Transgender rights discussion
- Thread starter crappycraperson
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To be fair, in today’s day and age Hitler would’ve never got into politics as he would’ve ended up as a Minecraft YouTuber, fulfilling his life-long dream of becoming an architect and making the most of his natural gift of public speaking.The deaths of millions would get him banned or at very least he wouldn't get a blue tick, so I'll go for glorified Piers Morgan.
Poor Susanna
I was just taking the piss.
I think there's a distinction between 'calling anyone Lib Dem a fascist' and 'being a centrist isn't left wing'.
I'm not really sure there's a convincing argument that anything Rowling has done is particularly left wing. Her novels are a peon to pointless centrism which conclude with a bunch of kids killing wizard Hitler and then all taking jobs in the establishment to uphold a racist, classist, segregated slave owning society because the extent of their progressiveness is just 'well Hitler is bad'.
It's the world of one of the most prominent Blairite authors of the 90s, and whilst from our respective point of views living in the UK and Ireland makes anything to the left of Thatcher look like Karl Marx, she's as close politically to the government of Johnson and Thatcher as she ever has been to the left. That's sort of the point of her politics!
I don't know. I've never read a Dan Brown book, but I have read several excerpts. Meaning I have some idea about his writing style, but not really about his stories (this parody is great, even if it turns out that it's not accurate). I also relatively recently re-read the Harry Potter books.
Rowling's writing is bad. I don't know if it's extremely bad, but it is bad. The thing she's got going for her is world building, which in my opinion is not really (or at least not necessarily) about talent but that's another story.
The plots are really shit, but here the issue is that she's writing for children. Brown is writing for adults, allegedly, so should we shit on Brown while excusing Rowling because Rowling just wants to entertain pre-teens? Maybe, I don't know.
Take the first book, for instance. They want to find the ***********'s stone, which gives you immortality and some other stuff. It's Potter and the gang vs Voldemort. Wizard boss Dumbledore hid the stone behind seven impossible challenges, each created by seven of his friends. It was emphasized how very impossible it was to get it.
So what are these challenges? Win a chess game, light a fire, solve a riddle, etc. Most of the stuff our heroes learned in the first week of their first year at wizard school, the chess game was barely four digit Elo, and the riddle stuff you'd find in a cartoon magazine. And that's half the book. Of course the challenges have to be piss easy when the kids reading it have to kinda follow along and the people actually solving them are around 10, but we're still left with the problem that seven of wizard boss Dumbledore's most trusted friends (several of them some of the most powerful wizards) are so confident in the impossibility of the challenges that they laugh off Potter and co when they warn of the incoming monster Voldemort (of course our wizard gang of 11 years old are the only ones who know what's going on, Rowling has after all read Bobbsey Twins).
Again, she's writing for children, so I don't know how to judge that. Her writing is shit, the story is bad but for kids, and the world building is exciting even if it's a ripoff of WW2.
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Death threats to Adolf Hitler is wrong as a matter of principle, you heard it here first folks.
OK, firstly define sex and define gender.
Then let's define the difference between transphobic statements and broader questions around gender dysphoria and gender transition.
A debate cannot start if everyone has a different definition of several different components, phrases, words.
After that quagmire is breached, you can then look at whether J.K Rowlings statements or phrases are indeed transphobic or perhaps we deem transphobia as something else entirely.
you’re mates proper bigots are they?
I see. I guess you give us yours and we'll work from there.
it’s harmful to trans people because you are pushing a false equivalency that doesn’t exist. JKR or any cis person is protected by state and law. Trans people on the other hand aren’t.
lol
I can't read so I'm not versed in his stuff either but that is precisely what I've imagined from the views I've come across. His first one was the only book my very stubborn dad's ever failed to finish.
source? I’m sorry but this is surely a BS statement.
LGBQT people in KSA, Iran etc fear for their lives daily.
In the UK, I'm sure some people are scared and fearful but the risk to them in comparison to those countries is very small.
Okay and within that would you like to do the difference between transphobic statements and broader questions around gender dysphoria and gender transition?
Nope. Death threats are wrong and it’s not something that can be simply written off. In fact, dismissing the significance of death threats in order to achieve some purposeful goal (you’re yet to explain how turning the blind eye on an aggressive mob on the internet helps trans people btw) is more harmful to those trans people, as it legitimizes the logic that it’s okay to threaten someone if you don’t agree with them.
In Islamic countries I can imagine they do fear for their lives.
Uk I don’t deny there’s twats but applying KSA and Iran’s religious behaviour to a social problem in the uk is wrong.
She seems like an awful ghoul of a woman.
1. That's super easy. It helps trans people if the aggressive mob on the internet leads to less harassment and hate towards trans people.
2. What's the deal with this chicken shit language that's all over the internet? They're not threatening someone "because someone don't agree with them", they're threatening someone for specific reasons. Why are you generalizing the issue away?
yes, aggressive mobs spreading intolerance is a super easy answer to transphobic people who don’t actually exist.
If transphobic people don't exist then the aggressive mobs on the internet won't have any effect on trans people either way, so it's fine.
Nick Cohen (who has actually read the 900 page book) essentially calls it an uninformed Twitter pile-on.
The details of the offending paragraph, according to Cohen
Troubled Blood is a 900-page novel that is Dickensian in its scope and gallery of characters. Strike and his business partner Robin Ellacott are hired by a middle-aged woman to investigate the disappearance of her mother in the 1970s. Detectives at the time thought Creed had killed her, but no one knew the truth and the woman’s body had never been found. Strike and Ellacott investigate Creed, but then they investigate a good dozen others. You have to search hard to find a justification for the belief that the book’s moral 'seems' to be 'never trust a man in a dress'. But then relentless searches for the tiniest evidence of guilt are the marks of heresy hunters
It amounts to this. On page 75, Strike is listening to the son of an investigating officer tell him what he knows about Creed.
'He had his failures you know. Penny Hiskett, she got away from him and gave the police a description in ’71, but that didn’t help them much. She said he was dark and stocky, because he was wearing a wig at the time and all padded out in a woman’s coat. They caught him in the end because of Melody Bower. Nightclub singer, looked like Diana Ross. Creed got chatting to her at the bus stop, offered her a lift, then tried to drag her into the van when she said no. She escaped, gave the police a proper description and told them he’d said his house was of Paradise Park.'
Creed mentions the advantage of lipstick and a wig in making women think he’s 'a harmless old queer' when Strike interviews him, and that’s about that. A novelist uses a passing detail to explain how a murderer got close to one of his victims – for presumably the victim who gave the police a 'proper description' did not see him in a woman’s coat and wig.
The details of the offending paragraph, according to Cohen
Troubled Blood is a 900-page novel that is Dickensian in its scope and gallery of characters. Strike and his business partner Robin Ellacott are hired by a middle-aged woman to investigate the disappearance of her mother in the 1970s. Detectives at the time thought Creed had killed her, but no one knew the truth and the woman’s body had never been found. Strike and Ellacott investigate Creed, but then they investigate a good dozen others. You have to search hard to find a justification for the belief that the book’s moral 'seems' to be 'never trust a man in a dress'. But then relentless searches for the tiniest evidence of guilt are the marks of heresy hunters
It amounts to this. On page 75, Strike is listening to the son of an investigating officer tell him what he knows about Creed.
'He had his failures you know. Penny Hiskett, she got away from him and gave the police a description in ’71, but that didn’t help them much. She said he was dark and stocky, because he was wearing a wig at the time and all padded out in a woman’s coat. They caught him in the end because of Melody Bower. Nightclub singer, looked like Diana Ross. Creed got chatting to her at the bus stop, offered her a lift, then tried to drag her into the van when she said no. She escaped, gave the police a proper description and told them he’d said his house was of Paradise Park.'
Creed mentions the advantage of lipstick and a wig in making women think he’s 'a harmless old queer' when Strike interviews him, and that’s about that. A novelist uses a passing detail to explain how a murderer got close to one of his victims – for presumably the victim who gave the police a 'proper description' did not see him in a woman’s coat and wig.
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What constitutes transphobia. I'm asking.
- I've never seen death threats lead to deescalation of violence, hate and harassment personally, but maybe I don't have enough experience in the matter. Usually it's the other way. Feel free to educate me
- What issue I'm generalising? I'm quite happy to specify in each individual case that anyone who threatens to kill another person over an opinion, however wrong (and there's no doubt that Rowling is wrong here) it is or it seems to be, is either genuinely vile or simply stupid
1. If you don't think death threats work as a deterrence, then presumably they're irrelevant unless anyone is actually getting killed, yeah? No one's killing Rowling.
2. People aren't threatening anyone over "an opinion, however wrong", they're threatening people for specific opinions. So be specific. We can do the same thing with actions. One action is to try a Panenka penalty kick, another action is to shoot a baby in the head. Assuming you don't like either of those actions (if you happen do like Panenka penalties then pretend that you don't, and of course do the same if you happen to be a fan of murdering babies), would you send people to jail for doing something you don't like?
You are once again pushing a false equivalency that doesn't exist in reality. JKR could stop saying transphobic nonsense and carry on with her life as a cis woman. But trans people are still going to be subjected to violence, death threats, whether you support it or not.
Are you really arguing it's fine to send people death threats online?
It depends on the threat, of course. If you want to send a death threat to Wyn Myint for overseeing the genocide of the Rohingya people, then I'd be totally ok with that even if you happened to use your email account instead of Royal Mail.
Pretty safe example to pick a dictator or overseer or genocide to say it's 'fine', but you suggest there is a sliding scale below that of acceptable physical threats, of which the ones received by Rowling are also seemingly acceptable.
About Rowling personally, who will relish it because it helps her in the culture war and who will face no danger, I don't really care any way.
If the answer was so safe you shouldn't have asked. This is yet another example of how internet people want to talk about generalities instead of specifics. If you want to ask me about Rowling then ask me about Rowling.
I wanted to clarify your view on it because I thought you seemed to be saying it was ok for Rowling and others to receive death threats online, but I didn't want to assume that without checking your general views first. You chose to provide a more general example unrelated to anything that had been discussed in the thread, and where people are less likely to disagree that the threats are unacceptable.
You've clarified above that you don't care if she gets death threats. Personally I think you're underestimating the impact receiving threats has on an individual and the psychological issues that can cause. You also have no guarantee that someone faces 'no danger'. Many public figures, particularly women, have had issues with stalkers or other members of the public finding out where they live and posing a risk to them. In several cases that has led to murders, so personally I don't think it's something to be so cavalier about.
The eligibility of a threat depends on the aggressor, it's effectiveness as a deterrence – on a person getting threatened. There's no logical link there.
And which opinions are bad enough to justify a death threat? If you're talking about specifics. I assume that you approve threats to Rowling? As you can guess, I don't. I also don't approve threats to, say, Marine Le Pen (I'm desperately trying to find a bad enough public persona that voices horrible opinions but isn't yet in a position to cause actual deaths by their direct actions like Putin, Trump, Xi Jingping etc.; not sure if she's a good example, I probably simply don't know enough about her).
If someone does something bad – put him on a trial, let him defend his position and, if found guilty, give him a proper sentence. That's what I would've wanted for Hitler btw and that's what I want for most of the above-mentioned. I don't trust an anonymous mob that doesn't even take time to try and objectively assess a situation, to make a judgement – and to propose and to issue a sentence (in a general way – a death threat is also a sentence in a way).
And just to remind you – a death threat is a criminal offense (I'd expect this to be the case in 99% of modern countries), and it is one for a very good reason.
Equivalency between death threats is not a false equivalency, a threat is a threat. If you're saying that Rowling deserves those threats and that she can stop them anytime by changing your rhetorics, you're using the victim-blamers logic. She wouldn't be getting death threats if she weren't talking transphobic nonsense, right?
The inequality between Rowling and the general trans-population is obvious, yet the morality of a death threat isn't justified by it. The fact that RAF supported ideas of anti-fascism, feminism etc. doesn't make their killings any more justifiable than those of ISIS, for example.
Of course I don't have any guarantees, if there is a real danger to Rowling then I'm wrong. I think the probability of human trash like Rowling driving people to suicide is magnitudes higher than someone killing Rowling, but if I'm wrong then I'm wrong.
Work on your assumptions, then maybe we can talk.
I think this was posted before but I couldn't find it looking through the thread.
There's lots of things that do, of course, just as there are lots of things that constitute any form of bigotry, but I'd say the most common is the belief that people's assigned gender at birth should be immutable. That people who were born assigned male cannot/should not be later recognised as female and people assigned as female cannot/should not be recognised as male.
@harms has made the other points I was going to make and very eloquently, so I won't expand on those.
I think online threats and aggression do have a real cost to us as a society, as well as to individuals on the receiving end, so aren't something to be shrugged away or encouraged. Even if acting on behalf of a noble cause or responding to someone who you feel themselves is behaving in a threatening or dangerous way, I agree with @harms that debate or some kind of due process is the better/only way forward.
Soph's rightfully dismissive, you're being ridiculous in pretending that the death threats are worthy of comment. Every prominent public figure who weighs in on a controversial topic gets death threats on twitter. All of them. Some issues more than others and particularly black women get more when speaking about racial injustice, but all of them get them. It's really not okay but nothing to do with the trans debate and it's disingenuous to pretend it is in any way specific to it.