Don’t Learn About Jasmine Saavedra’s Victim

So some folks in my off-line life have asked me if I’ve watched Jasmine Saavedra’s BRAVE HERO video. I have not. And I’m asking you not to watch it either.

If you’re not aware of this, Saavedra was at a Denny’s, just eating it seems, when someone she decided was trans needed to use the WC. RawStory picks things up from there:

she walked up to the bathroom and claimed that she couldn’t use the ladies room because it was occupied.

“So, that guy is violating my right to use the ladies room here, and he’s saying he’s a lady! Stupid guy,” she said.

Entering the bathroom and filming the scene with her cell phone using a selfie-stick, Saavedra screamed at the woman occupying a stall with the door closed, telling her, “You’re invading my privacy.”

This is terrible behavior. But worse is yet to come:

As the transgender woman walked out the bathroom Saavedra pointed the camera in her face. “Next time use the men’s rooms or nobody rooms,” Saavedra said.

Is that terrible? Yes it is. You know what’s worse? Posting that video on the internet to humiliate an innocent trans person who happens to metabolize food and excrete various biological waste products.

But it gets WORSE.

Saavedra is a primary candidate for the Republican nomination for the US House of Representatives, and this video is intended to humiliate a trans person in order to show off the Brave Heroism of Saavedra to get fucking votes. That’s right, this trans person is being unwillingly used as a campaign prop by Saavedra.

I am all for exposing this completely shitty behavior by Saavedra, but this STILL gets worse. RawStory, who one might think would know better as they tend to lean left, titled their story on this:

WATCH: California GOP candidate stalks and harasses trans woman attempting to use Denny’s ladies’ room

and then included the full video embedded at the bottom of their story.

NO. If a non-public figure is being humiliated publicly by a video, the one thing you don’t do is share the video further. You’re a journalist and have to watch the video in order to do your job writing an accurate story, maybe. Just maybe. Do you really trust yourself to represent that humiliated trans person well? Does the trans community trust you? If the answer to either is no, then writing this story isn’t your job, and don’t bother watching the video. But there will be a few for whom it really is required. I get that. This isn’t directed at you.

For everyone else, including RawStory, when someone doesn’t want to be a public spectacle and someone else selfishly tries to turn that person into one, the barest minimum you can do is NOT WATCH THE FUCKING VIDEO. My friends can’t unwatch the video, but maybe some of you can stop yourselves, and think twice about watching anything similar.

PZ is Right in Everything He Says, But He Didn’t Say Everything

There have been many articles and classes and books and lectures that have attempted to productively address toxic masculinity. And, though this may surprise many of you, there have been blog posts as well. PZ has his own up right now, which is itself responding to another (and thoroughly incompetent) attempt to address toxic masculinity in a blog post.

Nothing PZ says is wrong, but it reminds me that I am ever surprised at how often 2 of the most important points to remember about TM are left unstated. It’s not that people aren’t aware of them, at some level, but I think we get much farther much faster if we make them explicit.

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The Nature of Reality Denial

PZ has an excellent post up, which I hope you’ve seen already, regarding the hatred of the Catholic bishops. I want to call out a small piece of that larger statement here:

Children especially are harmed when they are told that they can “change” their sex or, further, given hormones that will affect their development and possibly render them infertile as adults.

If you read this as the bishops obviously intend you to read it, this portion of their statement says:

You can’t actually change your sex, so telling this to children is bad. Also, it’s even worse when you change the sex of another human being, particularly a child.

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Men and Women

The CBC’s The Current had a story on #metoo and sexual violence/harassment prevention this morning. One guest was carefully talking about the tradeoffs between eradication strategies and harm reduction strategies. The other was firmly ensconced within the loving, anti-feminist embrace of Chill Girl tradition, raging against the demonization of men, portraying all women as fragile victims, and the conflation of bosses non-consensually massaging their employees and strangers kidnapping women to rape and kill them in an isolated farmhouse. Predictably, CG denigrated the tone of the people speaking out on #metoo and the public presence of actual outrage.

Now, I could critique the segment in general. The Feminist Guest certainly made a couple statements with which I could quibble (though in general I thought FG was very good), but the Chill Girl delivered so much wrong it would be easy to make another Crip Dyke-Patented, Lengthy, Ranting Post™ dissecting the conversation and especially CG’s contributions. But this isn’t that post.

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Ignorance, Dunning-Kruger, & Trans Rights

Goodness me. Areomagazine has an “article” up by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay that takes itself far more seriously than it deserves. The intro and premises can be found in the opening paragraph:

The rights and social inclusion of trans people is a heated topic right now and, as usual in our present atmosphere, the most extreme views take center stage and completely polarize the issue. On the one hand, we have extreme social conservatives and gender critical radical feminists who claim that trans identity is a delusion and that the good of society depends on opposing it at every turn. On the other, we have extreme trans activists who claim not only that trans people straightforwardly are the gender they experience themselves to be but that everyone else must be compelled to accept this, use corresponding language, and be fully inclusive of trans people in their choice of sexual partners.

What the hell?

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Mountains of Chutzpah, coming soon

Our own Trav Mamone has a new post up advertising an article they have published on another site, SpliceToday.

It’s a look at an article on another site, AeroMagazine.com, that with garish arrogance titles itself

AN ARGUMENT FOR A LIBERAL AND RATIONAL APPROACH TO TRANSGENDER RIGHTS AND INCLUSION

So I took a look at the original article. Trust me, when I say that Trav Mamone is being very, very generous when saying of the article,

It isn’t as bad as I thought, but still missed the mark.

So, I’ve cheerily taken a dive into a cesspool of ignorance and am swimming around it for a bit, all so that you don’t have to. I’ll soon have two -count them two- posts up thoroughly addressing important aspects of the original article, including a whole lot of wrong. Here, however, I wanted to pluck out a criticism I’ve made of something from the AeroMagazine piece both because I’ve seen it way too many times (so it deserves extra attention) but also so that you’ll have a bit of snark to carry you through until the longer pieces get here. Also, too, there will be more coming your way on gun rights, some  of it addressing a couple things about which Enlightenment Liberal is correct, but didn’t realize that I was going to say in a future post, and some things in which EL is grossly, laughably wrong. (Hint: Bell v Burson figures prominently in that last category.)

From the upcoming post further tackling Trav Mamone’s target:

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