You're a bad person
Has political correctness actually gone mad?
- Thread starter Pogue Mahone
- Start date
You're a bad person
For someone who so vehemently objected to being labeled a transphobe, you sure seem to love being one. It's almost as if the only thing you actually cared about was your right to be a transphobic asshole without consequence.
This is exactly what the catholic right do when talking about gay marrage or homosexuality in general.
When debating gay marriage the catholic argument against it was not just that it goes against the bible but that if we as a society agree on gay marriage then where does the line stop ? And thus these scum bag minsters would go on to talk about people marrying animals or marrying young boys etc. Yet they would say no we are not being homophobic but simply talking ultimately about the sanctity of marriage.
In fact this is the US Republican go to method of politics
.Health care for everyone = Venezula
.Not locking up immigrate children in cages = MS13 in the suburbs
.Taxing the very wealth a tiny bit = The Soviet Union
.Saying Black Lives Matter = White genocide
It's not actual a nasty character assassination is it. Firslty it's not a character assassination if the person said something transphobic but ok lets just say for argument sake what she said wasn't transphobic and she is now being unfairly being labelled a transphobe, what's the negative here ?
We live in a society that uses brutal violence on trans people in particular black trans women, people have made whole careers out of being arseholes to trans people, there is a constant effort to stop trans people being able to get the healthcare and legal rights they need. Martina Navratilova will still have all her money, mostly likely have her gig at the BBC and will be able to function in a society that on the whole agrees with her views.
Good post.
As for the Trump thing, some of the most racist white men I know are married to Asian women and have mixed-race children. The myth that one can’t be intolerant of a group when they have a relationship (personal or professional) with a person from that group needs to die.
I'd personally like to see us do away with gender-based sports and let everyone, men, women, trans, male-one-day-female-another-day-persons, compete on the same playing field.
And in those sports transwomen would only be able to compete with women of the same size as themselves anyway so it’s a non issue.
Agree.
It's such a simply view how things like racism, sexism, homophobia etc work yet so many people think this way. Although it's far easier to believe that you don't hold racist views or you don't participate in racism because you hired a Asian person for a job or because your attracted to someone with dark skin than say looking at the way you vote, the media you consume, views on policing, views on nationalism, the way the economy functions.
But we are in a "political correctness gone mad" thread so can't expect to much.
Typical liberal nutjob reply as expected, nothing to do with the discussion, just call them racist, sexist, homophobe, transphobe, asshole, ignorant from the lofty moral high ground you created in your tiny little head,only problem is you have deluded yourselves into thinking anyone gives a flying feck.
When did the bolded happen ffs
?Why would anyone bother themslves with what you crazies label them? I mean on this thread someone is being called transphobic because she's against transgender women competing with actual women born as women, and she's supposed to bother if loons call her names for that opinion? Nah mateTrans men would likely be 'automatically' excluded: they wouldn't be able to compete.
And that would be because calling a person who is transgender the gender that they have/are transitioning from, even though you know they don't want you to, simply makes you a grade A cnut.
In your head, what about my Trump question?
Yes. Just in my head.
I have a transgender nephew and I can tell you from real experience that idiocy like insisting on calling him, her, just for your own warped need to make some bizarre and unnecessary point, is the sort of hurtful thing that only an utter cnut would do.
And your Trump question is nothing more than bigoted dog-whistling.
Yes. Just in my head.
I have a transgender nephew and I can tell you from real experience that idiocy like insisting on calling him, her, just for your own warped need to make some bizarre and unnecessary point, is the sort of hurtful thing that only an utter cnut would do.
And your Trump question is nothing more than bigoted dog-whistling.
Okay mate
The solution is to make Hungarian the official language of the world, obviously. We have no gender-specific pronouns. And I'm sure the average person doesn't need more than 10-15 years to learn it!Yes. Just in my head.
I have a transgender nephew and I can tell you from real experience that idiocy like insisting on calling him, her, just for your own warped need to make some bizarre and unnecessary point, is the sort of hurtful thing that only an utter cnut would do.
And your Trump question is nothing more than bigoted dog-whistling.
Out of interest, using this broad definition for what constitutes racism, what % of the population are not racist, in your opinion?
My take on it is that a lot of people (most people?) have biases and prejudices when it comes to people of a different ethnicity to their own. Which is ok, so long as they're willing to recognise these impulses, challenge them and make sure they always treat everyone equally, irrespective of the colour of their skin.
The idea that someone could decide to spent the rest of their life married to a black person and still be lumped in alongside members of the fecking Klu Klux Klan in one big, amorphous racist club is obviously preposterous. Calling someone a racist is insulting. We're only a generation or two away from lynchings ffs. Expanding the definition to include huge swathes of society will only end up alienating and pissing off potential allies and/or rob the word of any kind of real meaning.
All of the above equally applies to sexuality/gender. Sticking people like Martina Navratilova - a lesbian who chose to spend a large part of her career working closely with a trans woman - in the same category as actual queer bashers for daring to express an opinion on fairness in sport (an opinion you're allowed to disagree with) is exactly the sort of over the top, mean-spirited tactics that turn a lot of people off trans activism, when they might naturally be inclined to have sympathy for their plight.
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It really is when we set it against the male equivalent.
There are a tiny amount of women’s sports that are at the same level, or better, than the male version.
I’m not speaking to the value of women’s sporting events. They’re every bit as important as men’s events in societal terms.
But almost exclusively the pinnacle of any sporting discipline has a Man atop. Most female sporting disciplines could be conquered by amateur or semi professional men.
I don't know if its as black and white as that in combat sports though is it? Within MMA both men and women compete in some of the same weight divisions. So technically they are roughly the same size and weight but no commission would ever sanction a fight between TJ Dillashaw vs Amanda Nunes despite them both being bantamweights.
If someone transitioned later in life from male to female then they would have a physical advantage over other female fighters. Fallon Fox transitioned in her 30's and in her last fight she badly fractured a womans skull. Hasn't fought since then not sure if she retired or had trouble getting licenced to fight.
Never understood this, and maybe never will. Why would you not take umbrage with the people that potentially 'turned you off'? Rather than the movement that you have been in agreement with up until that point? Seems like you were never that invested... In which case, no big loss?
Equal rights? Yes
Protection? Yes
Equal employment? Yes
Anything else? Yes
But entering a sport? No. You can live just fine without having to play a certain sports for a living. Trans people are still free to pursue whatever sports they find the passion in but when they use their advantages in professional sport... i find it cheating.
Technicalities aside any person can see that they're above and beyond their range they destroy the competition.
Protection? Yes
Equal employment? Yes
Anything else? Yes
But entering a sport? No. You can live just fine without having to play a certain sports for a living. Trans people are still free to pursue whatever sports they find the passion in but when they use their advantages in professional sport... i find it cheating.
Technicalities aside any person can see that they're above and beyond their range they destroy the competition.
I am taking umbrage with the people that "turned me off". In my opinion, they do a disservice to the movement.
Dunno how to measure how invested I was to begin with but I suspect that I'm one of many who is starting to feel jaded about so many of these issues, as people seem quicker and quicker to take offence and start flinging round racist/transphobe/homophobe insults at the slightest provocation. Seems like a sure fire way to end up with compassion fatigue. Which goes against everything a movement is supposed to achieve.
And this shit matters. It's part of the reason that bigots like Trump got elected, or Leave won the Brexit referendum. Constantly seeing racism/homophobia/transphobia where none exists gives the false impression that activists are looking for reasons to be offended, because they are running out of legitimate reasons to take offence. And then we end up with large swathes of the electorate deciding that the "liberal elite" only care about trivial challenges faced by minorities and don't care about the real hardship they're facing, day to day.
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Bro, I have no idea because I cannot relate. I can compartmentalise and remove the actions of the extremists from my perception of the movement itself.
Fair point. I need to be better at doing that myself.
Surely you can see that there are a lot of people who can't/won't do the same, though? And they're the ones being turned against the movement because of these extremists. Which is a shame.
This is very true.
I keep hearing about it so I'll accept it. I disagree with their reaction though and I'd ask why they think it's the appropriate one, hoping that on self reflection they'll challenge themselves.
Taking his point to a logical conclusion. There's no wonder that each incident gets blown into a media storm (by certain entities) because it pisses off the subset of people that think this way, and those entities* get what they want. Another example of people being played off eachother maybe...
*Eg. Media organisations, political figures, etc...
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Plus you do beer, water polo and capital cities really well.
That's not the point I'm making. Again racism isn't (In my very limited understanding)isnt just about individual acts or individuals views, it's a systematic issue. And yes treating everyone equally, irrespective of colour is all well and good but how does this stop - A prisions systems designed with the intention of getting slave labour from working class men of colour, housing policy, the slave labour in the Congo, western foreign policy etc.
Actually this is why I've always hate when white liberals politicians when talking to us white folks about racism always quote the least radical parts of Martin Lurther King because it why it firstly misrepresents MLK views but also continues this idea that we can solve racism by being nice to each other rather fthan fundamental changing our way of life.
Wait what ? You've put her in the same catorglory as people who go around queer bashing. All I've said is that her comments were transphobic(Which is fine perfectly fine to say if you think her comments are)and that being label a transphobe means pretty nothing in our world considering how trans people are treated. Also again simply working with a trans person doesn't mean you can't have transpobic views.
As for putting off people who might be naturally inclined to have sympathy. I'm in my late 20s now and already I feel too tired to give a shit about people who turned their backs on some of the most marginalised groups in society because they saw a stupid tweet by a blue haired trans teen. If that's all it takes then I think it's fair to say these people never had sympathy in the first place.
No alternatives as far as I know. As far as I'm concerned, I'll call the person by the pronoun I feel appropriate and as long as the law allows it, if their feelings are hurt, they can piss off.
Yeah its beyond stupid. If they allow tranwomen to compete in womens sports without any sort of restriction they might as well allow doping. Men have roughly 40% more skeletal muscle in the upper body and 33% in the lower body compared to women, for everyday use this might not seem that much but for top trained athletes those extra percentages are fecking massive
Just look at this. Be a woman all you want, but at the end of the day you have a mans physique and it gives a wildly unfair advantage
I have never witnessed any issue of the sort but we don't really have to get around it because when you are not familiar with someone the polite pronoun is "vous" or the person name which is neutral.
Yeah its beyond stupid. If they allow tranwomen to compete in womens sports without any sort of restriction they might as well allow doping. Men have roughly 40% more skeletal muscle in the upper body and 33% in the lower body compared to women, for everyday use this might not seem that much but for top trained athletes those extra percentages are fecking massive
Just look at this. Be a woman all you want, but at the end of the day you have a mans physique and it gives a wildly unfair advantage
The one in the middle is a woman?
That's when you're directly addressing someone, though. We've got the gender neutral "you" as the equivalent in English. The tricky bit is misgendering someone in the third person. We can go with "they" but I guess that's not an option in French?
Yeah in that case it's not an option. Thinking about it this isn't really a topic that we have around here, outside of jobs names which is mainly ridiculed.
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Just as a sidenote I was listening to an AI specialist talking about some ethical issues last night - around how easy it is to build racist/sexist bias into AI models.
One of the illustrations he gave was google translate working on a series of non-gender specific phrases (I think it was in Turkish) and translating into English. Despite the same neutral pronoun being used in the sentences, it came up with things like:
He is a doctor
She is a nurse
He is an architect
She is a cook
I've seen it before where a translation algorithm came up with, "he is a chef" and gave as the alternative, "she is a cook."
Apparently a consequence of one of those "big data" learning models that uses word association to translate phrases. I'm not sure if it's been fixed now.
That's fascinating - and, well, makes perfect sense. I'm not even sure how it could be fixed (though I know almost nothing about machine learning aside from sufficiently vague concepts). Especially when you consider that so many languages are gendered.
You live in Spain, right? As far as I'm aware, Spanish is also a grammatically gendered language, not just in terms of the pronouns.
Because glory and self-validation can feel like glory even if some other people don't acknowledge it. In that context it's not hard to enjoy the competition and the victory, even if others see the competition as unfair, they don't see it that way and I guess nor do their friends. Most would argue it's just another physical advantage that one athlete might have over another, no different than a 6' tall high-jumper versus a 5'.
Paralympics is already hitting problems with cheating - faulty medical exemptions and classifications, medication being changed between medical exam and race etc. In some cases it won't even be seen as cheating by the athlete, particular with intermittent conditions and conditions that are normally managed by drugs. We've even had more direct cheating - like members of deaf teams, not being deaf.
And that's before we throw in the question of money.
Did you read @antohan posts in the Icardi thread? Something about writing "hermanxs" to be gender neutral instead of hermanos, hermanas or both?
We'll start making up words now? And, worse, unpronunceable ones?
We'll start making up words now? And, worse, unpronunceable ones?
Systematic racism is a complete red herring in the context of our discussion. Which is where you set the bar for calling individual people racists (or homophobes, transphobes, whatever) I think the bar is being set lower and lower, to a point where these word are actually starting to lose their meaning. Plus they're making people more and more entrenched into opposing camps, slinging insults back and forth, without actually listening to each other.
You me are old enough and entrenched enough in our views that they're highly unlikely to change, no matter what we read on Twitter (or on here). When I'm talking about turning people off trans activism, I would be a lot more worried about kids/teenagers who are still finding their way in their world. I've always been reassured by the way each generation gets more and more progressive, leaving old farts like me (and, soon enough, you) looking out of touch and outdated in our opinions. I'd like to think that will continue indefinitely but it's hard not to notice that identity politics is turning out to be incredibly divisive, with the animosity it generates causing people you'd expect to be sympathetic to the plight of minorities end up seduced by the alt right.
I've seen that happen, personally, with people I know (who would be about your age) leaving university as well rounded, educated and progressive young men, then got sucked into social media squabbles and found themselves siding with the "bad guys". I honestly don't think this would have happened if there weren't so many examples of activists picking fights, insulting people or over-reacting to trivial slights when (ironically!) a more tolerant and reasoned debate would have served their purpose much better.
That's the thing really - to fix it, you have to notice what the AI is doing and intervene in the model. In a translation, it's more obvious there than in situations where the details of the modelling are obscured by the layers on top of it. Some systems like those designed to predict reoffending rates for prisoners, have more subtle problems, ones that are easier to miss the first time you read the criteria set.
Things can get presented as "just realism" because the computer "doesn't care" about gender or race, when actually the bias is built into the foundations of the model. It can reinforce problems and perpetuate discrimination while simultaneously (to those naïve about the technology) being given a status based on its supposed independence and objectivity.
I'm not in Spain now, but yes, almost everything is gendered - pronouns, professions, colours etc. One quirk of the language is that the pronouns are seldom used (so "he/she is talking" can be said as the single word "habla" with context providing the who). Whereas "she/he is x" will often build the gender into the noun, profesora/profesor for teacher or adjective rubia/rubio for blond.