[Aaron Novick]

Germaine Greer is an actual radical feminist; she is one of the figures for whom the epithet "TERF" was coined, and it is perfectly descriptive of her. Today's anti-trans activists owe little to nothing to this tradition, which is why it's misleading to refer to them as TERFs. They're just reactionary.

Yes, there's a school of "thought" that children and teenagers who believe themselves to be trans are actually gay. It's baseless.* Just because someone makes up worries out of thin air doesn't mean you need to believe them. It's just a "trans panic" akin to the "gay panic" of the 90s. That a bunch of lesbians are signing on, when they of all people should know better, is pathetic, but perhaps not surprising.

*It's anecdotal, but the trans people I know report that it's much more common to meet trans people who thought they might just be gay. Which isn't surprising, since being gay is much more socially accepted now than being trans—it would surely be "nicer" for them if they were gay and not trans.

I don't think you're a dupe of the right, Mark, so much as I think you are overly convinced by the optics of reasonableness, even when underneath it there's no substance. That does have the result of making you susceptible to the right in particular, since the right has figured out how to manufacture controversy, to make issues seem complex when they aren't. They are horrifyingly effective at manufacturing "sides" to debates that don't really have them. They've done it with climate change; they're doing the same damn thing with trans issues. Sometimes a cigar is just a god damn cigar, not a "complex issue". But since it's much easier to produce bullshit than to dismantle it, the "debate"-generator always has the upper hand in these matters, especially since when people lose patience with their nonsense, they can always accuse people of "a tendency to dissolve complex policy issues into blinding moral certainty."

Regarding the right-wing threat to free speech, see here and here.

[Aaron Novick]

[deleted ]

[Mark McDonnell]

it's anecdotal, but the trans people I know report that it's much more common to meet trans people who thought they might just be gay...being gay is much more socially accepted now than being trans.

This is also purely anecdotal, but I teach teenagers and I would say it's the other way around. Being trans and non-binary seems quite fashionable. It's all over YouTube. In the last two years at my high school (13 to 18 year olds) there have been about 8 cases of students changing gender identity and emails from management asking for them to be addressed by a different name and pronoun. But to my knowledge in that time I've taught maybe three 'out' gay teenage boys and no out lesbians. I don't know what to make of this, but it is my honest experience. If what you say is anecdotally true, why is it beyond the realm of possibility ("baseless") that it could also happen the other way around, given the high visibility of the trans issue? There's no judgement here, only calls for discussion. There's only panic if you want to see it.

I disagree that I'm "susceptible to the optics of reasonableness" and "susceptible to the right in particular". The right have nothing to do with my reserving the right to think, for example, that the trans issue might have some complexity to it, and I can see right wing takes on it, like that ridiculous article in First Things, for the nonsense they are. And what has climate change to do with this conversation? You insult me if you think I see that as an undecided issue. The "woke" chilling of expression in the arts is a real thing. It isn't the most important thing in the world. It isn't as important as getting rid of Trump for instance (though it may well be helping him) but as an "artist" (ahem) it sticks in my throat.

Btw I can only access the first link. I'll have a read.

Night night all.

[Andrew Szilvasy]

Mark,

There's no world in which people who are trans don't face more prejudice than people who are gay (except in Iran). 13 to 18 year olds who are now recognizing that they're trans suggests there has been progress, but this is among a younger cohort.

There is more-widespread-belief-than-we'd-like-to-believe belief among adults out there that people who are trans are just mentally ill people playing dress-up. Noted liberal JK Rowling is out there making decisions that could actually harm trans people; I think you'd struggle find anything similar to this to cis-gendered gay people.

[Andrew Szilvasy]

On the initial letter, I think it's risible. There are consequences for speech. Always have been. And the letter's main complaint is that other people using speech in ways the letter-writers don't like.

Much of what has changed here is that people have MORE access to speech than they ever had. A college professor said something that makes a student feel uncomfortably sexualized or was pretty racist? 25 years ago (hell, 15, maybe 10) the student had limited places to share that. Now, that student has many.

This has many advantages. It also, of course, has disadvantages. Not so much in something clear-cut in the above paragraph, but in other situations where things might be more nuanced or misunderstood. All nuance gets stripped, necessarily, when we can only have one side*. This isn't a matter of speech being curtailed, it's a consequence of speech being democratized.

*A friend of mine teaching at a school outside of Boston was (anonymously--though she was kept anonymous as well) called out on Insta in one of those Black at [Institution]. She was teaching about institution racism. Had 2-3 days on it. At the end, she said that if those who benefit from the system don't work to solve it, they are themselves complicit, and by the definition they built in the class, racist. She said that he would classify himself as this sometimes. It was put online as "My teacher said he was racist to the whole class." An obvious mischaracterization. But this a lack of free speech, it's an abundance. We're in a transition period where we re-learn how to interact in a world where speech is fully democratized.

[James Brancheau]

Never mind. Waste of time.

[Aaron Novick]

Mark, I brought up climate change because I think the right has a playbook for generating controversy where there is none, and it's being applied in both cases. I wasn't suggesting that you are a climate change denier. I'm sorry for being misleading. I really do think that the British gender critical crowd has about as much intellectual power and genuine evidence behind them as your standard climate denialist or creationist.

I'm sorry if I touched a nerve in saying that you're susceptible to the optics of reasonableness. I don't mean it to be condescending, merely a diagnosis of where I think you go astray. I mean it with the same friendly spirit that I take it you meant it when you suggested that I reduce genuinely complex issues to blinding moral certainties.

[Kevin Rainbow]

Kevin, I never said Rowling should suffer consequences worse than further speech (criticism and loss of book sales) for her views. Please learn to read, thank you. You're of course also wrong that the tweet Rowling was responding to was defamatory,

Nice try. But I didn't say you said it. You didn't SAY it, but you and thousands of others out there who share your approach are DOING what goes beyond criticism when you resort to verbally bashing and insulting a person as "horrible" or smearing him/her as such merely for expressing a position on an issue.

Likewise, I didn't say the tweet to which she was responding to was "defamatory". I would need to be able to see the tweet to have some opinion regarding it. You conveniently left it out. In any case she is referring to MISREPRESENTATIONS and lies (whether or not they are officially deemed defamation). In other words, it is obviously not an attempt to suppress (legitimate) criticism as you are trying to smear it as.

.

[Aaron Novick]

Kevin, if a person supports morally abhorrent views and policies, it is not going "beyond criticism" to make a judgment as to their moral character. But I understand why you, who yourself support morally abhorrent views and policies, are concerned about people on the left making use of their free speech rights to criticize both such views and policies and the people morally bankrupt enough to support them. Have a lovely evening.

[Aaron Novick]

This is a very good thread, obliterating the letter bit by bit (it branches off into other good threads as well): https://twitter.com/spiantado/status...25848950861825

As a bonus, it contains an image of the (obviously not defamatory) tweet that Rowling, being the big bully and fragile snowflake that she is, decided she needed to intimidate the person into deleting.