Like today, for instance.
[Cartoon removed because trolls exist.] [Or, less facetiously, because people told me it was from a transphobic site.]
Update
I’ll just replace the cartoon with a screen grab of a comment on Michael Nugent’s 4,839-word post rebuking Adam Lee yesterday, the fourth in his series of posts rebuking Adam Lee for writing an article that criticizes Richard Dawkins.
“Crackity Jones” is Richard Sanderson, who has repeatedly posted a flagrant flaming lie about me on that post of Nugent’s. Does Nugent write 5000-word posts rebuking Richard Sanderson and his allies for telling lies about people? No. Does he even moderate comments on his blog? No.
September 25, 2014 at 2:52 pm
Ophelia has a spot of bother after her latest copypasta displays a cartoon from an artist who is a transphobe. Some of her commentators are politely trying to minimise the splash damage. This is not the first time Ophelia has got into trouble in this area. Seems to be she has a bit of a problem with trans issues.
Sanderson is obsessed with me, for some reason, and he’s a dedicated energetic liar.
He has visible chest hair, so his views MUST be valid.
Artist’s page:
http://theemperorsnewcottongrannypants.tumblr.com/
…has lots of more awesome stuff 🙂
#NotAllMen … wear suspenders.
(couldn’t resist)
As a member of the Penis-Havers club, I can explain that cartoon to any of the fairer sex who need it explained to them. 🙂
Wow, I hate to have to point this out, but that cartoonist’s work is really quite nastily anti-trans. 🙁
octopod @5
I’m sorry but I don’t see anything anti-trans about that cartoon. Or are you referring to other cartoons by that cartoonist?
You need to see a few of them in context (which I wouldn’t recommend, because then you’ll also notice that her cartoons are only ever good by accident). See this one, for example: Bringing Gender Back for a clear TERF trope.
Yeah, I noticed that just now. Damn. Now I feel bad for trying to credit the artist 🙁
TERF’s are pretty seriously horrible people.
sigh
Fine. My bad. A couple of Twitter-slime pitters are taunting me over this. I saw the cartoon on Facebook and didn’t seek out the provenance. This particular cartoon made me laugh because of its fit with a current situation (which I won’t name, because I’m sanctimonious that way).
There’s a serious point hidden behind this cartoon. Sexist people are sexist, in that they rate the views and opinions of one sex more than another. This means that the favored sex has a disproportionate impact.
On top of that, we recognize that the fortunate have some obligation to give that up for the unlucky. That’s why we do progressive taxes, redistributing wealth to partially level out the differences.
So not only do men wield a disproportionate impact in fighting sexism, as its primary benefactors we have some level of obligation to fight against it.
Benson @9:
Careful, there. They’ve got you playing identitiy politics: because we do not agree with X about Y, we cannot agree with them on anything or support them in any way. I disagree quite strongly with TERFs over their exclusion of trans* people, but if they got something else right, I wouldn’t mind agreeing with them on that.
If you were consistently posting TERF stuff and favoring it over similar material from less problematic sources, then you’d be legitimizing their views and we’d have a problem. But a one-off cartoon with only an indirect connection to TERFs, when you’ve made it clear you disagree with trans* exclusion? That isn’t a “bad.”
@Ophelia: Feel free to delete or edit to remove the link of my first comment, if you’d rather not have any more clicks sent from your page to theirs.
I do still think that the artist has some pretty good stuff. At first some of the images just fell flat to me. I didn’t understand the joke, or the intent. Some of the others were great, though. Now that I realize they’re a TERF….yuck. Either way, I don’t like the idea of promoting an artist who has such horribly bigoted views. So I feel quite bad about my comment 🙁
Hi Hornbeam @11 – is it that you have the privilege of being able to ignore the TE to cherrypick the RF?
Would you do the same where people advocate racist rather than transphobic ideas?
Bernard Bumner @13:
To qualify as cherry-picking, I’d have to ignore or minimize the TE in favor of the RF. I didn’t; I explicitly pointed out the exclusionary component, and said I disagreed with it.
The German government, under the control of the Nazi party, was one of the first organizations to recognize that smoking led to an increase in mortality, and their cruel experiments on prisoners led to important discoveries about hypothermia. Should I reject anti-smoking campaigns and survival courses because they use research done by violent racists?
There is a legitimate concern here about normalization. If Benson made a habit of linking to TERF materials, even though she knew where they came from and had plenty of alternatives, I wouldn’t be so quick to defend her. But this is a single cartoon that is only problematic because of its source, and even then you had to either know TERF lingo or read carefully to discover the source was problematic. It should be entirely forgivable, at minimum, especially if Benson made it clear she didn’t endorse trans exclusion once she knew of the source. Which she did.
That some people aren’t willing to forgive this no matter what Benson does outs them as demanding perfection from imperfect beings. Only the most fanatic religious fundamentalists agree to that.
Cathy Brennan uses the second cartoon on that blog that Jason Dick linked to for one of her twitter accounts.
Yeah, that site is as transphobic as hell.
Ophelia, I have to be honest and state this, I would feel better if you stated that you removed that graphic because of the bigotry of the creator and not because troll exists.
It was a simple cartoon. I hadn’t looked at the site it came from, and still haven’t. I took it down because people yelled at me, starting with the trolls. That’s the reason. I take the word of the non-slime people that the source is shitty, but I don’t know that first-hand myself, and I’m not nearly interested enough to look.
Speaking as a trans woman who has some familiarity with TERF arguments and tactics; the creator of that graphic meant that image to be transphobic. And every image on that site is pure TERF.
You may not care enough to check it out (And, frankly, I do not blame you.) So I will repeat my request, say you removed that image because it is bigoted, not because slymetrolls started crowing.
This is because I would have raised the issue even if Crackity Sanderson have not taken this issue to try to score rhetorical points.
And just a reminder, as long as Crackity Sanderson associates with “That’s Cissexist” and “Clownfall”, he has to room to call anyone on being transphobic.
@Hi Hornbeck,
Firstly, I noticed that autocorrect changed your name in 13 – apologies for not spotting that before posting.
I readily acknowledge that you condemned transphobia, and I don’t believe you are callous.
I would take a dim view if you relied on Nazi sources to make anti-smoking arguments, given the wealth of non-Nazi literature supporting the message. If you relied on Nazi sources to convey the message to an audience with a number of victims of Nazi ideology, then I would consider it a serious misjudgement at best.
There are other sources for anti-smoking messages. There are other cartoons offering commentary on sexism.
I make absolutely no criticism of Ophelia for not realising that this came from a TERF, and I share your disdain at the opportunists who try to attack her by pretending that she is transphobic.
I’m only pointing out that you risk collateral damage to your friends and allies by even appearing to provide succour:
I (perhaps uncharitably) initially read that as meaning that you could ignore the trans-exclusion – even whilst strongly disagreeing with it – for the sake of agreeing a common point.
My reading may be wrong, but it isn’t implausible.
So nice to have an illustration so quickly of what I was discussing this morning in a post on the “One of These Things Is Not Like the Others” thread. There, I wrote:
People who have certain life experiences as members of an oppressed group generally have a better sense than members of the dominant group for interpreting the motives of others in their group. Having lived as a woman and experienced the pressures against refusing to be a “chill girl” and the rewards for being one, it’s very likely that I’m more attuned to the signs than you are, just as I might, for example, more readily spot a misogynistic troll. There have been occasions when I’ve thought Josh was being excessively hostile in his responses to comments from other gay people or about gay issues, but almost invariably subsequent experience showed that his initial assessment was right.
Furthermore, the point of calling attention to chill-girl behavior isn’t just to express our anger, though there’s that, too. It’s important because we’re the ones who chiefly bear the consequences – chill-girliness is harmful to other women.
As I recall, I skimmed the comic, felt like something about it might be off, and forgot about it. Janine, with her knowledge and experience, is far better equipped than I am to recognize the hateful agenda. She’s also, unlike me, someone who directly bears the consequences of people mainstreaming or minimizing this sort of thing. The last thing I want to do is ignore or dismiss that harm.
And I’m a little irritable since I’m reading a chapter by Sarah Lucia Hoagland in Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Paul Sartre, and I’m agreeing and underlining and putting little stars next to all of the good points, and then out of nowhere she launches into this anti-trans rant. Sartre was douchey when it came to sex and gender, but existentialism is probably the most transphilic philosophy imaginable. It’s twisted to use it to oppose people’s free projects. My only hope, since it was written in 1999, is that Hoagland has moved away from that position.
people mainstreaming…this sort of thing
Astroterfing? (Sorry.)
The “because trolls exist” is kinda weird. Seems like “because of TERF themes I didn’t pick up on (which are more explicit in the cartoonist’s other work)” would be better; that makes sure people understand why it was problematic (and that it’s not just trolls who found the cartoon problematic). Also fits in well as a comparison to Harris/Dawkins/etc.–that it’s actually a good thing to own up to posts with problematic elements.
Well yes but on the other hand I don’t actually want people telling me word for word what to write on my blog. If I didn’t accept that it should be taken down, I wouldn’t have taken it down.
I honestly don’t think the posted comic had any TERF themes. Any TERF themes in that comic would be involved in what the man was inserting his view into, and what that view was. But neither of those are hinted at or implied in the comic. The author may have been thinking along the lines of posting bigoted opinions and having a transgendered woman reply, which would be a horrible thing to do, but the work itself doesn’t hint at that theme.
In case anybody is curious what it was about but doesn’t want to click through, the comic has a picture of a bald man with red pants and suspenders and a white shirt, bursting into a room with the text:
“Behold
A man has arrived
to share his manly view”
Among the extremely trans-inclusive friends I hang out with online, this is very much the kind of thing that they enjoy saying. And I definitely feel that there are many contexts in which it is apropos. Yes, the author may have been thinking of a very bigoted context, and I am still upset at myself for not checking their other artwork more thoroughly before linking or suggesting it was good. But I don’t think there’s a basis for the statement that that cartoon itself is bigoted.
Thank you, Ophelia. Seeing the serious reason makes a big difference.
I was not trying to tell you what to say. All I said that what I would feel better about.
So I will explain what is meant by “Gender Fatigue” and why it is transphobic.
TERFs like the talk about how they are gender critical. And part of that mindset is that they are out to dismantle gender. Trans people, and especially trans women, are seen as holding up traditional gender roles by simply working at being seen as women instead of just renouncing gender altogether.
Hence, gender fatigue.
So the very idea of that comic was screaming transphobia. In a lot of ways, you might as well been holding up Cathy Brennan’s “Sorry About Your Dick” stick figure man.
And Crackity Sanderson, who has been communicating with TERFs ever since the Slymepit and TERFs joined in whining about the Block Bot, knew where that cartoon came from and what it mean. So he started crowing about it. Never mind the fact that many of his allies are actually transphobic. Because it is more important for him to score rhetorical points instead of actually making an actual ethical stand, Crackity Sanderson will go off about this.
And I will ask this question, Ophelia. What if I commented about that cartoon first and asked you to remove it because of it’s transphobic content. Would you have made a comment about how you had to remove it because of trolls?
There was nothing good or cute about that cartoon. And please do not position this as you not liking to be told what to say. Please consider what that cartoon means? Is that really an idea you want to even seem like you are endorsing?
Bernard Bumner @18:
It was a fair reading, and at the time I didn’t see any trans-exclusion in the cartoon. But
Jason Dick @23:
then I started looking for dog whistles. As Lee Atwater famously put it,
Not only does coded language allow you to get away with saying racist/sexist/classist things, you might trick non-racist/sexist/classist people into supporting you. I myself was thinking of sharing an image elsewhere, until I saw octopod raise the TERF flag and went “hmmm, I might be missing something here.” On and off over several hours, I scratched my head trying to work out what that was. “I suppose that one comic ‘reinderdijkhuis’ linked to made it explicit, but I didn’t spot anything else as bad. Though, now that I think of it, that rainbow comic looked like a coded message. And it was weird the masthead used the word ‘cotton’ but I’m HOLY SHIT HOW COULD I BE THAT BLIND….”
Emphasis mine. Suddenly, that odd “rainbow” comic made perfect sense. It pictured the acronym “QUILTBAG” (queer, undecided, intersex, lesbian, trans*, bisexual, asexual or allies, gay) over a rainbow, but the “L” was parachuting out. “Get the L out” is actually a really obscure slogan calling for lesbians to leave inclusive spaces, as according to radical lesbians having “men” there only propagates the patriarchy.[4] “Sisters before Misters” was actually a middle finger to trans* women. And that cartoon I was going to share, about men invading women’s spaces, wasn’t actually about sexist dudebros trying to invade safe spaces, it was about trans* women trying to invade lesbian spaces in search of sex. Hopefully I don’t need to explain the code behind picturing a hairy guy invading a space to explain things by this point.
In that moment, a page I originally thought contained a mix of funny but heavily obscure comics was revealed to be a vicious cacophony of sexist dog whistles. EVERY comic was dripping with hate, but in some of them it was so carefully hidden that it looked like feminist commentary. Those could easily float around Facebook, with only a select few snickering over the true message being passed around. Imagine sharing an image that mocked Obama for being a warmonger, following the link to the source, and stumbling across a white supremacist website. If you were black, that would be horrific.
Hopefully that should explain why the image had to go, and why I was wrong to edge towards the “devil’s advocate” chair. My apologies for taking so long to clue in.
And now, the citations….
[1] http://www.thenation.com/article/170841/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy.
[2] http://queerfeminism.com/2012/03/27/the-cotton-ceiling-is-real-and-its-time-for-all-queer-and-trans-people-to-fight-back/.
[3] http://freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed/2012/04/04/caught-up-in-cotton/
[4] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JqwQejmJbJkJ:members.boardhost.com/duckies/msg/1339170276.html+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk
Hj Hornbeck, I do expect cis people to understand every little detail when it comes to what are, to outsiders, confusing details. But I do thank you for taking the time to figure out what they mean. And I hope you can understand why I said that every comic on that blog screams TRANSPHOBIA.
Hell, even the title contains two dog whistles. “The Emperor’s New Cotton Granny Pants”. The first part refers to Janice Raymonds’ The Transsexual Empire while Cotton Granny Pants refers to “the cotton ceiling”.
Ophelia, do you still think I am just trying to tell you what to say?
Janine, I suspect the “tell me what to write on my blog” was directed at my comment @21, which was definitely phrased as ‘don’t say “this”, say “that”‘ (though the later wasn’t meant to be a verbatim request; I’d have been better off putting it like “maybe something in the spirit of ‘…'”).
Janine the Jackbooted Emotion Queen@28:
The horror of it all is still sinking in a little…
…. OK, more than a little.
That book sounds like a cross between “On the Jews and Their Lies” and Christina Hoff Sommers. And this cartoonist endorses it? Shiiiiiit.
@ 25 Janine
I think there might have been a misunderstanding. The cartoon originally in the OP wasn’t the one titled “Gender Fatigue”, it was this one.
I have seen a lot of people use that image on Twitter. If it was made by the same artist who runs that blog, it is easy to not see anything transphobic about it. That can only be inferred if you know what the artist is working at.
So here is my silly question, who made that “manly opinion” cartoon?
@ 32 Janine
I’ve no doubt it’s the same bigot who created all the other images on the site linked @2. (“A Man Has Arrived” is currently on page three of that site.)
But Ophelia didn’t know that, she removed the image when she found out, and the reason she wrote “because trolls exist” is that she has a dedicated entourage of harassers who watch everything she does like a hawk looking for some opportunity to smear her with disinformation. In this case, twisting the inadvertent posting of an image by a cartoonist who turned out to be a transphobe into “she has a bit of a problem with trans issues”, to quote the comment in the updated OP. (That interpretation, of course, is utter rubbish.)
Knowing the dog whistles of sexism, transphobia, racist etc is not at all easy, I only know about some of these cos Brennan and pals got rather upset about the block bot. So I’ve read quite a lot about TERFs and seen their cis-is-a-slur, terf-is-a-slur, pretty much the whole trans experience is a slur, “arguments” … It seems to fit with all forms of oppression really, those in the privileged group don’t see it. I didn’t know all the implications of “Gender Fatigue” as Janine explained them, only that some terfs/tokens use that term so it would raise a red flag!
It’s something Sanderson will never understand, or me, as we are not subject to it. But we both could try and avoid it and be aware when people say, hey that was a shitty thing to say, here’s why. Sanderson couldn’t give a shit, to him it’s a game where he “wins” points by using other peoples hurt and oppression against them.
He is constantly trying to “use SJW rules against them”, was ecstatic when Brennan called me an “MRA” cos that is the one of the scary words that leads to them being “shunned” as they see it. So anyone making a sexist mistake, a transphobic mistake must, by “our rules”, be immediately shunned for all time. As that is how it works in his shrivelled little mind. Sorry Sanderson, you are consistently a sexist, racist, transphobic, homophobic shit head. Stop doing that and “we” and any other “SJWs” will leave you and pals alone. Hell even fuck off somewhere with a bunch of your fellow bigots and keep yourselves to yourselves and we’ll ignore you. We won’t obsess over you and everything you do years later either, funny how that works isn’t it?
Everyone is cissexist, sexist, racist, etc, etc, to a degree, all we say (I think anyway!) is be aware of those biases and listen to the experts.