Christ. I have absolutely no part in this conversation and should stay out. However.
My impression from a distance is that this is not a thing worthy of anger if you are not part of the fucking. I've concluded, from a distance, that people's tastes are varied and malleable, even lesbians' tastes. That many people are open to a wide variety of genitals once they think the person is attractive and there's no guessing from the outside whether "suck my girl dick" is offputting or hott. From what I can tell, it could be excluded by someone's sexuality or included in some situations, or especially attractive. The people for whom that is relevant are the potential fuckers, and their interaction should have foreknowledge and consent and kindness.
But if you are not about to fuck someone, there is simply nothing for you to concern yourself with. You have no need for vicarious anger on behalf of a class of people when the tastes of any member of that could be anything and changeable.
I am dead certain there are girl dicks getting very happily sucked by cis men, cis women, trans men and trans women, gays and lesbians and pans. I am certain that is happening right this very second. There's no cause for anger. Surprising someone with unexpected genitals could be cause for anger (or thrill!), but the person you are thinking of is literally carrying a sign.
The issue is that telling someone "suck my dick" who you are not in a sexual relationship is sexual harassment and an implied threat of sexual assault. Men shouldn't do that, and neither should women.
Of course a few trans people doing bad things just means trans people are like all other groups, there's assholes everywhere.
Walt, I'm an old straight white man who's generally spent the last 40 years fairly near the mainstream, with all the flaws that that entails, and if you don't think I should expect that at some point something I've said/done is liable to get me into trouble, you're having a failure of imagination. What saves me isn't past virtue or present alignment/compliance, but present (and I hope future) irrelevance.
Left/right isn't the only axis, or even, really, the most relevant axis, wrt these things.
Like irl I had a conversation with a lesbian this week about feeling uncomfortable about having to put pronouns in Zoom, nametags and email footer, because it forces introductions to center gender so strongly, which is uncomfortable if you don't feel like gender is an important part of your identity.
Interesting. One trend I've been noticing lately irl is an increasing number of people stating that they use "they/them" without necessarily making androgyny or gender ambiguity part of their public presentation or identity. This seems to be happening among both cis and trans people in LGBTQ+ communities, and some people are explicitly continuing to use a set of gendered pronouns in addition to they/them. I wonder if it's related to that feeling of wanting to deemphasize gender as a component of identity. There also seem to be more people identifying as non-binary, which may also be related.
Just catching up, but seriously NW, wtf is this:
Incidentally, for all the Americans asking why there is a terfy left in this country: one reason is that a lot of them are lesbians who won't accept that if a person waves a dick at them and tells them to suck it because he's really a woman they should, so to say, suck it up. Some women, oddly, won't.
"British lesbians have some sort of inchoate nightmare that they're pinning on an extremely vulnerable without any concrete evidence"? This sounds like the same fever-dream that makes Republicans pass Bathroom Bills, honestly.
Maybe that's the difference here: Republicans have staked out the anti-trans position so violently that anyone vaguely lefty is going to think twice about it.
124: Thanks, lurid, for your courtesy. I quite see that my comment didn't deserve it.
1) I think the appropriate support for Stock's career is more or less the statement that the vice chancellor made, a couple of years too late, to the effect that the university does not tolerate or give in to campaigns of harassment and bullying and that anyone who disagrees is welcome to get educated elsewhere.
2) I don't know a better compromise in policy than the present British equalities law, which makes both sex and gender protected characteristics. You can't, therefore, be sacked or otherwise discriminated against for either. This is of course a long way ahead of US employment law. But rights-based arguments only get you so far. What happens when the rights collide gets settled on a case to case basis. And a lot of this stuff the law should just keep out of, and leave to social norms, which will be inconsistent from place to place, but more or less reflect the desires and preferences of particular micro societies.
3) I think your use of "appease" is exactly the problem with the present debate. It may well be justified, but as soon as people feel compromise is appeasement, the hope of productive disagreement go out the window. You only appease something powerful and malevolent. I don't see, obviously, "misogyny and threats of violence" baked into the gender critical movement. It's hard to find either in Rowling, or Stock, or Helen Joyce. But no doubt from a different perspective you see the Proud Boys. HUmanity is fucking terrible. The only way through that is to do what I didn't, and be scrupulous about separating the arguments put forward in good faith from the thugs who march alongside them.
I did read the paper Lourdes recommended, but the talk about "resistance" made no sense to me at all. It was coming out of a discourse I just don't speak.
Although I'm mostly mollified by 120. Although waving a sign at a protest is way different from telling someone in person to suck your dick without having ongoing background consent.
129: Right, I think that's certainly where young people are headed, and maybe it's fine. But if you've spent a lot of effort making space to be a woman in a different way, it's hard to just give all that up and cede the concept of womanhood to the traditionally feminine.
It's less emotionally complicated for me than for the people I was talking to, but it still feels weird thinking of myself to affirmatively request they. It's never really bothered me to be male, it's just not an important part of my identity. I guess this is what leads people to list he/they, but even that would make me feel like a poser. I don't particularly like a strong gender trinary any more than a strong binary.
I guess I also don't have a problem with making exposing one's genitals, of whatever sort, to a stranger, of whatever status, and attempting to coerce them into a non-consensual sexual act also per se IIED. Of course people engaging in that sort of behavior can be thrown out of any place they are doing it.
133: Let me be the first to suggest "zir".
133.2: Yes, I'm definitely too old for that or to call myself genderqueer. But I feel like accepting my other identity as Princess Fluffykins Hussein Obama has moved me in that direction.
What I'd actually like is a language without gendered pronouns at all. I don't want to have to pick one, and I don't want making the choice to imply that it means something important. Personally I'd rather be called she/her than have to put a pronoun on my nametag, but I understand that's coming from a place of privilege and that it's not really a big deal.
Which is to say, I'm sort of sad about "they" going from a pronoun that can be used for all people regardless of gender and instead becoming a pronoun for people of a third gender. I get how and why it's happening, but I'm sad about it.
It won't be final until expectant parents burn down a forest to announce they are expecting a they.
I admit my thought process was something like "okay, so what are NW's claims here, let's see... lesbians are... dicks waving... what? Okay, uh, pass, what else..." But honestly, people's fantasies are such a huge part of this debate. On both sides, but I tend to notice it on the GC side more, obviously: everywhere wolves in sheep's clothing. I think that alone has a tremendously corrosive effect. When stereotypes have that kind of salience for people, when people with large platforms hammer home again and again that the trans woman you're hanging out with is not really a woman and that should make you uneasy, not too uneasy to do your job or to be civil but a little bit uneasy, or hey, maybe a lot uneasy if you've had trouble with men, men, men... it's very undermining.* And Stock is, for all her bravado and willingness to square up, one of the milder critical voices; you don't have to get all the way out to the Proud Boys before you arrive at Graham Linehan.
I'm comfortable saying that whoever put up that sign was a complete idiot and it will stand as an own goal forever, but also, who cares? It's all so rotten at the moment. The cultural shift matters, and right now there's a lot of fear in the mix, made worse by various external factors: the global ascendancy of the right and intensely sharpening polarization, social media bubbles, perhaps above all universities being dysfunctional and playing a dysfunctional role in both economic and social life for an entire generation... I suppose it goes without saying that I don't think Stock should have to leave her job, but there's a real swell of apathy around that view. I feel like I've been trying to care more for hours and just failing.
* God help me, I can go deeper if I need to explain why this is actually bad and cruel and a big deal, but I hope I don't.
I'm sort of sad about "they" going from a pronoun that can be used for all people regardless of gender
Before it started to be commonly used in the nonbinary sense, I recall gatekeepers springing out to safeguard "good English" whenever you tried to use it neutrally in the traditional way.
Thanks dq and everyone for the solidarity. I wholly endorse 92, we should make that happen; that's a cheerful thought.
waving a sign at a protest is way different from telling someone in person to suck your dick
It is also different because it is a specific response to someone who cites your male genitalia in opposition to your views. It wasn't the protester who raised the issue of the protester's dick.
Let me take 143 a step further and say that the protester's sign, in context, was witty and contained nothing resembling a threat.
The real threat is the penises you meet along the way.
143/144 is bizarre. I don't see any wit here, and although it's probably not intended as a serious threat, it's obviously threatening.
I always try to convince myself that no left spaces are fine and all the criticism is over-the-top and cherry-picking, but then there's always someone to show up and just say no I actually mean the crazy thing.
Which is to say, I'm sort of sad about "they" going from a pronoun that can be used for all people regardless of gender and instead becoming a pronoun for people of a third gender. I get how and why it's happening, but I'm sad about it.
Is this true?! Is "they" on its way out as a idly neutral pronoun for glossing over general situation?! Is this based on experience, or just extrapolating from what you expect to happen now that people are specifying "they" as their pronoun of choice?
I don't see any wit here, and although it's probably not intended as a serious threat, it's obviously threatening.
Really? A trans protester who is surely used to getting abuse for having the wrong genitalia is then repurposing traditionally masculine slang to be about their wrong genitalia on their protest sign? And this is threatening?
I think "they" as fully neutral might be gaining currency in some ways. Laws and rulebooks that in previous decades were amended swapping "he" with "he or she", I'm starting to see "they" introduced, if not as a comprehensive measure.
I think the joke is that "suck my dick" is something a man or a woman might say out of generalized anger without meaning to particularly reference actual physical dick-sucking, but it's amusing that the person holding the sign is actually capable of having her dick physically sucked, which most women aren't. I don't think it's a super strong joke, but that's the shape of the joke as I understand it.
Although I'm with Upetgi as far as saying it's at least quite hostile, even if it's not a meaningfully particularized threat. Someone with a dick tells me to suck their dick in the context of a conflict between us, I would take that badly.
I agree that the sign, protesting a specific person, is much more aggressive than carrying that sign at a large women's rally. At a large rally? Not threatening at all. Hostile sure, but one ought to be hostile about the patriarchy.
who is surely used to getting abuse for having the wrong genitalia
Who is providing a specific response to someone who says their genitalia should prohibits them from using the ladies' room. Even if one agrees with Stock on this, the sign is an unambiguous joke directed straightforwardly at Stock's own remarks.
I thought it was funny, but humor isn't universal, and I guess you're not supposed to have to explain jokes.
It's been a long time since Standpipe was here.
I thought it was funny, but then I was also amused when the person administering my Covid shot asked me if I was pregnant.
137: Estonian, Hungarian, Georgian and Turkish are on offer, along with many other languages, I am sure. Alas, a language without gendered pronouns does not get you a society without gendered behaviors and discrimination.
Grace Lavery is collecting a list of students who have been harassed by Stock and her followers.
https://twitter.com/graceelavery/status/1450823410766974979
Part of why trans people are pissed is that the media keeps regarding only one side as victims and ignoring the many ways in which those who've tried to argue against Stock have been harassed or had their careers threatened. At least two of the students listed have left philosophy / plan to leave because of these attacks. Several people I know had to lock their Twitter accounts after trying to argue with gender-critical people, because of the sheer amount of abuse they would get. And don't get me started on the trans people I know (incl. myself) who have left academia / are in the process of leaving because of institutionalized transphobia that existed long before the current crowd jumped in. Nobody jumped in to defend academic freedom when any of us were being harassed out of academia. I guess we don't have OBEs so nobody cares.
I'm also going to do a frowner and disappear from this site indefinitely--it's stressful enough worrying about healthcare and safe bathroom access being more difficult (things that Stock has* championed), without arguing with strangers on the internet.
* Should be pretty obvious that conversion therapy has the aim of preventing AFAB folks from accessing the medical care they need to change their bodies
** Don't tell me that I just have to show ID when someone challenges me in a bathroom. The fact that they encourage challenges at all makes anyone non-gender-conforming in a bathroom unsafe. And if you haven't been actually challenged in one before, I'd advise some epistemic humility.
I'm also going to do a frowner and disappear from this site indefinitely
I'm sorry to hear that. Selfishly I would asset that it should be possible to continue commenting here (as you choose) without feeling like that has to involve arguing with strangers on the internet, but I realize that may not be possible.
The bathroom rule is just nuts even from a point of view that only considers cis women. To protect women from men, you're providing a license for any man to harass any woman that looks the least bit masculine in his opinion. Just given the population numbers, there's no way that checking can become a thing without most of the people being checked being cis women. And I doubt the kind of guy who thinks it's his business to check is going to be friendly about it regardless of the cisgender of the woman he's checking.
Every word that Ponder S typed is true, the whole situation is a fucking disgrace, and I'm also in terrible spirits and should step away, but I probably won't because I somehow still want to Set Things Right even though IT IS IMPOSSIBLE. NOT POSSIBLE.
As an aside, Frowner still comes around! Good comments in the climate thread.
it's just grotesque. at least that halferd dude had the good grace to fade away. & apparently engage in some self reflection. some of those who admire(d)/miss him around here could profit from a bit of the same.
Wait, Halford never said anything bad about trans people, did he? I wouldn't have thought he would have.
His greatest moment was pointless arguing about national park visits or something.
As a stupid fucking dumbshit, I will jus t outsource to the always estimable Michael Hobbes. The Methods of Moral Panic Journalism. Scare stories on "left-wing illiberalism" display a familiar pattern.
As someone like Charley who is somewhat older, I will draw folks attention to the following graph he cites (as well as his commentary on same).
Graph that Rotten in Denmark cites, not Charley.
Older feminists and lesbians with narrow and hateful views on trans folk conjures up the image of climbing the ladder and pulling it up behind. I think LB got it right - the US hashed the fundamentals out a decade or two ago that no decent supporter of LGBT rights (add letters as needed as the years have gone by) can actively oppose trans rights (and what constitutes trans rights continues to evolve, of course). I cannot for the life of me at this point imagine anyone making arguments about women born women in good faith, nor do I imagine there is some unique lived experience in my childhood that renders me as an authentic female. Maybe decades ago, I'd have given this the benefit of the doubt. Even my job in rural nowhere says you can use the locker room you feel comfortable in.
This thread is kind of horrifying, so I wanted to weigh in for team "let's not be hateful on the internet towards vulnerable people." I'd love to understand what is driving the gap between US and UK on this issue, but not at the expense of folks I like hearing tired arguments about why they should continue to be marginalized.
My verdict (not that anyone cares) is that the sign is funny in the context presented and anyone seeing something sinister needs to recalibrate.
oh lb no he never to my knowledge (far from comprehensive to be sure) said anything dreadful re trans folks & i have no reason to believe he would. he did lose his shit in ways that were personally directed at others. i gather, from his v brief reappearances, at some point he realized he didn't want to be a person doing that on this website so he just ... went away.
The idea that the US is morally superior to the UK on this, or on almost any other issue, really, is a bit puzzling/problematic to me.
Just not feeling the "what's with the UK?" vibe, I guess. But then again, I'm older than God...or, at least, I am an "older feminist"...
Just on the whole, this place used to have social norms much more accepting of conversational aggressiveness. (The blog, not the United States.)
Just so we're on the same page/thread, JPJ, one of your fellow longtime commenters just left this entire site because it's become a hostile environment for him. That really did just happen here in this very thread and is not a folk tale to be told in corporate diversity trainings. Now sorry, what were you saying about moral superiority?
Aaaand this is when I need to close the laptop and rejoin family and restring the classical guitar. Good night.
171.last: I'm just not seeing writings or public comments about how you have to be born with certain bits to be a "real" woman from younger feminists. Am I missing a movement? I think there's a real generational gap on full acceptance of trans women as women.
174: So you're linking me to corporate diversity training, now?!
Er, sorry, but no.
And I haven't even expressed/explained my views on any of this (I don't actually think my own views are all that interesting, or all that relevant). And I'm certainly willing to take a backseat, and just learn and listen. It's just that apparently I give off the whiff of heterodoxy, which is enough to condemn me as a heretic, I suppose.
But it's not about me, since I'm older than God, after all. I worry about young women, and about the messages they are receiving (suck my dick, bitch, unless you agree with everything I say, you presumptively murder-worthy cunt).
I like 92. Especially if it could be accompanied by some expedited mechanism for forcing internet companies to reveal the identities of anyone who makes rape or death threats.
there's this option where you type all that out jpj & then you ... just don't post it. open to all at all times.
If you find yourself issuing rape and death threats against girls and women, you're probably not much of a feminist, after all.
If you find these rape jokes funny, you may need to revisit or recalibrate your feminist commitments?
tbc - in the context of a thread on this website where longtime commenters who are trans have participated & felt uncomfortable at the least & who as trans are faaaaar more likely than non trans women to have actually been menaced along the lines of your 178 last - i just suggest that in the spirit of listening & learning maybe you might consider just ... not.
I don't think having been menaced is something you should assess and trade-off at a population level.
I have been menaced/assaulted.
But please go ahead and tell me how/why I am the actual aggressor/oppressor here.
But if you must, the appropriate unit of neasure is negative rat organisms.
so have i, a fair assumption is that every woman commenting or lurking here has been ... you can move from that to recognizing the greater dangers, statistically, faced by trans women (not that you need statistics to get there a bit of reflection imo should do the trick) and move forward empathetically and in solidarity or you can do whatever it is you want to do.
there's a repeated dynamic in this community that i object to. no one's obliged to agree with me. i am not obliged to shut up about it.
Yeah, I apologize for my role in prompting this conversation. I was not expecting the vehemence of the reaction by the British commenters.
For whatever it's worth, from over here in Germany the prominence of TERFiness does look like a thing where the UK is an outlier. It baffles me, frankly.
178: I haven't even expressed/explained my views on any of this (I don't actually think my own views are all that interesting, or all that relevant). . . . It's just that apparently I give off the whiff of heterodoxy, which is enough to condemn me as a heretic, I suppose.
I think it would really be better if you chose to express yourself directly, for what it's worth. At least in principle. In practice, there's an equally strong argument for killing the thread completely.
Before that happens, let me share a qualitative social science paper by someone at NYU interviewing native German speakers of various genders about pronoun use -- I skimmed a bit but it's interesting. The interview with "Ingrid" in particular was memorable -- the combination of pragmatism and melancholy.
Ingrid was the fourth genderqueer participant in this project; they are nonbinary and added that they do not wish to physically transition. Given this fact, they describe themself as cis-passing and acknowledge that they "are and probably will always be completely invisible and never fully out." They seemed to struggle the most with the confines of the German language, as a nonbinary native speaker. On the demographic survey, they specified that they use "they" pronouns in English, but that no pronouns should be used for them in German. When asked, "If you do not identify as a man or a woman, how do you address that in German?" they answered simply: "I can't."
Turkish is much more accommodating! (other Turkic languages too?)
Turkish is one of these grammatically genderless languages, and due to the prevalence of Turkish immigrants in Berlin, several of my subjects spoke (at least some) Turkish--whether through time spent abroad in Turkey or work with Turkish-speaking refugees. Freddi described Turkish as easier than the other languages they had learned in terms of grammar:You put the pronoun at the end of the word. So if you say "I'm going," you say "gidiyorum" and "um" means me, and if you say "he's going" you just say "gidiyor." If you say "she's going," it's "gidiyor"--he and she are the same. So you can speak a really long time and you don't know the gender the person has.
Reminder that this thing is why tia left
I left at around the time Tia did, for the opposite reason, and have only dropped back in because NW has been talking about this thread. I added almost no value to the blog and no-one will have missed me, but want to note that it's not only trans people who find this sort of discussion too uncomfortable to stick around. As a life-long liberal feminist and gay ally, it hurts like hell to know the people I'm talking with assume that I'm fascist-adjacent for not being able to repeat the shibboleth that trans women are women.
I'm not trans, and I can barely imagine how painful and enraging and alienating it would be to have an important element of my identity be referred to as a "shibboleth" by people who, on other issues, are my political allies. Yikes.
I'm glad the US left has more solidarity with trans people. Perhaps it is because we face a much bigger threat from the right.
I added almost no value to the blog and no-one will have missed me,
Putting all else aside for the moment, this is not true. I've always enjoyed your contributions here.
Does everyone need some ketamine? Too tense.
I thought, why is the check-in thread so long, did someone die? No, it's much worse than that!
This is such a hard issue. I work with trans people every day, they're awesome, it's hard to be trans, and my public stance is always to throw in with the trans folks, because when basic rights and safety are at issue, we can park the nuance for the time being.
But there is nuance. If a theory of trans rights can't make space for folks assigned female at birth who find penised, testosteroned bodies in intimate space threatening, then those folks are not--eventually, or maybe just privately--going to fully believe in that theory. You can't argue people into feeling safe. That's not evidence of some moral failing (although the various modes of its expression may be).
My conception of this place was as a semi-public space where strangers could talk about the nuance (this was the thought behind stopping engagement with other blogs and removing ourselves from search engines--though maybe not so smart about the search engines...): community over popularity. But that itself presumes a level of detachment that's not always possible, so of course I understand when folks no longer want to participate, even though it bums me out.
I didn't know this place doesn't show up on search engines -- when did that happen? (Probably a decade ago and it was discussed at length and I forgot.)
I think it does now, mostly, but that's the meaning behind the googley hoohole. There are chunks of the site not indexed by google.
Guess we should have built that concordance after all.
Unfogged was born without a hoohole.
195.3: Yes, there is nuance. I wish it felt easier to talk about some of the nuances safely. But it's a topic about which people can be very sensitive, for good and valid reasons, so it seems like one needs to be very careful about saying anything.
Does there need to be "room" for cis women who find trans women's bodies threatening? Maybe it depends on what "room" means. If we say there has to be "room" in the public discourse for people to treat trans women as a perceived threat to cis women, then we are burdening trans women with the responsibility of making that "room" by continuing to participate politely and civilly in that type of conversation. It seems like an awful lot to ask of them.
Can you argue people into feeling safe? Some people, yes. But not all of the people, all of the time. But if someone feels unsafe and is impervious to reasonable argument, does that mean the rest of us are required to defer to that feeling of unsafeness? If so, then it must be wrong to mandate Covid vaccination.
Does there need to be "room" for cis women who find trans women's bodies threatening?
I don't see how a body is threatening just for the features it has. A person can do threatening things with their body, like not obtain consent from the other person, or not respect the withdrawal of consent from the other person.
Trans women sex workers get murdered all the time for having a penis, in bed. But they weren't being threatening. They didn't have any power in the situation whatsoever.
I don't see how a trans woman would have all this power with another woman. If the other woman withdraws consent and the trans woman respects that, then everything is aces. No one has been threatened by virtue of the presence of the penis.
||
by virtue of the presence of the penis
Tell me now if you don't want me to present the penis of virtue.
|>
If I'm about to rock, will it salute me?
I don't actually think 201 needs a response. Probably better to just let that thread go dormant.
IIRC, some of the UK focus had to do with what is required legally to change one's gender status on an ID -- whether the requirements should be very permissive (self-declaration suffices) or more strict (medical treatments, etc.) Then it blew up. I'm inclined to agree that a lot of these questions are very hard and deserve a nuanced treatment, but I can't have a lot of sympathy for Stock here, it's hard to square "it's just a nuanced discussion" with some of the hateful rhetoric she tosses around.
But that itself presumes a level of detachment that's not always possible
One of the many fine things about being an old white guy is that detachment isn't that much effort. (Yeah, sure, a lot of us can't manage it, but still ...)
How big a tent do you want to have? Personally, I don't mind being in a room where people are comfortable saying, "Trans women are really men," and "People who refuse to accept trans women as women are bigots," even if I don't sympathize with one of those at all.
But I get it. This is more or less the definition of privilege, and as a practical matter, I know my attitude can manifest as tolerance of abuse.
I know this thread should go dormant, and I was mostly disciplined about staying out of it yesterday, and I'm grateful to everyone who came in and said things so I didn't have to. But in part because it's meant a lot to me to hear from folks like Frowner, Tia and Ponder, and I miss them, I do feel obliged to say something about how one trans woman who hasn't left the blog actually feels about all this. Not stats or argument-parsing, just the feeling.
The scenario that seems to be driving all this, where a trans woman threatens a cis woman with her body, is just so bizarre to me when you think of actual people being involved. The idea that I would ever, ever, mount some kind of subterfuge operation with sexual satisfaction as the end goal is just... the whole reason I quit masculinity was to get as far as possible from any kind of cultural coding where I would ever be assumed or expected to behave that way. If you talk to trans women, this is a pretty common thread. Pre-transition you feel you belong in women's spaces, you want to hang with the girls, and there's so much misery in having people always assume you're hitting on them when you just want to sit and tell stories. Post-transition that conditioning takes a long time to shake off, and the last thing you ever do is step into women's spaces feeling like some kind of conqueror. You step into them humbly and gratefully, because--at least in my urban area--you've been invited.
In bed, when the other party is a man, as Heebie already said, the deception-and-reveal scenario is what gets trans women killed. (More broadly, when a trans woman gets killed, a story about that scenario is still a legal defense that her murderer is allowed to raise in a good many states.) When the other party is a woman you'll probably come out alive, but you possess absolutely no power to force anything, and your overwhelming emotion, if for some reason you haven't come out yet, is going to be terror of rejection. This is usually the point where someone will respond with one of those outlier media reports that the British press cannot put down. But the only way the scenario possibly rises to the level of a pressing societal concern is if you have a prior conception of trans people as ontologically deceptive, something that simply should not exist, or, if they must exist, need to stay well and clear out of everyone else's way.
The local Zen congregation that I belong to has a lot of older members who would have come up under second-wave feminism. A couple times a year they have women-only retreats. I came out at the temple earlier this year; I don't think they've had a trans woman around before, and say what you will about generation gaps, they immediately added some announcement language to the effect that people like me were explicitly welcomed to the retreats. I really can't express how moved I was, or how fearful I would have been of taking part without an explicit welcome. I spent all day in a space with other women, and at no time was my body a point of concern, and I did not raise my voice to interrupt and mansplain over people, or whatever is the imagined bad behavior that "men in women's spaces" perpetrate. I sat and listened and was so glad to be there, and it's this kind of experience that a discourse like Stock's keeps trans women in the UK from having.
As an academic, Stock is a professional contrarian and provocateur. We don't have the gender critical sort in the US so much, but we certainly have others, and these people always have the same playbook. You stake out positions calculated to generate outrage, because that gets you attention, and when tactically necessary you fall back on invocations of free speech and academic freedom. It's a really effective strategy! Look at her career, her OBE, how we're all still talking about her. She'll come out of the current controversy strengthened.
I don't think Ume is fascist-adjacent. I really like Ume, and I'm heartbroken by this divide.
Thanks for sharing that, lourdes. Your perspective is really valuable.
Thanks, LK, for that, and thanks for sticking with us.
What I find really striking about the UK and UK-adjacent reaction is the extent to which it's 'they are coming after us' while (a) surely no one is seeing that Ponder, lk, others are 'coming after' anyone and, indeed, (b) in our context here, 'they' are 'us.'
There seems to be some measure of bad behavior among the followers on both sides of the discussion out there in the wild; imo it's all bad, and especially it's clear enough to me that nothing some trans-person did (or is said to have done) in some particular place in Essex, in Ottawa, or in Los Angeles, excuses either making/sending death threats, or insulting/othering our friends here.
a prior conception of trans people as ontologically deceptive, something that simply should not exist
I like that. I wonder how many ideas or things I can't engage with because I can't even acknowledge their existence.
207: Lourdes, I really appreciate that as well.
There was a time when I would have been uncomfortable with a trans penis in a female only space, but to be honest, I think I would have been uncomfortable seeing female genitals of a stranger too then.
One of the things I personally struggle with a lot is the pronoun stuff - not people beings explicit about what they want. A few years ago, the lefty Episcopal priests I knew put their pronouns in their signature, but now in the past year, it's turned into a kind of expectation. We have a non binary person join my department, and they did a presentation about it. They briefly mentioned pronouns and also that some people are discerning the difference between being a woman, feminist opposed to the patriarchy and non binary. They travelled in more activist circles and seemed to feel kind of frightened by the fact that only some people had pronouns on their ZOOM. It had to do with the settings on our ZOOM account.
I'm happy to have people tell me which pronouns they prefer, but I haven't done it yet. I would wind up writing "she/her" but I think it might be kind of neat to be called "they" and not feel restricted by gender.
I've been trying to figure out what to say, because it looks like my 146 is what blew up the thread, and there were other things in this thread where I was trying to tread carefully to avoid offense (like 117), but it just didn't even occur to me that 146 was going to be controversial. I'm sorry for my part in where this discussion went, and I will try to talk less in the future at least until I feel like I have a better sense of what is going to be a hurtful thing to say. I genuinely did not mean anything at all specifically about trans women in that comment, and have no interest in defending Stock who I literally have never heard of.
I don't think 146 had a meaningful negative effect on the thread at all -- it had already gotten heated. I mean, every additional comment, including all of mine, had the effect of keeping the thread going, which was probably a net negative, but I wouldn't beat yourself up over 146.
I also wouldn't single out 146 as explosive.
Since teo apologized, let's blame him even though I'm not sure why he apologized.
Ok thanks, sorry didn't mean to make this about me. At any rate, as LB says talking a little less is the answer even if it wasn't that particular comment that was the problem.
Honestly, it was probably me trying to start a conversation with JPJ after she said that Stock's death threats crossed a line, and I should just have asked directly what line she thought was crossed, or (in hindsight, obviously) just let it slide. Then I went to bed and woke up and things had gotten very different overnight. I'd take some ketamine, sure.
I don't have any ketamine right now. It's been a stressful week.
I was telling Upetgi not to feel bad, but you specifically should really not feel bad all. You (and separately Lourdes) have been astonishingly eventempered throughout this mess.
Since teo apologized, let's blame him even though I'm not sure why he apologized.
Just that my 93 focused the conversation on the question of US/UK differences, which seems to have been part of what set off the Brits.
I was playing Pandora 80s pop station in the car. Funky Cold Medina came on and wow has that song aged badly. I don't think the kids understood the lyrics.
Oh man, I haven't thought about that song in a long time. yikes.
Thirding 208.
211
There was a time when I would have been uncomfortable with a trans penis in a female only space, but to be honest, I think I would have been uncomfortable seeing female genitals of a stranger too then.
Call me a prude but I wouldn't want to see trans OR cis genitalia in a male-only space either. I try to be discreet in the locker room and I appreciate it when others are too, and letting it all hang out in a public bathroom would be crazy. I hesitate to say this both because as a cishet guy what do I know and because I'm on my phone so going into detail seems hard, but the anti-trans concerns seems weirdly divorced from reality.
Lourdes, I really appreciate 207.
I also appreciate 207. It's decent, generous and actually inspiring -- really. I know a couple of trans women priests here who have also been treated like that and this is entirely good.
And I apologise, as I have said, for flying off the handle about the treatment of KS. I don't think it's remotely fair to call her a hate-filled provocateuse but anyone who wants to take that up or supply evidence can get in touch with me off the blog. I had thought this thread had died, and I think that it should.
