First Things reaffirms that it is a hate magazine
 

Talk about over-intellectualizing a pretty simple reality for some. Bend over backwards why don't you to justify a bigoted view. Yeah, it's sad. Despite the fact that one of my favorite poems was published there (by Dana G), shunning is a natural, just response.

Added: This is a Catholic journal? The matriarch of my family was a Notre Dame nun. Whenever I visited her, and when quite young, there were always multicultural paintings on the wall of the convent. I have so many problems with the church, but not necessary to get into that here. But some idea of social justice seemed palpable then. What the fuck happened?

The professor’s political and economic fantasies predating his transition don’t speak well to his sanity, which does cause me to wonder about any “idea” that may fly out of his head. First Things has always advocated for condemnation over love. Nothing new there.

A trash journal edited by trash people whom God is one by one slotting into the dustbin.

I was assuming this would be some integralist Sohrab Ahmari phalangist-to-actual-fash screed. But yeah, a bunch of hateful bigots.

From the same issue:

https://www.firstthings.com/web-excl...power-the-rich

Consider not sending your poems here or having anything to do with A M Juster.

It's ridiculous. Jim M and Julie, this is precisely why it's not sufficient to have a dialogue with these people. Or bother with a Republican who seems pretty cool and so you think you can sit down and chat. They should be shamed off of the planet. The assault on the truth, particularly. Pretty fundamentally dangerous. And just plain stupid.

Well, it's a magazine that advocates for 'religious values' in public life, so I suppose this isn't too surprising. That's never a phrase I hear without something of a shiver down my spine. I haven't read the second article, but the first is absolutely loopy in the way it frames its anti-trans agenda around a 20 year old memoir by some conservative economist. It's so weirdly specific, often about things that appear to have no bearing on the point.

The religiously inclined, right wing and generally bigoted have made strange bedfellows recently with some voices in the feminist movement over trans issues. Does anyone think their opinions have any legitimacy, enough not to be simply labelled as 'hate'?

https://www.troubleandstrife.org/new...re-killing-me/

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James: "It's ridiculous. Jim M and Julie, this is precisely why it's not sufficient to have a dialogue with these people."

Maybe not with "these people" (I'm not sure you can throw everyone who reads this journal into a collective persona. After all, you're reading it and I'm in dialogue with you). But dialog between those with opposing views is essential to conflict resolution. Go ahead. Spend a day in someone else's head. Something's got to change. Why not all of us?

Here's an interesting addendum to the atrocious saga of the Westboro Baptist Church. Dialogue set her free.
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To answer your last question, Mark, no.

Thanks for the link, Jim. Good story and happy to have read it. I'm certainly not saying it's impossible to change minds, even of those indoctrinated at such a young age (or maybe especially of those indoctrinated at such a young age). And I used to share your view, and hope to again someday. But when truth was tossed out the window, well, I put that approach on hold. You can't reason someone out of a position he/she wasn't reasoned into in the first place. Or, at the very least, it makes it a hell of a lot more difficult. (And we're talking, unfortunately, about a hell of a lot of people.) We can agree to disagree on this one. (See, I can do that.) Cheers.

To expand a little bit: it is entirely unsurprising that a movement devoted to reviving the religious right's anti-gay rhetoric from the 90s and early 00s, only now applied to trans folk, would be in bed with (and funded by) the religious right.

Hate's hate, even when its proponents call themselves "feminists" for the cultural cachet.

[CAVEAT: The following comments were cross-posted with everything posted during the embarrassingly long time between my clicking "Post Comment" and "Submit." They are not a direct response to any individual post above--just to the thread in general.]

Personally, I feel that people who worship Christ Crucified should not be in the business of crucifying people.

And crucifying non-conservatives is what First Things has always been in the business of doing. It has always been a venue for snark and sneer. Always. The founder's columns were nothing but snark and sneer. It was a selling point. Among religious insiders, there is always at least some market for contempt and a holier-than-thou attitude, and First Things deliberately appeals to that market.

That's why I published this there. I thought readers there might think, ruefully, "Oh, yeah, that's me."

Jesus repeatedly said that it is the religious and comfortable people, not the more obvious sinners, who are most in danger of never entering the kingdom of heaven, because they deny that they have any need to change their hearts and minds and actions.

But these are, to some extent, my own people. I come from that upbringing. I feel compelled to try to help them. They may not always deserve (or even want) my empathy and goodwill, but they've got it anyway.

I will not participate in the shunning and shaming of my friends who continue to publish and associate with First Things. Friendship and love are the only things that have a chance of changing minds and hearts. Threats of public crucifixion won't do it.

Besides which, the current bloodthirsty enthusiasm for the public crucifixions of people deemed deplorable doesn't seem very healthy for anyone.

Again, people (myself included) who preach empathy for the shunned and the shamed and the persecuted should not be saying, "Except for these people. These people deserve to be shunned and shamed."

Isn't that attitude identical to the attitude we're trying to combat?

Yes, I sometimes can't help but ridicule Trump, etc. And I sometimes make people feel attacked when they, ahem, employ a metaphor I dislike. I still succumb to the temptation to crucify people myself, on occasion. But doing so is always hypocritical and wrong and counterproductive.

[Edited to add: Oh, yeah, I certainly piled on in the thread about the Best American Poetry editor's having included his own work, his wife's, his friends', etc., in a way that was made worse when it unintentionally implied that even the other included poets who had had nothing to do with that were in some way tainted. Yeah, I'm not very proud of my participation in that thread.]

In general, I try to be in favor of continuing to talk to, and even respect and have fondness for, people with whom I disagree, even while I disagree with their ideas. Vehemently, at times.

Certain opinions and attitudes must be confronted, because silence implies endorsement of them. But I think it's possible to decry homophobia and transphobia for what they are, in a way that doesn't make those who are promoting those attitudes feel personally attacked, and therefore more entrenched in their positions and more inclined to characterize their discrimination as self-defense.

I might not be able to convert anyone from these attitudes. I may lack the requisite silver tongue. But I still think it's possible. And I will continue to try. And fail. And try again.

Poets, of all people, should try not to lose faith in the power of words to change minds and hearts for the better, in a world abounding in examples of words changing minds and hearts for the worse. We should proclaim words' potential to build and heal, not just destroy.

Words like "Mom and Dad, I'm gay, and I'm still the same person you have loved all these years" or "Hey, you know when you were saying trans people are just attention-seeking sickos whose whims shouldn't be indulged? You're talking about someone I love dearly, and let me tell you why you're wrong" can go either way. I have seen those words drive families and communities apart, but I have seen them bring families and communities together. And I honestly believe that personal testimonies from friends and family are the only words with any potential to turn certain people from attackers to defenders of the vulnerable.

The chances of converting someone's attitude may be slim, but they vanish to zero when someone says, "It's pointless to have a conversation with you about this. Goodbye."

(needlessly antagonistic, nvm)

Maybe shunning was the wrong word, ha. I did go off a bit too much though. I too have friends who are conservative. It can be difficult, and we fight more frequently. My point is that there's not even an argument anymore, the traditional sense of the word. There isn't a foundation for consensus. My response may not sound healthy, and maybe it isn't, but I think that I can argue that it's rational.

*And btw, I don't think the nutty hard-core conservatives who have, at present, taken over a large part of the government are fretting about the lack of dialogue.

*All of the above is hypothetical. As if I were being addressed. I simply wanted to show how the barest threads of dialogue can move us all on to a better place.

Sorry, Aaron, my post wasn't actually in response to your comment, although the proximity suggested that. I don't disagree with anything you've said in this thread. [Unless I misunderstood what you meant by "no" to Mark's question. Which is quite possible.]

James, I think part of the problem of disappearing common ground is that disagreements among friends and colleagues tend to be very public now. This respectful argument between Auden and Cerf might not have been as conducive to mutual understanding if the whole thing had taken place in a public forum. (And yes, I am aware of the ironies of my referring in a public forum to a private disagreement that has now been made public.)

It's far easier to come to a consensus between two people than among dozens or hundreds, many of whom feel deeply invested in what they perceive as their own side winning the argument and the other side losing.

It doesn't take a lot of effort for one to ignore First Things. It does take some effort to be listed among its contributors.

For my part, I apologize for the misunderstanding and my needless aggression.

I believe that, Sam. How many hate crimes does that require?

Women in America often have to drive to another state in order to determine what they want to do with their pregnancy. Over half of the population. And choice is law. We should start there. Anyway, if I've ruffled any feathers of those who thought blocking Garland's nomination was standard political process, or that it's good that this diaper of a magazine makes it easier to hate gays or transgendered folks, go fuck yourself. I'm starting the dialogue, Julie. Don't worry so much.

It takes dignity and self-respect to not want to be listed among its contributors.

Hi Aaron,

It is tempting, and often with good reason, to blame the right for everything. But it does seem that a not insignificant strain of feminist thought is, for various reasons, uncomfortable with the idea of self-identifying transgender women being classed as 'real' women in the same full legal sense as those who were biologically born, and have lived all their lives, as women. You may not agree with them, I may not agree with them, but in their case it doesn't seem to be about right wing or religious bigotry and it seems simplistic to dismiss it as 'hate'. And if it is simply hate, what reasons do you see for it? The religious right had the 'justification' of scripture for their anti-gay rhetoric; what are the roots, in your view, of feminist 'hate' for trans people, if that's what it is?

I don't think the writers at the 'Trouble and Strife' website I linked to, an offshoot of the feminist journal of the same name formed in 1983, could be described as "calling themselves "feminists" for the cultural cache" and I doubt they are funded by the religious right.

https://www.troubleandstrife.org/new...re-killing-me/

Similarly, Julie Bindel, longtime feminist campaigner and 'co-founder of the law-reform group Justice for Women, which since 1991 has helped women who have been prosecuted for killing violent male partners'. (wikipedia)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_Bindel

Or indeed Germaine Greer, author of The Female Eunuch and one of the most influential feminist voices of the 20th century.

Here's British comedian and writer Jo Brand trying to pour some oil on these troubled waters.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...greer-feminism

It's actually not even a little simplistic to dismiss it as hate.

You may find this useful, Mark: https://majesticequality.wordpress.c...nism-is-bogus/

But Mark, it's the oldest trick in the book for the condemnatory right to use legitimate debates among people who do not wish harm to one another as a beard to hide behind as they go about trying to outlaw and punish beliefs and behaviors they are incapable of accepting. It is playing the right's game to mix them up. Religious organizations played a huge role in creating the societies feminism has been working to change for decades. The religious right would like to erase feminism and replace it with the male-centered society of yesterday, and they would certainly like to make the transgender movement vanish from the earth. They do not care about the well-being of transgender people. They just want them to go back into their holes. I don't think that's true of the vast majority of feminists. It is unfair to feminist critics of transgender rights to color them with the same brush.

Feminists are having a discussion about where transgender women fit. It is a necessary discussion. The religious right wants to bury transgender women, and feminists, in a hole and bury them. It's important to not confuse which is which.

A little middle of the road, Mark. Love ya just the same.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hONtmFgh3IQ

Hey John,

Obviously the point I'm making isn't coming across. I agree with all of this, and the last sentence is exactly the point I was making to Aaron. Let me recap what I've said:

In my first post (post #8) I recognised the First Things article as religiously inspired bigotry, however disguised it attempted to be. But I was interested to hear people's thoughts on some of the feminist critiques of the transgender movement. Just interested -- in a 'General Talk' sort of way.

Aaron then said, or strongly implied, that those voices aren't real feminists but are just people in the pay of the religious right. (post #12)

I responded to this by naming some actual people who, by anyone's definition, clearly are real feminists and do have some issues with aspects of the transgender movement which, whatever one might think of them, can't be said to be inspired by right-wing or religious bigotry.
(post #22)

Aaron then said that it's still just hate, and posted a really long article that I might find useful (not 'interesting' or 'informative' but 'useful' — slightly patronising that). I've read a bit. The writer takes a long time to make a point, but I will read it. (post #23, 24)

James sent me a great Pretenders song and made a gnomic comment. Love you too James.


Fwiw I sincerely hope that we can reach a point in society where trans people, along with everyone else, are able to live their lives happily and without prejudice or harassment. That really shouldn't need saying, but there you go.

Mark, were the suffragettes—historically important and really feminist as they were—not hateful when they were racist against black women?

Assuming that we can agree that they were, surely we can also agree that the historically important feminists who are transphobic are, insofar as they are transphobic, hateful.

Regardless, my claim was not that today's "gender critical" feminists are inspired by or derive from the religious right. I said they're in bed with them (clearly true) and borrow their rhetoric (equally clearly true).

Your first post expressed surprise that this should be so. My point is simply that this isn't surprising, since both are motivated by hatred of trans people. The enemy of my enemy and all. I'm not denying that this hatred has different sources in the two cases.

My point about cultural cachet was a response to the fact that a lot of folks who never gave a rat's ass about feminism, but who do love them some hating trans people, have suddenly become "feminists" now that they realize that it gives them a "woke" outlet for their hatred.

I dunno, Aaron. No doubt there are plenty of bigots who are using 'feminism' as a convenient cover for simple, ugly bigotry. But I don't think 'transphobic' and 'hate' are the right words for some particular feminist points of view. Transphobia suggests a hatred of transgender people in and of themselves and I don't know that that's what is happening here. I think it runs more like this:
'I appreciate that although you were born biologically male, at some point you began to feel you were in the wrong body. I can appreciate and accept your deep and sincere belief that your true identity is that of a woman, that you live your life as a woman and that you may (or may not) at some point take surgical steps to transform yourself physically. However, I can't reconcile with your insistence that you are and always have been a woman in exactly the same way and to the same degree that I am, because you have not experienced the reality of womanhood in a male dominated society that I have. I am a woman, you are a transgender woman, and, while your existence and identity is absolutely valid, those are not the same thing'.
If anything, the essence of this is less transphobia than the suspicion of men that radical feminists are often accused of: they see this not as more women coming into the fold but as men claiming their territory. I'm sorry, but I can kind of understand this. I'm not saying they're right, but I reserve the right to be thinking about it.

The first website I linked to puts it like this. Read the whole thing, it might be useful. This doesn't read to me like someone filled with hate:

Anyway. Peace and love to all. Night night.

Gnomic- ha, thank God. I've expressed about all I wanna express, over a span of threads. Cheers, Mark, and everyone else. Hopefully I'll start addressing my own work very soon. It is a damn good song, isn't it?

Note: Deleted much of the above. Just kinda want to move on.

(nevermind, not a debate worth having)

Hi Aaron,

I don't want to argue. And I'm really not arguing for the 'gender-critical' position, just acknowledging that it exists and floating the idea that for some women it might be more than simple bigotry and hate. You obviously disagree. I feel that, to you, even the suggestion that some accusations of transphobia might be more complicated is in itself an instance of transphobia, and therefore not worth engaging with. So by claiming the discussion isn't 'worth having', even though you started it, you put me in a Catch 22 and kind of label me as transphobic for even thinking about this. I could be wrong but it feels a bit like that. Maybe it's the word 'hate' that you seem to use so much that grates on me a bit. I don't think it's always helpful, or conducive to change, to dismiss any position you strongly disagree with as 'hate' and then use that as a justification for closing down communication. I get 'don't engage in public debate with fascists'. But that can then become 'don't engage with Christians/conservatives/feminists you disagree with/people who might suggest that any area for discussion exists', or, apparently, a fair percentage of ordinary women.

https://www.scotsman.com/news/politi...ties-1-4940267

We seem to live in a world, which has flowered online, where just the words 'debate' and 'free-speech' are sometimes looked on with suspicion and have even become weirdly synonymous with right-wing politics. This is really baffling to someone like me, who has always had a natural (and no doubt exasperating) tendency to want to share every contradictory thought in their head, without worrying about whether it might be the correct one. I did it in pubs and around tables for 20 years before I got the internet in 2009 aged 37 (I was a late adopter). I don't naturally view the world through a left/right political lens, I just instinctively vote Labour every election and try to be my own version of a decent person. Fwiw I really have no issue with transwomen being classed as 'real' women, whatever that might mean, philosophically or otherwise. But I am honest (or foolish) enough to admit that it does feel somewhat counterintuitive to me that a person with male genitalia who has lived most of their life, however uncomfortably, as a man is in fact a woman in exactly the same way as someone who was born, and whose whole lived experience has been, biologically female. But then I shrug and go about my day. I do know that my thought process as I consider this still-relatively-new idea contains nothing even vaguely resembling 'hate' as I understand it. I'm quite fascinated by what it might mean to feel like one is in the wrong body. I try to understand it, but can't quite grasp it. I understand same-sex attraction because I've experienced that, but 'feeling like a woman' is ungraspable to me, mainly because I have no real sense of what 'feeling like a man' means, beyond the way that other people treat me and the obvious reality of my body and genitalia. But I don't doubt for a second the absolute sincerity and subjective reality of the transgender experience. Still, your definition of 'hate' may be different to mine, and having read (most of) the blog you linked to, I think it is. I feel like my default as I go through life is to be filled with kindness and empathy, as I particularly try to be with the few gender non-conforming students (boys and girls) that I teach. Because adolescence is hard enough, and I can only imagine what extra pressures those students have to deal with. And they all happen to be really nice. But, I can also understand the discomfort felt by some (non trans) feminists and some women more generally. To them, to take a somewhat farcical example, Caitlyn Jenner winning 'Woman of the Year' could have felt like something akin to the ultimate insulting act of cultural appropriation. The link above provides more distressingly mundane examples — women who have been abused by men, stating that they might feel uncomfortable with the presence of 'male bodied' transgender women in women's refuge centres for example. Women who feel this way might very well be 'wrong' to feel like this, in the sense that history will not be on their side. I hope they are wrong, because what a utopia it would be if the future was a place where a person's skin colour, race, religious belief or lack therof, sex, sexual preference and gender orientation were of little significance as the colour of their eyes. But right now the world isn't like this and I don't think it's helpful to dismiss, for example, women who feel like the above as simply filled with, or purveyers of, 'hate'.
I apologise for being able to see more than one point of view. It's an unfashionable fault of mine.

The 'First Things' article is different. It does feel bigoted, it's slimily manipulative and it is filled, literally, with bad faith.

I also understand that the position of the Trump administration and the right in America in general might make this feel different over there. But eventually, hopefully very soon, Trump will be gone. And then we will all have to carry on living with each other. And that has to mean communicating, because ultimately that's what makes us human.

Again. Peace to all. I know you mean well, Aaron and I respect that. Done now.

Edit: I'm only getting involved in this because I can't write at the moment. I can't even crit. It's depressing ha..

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This scene is so dramatically accurate/reflective of our current state of affairs (in more ways than the obvious one) that it deserves to be seen. Again. And again. There is a figurative truth to it that blows the mind.
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Yes, Jim, that's a resonant scene. Thanks for posting it. It's also telling that the powers that be have the guy on air knowing he's going insane because they figure it is ratings gold - as the cuts to Faye Dunaway remind us.

Cheers,
John

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“We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist."
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I've never seen Network. Is it as good as The King of Comedy?

Btw, I've read the other 'First Things' article now. Yes, it's horrible.

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Mark: "I've never seen Network. Is it as good as The King of Comedy?"


I think so, though a different brand of satire. Definitely worth checking out. It's uncannily relevant in a number of ways (especially today’s 24/7 news business) as well as this specific conversation.

I almost never see a film twice (though I should) and it’s been a while since I saw it but remember it at the time as being essential to understanding the quagmire we were headed towards (and are now mired in). I don’t know how well it holds up with time, but that one scene certainly could have been filmed today. I’ve always liked Faye Dunaway, too. (And she has one of the all-time great monikers in entertainment.) Peter Finch too, is a great actor and good in this film.
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I myself am happy to have published three poems in First Things over the past several years, with a fourth coming out in the spring. The editors who chose them, Paul Lake for the first two and Mike Juster for the others, are discerning and intelligent editors, as well as accomplished poets. And I know some smart and quite lovely people who are regular readers of the magazine, though I myself am not.

So, despite the proscriptions in this thread, I’ll still submit work to FT if I feel I have something that fits. And I’ll continue to associate with Mike Juster, if the feeling is mutual, who in my experience is a right nice fellow and a generous friend to poets and poetry.

This piece... HOO BOY!

Fash, or, at the very least, part of a moral rearmament of the intellectual raw materials of fascism, phalangism, and the like.

Hmm. Well, it is interesting and somewhat unexpected to see Hernan Cortes the payoff in a line about "what a more decisive man might have accomplished."

Cheers,
John