I seem to have recently stirred up the TERFs, who have been making the usual TERFy accusations, including this one.
Peezy Myers is not fooled. He just knows that if he speaks up against his gaggle of blog subscribers, they will cancel and fire him the way they canceled and fired feminist women while he cravenly let it happen and aided it along.
— CorrienteCanta (@corrientecanta) October 3, 2020
Apparently, the only reason I support trans rights is that if I don’t, the all-powerful Trans Lobby will rise up and cancel me and cast me into the outer darkness for all eternity. There are just a few little problems with that imaginary scenario. For one, my accuser says she was one of my “gaggle of blog subscribers”, and I wasn’t so protective of her views at all, since I drove her away.
Mumsnet 😊 It was actually Freethought Blogs where I used to enjoy most of my online engagement, before you let the narcissistic children give one of your best bloggers the witch treatment, and then I saw your true “values.”
— CorrienteCanta (@corrientecanta) October 3, 2020
She canceled me! Oh, nooooo! Appeasing my readers is all I live for, as everyone knows.
Her complaints caught the eye of the one of our “best bloggers” to whom I gave “the witch treatment”. Ophelia Benson had a few things to say about that.
He didn’t defend me. He refrained from joining the other bloggers in trashing me, for a time, but he sure as hell didn’t defend me. He privately begged me to stay, while doing nothing to defend me in public.
Then, in the end, he broke down and did a post saying I needed to “own” my mistakes.
Also, I wasn’t dismissed. I left. That “her dismissal” is a lie. He may have forgotten by now, but the fact is I left.
I will most definitely accept that final correction: before Ophelia could be dismissed, she stomped off in a huff, in the same way that Richard Carrier was not kicked out, but eagerly left the network before we could investigate the accusations against him. They both knew the inevitable conclusion would disclose that he was a harasser, and she was a TERF, and neither are acceptable around these here parts.
But I disagree with the claim that I didn’t defend her, or that it wasn’t public. How else did it happen that I antagonized so many good people in the lead-up to her departure? I struggled with that. She was one of our best bloggers, writing frequently and well, and I was in total denial that such a good progressive feminist could also be hateful towards trans people — I defended her, but did not defend her repulsive views, and kept hoping that reason would bring her around. It did not. She turned out to be far more rigid in her beliefs than I expected, and thus her departure was just a matter of time, and a question of whether she’d leave willingly or we’d kick her out.
Finally, though, it seems to be an article of faith among internet TERFs that I’m held hostage by immense numbers of trans people who give me clicks, and that is the only reason I argue for trans rights. That’s nonsense. If I wanted blog hits, it would be far more profitable to cater to the mobs of cis bigots, who far outnumber the tiny minority of trans individuals. The reason I support trans people is more nefarious than that: I’m a biologist, steeped in the dogmas of biology, which state that sex determination and expression are far more complicated than most people can imagine, and that there are more possible outcomes of the process than just two, and that humans are much more socially and functionally diverse than can be encompassed in a mere two categories, as if we were primitive ants with two castes. I held those views since long before I became aware that TERFs actually exist and think that they understand biology.
That’s particularly galling. All weekend long I was getting indignant messages from TERFs telling me that I don’t understand biology and that real biologists agree that sex is a discrete binary. It’s a bit like being harassed by flat-earthers trying to tell me that a globe violates all the principles of physics, or by creationists confident that more and more True Biologists are abandoning the theory of evolution every day. These are claims that are contradicted by reality and by the experts in the fields, yet they persist in their delusion, and no amount of arguing will convince them otherwise.
I should know that by now, but I have my own delusions.