What Salty Current said on Alex Gabriel’s “smoke / fire” post from last month, a post which was kicked back to life a few days ago by the odious “sonofrojblake,” whom I finally banned from commenting here because he’s so odious.
This is the whole comment, because it’s good.
Alex:
@Salty Current (#59): Including trans women in your definition of women doesn’t require you to ‘accept unproblematically a gender binary with whatever associated qualities anyone might attach to it’.
If you’ve been experiencing the oppressive aspects of the category “woman” and its associated beliefs for your entire life, writing for years prior questioning and challenging the category and its definitions, and (in Ophelia’s case) feeling very ambivalent about what it means to identify yourself in those categorical terms, it does. I’m really very angry about what looks like a total dismissal of our very real interest, as people harmed by these categories, in continuing to question and challenge them – in continuing to want to talk about gender in a critical way; like not immediately ceasing that aspect of our fight against oppression because some people demand it is done to exclude trans people from the great benefits of womanhood. People’s refusing to acknowledge the difference between this continued questioning and challenging of gender categories, in form and substance, and denying people’s rights, including the rights to self-identify and to have that identification be recognized and respected, is troubling. There is a difference between saying “I accept these categories and belong to one, and I won’t allow those people into it” and “I recognize and respect everyone’s self-identification and rights, but I want to continue to challenge the received categories which I and others have experienced as oppressive,” and it’s essential that it be recognized.
oolon:
Maybe there is a lesson in that somewhere too.
I think there is, and it’s a lesson for you. Your history suggests that you seem to have a very individualistic focus and to be less adept at recognizing harmful or evil social dynamics. IIRC, you had far less experience with the pit than did those to whom you were insistently defending them, and I told you that more than once at the time. The point, as we tried to explain to you, wasn’t that their individual motives – the site and the collective behavior was harmful (which isn’t to excuse any of them individually, and many were and are capable of individual evil acts).
What’s happening now with Ophelia is very similar in form to the pitters’ actions against her then. Again, people’s individual motives aren’t the point: some are willfully malicious towards her, some are trying to sow divisiveness among social-justice atheists, some hate FTB and everything associated with it, and many believe they’re defenders of trans people and fighting the good fight. The practices, though, are familiar: setting yourselves up as a group to prosecute an individual, quote-mining, misrepresenting, projecting things into their statements or actions, spreading and repeating rumors and false stories without links, uncritically accepting claims about the person’s alleged bad behavior from questionable sources, looking for guilt by association, monitoring them closely on social media and compiling public dossiers to present your case to the jury (who are yourselves), encouraging others to join in, personalizing arguments and instead of reading arguments as arguments mining them for clues of bad intent, reading in the most uncharitable fashion possible, gathering on whatever sites will host you (if one blogger puts an end to it, you can always go to another) to endlessly rehearse their supposed misdeeds, providing threads for others to talk about their suspicions, ignoring or abiding some of the nastier tweets and comments, denying that there’s any such dynamic going on, dismissing the person’s feeling collectively attacked or besieged, presenting their statements and responses as though they weren’t made in that hostile context,…
I know many of you don’t see it this way and think you’re on the side of the angels, but it’s evil and harmful and cruel collective behavior that gets us nowhere. But for the lack of caricatures and derisive nicknames, much of what you’ve been doing is indistinguishable from the pit’s targeted attacks. I hope you’ll think about that. I don’t think any of you would want to be subjected to this yourselves.
I just wrote this, so I’ll put it here and hopefully it’ll be read:
There are many sad aspects of this situation, but one of the saddest for me personally is that people I’ve long liked and respected (like Janine at Pharyngula, who’s been one of my favorite people on the internet, despite her inexplicable hostility to the late Dead) might think that I’m hostile to them or uninterested in what they think or their experiences. It’s a function of the way this dynamic has been set up – pitting some people against one another even when they’ve fought alongside one another for years. So I just want to say to Janine and other trans people who’ve been my online friends, comrades, whatever: In arguing as I have, I hope I haven’t made you think that I respect or care about you any less than ever, and I hope this won’t be an irreconcilable break. I hope getting past this episode, rather than marking an end, can allow us to be friends and comrades again.
Thanks, Ophelia. Hope it helps.
Oh, jebus, sonofrojblake. Long banned at Pharyngula, too.
It’s all the same large handful of persistent assholes everywhere, isn’t it? Yeah, guys, you despise FtB, I get it. So why do you spend all your time obsessively haunting the place?
I’ve got a long list of online sites I detest — places like Answers in Genesis, or Evolution News & Views, or Al Mohler’s blog. But I don’t hover over them, I don’t comment there, and for the sake of my sanity, I avoid them altogether until I hear about something particularly egregious wafting out of them, and then I criticize on my own blog. But to struggle mightily to get past blocking software, to create new accounts and pseudonyms, to insist on trespassing where you’re unwanted, to whine on any tangentially related site you can get access to, and to protest angrily when you’re banned…there’s something fucking wrong with you.
Well, it’s the gang of persistent assholes, yes, and it’s also former colleagues and friends. In my case, at least.
PZ:
Yes, and Alex Gabriel isn’t especially perturbed:
…But keep pushing the narrative about Ophelia, sonofrojblake. Nothing suspicious or unreliable about you, fellow social justice advocate. I’m sure you’re on the up and up (aside from the misogynistic slurs).
Applause, SC.
To paraphrase sonofrojblake: “Do you believe trans women are twats and cunts? Yes or no.”
SC – In just the last few posts you have put into words, very elegantly, what I’ve been struggling to say since this started up again a few weeks ago. Not only about the substance of the question, but the way this whole thing has gone down and its toxic effects on the people engaging.
This is exactly what has been bothering me about this situation. It has become “us vs them” argument. It is more important to understand where each of us coming from. Instead of calling “TERF’s” bad people, it is better to ask why they are afraid and why they are angry. (By the way, I don’t think Ophelia is a TERF). The fear is not really about teansgenderism. It may be a fear that certain feminist issues will be pushed aside, even though we know logically there is room for all fights for equality. I also imagine there is a lot of fear for people who are transgender. Fear can lead anyone to be extra sensitive to any hints of rejection or oppression.
I think is more important to save the fighting for things like actual bullying and laws that discriminate against transgender people. Discussions are important to clarify these issues but it doesn’t have to lead to fighting
I’ve been spending much of my free time lurking over at file770 following the Hugo Awards and Puppygate and increasing my Amazon wish list by about 200 books, so I missed all of this. Oh, dog, I’m so tired.
I don’t know why with so much going on Comment 32 @ dysomniak in the link above is the one that stopped me in my tracks:
Really? Taking no shit from anyone is a problem now?!
My condolences, Ophelia.
That’s interesting. It wasn’t that long ago that AG had some mention about “being an annoying cunt” or something very similar in his self-description/About info on his blog. He excused it by saying that “someone else called me that”, i.e. he was jokingly repeating what someone honestly said bout him. Regardless, he was totes okay posting it publicly.
I guess we should assume that he’s anti-feminist and an MRA because of that? Or would that be overstepping and simplifying a simple case of him just being a blindered nitwit who didn’t realize how offensive the word would come across, even jokingly? Because that latter approach would be one of nuance and not immediately leaping to conclusions and assuming the worst of someone, and the lesson lately is that that kind of approach is the “wrong” one.
MrFancyPants @11, you’re doing that thing.
I challenge you because I don’t think about Alex Gabriel’s character at all.
You think he’s mistaken or confused, say so.
(So, so much could have been avoided if people had borne the fundamental attribution error in mind!)
The way TERF is thrown around and the urgency to correct people not on the merits of any argument made but on the accusation of terfism makes me think terfs aren’t regular women with political opinions, but something more like this.
There is a lot of discussion on whether or not Ophelia belongs to that monstrous group – the terfs. Now, given that those who declared Ophelia a terf are roughly the same folks that labeled all the others as well, I think the portrayal of these women at large as well as the label itself are ready to be critically examined.
John Morales@12:
“You’re doing that thing.” ? And which thing would that be? You ask me to be explicit and clear by way of an unclear, vague response? You’re doing that thing, John.
But I shall indulge you. I was pointing out an instance wherein Alex wrote something that could be interpreted either graciously (“oh, someone said that about him, and he’s just joking, even though I don’t like the use of that word even in a joking context”) or ungraciously (“clearly, this man is an anti-feminist, because no supporter of women would fling about the word ‘cunt'”).
Yes, I do think that he’s mistaken, about Ophelia. I also think that he’s been given gracious latitude that he refuses to extend to her. This being a case in point. If I cared to harass and bully him, which I do not, I’m sure that I could mine his archives for more examples. But that would be petty.
(I think) that’s not what MrFancyPants is saying. He’s saying that if we treated AG the way Ophelia’s been treated, we’d label him an anti-feminist and an MRA, because he said Wrong Things.
OK, granted, he did call AG a blindered nitwit. But AG’s character is really beside the point.
Oops. Jinx!
Certainly Jason Thibeault’s contribution to the whole thing never would have happened, if he had done so.
I did, and I should not have. I appeal to frustration as an excuse. Frustration fueled by weeks of unfair attacks on Ophelia. That being said, my insult towards AG doesn’t serve any purpose other than making the situation worse, so I apologize for that.
Also, too, yes, this was exactly my point.
Well, I wasn’t judging you for it, I just meant it wasn’t really your point.
(As insults go I find “blindered nitwit” strangely endearing. But that’s probably just me. :))
@jose, 13
Eh… not really. Granted, the term TERF is now rejected as a slur, but it’s also one that they kind of invented for themselves, and they’re just using new terms now. They’re not weird monsters with baskets on their faces, but they are people who, when faced with the question “is a trans woman a woman?” would clearly answer no, rather than reject the question as overly simplistic.
Ok, so I think that there are problems with rejecting the question rather than simply answering with a direct yes, but I’m also unaware of the context in which the question was asked or the exact wording of it, so I can’t speak to how reasonable a response it was. I’m also incredibly aware that, when people have asked me if I was a man or a woman, my own personal response has been to outwardly just ignore the hell out of them and keep walking, while inwardly wondering what the fuck that even means (because the only criteria by which I could consider myself a man, outside of discussions of how social attitudes and expectations toward gender have shaped my development and influence the ways in which I’m treated by people and society in general, are the ones that would deny that trans women are women). So I can see why someone who has made comments like those that Ophelia has made about their own attitude toward gender might, when people are asking yes/no questions and demanding answers, ask what the fuck that even means, rather than directly responding in the affirmative.
(And, for the record, no, I’m not making any assertions, nor do I hold any opinions about her gender identity. That would be weird and inappropriate. It’s entirely possible to have apparently similar opinions for vastly different reasons, and it’s none of our business anyway.)
Athywren,
I refer you to http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2015/07/glasgow-pride-says-no-drag/
@John Morales, 22
While I’m not accusing you of misquoting or misrepresenting, I can’t see the original comment in full so your quote doesn’t really help me. I missed that boat, and I’m not going to drown myself in the attempt to catch it.
Athywren, slymies have screencapped the original before Ophelia moderated.
(What you seek is available, if you care to delve)
—
PS M.A. Melby independently shares my belief. FWTW.
This might be a black mark against my skeptic cred, but I’ve delved as far as I care to on that. I looked at the comment thread, checked archive sites for unedited versions and, finding nothing, and considering it to be the least relevant aspect of it from my point of view, since it being a justified or unjustified question makes very little difference to the question of whether the response was a TERF red flag, I didn’t bother to pursue it further.
The issue of how reasonable a response it was in general is something else entirely, and I’m not particularly interested in pursuing that, because people often do act unreasonably when they feel like they’re being cornered on something. I don’t think the question of whether Ophelia is a human being with human emotions and thought processes is a worthwhile thread to pursue given that the answer is definitely yes, so it’s not, in my opinion, worth the effort of digging into it.
I would like to register my dismay that Dana Hunter has now come out with a public rebuke of her FtB comrade – and provided a re-education course by way of links.
Does she really believe she has to school Ophelia this way? In public?
Please. Please.
For the sake of this network take your dispute to the backchannel and get this sorted. I cannot believe that of all the bloggers here, only PZ has showed any support.
I simply can’t believe what’s happening here. (And, to be honest, it had to sate my voracious schadenfreude appetite associated with the concomitant Pharyngula in-fighting before being free to move on to disbelief.) It’s so much like “you adhere to the baptist confession of 1689? Heretic! It’s the baptist confession of 1646 that is orthodox!”
Ophelia, we have probably never agreed on anything. But fwiw I have been on the receiving side of no-room-for-nuance “yes or no, now!” questions many times. It’s fucking frustrating beyond all measure. I feel your pain.
And now another network blogger has decided to lecture Ophelia about the harassment and murder of trans people, as if that were called for or helpful. I’m completely disgusted and sorry this is happening.
The other blogger led off, once again, with:
This is a familiar pattern to me: when the wagons are being circled against a heretic, the “shibboleth” becomes a creed that must be affirmed, first of all, in order to establish one’s membership in the group. Affirming the creed becomes a performative repudiation of the heretics who rejected it, or refused to affirm it, or affirmed it but not heartily enough for others’ satisfaction.
That doesn’t make the creedal statement false. The statement could be anything. “Black people are not inferior.” Or, “child molestation is wrong.” Or, “People who murder puppies should go to jail.” The statement may be fine. Affirming it may be fine and good. But in context, the affirmation ceases to be so much about the content of the statement, and becomes primarily a marker of belonging to the in-group.
If you remove that bit from the blog post, then in fact the post is also good. Trans Ally 101 is a worthwhile thing to expose people to. And without the performative repudiation of OB, in the form of a creedal affirmation, it would in no way seem (to me at least) as if the post were directed at her. It would just be useful information presented timely. (One might guess that the timing suggests that the post is targeted, but one might guess lots of things.)
This runaway situation has gone way past the zone of disbelief, crashed through the head-shaking territory, and is currently melting its way through the facepalmheaddeskopause.
You have my sympathy and support, Ophelia.
I can’t help but think of the very old-but-evergreen Emo Phillips on Golden Gate Bridge. I hope he brings some cheer.
Jennifer Chavez @ #28
Yeah. Because that was both wise and necessary. “Hey, how can I make a bad situation worse? I know!”
I mean, as if feminist gender theory is the motivation behind the gendered violence against trans people. As if the families rejecting trans children, brothers and sisters are motivated by feminist gender theory. As if Ophelia doesn’t know the hurtful, hateful ways people act towards someone who challenges their prejudices.
When this started, I wanted Ophelia to ride out the storm and stay on FtB. Now, I’m only checking in to this blog so that I can get the link to her new blog.
Another one?
It could have omitted the performative repudiation and expressly directed the helpful and timely 101 at the general audience, and that would have been great. Instead, it opens with a little knife twist. And no, I don’t care more about Ophelia’s feelings than I care about the lives of trans people. I just don’t think this performative bullshit is doing much, if anything at all, to make the world safer for trans people or ensure their rights. (All of what sambarge said.)
Late to this. Excellent contributions, SC, as always. (If I may adhere to a comment of yours, I wouldn’t want either to give any pain to the wonderful Janine. And if he reads this, thanks to PZ too for his interventions, both here and in Pharyngula.)
These last hours, I have tried to follow too many links and conversations to get an idea of the evil crimes Ophelia has committed, chafing at the same time at the surprising certainties of so many comments. Haven’t these people heard of The Second Sex, or of the long debate about feminine identity? Actually, I’ve felt glad for a long time that in these recent years trans women have come to disturb complacent, lazy assumptions, and I feel that a very rich and exciting conversation is about to be had. But to forgo a long quest around gender questions because another woman just tells me so, or because “cis women never question their identity”? WTF?
This is a rough summary of what I have understood here — this, and bad group/pit dynamics. So… sorry for what you’re going through, Ophelia.
Re ‘performative repudiation’:
Another very apt observation, I think.
(Ophelia, please don’t imagine I’m in any way happy that this is happening from my saying so, but, well, making some lemonade here, at least, willingly or not, observing all this, I guess. It has all been a bit of an education, if a really pretty awful one.)
I’m coming late to this, but it occurs to me to ask: certain therapies are normally only prescribed for women – HRT is an obvious example. When doctors are considering such therapies, should they take the patient’s self-described gender at face value?
It’s not a little knife twist. It’s a big one.
It’s a big one not least because Dana and I were scheduled to have dinner with PZ and Mary in a couple of weeks. Obviously I’ve had to back out of that.
I think medical care and therapies are pretty individual, outside the general hints for people. I mean, does a woman without a uterus need a pap smear even though they are recommended? No. But it doesn’t matter why a woman doesn’t have uterus. Lots of women don’t, after all. Likewise birth control. A woman without a uterus wouldn’t need it but a man with a uterus could. Actually, all fucking men need birth control but that’s a different issue.
Not sure about breast tissue and cancer, as anybody can get breast cancer, after all. I suppose trans women would be well-advised to check for breast lumps, particularly given that they often take hormones and HRT has been linked in breast cancer.
Anyway, I think the point is that medical treatments are determined by the needs of the individual and not the gender.
OMG, heddle and I agree on something! What next? Human sacrifice, dog and cats living together – mass hysteria!
Alex has told me not to bother to comment there anymore, so I’ll respond to him here (I won’t respond to M.A. Melby, since their post insisting that they aren’t doing what I described was…another example of what I described):
I’m not sure what Alex is trying to say here, but it makes no sense. What people seem not to be able to understand is that we’re not making a TERF argument. What we’re talking about with regard to “Do you believe X are women?” isn’t “X”, whatever X may be, but “are” “women.”
There’s really no apt analogy that I can think of – they all seem to involve categories that are relatively privileged, which “woman” is not – but for purposes of conveying the general idea: Say you’re a person who’s long challenged normative ideas about sexuality, and someone demands that you answer the question “Do you believe bisexual people are normal? Yes or no.” You might well not want to answer this as a yes or no question, not because you think bisexual people are “abnormal” or want to exclude them from the normal category, but because you reject the idea that normality has any evaluative meaning and see it as a dangerous and inherently exclusive form of categorization. This concern might be particularly salient if you’re someone in a category which has been oppressed on the basis of your “abnormal” sexuality.
Here’s another, which Alex possibly can relate to. It’s also not perfectly parallel for a number of reasons, but might get the point across. I’ve spent several years challenging human supremacy. I would aggressively resist answering any question in the form “Are X people fully human? Yes or no.” Not because I want to exclude anyone from a category I claim for myself (I would have the same difficulty answering “Do you believe you‘re fully human? Yes or no.”), but because it’s a bad category and question: it implies that a species is a status; it privileges qualities associated with white, “Western” men; it’s inherently exclusionary; and it’s long been used to oppress other animals as well as many humans. “Yes, of course” would be the appropriate answer if I were somehow absolutely required to limit myself to a yes or no, but that’s almost never the case, and it’s not the case in the current context. Answering simply “Yes, of course” and leaving it at that would perpetuate the human supremacy I’ve been working to challenge. Likewise, I won’t meekly support struggles for human liberation that are framed in terms of demanding recognition of some people’s status as “fully human,” not because I think any humans are less worthy of respect or rights but because that framing is inherently oppressive and counterproductive.
And here Alex continues to ignore or dismiss my actual statements to which he’s responding. It’s easy to blithely assert that “Of course womanhood means different things for different people” when you’re not recognizing that for people thus categorized it’s meant millenia of oppression. Once again, I’m not seeking to exclude some people from a category I happily and unproblematically claim for myself. I’m calling attention to the category itself.
FFS. I am not a trans-exclusionary feminist. If Alex hasn’t gathered that much at this point, I don’t see any point in continuing. It’s like he’s reading my words through a filter that translates them into TERF.
I’m not arguing anything about trans women specifically. I’m talking about what it means to have this category in general, which is a matter that affects me personally. And my talking about it isn’t something new that arose only in this context.
Forelle:
I know – it makes this episode even more upsetting.
Jennifer Chavez:
As far as I’m concerned, Ophelia, you can’t get off this network fast enough.
Lots of great things being said here.
I am somewhat reminded of discussions regarding same-sex marriage, when people might bring up issues with the whole concept of marriage, or might express support for sibling marriage or polyamory. Sometimes those other issues are brought up as a way to reject same-sex marriage, or to lend credence to a slippery slope argument, or simply to derail a discussion. But sometimes those other issues are of high importance to the speaker, the subject of countless previous conversations, and we are only just noticing because we weren’t in the conversation before. Perhaps they were brought up in a bad context, perhaps they were ill-timed. The listener could, at the very least, try to interpret things charitably.
The Brute Reason post on the Free Pride event I thought made the point well that there are conflicting needs, that a safe and welcoming space for one group may not equate to a safe and welcoming space for another. We can’t all please everybody. If Ophelia and her commentariat like to discuss gender as possibly a social construct, it’s not going to be welcoming to people who view that concept as insulting. I wish they could simply disagree, though, and stay out of the conversation, rather than demand people’s heads.
Me, I like that line of discussion, and I will follow wherever this blog ends up.
I LOLed.
SC @ 42 – as far as I’m concerned too.
Ophelia, #45
🙁
I hope you’ll let us know where your new blog will be. I’m not the most knowledgeable person on social justice topics so you don’t see me posting as much, but I do read and learn a lot from your blog. I discovered FtB through PZ’s blog and for a long time only read that. But since discovering B&W, it became the very next one I started coming to. Thanks for all your great writing here.
SC @ #41 – Brilliant. I wish I could say more but you said it.
Salty Current, allow me to add my thanks for saying the words I have been trying to think all week.
I continue to be reminded of a trans woman I have known for a while. She is a woman, full stop, AND:
– she has been quite vocal about the power, privilege, and protection granted to her by dint of being gender-identified as a male for the first many years of her life. She was born to a pretty well-to-do white, East coast family, with several generations of college-educated members. These advantages, coupled with her being the recipient of the outside label “male,” made doors open for her that most people would never even be allowed to knock on. She ended up entering, and succeeding in, a STEM field at a time when, had she been identified as female from birth, that would have been much less of an expected option.
If someone were to take the above and accuse me of ignoring the terrible circumstances so many trans* youth find themselves in, that would be ridiculous. I can’t know the difficulties the woman I describe above went through as she determined her true identity, but her story is more than her being trans.
Ms. Benson, you are being subject to highly inappropriate behavior, to say the least, from your fellow bloggers here. I was so glad that you were one of the blogs included in the founding of FtB, but fully understand your apparent wish to bid these jerks adieu. It’s not FtB that I choose to come to, it’s Butterflies and Wheels.
I remember several years ago discussions and debates even amongst gay-marriage activists about the framing of that struggle. Some people objected to attempts to frame the demand for marriage rights in terms of normality – “gay people are just like you straight people,” where “just like” implied a fairly conservative, traditional model of sexuality, relationships, and family. There was a sense that winning the struggle on that basis came at the expense of and marginalized especially gay people, but really anyone, who didn’t accept that model for themselves and wanted to have their nontraditional choices respected as well, even to the point of asking some of those people to tone down their self-presentation for the good of the movement. Yes, marriage would be extended to include gay marriage, but at the cost of leaving the traditional model largely intact. I do see some similarities, and in that case, too, I think it’s a mistake to see the struggles – for the right to marry for all those who want to marry, and for “flamboyant, sex-crazed deviants” to be accepted – as contradictory when they’re actually complementary.
Salty Current has hit the nail on the head! Thank you.
My own summarized take on a lot of this:
– TERFs in general seem to be people who have a strong investment in the gender binary, and consider trans women to be on the other side of it.
– Ophelia spends a fair bit of time questioning the point of the gender binary in general, and promoting ‘it’s more complicated than that’, which already sets her apart from the usual TERF.
– A whole lot of this seemed to start off with Ophelia commenting on some trans people actively playing to the gender binary stereotypes to ease perceptions of their transition by jumping over the wall from one box into a different box, instead of questioning why there are walls between the boxes in the first place. She’s not and never has been saying ‘stay in your box’, she’s been saying ‘question why the boxes are as they are when actual people are scattered all over the place’.
Some of the comments about me on the Pharyngula thread after my last guest post here were… distressing. At least one of the things that went through my head was ‘why do you think I am somehow considering you as evil and sub-human when what is actually going on is that people are engaging in an all-too-human attempt at creating nice neat categories to slot others into?’ Not that I commented there, as it seemed unlikely to lead to anything useful.
Prejudices are a fundamental aspect of human psychology. Everyone has them, and the ones who insist the most that they don’t have them are generally the ones who simply have refused to actually look at theirs.
Damn, I’m sorry about the distressing comments. I didn’t think of that when I posted your guest post.
Is this working?
Well, neither did I when I posted the original comment; I was just trying to figure out how to say what I was seeing in my own head. And I did click on the link to the Pharyngula discussion of my own free will.
It didn’t take long to figure out that commenting there wouldn’t likely help matters, though.
It’s notable that the last big raging argument over at We Hunted The Mammoth that resulted in regulars leaving (including at least one of the moderators) was also over trans issues. There are a lot of hair triggers involved. Hair triggers which are unfortunately understandable coming from people regularly blasted by both society and supposed allies.
@29 A Masked Avenger, You expressed my feelings exactly about Dana Hunter’s post. I am beyond disgusted at this point.
@ Ophelia – Just wow. The upcoming dinner, how horrible. I already said I thought it was a good idea for you to leave. Now I’m just amazed you are still writing and participating. You are a role model of fortitude.
@ SC – I recall some fop just the other day saying you were unclear and a poor writer. I already knew that was bullshit, having been a longtime lurker. But seeing your comments all over the place the last few days expressing my thoughts so much more eloquently than I could and educating me along the way, I’ll now be a regular reader of your blog.
I said when Ophelia left I’d still be following Pharyngula, and I will. But I used to explore the other blogs when I’d get some time, and also hit a few regularly, if not so regularly as PZs and OBs (including three of the four that have so recently disappointed me). I don’t feel very comfortable about keeping that up, at the moment, I have to admit.
My sympathies too, Ophelia. And I will follow you wherever you go.
I just read the guest post by V.V. Urquhart (Why I’m Still a Butch Lesbian) and identified very much with that. Not just becase I wear “men’s clothes” too but also because I am for destroying –to the extent possible– these categories of “men” and “women.”
I haven’t followed the Ophelia Benson affair on FtB because I have stopped all but occasional reading here. I could no longer take the cultish atmosphere, the uncharitable readings of other people’s comments, the righteousness, purity and virtue signaling, the lying in wait for a new “chew toy,” the taboos and sharpening of teeth.
I think the most appropriate thing for me to do is just declare to the world that I AM A TERF.
Thanks for sharing.
It’s not my blog, of course, but I would greatly prefer if you didn’t. In fact, you can fuck right off.
Asking whether trans women are women, period, yes or no, can act as a shibboleth, but it’s also a form of shorthand for a longer, multi-part question. The full question would be something like
Do you support trans women’s rights to enter women-only spaces, to medically transition, and to conduct themselves as women in public and private?
Will you refer to trans women by their names and not the one they were given at birth? Will you refer to trans women using female pronouns?
Do you recognize that trans girls’ experience of childhood were not analogous to cis boys’ experience of childhood (this is related to the idea of male vs female socialization)?
Will you say that trans lesbians’ sexual and romantic partners cannot be lesbians? Will you say that straight trans women’s sexual partners must be bi or gay?
And most importantly, can trans women count on you when they are physically or verbally attacked?
(That list is obviously incomplete and could be added to (I am assigned-male-at-birth nonbinary so have some similar experiences to trans women, but can’t speak for them).)
It’s been trans women’s experience that people who aren’t inclined to answer all those questions in the affirmative are not people that are safe (physically or emotionally) to be around. And since it’s also been trans women’s experience that people who aren’t willing to answer “Are trans women actually women?” with a simple “Yes” are also likely not to answer all the above questions in the affirmative and therefore don’t need to bother asking the full list.
Leum, a heuristic is just that.
(And you’ve just spoken for trans women)
Leum:
I get what you’re saying, and I understand why trans people would generally be wary and make use of such a “litmus question.”* The problem, I think, is when further information is given showing that the person does in fact answer these (good) questions in the affirmative (I think you mean all but the second-to-last), and that the refusal to answer the litmus question is in context not about excluding trans people from gender identities but part of a longer pattern of examining those identities in general (including with regard to themselves and other cis people),** and people still continue to act as though the question is a litmus test of those views.
* And why, barring further information, they might not trust a person who won’t respond with a simple Yes, but not why anyone would join a collective campaign against that person.
** Recognizing this doesn’t require agreeing completely with their views, or even that these views be fully developed or articulated. It just means believing that the person is genuinely concerned about these identities in general and not using that questioning as a pretext to exclude trans people. I understand that there’s good reason for skepticism in many cases, and that it’s a judgment call in which most people will want to err on the side of caution, but I think everyone should aim for fairness.
Leum (58). Yes, except of course that was not actually the question asked. The question was about personal belief. The question you outline may well be what was meant and was in fact answered in the affirmative (along with others) by Ophelia at a latter date.
Dammit SC
What did I do?
Thanks for your response, SC. I’ve been not-very-closely following this whole debacle (or whatever you care to call it), but don’t have a great mental picture of who said what when and where. I apologize if I misinterpreted or misremembered something that affected what I said in my post.
Answering first and best again in crossed posts. Clearly the rest of us need to form a union. 🙂
(sorry, should have made attempted humour explicit, there’s enough misunderstanding going around atm).
Rob:
🙂
Leum:
I wasn’t disagreeing with your post at all, just trying to relate its general point to the specific circumstances in this case. I think the general point is right, especially given that TERF assholes have explicitly made “trans women are women” a fundamental point of contention.
Leum@58:
I would like to explore/think/ponder/discuss this. To be honest, I’m afraid to, though. I know that the screencapping, intellectually dishonest hordes are watching, and ready with their TERF ranch-brands heating to red hot. But I shall forge ahead. Because this is a forum of ideas, and I’m not going to stop thinking about ideas just because someone wants to silence Ophelia.
I think that the obvious answer to the question that I block-quoted is “yes”. Obviously a person who identifies as female, despite being branded by society as male, is not going to have an analogous experience of childhood as a male child who identifies as a boy. But then you extend that (“related to the idea”) of socialization in general. I am uncertain what you mean with that, and I would ask you for clarification. Are you saying that socialization as doesn’t matter at all because a person feels themself to be ? I doubt that; I think you mean something else.
I have some personal experience that might be relevant. For a time, I lived in Italy. At that time, I had blonde hair, and typically germanic features in my face. (I still have the latter, but have long since resorted to just shaving my head bald.) I spoke Italian with an American accent, but unless I opened my mouth to say something, everyone thought that I was German and in the town that I lived everyone HATED Germans. Even then (circa 1992), every sunday newspaper had a long section on how the nazis had abused and destroyed everyone and everything, and particularly how Hitler had tricked and shamed Italians. It added weekly fuel to the fire of “hate the nazis”, and this was 50 years after the fact. I was called a “fucking nazi” to my face on a daily basis by total strangers. In effect, I was being socialized to feel ashamed, and ashamed I did feel. Or perhaps more “nervous” than ashamed. I became incredibly fearful that people would assume me to be something that I wasn’t. It wasn’t long before I learned to quickly speak and establish to new people that I was american, not german (americans weren’t liked, but we weren’t detested). I obviously still felt american, but everyone seeing me as german definitely changed the way that I viewed and interacted with the world. From this experience, I understand that no matter how one might feel internally, that the outside socialization pressures from society are going to change the way one thinks. I fail to see how this could not apply to transgender persons growing up in a body that they don’t feel matches their gender. I’m very open to your thoughts on it.
There are other, biological issues (unrelated to genitalia or any other thing that one might throw out there to determine “sex”), that affect the way that male-persons growing up see the world, versus how female-persons do, in general, that I think bear upon how our world views are formed as children. That is probably best left for another discussion, in order to keep this one to the single issue that I addressed above.
I think that the obvious answer to the question that I block-quoted is “yes”. Obviously a person who identifies as female, despite being branded by society as male, is not going to have an analogous experience of childhood as a male child who identifies as a boy. But then you extend that (“related to the idea”) of socialization in general. I am uncertain what you mean with that, and I would ask you for clarification. Are you saying that socialization as doesn’t matter at all because a person feels themself to be ? I doubt that; I think you mean something else.
Okay, so this is something I also have somewhat nuanced feelings about. For background, a common claim by TERFs is that trans women can never truly be women because they were not socialized as women growing up. The claim boils down to saying that there is some essential feature of growing up gendered female that all cis women share and no trans women do.
There are multiple ways to disagree with this statement, to my mind the most obvious being that the experience of being female varies wildly by culture, class, and era, but many trans women also say that they were effectively socialized as girls (and women as adults) because they picked up on the cues society directs at girls, not those directed at boys.
Since, as per above, I don’t think there is a common experience of being socialized as a boy or a girl, I didn’t want to say that trans women grow up socialized as girls in the same way cis women do, but rather that they do not have experiences that mirror their cis (and trans to some extent) male counterparts.
Thanks, Leum, I think that does clarify what you were saying.
I think that the claim that “trans women can never truly be women because they were not socialized as women growing up” is false on its face. To defend that claim, you’d have to define what “woman” means, and then “socialized as a woman”. As we’ve found, those definitions are sketchy, at best. I think that the best that we can say is that people raised in different ways are socialized differently, but there is no clear relationship between that socialization and the way they/we think/feel as adults. I do think that we can agree upon this.
There is only one thing about this question that still bothers me. You just said:
but did you not require a yes/no answer to the question, originally? If it is nuanced (as I agree that it is), how is it wrong for someone to object to giving a yes/no answer to the question:
Perhaps you just phrased that part of your litany of questions wrong, and there is a better way for it to be phrased. But you can see now why someone would object to answering that one right away with a “yes” or a “no”? Like I said, it’s obviously true on first blush, but as you’ve said, it’s nuanced on even the slightest deeper examination. If one of the litany of questions is not answerable, what does that say about the summary question?
I would say my explanation of the question is nuanced; I don’t think the answer is. Trans girls did unequivocally not experience childhood in a way analogous to their cis male counterparts.
Allow me to rephrase, the, Leum:
If your ability to phrase a question is nuanced, and open to various interpretations, how can you expect the answer to be definitive?
If I got this wrong again, please tell me what you mean was nuanced. It was either the posing of the question, or the answer. Right?
Also, the statement that “trans girls did unequivocally not experience childhood in a way analogous to their cis male counterparts” doesn’t say much. I think that we can all agree to that statement.
The question is, to what degree did trans girls experience socialization that cis girls did not? That clearly cannot be answered, but it’s also clearly a question. I used my nationality example as… an example. You had zero to say about that, Leum. How do you think my experience as an expat might or might not correspond in this discussion?
Leum @58
Do you think Ophelia is not physically safe for a trans woman to be around?
Full disclosure: I am a cis male. I have the same reservations as Ophelia about a “yes” answer. I have spent some time in the company of a trans woman and felt no desire to attack her, physically or emotionally.
There’s a helpful, non-inflammatory discussion of gender on Skepchick. Clearly prompted by recent events at FTB, but does a good job staying out of the fray.
Yes, it does, even going so far as to tell people not to try to bring up this episode. I look forward to reading the one “addressing how these concepts play out for trans people specifically.”
One problem I have with the post on first reading – and it’s an issue I’ve had with these discussions generally – is the lack of attention to the material oppression and exploitation that have long been at the heart of the gender hierarchy. It’s true that gender broadly is “a way of categorizing people that is dependent upon social relations” and that “[t]he criteria that are utilized in the construction of such categories are culturally relative – the things that are emphasized as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ or ‘androgynous’ shift across time and space”; but those things are not chosen randomly. Race isn’t perfectly analogous, but, as Fanon argued,
I’m not saying that gender as such can be reduced to oppression, but I don’t think a fruitful discussion of gender can take place without recognizing how gender necessarily forms a part of these power relations as gender prejudice: sexism and misogyny. (The recommended books do cover this – I just would’ve liked to have seen it discussed more explicitly in the post itself.)
And just a strange side note: The post has a picture labeled “Image on Greek pottery of two male-bodied people engaging in sex act.” I’m pretty sure I saw that piece of pottery itself at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts last weekend in the “Dionysus and the Symposium” exhibit, and that the person to the right was described on the descriptive plaque as a woman, probably a prostitute. I’m sure that was the description, but not that it was the same piece of pottery. But if it wasn’t, the composition is remarkably similar (which, I suppose, wouldn’t be all that unusual).
Leum @76, if I understand you, literally everyone in our society is a potential physical threat to trans women.
Then why the f*** is everyone singling out Ophelia for these attacks?
No need to bother replying to Leum any more. Leum won’t be commenting any further.
@PZ Myers
I took a break from all this when I found at Ophelia was claimed as a TERF. I took some of my anger out against you, and I apologize for it.
You too, Ophelia, since I used your blog in order to vent my rage. I hope this get resolved without the need for anyone within the FtB Community splitting.
Ha! It’s now a different Greek-pottery picture. That was fast.
How coincidental, though.
The Skepchick article is helpful; it clarifies some of the essentialism/constructivism controversy for me. I would like to read more on the topic. Is Butler a good place to start?
(Perhaps irrelephant, but I think I’ll change my display name. I learned that “elephantasy” is a slang reference to Republican policies. Wouldn’t want to have anything to do with that. Damn Republicans, adopting the noble elephant as a mascot.)