I’m not ____ist, but: A note on so-called moderates

The so-called moderate conservatives in Alberta have a lot of criticisms of the current NDP government. There is a common refrain that Notley was only elected to punish the arrogant Jim Prentice, the former leader of the now defunct “Progressive” Conservatives. I don’t doubt that there are a lot of uninformed voters who cast their ballot in this fashion–this candidate is an asshole, this candidate smiles nice–but they seem to miss the part where many of us voted for Notley because the Albertan NDP had a mostly sane, mostly evidence-based platform.

I’m glad to see that these so called moderate conservatives care about such issues as poverty, unemployment, rampant drug addictions, violent crime, sex trafficking, palliative care, overburdened healthcare providers, enormous class sizes, and so on. But increasingly I am noticing a pattern where actually resolving these issues with time tested methods is met with vocal objections by these moderates.

Canadian oil isn’t as attractive as it used to be, so fewer people are buying it, which means oil companies engaged in massive lay offs to protect their bottom lines in response to the tanking value of their commodity. This isn’t a new phenomenon. It happened under the previous government every few years, too. The nature of Alberta’s oil-dependent economy has always meant being extremely vulnerable to the whims of the global market since it’s the only thing we’re selling that rakes in the big bucks. And if nobody’s buying?

[Read more…]

Another god damn trigger warning & safe space debate

Content Notice: Trigger warnings. /snark

More serious content notice: I’ll use transphobia to make my point.

Imagine for a moment you’re in a class where today’s topic is “Freedom of Movement.” The professor introduces the concept and states today’s lecture is specifically about the contexts in which it is appropriate to restrict freedom of movement. They go over things like “a building is on fire and the fire department needs you to get out the way,” or “it’s one way to punish lawbreakers without causing permanent injury.”

Now imagine someone interrupts the professor to make an argument about how it’s wrong to expect them to get off of someone’s toes because it restricts freedom of movement. “I have a right to stand on Sally’s toes,” he says, ignoring Sally’s numerous protestations.

That is how fucking absurd this debate is. Every time it comes up–and this isn’t the first–you get a whole lot of talking past each other, because one side of the debate thinks they have a right to stand on Sally’s toes.

Problem #1: I don’t think that means what you think it means.

[Read more…]

Defending the indefensible

You’ve probably heard by now that a number of beaches in France have banned the burkini. Far from a rational response, these policies are absurd, sexist, racist, immoral and entirely indefensible. And yet, I see many arguments even from so-called free thinking people defending this policy.

Excuse #1: The French have been victims of a string of terrorist attacks and are scared

This might be a reasonable explanation for how the owners of these beaches thought this was a great idea, but it does not actually excuse the policy. A random Muslim on the street is no more culpable for the Nice or Paris attacks than I am for the routine Planned Parenthood terrorist attacks carried out by self righteous white Christians. It is racist to presume that every brown-skinned person is complicit in the attack because they are not, AT THIS EXACT SECOND, protesting or otherwise condemning the violence. That is a backward and perverted idea of justice.

They’re people. They have errands to run and chores to do. Even though every mosque goes on record to condemn a terrorist attack the moment it happens, this is not enough. Brown people who are on their way to the grocery store? They’re complicit in the violence! Taking time to do housekeeping or paying the bills? Tacit approval! Engaging in self care–including trips to the beach? That’s practically an endorsement! Arrest! Deport! Publicly humiliate!

You wouldn’t try to argue I’m complicit in poverty because I don’t donate 100% of my earnings to shelters. You shouldn’t try to argue that because Muslims may have spoons invested elsewhere they agree with terrorists, particularly when they do adhere to your ridiculous demands and condemn the attacks anyway. Neither Muslims nor brown people should have to prove their humanity to you.

Fuck off. Fear does not justify irrationality, it causes it. Have some fucking perspective. After all, many of the victims at Nice were Muslims.

I have a question. What does the burkini ban actually solve? Are you intercepting finances directed towards ISIS? Disarming dangerous people?

Oh, here’s a good one, Excuse #2. “Liberating women.”

Excuse #2: We’re liberating women.

[Read more…]

By what measure of “effective”?

While reading some of Julia Serano’s work, there was one statement she made about the battle between gender-affirmation treatment models and gender-antagonistic treatment models pointed out by anat in our comments that made me take a second (actually fifth or sixth) look: (emphasis mine)

We can continue to debate the efficacy of gender transition, or of gender-reparative versus gender-affirming approaches, and each side will be able to find statistics to support their side of the argument. But what is really driving this debate is a difference of opinion with regards to what constitutes a “good outcome.” Trans activists and advocates like myself generally think that a good outcome is a happy child, regardless of whether they transition or not, or whether they grow up to be transsexual, non-binary, gender non-conforming, lesbian, gay, bisexual, etcetera. Trans-antagonistic and trans-suspicious people (who constantly cite “80% desistance”) seem to think that a good outcome is a cisgender child, and they seem to be willing to make transphobic arguments and subject transgender and gender non-conforming children to clinically ordained transphobia (i.e., gender-reparative therapies) in order to achieve that end goal.

I’ve certainly tried to explain how frustrating the media can be when it comes to covering trans issues, including trans research. In addition to the media, trans folk have to contend from misinformation perpetuated by religious fundamentalists and/or TERFs as well as academics whose work is completely imbecilic. Common among the many, many groups that antagonize trans women is a refrain that transitioning doesn’t “fix” anything, sometimes citing (when they remember evidence should back up their claims) a Swedish longitudinal study following two cohorts of transgender women over the course of several decades. The Swedish study found that many of the health outcomes of trans women were still poor after transitioning, including gender affirmation surgery.

The problem, of course, is that the numerous trans-antagonistic lobbies didn’t actually finish reading the paper. The primary author of the Swedish study, Cecilia Dhejne, is not pleased with the way her work has been hijacked by motivated reasoners:

[Read more…]

The paradox of activism

Problem 1: As rationalists or empiricists, we probably agree we need to observe a problem before we can fix it.

Problem 2: The more we start to observe, the more we see that warrants fixing.

Problem 3: Truly grasping the immense cruelty that needs fixing tends to leave one terribly depressed.

Problem 4: Depression demotivates people to fix a problem.

This is the basic principle of career activists and their push to get activists to “turn off” and engage in periodic self care. Being woke is bloody exhausting. Trying to wrap your head around the state of world affairs leaves you with a cold chill–yet you must do it if changing the world matters to you. You need information. You need data. You need the patterns, the knowledge, because those lead to answers and solutions.

But you have to not snap like a twig under the weight of the whole world while you find them.

Good luck.

-Shiv

That’s an odd way of using the word “choice”

I’ve long lamented the role of Catholic institutions in my government. Initially a persecuted minority, Catholic institutions that were established prior to Canadian confederation had their role cemented by law as part of the agreement to confederate. It was an agreement to legitimize what was, at the time, an organized–if widely discriminated against–minority. The problem, of course, is that these days education tends to be a matter of the theoretically secular government that runs the province… except that these Catholic institutions are happily trodding on secular law by shoehorning “conscience exemptions” into every damn bill that crosses the Legislature’s table. In other words, Catholic institutions don’t have to follow the law.

We’re long past the openly violent conflict between Protestants and Catholics, yet Catholics still enjoy their role in government. Or, I would say that, if not for my favourite advocacy group ever, Parents for Choice in Education. Apparently not satisfied with indoctrinating their children in both faith-based school and church (and in homeless shelters and hospitals–their reach is far), PCE, despite being called a “choice” organization, seems chiefly interested in making everyone else follow their choices.

I’ve written about PCE before. They were the ones who said the new Albertan government would “foist comprehensive sex education on schools next,” and meant it as a bad thing.

Just let that sink in for a moment. Comprehensive sex ed. The thing that reduces teen pregnancy. The thing that reduces the rate of abortion. The thing that reduces the rate of STI transmission. The thing that allows women to participate in the economy, drives up the GDP, drives down the cost of healthcare, stabilizes population growth, mitigates numerous health problems, reduces the rate of domestic and relationship violence, and perhaps most noticeably puts a dent in the poverty cycle.

Class mobility. Cheaper healthcare. Lower crime rate. Bad. 

[Read more…]

Transphobes inoculated against facts

If any of you want a demonstration of willful ignorance, check out this article on transgender athletes:

But plenty of other prominent athletic leagues have instituted policies for allowing transgender athletes to compete with others have the same gender, including the NCAA and the Olympics. Both simply require that athletes have undergone at least one year of hormone replacement therapy. That’s because it’s the hormones that matter, and research has shown that trans athletes lose any competitive advantage they might have had after hormones begin to make changes to their bodies, such as to their muscle mass. A recent studyspecifically confirmed this result in transgender runners.

The author of the piece helpfully points out a number of factors that challenge the exclusion of trans folk in competing in gender segregated sports.

  1. Literally any physical attribute which contributes to fitness in sports can be possessed by both AFABs or AMABs–cited in the article is the example of a 6’7″ AFAB cis woman competing in basketball having an edge over her competitors, just as any other 6’7″ competitor would;
  2. The more malleable facets of fitness, like muscle mass/tone, are governed by sex hormones–in this respect, trans and cis athletes are nearly identical (trans women in fact have lower testosterone than cis women);
  3. Bio sex is a blurry concept when you look closely under the microscope, and setting precedents for policing trans bodies will inevitably bleed into policing uncommon phenotypes in cis bodies–even if the sex hormones are still in the typical range otherwise.

All of these have citations in the author’s article. You can fact-check the claims.

Despite this, transphobic commentators make the exact same arguments that were just refuted in the article.

How do you get through to someone like this? I can’t even.

“I can prove gravity is an attractive force by dropping this pencil. See? It falls to the Earth.”

“No it doesn’t! It clearly just floated into the sky!”

Sure makes you rethink that painfully stubborn “activists against science” trope, no? Who, exactly, is denying science here?

-Shiv

What do you do when your abuser is part of the whisper network?

Women in any special interest community have a network to vet potential sexual & romantic partners. This network is entirely informal. It has no administrators or moderators, no leaders to hold accountable, no hierarchy to organize behind or against. It seems to just happen inevitably, a product of the deadly clusterfuck that constitutes patriarchy–its implicit belief that women are unreliable combined with the rationalizations for victim blaming. Since the police and most organizations are completely inept at actually doing anything about allegations of sexualized violence, women often depend on this whisper network to help keep them away from serial harassers and rapists who’ve never been held accountable. Even if an organization takes an allegation seriously and finds it to be meritorious, the public almost always engages in a metaphorical witch-hunt to brand the victim a liar, still resulting in further loss for the victim. And then, if all this does not deter a victim from reporting, there is always libel bullying, where the entire ordeal of reporting objectionable behaviour has to be repeated, in a court room, in front of amoral attack dogs masquerading as humans who wear suits.

Given what the “proper official” channels put you through, it’s no surprise whisper networks pop up everywhere you go. It’s a shitty system borne out of necessity to avoid an even shittier system that punishes you for being a victim.

One other characteristic you’ll notice is that it is primarily, sometimes exclusively, populated by women. This makes sense in the broader context of gendered patterns in relationship & dating violence–women are more vulnerable as a demographic and so we work together to address that disproportionate risk.

There are many problems with the whisper network regardless. Perhaps the problem most salient to my experience is my relationships with other women.

In other words, if I have a violent encounter with a woman, the whisper network is at best no longer accessible–because my abuser is privy to it. At worst, my abuser persuades the network I am at fault, and then I am effectively ostracized from a community as keeping myself safe becomes increasingly difficult without access to the whisper network.

[Read more…]

Bouncer of Corona Tavern: You called me mean names, and now I hate you

Remember Corona Tavern, that fine establishment that totally didn’t break the law and totally doesn’t continue to break the law by micromanaging who pees where? Well, the bouncer involved in the story decided to take a principled stand and defy his employer’s gag order in order to condemn the mismanagement of Corona Tavern by Lorraine!

Hahahaha. Just kidding.

“I asked her about her surgery,” said Smith. “Had she answered post-op,  it would have ended there. I asked to clarify the matter. Had she said post-op, use the woman’s bathroom all you want. She identified herself to me as a male.”

According to Smith, River expressed concerns for her safety and the bouncer offered to personally escort her to the men’s room.

Smith, who says he is a friend of the LGBTQ community, says he became upset when River’s friends began to swear at him, calling him a homophobe and a transphobe.

“And worst of all, they called me a hateful bigot,” recalls Smith. “Anybody who knows me knows I’m none of those things.”

“That hurts (coming) from a group that wants tolerance and respect. To spew hatred at me and take a personal attack on me, sorry, it doesn’t help.”

Once again, fragile cishet white bro has to make it all about him.

Un-fucking-believable. So, Smith, let’s review the mistakes you made that corroborate these accusations against you:

[Read more…]

The misuse of the word authoritarian

Siggy touches on his post about Atheism 101 the simultaneous utility and flaw of definition use. The problem of definition is one of those epistemological headaches that wakes me in the middle of the night with a cold sweat. “If you replaced all the parts of a boat, is it still the same boat?!?!” I scream into the stars. My partner, roused from her slumber, cocks her eyebrow from the pillow, mumbling into the fabric “Who cares?”

Credible dictionaries choose to be descriptivist–which is to say, they simply describe the way words are used. Contrast prescriptivist, which claims “this is the way a word is supposed to be used.” Ultimately a language puritan will lose in their argument but for the simple fact that once a phrase catches on, people will continue to use it, and your dictionary will rapidly be out of touch if you don’t keep up. The utility in providing a definition is to aide communication, ensuring everyone knows what we’re supposedly talking about if I suggest we debate garbledina. Misunderstanding of what definition of garbledina we’re using in a debate is typically how an argument goes south.

Following descriptivist logic, I don’t actually mean to argue the way most people use the word “authoritarian” is wrong. Rather I have found another way the word is used in a book that technically wasn’t recommended to me by Marcus Ranum, but I ended up devouring it from start to finish anyway. It’s called The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer. That link is a free PDF hosted by the author himself. I at least recommend reading the first few pages–you might get sucked in, in part because the book was written in the noughties but practically describes Trump’s rise to popularity even though it didn’t happen for another 10 years.

[Read more…]