Today I’d like to share with you two quotations. One is from Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights leader whose legacy we honor today. The other is from someone who considers himself the leader of a human rights movement that follows in the footsteps of King.
The first quote:
Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.
The second:
[Name redacted], I hope you are looking forward to our date. I certainly am. … [I]t is clear that you have gone to great lengths to keep your image off the internet.
Nice try.
Is that a threat? No, it is a promise. Big difference.
As we have been saying here for years, the time for collegial, polite discussion and negotiation with these piles of refuse is over. …
We have people working on securing her image. Meantime, $100.00 to the first person who gets us a clear image of her which we can verify. Something large and clear enough to be used as a feature image is preferred.
As you have probably gathered, the first quote comes from Dr. King. It’s from his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, in which he sets forth a powerful argument for the transformative power of nonviolence, which, as he notes, “nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation.”
The second quote comes from Paul Elam of A Voice for Men. I’ve taken the liberty of redacting the name of his target.
Yes, this self-described “humanitarian” is launching yet another campaign of doxxing and intimidation aimed at an ideological enemy who just happens to be female. And once again, as he so notoriously did several years ago, Elam is offering a bounty for the personal information of one of his targets – in this case a clear photograph of her face.
It’s a strategy that draws not on the tactics of Martin Luther King but on those of his enemies – in particular the Ku Klux Klan, which in the 1960s posted “wanted posters” featuring the faces of civil rights activists, including King himself. Some of those whose faces appeared on these “wanted posters,” most famously King himself, were later murdered.
In more recent years, anti-abortion activists have posted similar “wanted posters” featuring the pictures and addresses of doctors who perform abortions – some of whom were themselves later murdered.
Now AVFM has taken up this classic technique of intimidation.
Last year, AVFM activists – including the site’s “activism director” Attila Vinczer — posted hundreds of wanted-style posters of feminist philosophy professor Adele Mercier on and around the campus of Queen’s University in Kingston Ontario. The year before, a Men’s Rights group in Edmonton closely associated with A Voice for Men put up similar posters targeting Lise Gotell, the chair of women’s and gender studies at the University of Alberta.
We can only assume that Elam has a similar campaign in mind for his latest target.
So what are Elam’s charges against this new woman to hate?
According to him, the woman, a professor at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, accused AVFM activist Sage Gerard (aka Victor Zen) of “demonstrat[ing] a desire to kill women” in a complaint she filed with the KSU administration.
Elam has posted the complaint on his website. Her name appears nowhere in the complaint, nor does anything about Gerard wanting to kill women.
[ Clarification: Elam has now posted a separate campus police report about an incident in which Gerard came to the office of the Interdisciplinary Studies department requesting to see the professor; the police report contains her name as well as notes from the officer saying that “she has seen the cartoons, videos and blogs online and believes Gerard demonstrates having violent fantasies about hurting and murdering women.” ]
This anonymous complaint, along with another complaint about Gerard, were evidently triggered by a video Gerard posted last year of a late-night “sticker run” he made on the KSU campus.
The video, which Gerard filmed and narrated on the fly, is more than a little creepy. In it, Gerard describes his preparations for his “activism” as if he were launching some sort of covert operation; at one point he talks about hiding his stickers in the sleeves of his jacket. As he heads out the door to start his stickering, he announces “let’s go fuck with people.”
Gerard clearly sees what he’s doing as a deliberately provocative act. He talks about putting AVFM stickers in places “where they cannot be ignored” and about his desires to “push the boundaries” by plastering them in places they’re really not supposed to be put – most notably in a women’s bathroom where, thankfully, no women were present.
Weirdly, given that he later posted the video on his YouTube channel, Gerard also took steps in the video to conceal his identity and cover his tracks, wiping his fingerprints off of some of the stickers after pasting them in a bathroom. Later, apparently wanting to look as much like a serial killer as possible, he dons latex gloves.
At one point, Gerard jokes about how he’d like to paste one of the stickers over the mouth of a feminist to shut her up.
His behavior in the video and in his interactions with others on campus, as well as his affiliation with AVFM, clearly rattled some on the KSU campus. The anonymous complainant to the KSU administration suggested that Gerard’s actions were creating a “hostile work environment” for some faculty and staff and making students fear for their safety.
Elam has posted the actual complaints, which, in what seems to be a pretty clear violation of privacy, were sent to Gerard with the identity of one of the accusers laid bare. Here’s the anonymous complaint that Elam has attributed to his current target:
Among other similar offenses by the same individual, a KSU student (Sage Gerard) posed as a custodian and entered the women’s bathrooms on campus, placing stickers intended to intimidate women. … Gerard’s behavior indicates contemplation of violence against women (he posts art depicting guns pointed at women’s symbols, as well as other violently anti-feminist themes). His behavior has created a hostile work environment for multiple KSU employees who do not only fear intimidation and harassment, but actual physical violence against themselves and their families. KSU students have also expressed real fears for their own physical safety on campus . . . I do not feel safe on this campus. As an advocate of women, I feel strongly that I am at real risk of becoming the target of violent retaliatory actions perpetrated by Sage Gerard and the organization sponsoring him, A Voice For Men.
Emphasis mine.
The KSU administration investigated these complaints, and concluded that Gerard was not responsible for creating a hostile work environment, and that his speech was protected under the first amendment. The complaints were dismissed; no charges against Gerard were even filed.
He was asked to stay out of women’s bathrooms in the future. And the KSU counsel who prepared the report also had this suggestion:
We do recommend that Mr. Gerard continue to refrain from further contact with the persons who made the hotline reports (or those who Mr. Gerard believes may have made them), to avoid any real or perceived retaliation. In addition, we recommend that Mr. Gerard refrain from further contact with the members of the Interdisciplinary Studies Department to avoid escalating the situation to the point that it becomes a hostile environment in the legal sense.
That’s right. Gerard wasn’t charged with anything. He faced no sanctions. He was simply asked not to contact those on campus he was making uncomfortable.
But apparently this “no contact” request is so offensive to Gerard and his AVFM comrades that they have decided to launch the very retaliation campaign that the KSU complainants were afraid of. Thus, once again, proving their critics have been right to label them a hate group in the first place.
AVFM’s new target joins a long list of women (and a few men) who have been doxxed and/or harassed in retaliation for their “crimes” against Paul Elam’s delicate sensibilities.
Elam started off this parade of harassment shortly after this site started by attempting to get a woman fired from her job at a women’s shelter for a comment she made here in which she wondered aloud if Elam had a criminal record.
Since then, Elam and his AVFM cronies have:
Started Register-Her, a fake “Offenders Registry” designed to vilify and intimidate women. (The site is now in the hands of AVFM defector John Hembling.)
Gleefully participated in the unending harassment of a Canadian feminist that one AVFM author dubbed “little red frothing fornication mouth,” for her crime of … arguing with some AVFM activists at a demonstration once. Unflattering images of “Big Red” at that demonstration have since been plastered all over the internet; she even has a page devoted to her on KnowYourMeme.
Launched a years-long harassment campaign against feminist writer Jessica Valenti. Starting with a 2011 post in which Elam himself attacked her as a “stupid, hateful bitch,” the hate campaign has moved on to labeling her a “child abuser,” posting her personal photos on AVFM without permission, putting her on Register-Her.com, and libeling her by making up inflammatory quotations and attributing them to her. (AVFM’s “social media director” and serial quote-fabricator Janet Bloomfield was evidently permabanned from Twitter for her persistent harassment of Valenti.)
Supported GamerGate’s harassment of cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian, with AVFM’s PR whiz Bloomfield doing her part by blatantly libeling her on Twitter.
Launched a campaign of vilification against a Chicago-area “mommy blogger” for writing that she felt uncomfortable with the idea of a male day care staffer taking young girls to the bathroom.
Along with an assortment of white supremacists and online assholes, joined in a hate campaign against a young woman wrongly accused of trashing applications from white guys as a staffer at a college admissions office. Elam declared the woman, by name, to be a “warped by ideology” with “deep seated prejudices that guided her unscrupulous actions.” The blog was a hoax, and the woman Elam so eagerly vilified had nothing to do with it.
Published an article falsely accusing a male feminist blogger of being a “confessed rapist,” because, as Elam puts it, “karma is a BITCH.” (AVFM’s defense? It was being “satirical.”)
Accused a former AVFM staffer, with no evidence, of absconding with money donated for a men’s shelter.
Attacked feminist and skeptic Rebecca Watson on numerous occasions, including a post from Elam in which he used the term “whore” several dozen times.
And of course AVFM has accused me of everything from starting Reddit’s terrible BeatingWomen subreddit to somehow faking my site’s traffic stats on Alexa. (AVFM has never even bothered to provide “evidence” for any of their various accusations against me, perhaps because none of them are even remotely true.) Elam has posted bizarre sexual fantasies involving me, called me a pervert, and publicly suggested that I kill myself. One of AVFMs most, er, enthusiastic activists once left me a creepy, threatening voicemail at 1:38 AM. And AVFM “activism director” Attila L. Vinczer has tried to dox me, with somewhat comic results.
This isn’t even close to an exhaustive list of AVFM’s assorted retaliatory campaigns against feminists and other critics.
AVFM has made it very clear to the world – through its actions and its rhetoric – that if someone starts putting up AVFM posters or stickers on your campus or in your neighborhood, you have every reason to worry.
AVFM is not a civil or human rights group by any stretch of the imagination. It is a hate group, plain and simple, less akin to Martin Luther King Jr. than it is to those who so stubbornly fought against him.
NOTE: Here is Sage Gerard’s (aka Victor Zen’s) video of his sticker “activism.” You can probably see why people found it a little unsettling.
Hello, delurking for a moment…
As awkward as it might be to have refer to people with uteruses as just people with uteruses, it seems like the simplest way to avoid the minefield of what does “female” mean even when you say you only mean it in a scientific way, because while science itself as a way of processing the world around us loves to fit everything into little boxes, biological sex and the related process of creating offspring in the animal kingdom has a considerable many exceptions to the “rule”, so it may be that an appeal to science as an authority just reinforces ideas in science that are actually in need of updating how we talk about the “naturalness” of having two biological distinct sexes. I think we can all agree that much of currently accepted scientific discourse comes from a very privileged, othering place that still relies on many outdated ideas that we simply do not have an agreed upon updated version to replace them with yet.
There are species that follow what is thought of by society as the “conventional” way of creating offspring through “male” deposit of genetic material into “female” gestational carrier, but there are also a lot of other species that don’t follow this model: seahorses have the male sea horse carry the offspring to term, many invertebrates are either asexual or hermaphrodite (which is a word that is an excellent example of a biological term that should NOT be applied to people, certainly not trans people or intersex people etc), or other animals like fish or insects that fertilize their eggs completely outside of their body and let them mature on the ground or floating in water or perhaps carried in one parent’s mouth. If we are looking to nature to provide a sense of confirmation about universal terms and concepts for biological sex, I think what we really reveal more is the flaws in the human scientific method that we haven’t ironed out yet. Sometimes I think that in order to be more accurate, we should really not keep using just the terms male and female every time we find organisms that have two distinct body types, we even use the terms for objects sometimes like male and female plugs. We do it because it’s easier to understand in societies that do use the concept of a gender binary as the norm, it becomes shorthand for opposites. The idea of men and women being opposites is definitely a harmful rhetoric that also erases the existence of those who do not fit at either end of the imagined see-saw.
I read this thread and the thread of doom and the strongest sense I got from it is that most of us do have a very real sense of confusion or uncertainty when it comes to expressing ideas about gender and biology when it comes to people who do not easily fit into the traditional categories and do not fit into the feminist arguments that assume a tidy gender binary as the starting point for topics like male privilege and the oppression of women, in that I think most of us recognize that the ideas that we previously felt most certain about how biology plays into oppression often are rooted in oppressive assumptions or just ignorance about the true variety to be found in nature. That we often assume that those of us who identify as cis-gendered, that we feel comfortable saying we would have sex with those who identify as the gender we know we are attracted to, because we have a certain expectation of sameness as to what their genitals or body will look like. As a crude example, straight men are confident they are attracted to all women because in their minds, all women have breasts, which exists in pairs on the front of a person’s chest, as opposed to the back of their knees.
I have seen this expectation of sameness to either gender or biological sex (often interchanged erroneously) come up in talks about body image, in that many people across the spectrum of gender expression often express real anxiety about when their body parts related to sexual attraction are not “normal” because they are worried about a negative response if someone else catches sight of the deviation. So this is not actually just a trans issue, but really trans individuals are the ones who catch the most severe and lethal reactions, statistically speaking. Trans inviduals are punished the most severely for deviating, and I think it’s particularly cruel how their punishment is almost always paired with an accusation of dishonesty. Wherever we fall on the spectrum of gender or other identities, our species has many types of genetic variation and some of those variations are in our brains or come about in the levels of hormones we have in what ratios, none of that is fake or dishonest, it is what we were given by genetic roulette and we as an overall human society should devote more social capital into dismantling the idea of universal body ideals and expectations, generate appreciation and lessen discomfort over the idea that someone’s body is probably not at all what we might expect.
OK, I’m sorry, but there aren’t enough recreational chemicals in the world for me to be able to read something like the comment above with a straight face. Bye, everyone who’s still here, it’s been awesome for the most part, but there’s just no way I’m signing up for this. At least I’ll always have the mental image of the back of the knee bra to remind me of WHTM.
I want to second Sunhawk’s point about how nearly all of science as we recognize it in the Western world was researched and given vocabulary by people who were almost always white men and had strong biases about gender. The example that I was given in an Intro to Women’s Studies course involved the tendency to describe sperm as the heroic, active participants in reproduction, while eggs are treated almost as damsels, wasting away and deteriorating while they wait for that one sperm to come and fertilize them.
This is most definitely a thing that does happen in science.
I now feel the need to stress that I LOVE science, and it was my favorite subject matter throughout all of my primary school education. I loved to read about archaeology, and biology, and geology and weather patterns. That last especially when tornadoes were involved. However, while scientific advances are truly inspiring to me, it is not without some problems. When searching for an answer, people tend to lead from what they already know. No one starts off in some abstract space, with no connection to previous research, and continue forward with a perfectly neutral mind. Many discoveries have been positioned in ways that betray bias toward the status quo.
There is nothing remotely white dude-centric about referring to XX as female and XY as male. There is no bias there. No attributes are being applied to either. They’re just neutral labels we’ve created so we can refer to those things as something.
We all accept that it is a generality that these karyotypes are associated with certain body types (which exist on a continuum) which we might also call male and female and we all accept that it is a generality that these karyotypes and associated body types are associated with particular genders (which also exist on a continuum) which we might also call male and female – no one is claiming these are anything but generalities and we recognise that exceptions abound – but that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about biological sex as in chromosomal conformation with absolutely no regard for phenotype or gender because WE ALREADY KNOW AND ACCEPT THAT KARYOTYPE DOESN’T NECESSARILY DICTATE PHENOTYPE OR GENDER AND THAT’S COOL.
We all accept that, regardless of karyotype, you can be a woman. OK?
What’s happening is, after clarifying god knows how many times that many of these things are generalisations and, even regarding concrete matters like karyotype, there isn’t necessarily any association with phenotype (insensitivity to androgens will result in in someone with XY chromosomes developing a “female” physique) or gender, we’re being told NO NO NO NO YOU CAN’T SAY THAT, I’m being shouted down by people shrieking YEAH BUT WHAT ABOUT THE EXCEPTIONS? Holy shit, I would NEVER get ANYTHING done in the lab if I wasn’t allowed to proceed with anything without thoroughly revisiting the reality that there are exceptions to every rule first. It isn’t always about the exceptions though. Sometimes it’s about the generality. It’s OK to sometimes talk about that too. I shouldn’t be policed for that. No one should.
And there’s something particularly nausea-inducing about being lectured on misogyny in science AS a woman in science. For real? You think I don’t know that? Don’t deal with it every goddamn day? Like it isn’t a daily struggle for me? What would give ANYONE the impression women in science whose careers are predicated on pushing back against misogyny need to be informed of misogyny in science? Holy condescension Batman!
Using the fact the first scientists were white dudes who harboured sexist ideas to dismiss matters of science is nonsense.
Jeeping fuck marinerachel, you’re objecting to something nobody said on this page. Nobody said OMG DON’T USE XX AND XY YOU OPPRESSOR. I and others talked about how laypeople are still inclined to conflate “woman” with “female (human)” and Sunhawk spoke about how science in general is heavily influenced by the fact that historically only white men were allowed in the science treehouse. Take some deep breaths and read what’s actually been written.
How about you take your unsolicited advice and place it somewhere for safekeeping? I don’t need it.
I’m glad you don’t see any of this YOU SHOULDN’T CALL XY AND XX MALE AND FEMALE THAT’S IMAGINARY because it’s stupid and my brain is literally dripping out my ears. I’d argue you would benefit from reading what’s actually written but I’m not going to tell you to do so because I figure we’re both adults and have no business telling one another how to behave.
I mean you want to talk about fucking silencing – first trans folk can’t use the terms transohobic and TERF, now they can’t discuss how laypeople conflate theterms woman and female. If trans women even try, they risk being accused of flexing their male privilege. Who the fuck is being silenced and policed here?
I’m sorry, marinerachel. You’re the most oppressed of all. Get up on the podium and enjoy this medal.
(Blinks)
Wow, the plan to keep this thread more civil than the last one is going so well.
Out for good now. If this is the kind of environment that folks want, fine, hope you enjoy it.
What’s it like being the hero of trans people, Cyberwulf?
Trans people everywhere must be so grateful to have you speaking for them.
Oops there I go white-knighting. You’re right, I’ll be silent and let trans women talk about what’s been going on here. If we haven’t run them all off like we did in the last thread, of course.
And for God’s sake nobody address any of my points now.
I’ll miss you, cassandrakitty. I wish you wouldn’t go, but I understand the decision.
Is this going to be endless loop of people deciding that biology is too much of a drag and human sexuality doesn’t exist at all? Gender is a prison and a struggle but no, I’m not going to call myself a person with an uterus. Science has a lot more room for the complexities of human sexuality than people who know fuck all about science. Plus, it’s a well known fact that discussions about human sexuality have officially jumped the shark when someone mentions sea horses.
Go jump in a lake Cyberwulf or at least learn how to not be an asshole. I’m not going waste anymore of my time with this, it’s just all dithering and smug righteousness. If people here honestly think women can’t discuss their bodies and reproductive rights then I’m officially done.
That change pokes it’s head in whenever people who don’t know what they’re talking about show up to scream, lecture and denounce anyone who hasn’t kept up with whatever the kids are saying on Tumblr this month.
No. A far better idea would be to keep quiet about it here and give David a bit of a chance to think through how he’d like to run his own blog in his own space. We’re guests here. We can’t be the vegans who gatecrash a BBQ telling the host he’s a moral leper for allowing meat on his premises.
Just reading through all the comments confirms my view that this stuff is really, really hard to write about. Anyone who has some ideas on the issues would do far better to write them up privately in a document and read, re-read, revise, edit, delete the lot, rinse and repeat. I’ve already done that a few times and I’m not much better off. But I hope I’ve avoided disgracing myself too badly here while I’ve been doing that.
The way we’re going with people contributing on the basis of stream of consciousness combined with, in some cases, lack of needed knowledge, on top of distress or bad temper or being offended driving different people in different directions, we’ll be destroying David’s blog in front of his eyes. We — and David — really can’t afford to have people dropping off all over the place like a chaotic train in a disaster zone.
Any thoughts you have. Try and get your head around them on your own. Do some of your own research on your own. Talk about it with people you trust away from online stuff. Write them down on your own. If you haven’t time or energy for that, then you haven’t the time or energy needed for the care and attention it takes to discuss this particular issue in an open forum without upsetting, offending or angering anyone and everyone.
Leave it aside until David thinks he has the energy to run this without succumbing to massive migraines or other personal stresses.
“If people here honestly think women can’t discuss their bodies and reproductive rights then I’m officially done.”
Yeah, because that’s exactly what I said, brooked, you illiterate dumbass. Why don’t you just go ahead and call me an SJW now, huh?
mildlymagnificent is spot-fucking-on. This is such a hard topic to talk about and, well, since it has already led to casualties and this thread is devolving like the last one, I have the idea that if we can’t be civil while discussing it we probably shouldn’t discuss it at all, or stop as soon as things get heated. Such infighting, like mildly said, is basically shitting all over David’s blog.
It’s really disappointing that we can’t ever have disagreements around here without a bunch of people flouncing. This has happened on both sides. Flouncing is the last thing I ever thought I’d do and I’ll give it time and see if David is able to come up with anything to curb it. But I really hate drama. If there’s a content threat of several commenters getting pissy and leaving every time we argue about something, we’ll never be able to have a conversation.
I feel like I’m back in high school right now. Can we please just deal with conflict like adults?
I’m going to keep this short, sweet and totally devoid of any opinions or snark:
Shut up, Cyberwulf.
@Marinerachel, I do not appreciate having my post characterized as “shrieking” especially since you said you *are* familiar with these feminist issues so you should know better than to use dog whistles words that are pretty close to “hysterical” because I said something you disagree with. And when I went into detail about the science involved, it was not specifically for your benefit but for the benefit of everyone else in the thread who may not have a science background, which I did to try to promote clarity as to what I meant when I said this or that.
Since I didn’t explicitly say it but it may be necessary to make clear as well, I love science. I have studied science, nearly went into it as a profession, I have scientists in my family, and in particular biology and ecology are areas that I have spent a lot of time thinking about and reading up on, but science in general I think a lot of what it has accomplished and made understandable is amazing. But it’s impossible to be that into science without its flaws also coming up and you start to see patterns in reoccurring blind spots and biases, in fact I would go so far as to say that science itself *demands* we find these weak areas and work to improve them.
And I think that the word “policed” has been used around here lately to create an artificial level of hostility or scolding that at least for MY part is not there. I am not telling anyone what they SHOULD or SHOULD NOT do, I am just trying to say that oppression is present in our society at all levels and in a bewildering combination of subtle and obvious and simple and complicated, it pops up in places that we may consider “neutral” or somehow apart from the politics of oppression, but I personally feel no area of human thought is safe because all of our rhetorics and philosophies and methodologies are created by common social agreement so of course it makes sense for common biases and assumptions to come along for the ride.
If anyone here already knows this, ok great. Some may not and how can we try to get everyone on the same page if we don’t try to lay it all out on the table first? There seems to be a real resistance to even suggesting we could do with some going over of these terms/ideas and how we use them and examine them to try to eliminate harmful uses. In other feminist and social justice places, we don’t call doing so “policing” we call it “checking yourself” and it’s consider a vital part of the process of dismantling internalized oppressions and harmful ideas that we may otherwise continue to uphold and perpetuate.
Actually, to modify my first post, I would go back and take out my suggestion about calling anyone “people with uteruses” as a universal label, if anyone feels comfortable with that as their way of identifying that’s their prerogative but I think myself as a cis person it would be better to defer to whatever trans people say they feel is best for them. I apologize for that suggestion and for thinking it my place to make that decision even just as a suggestion.
@WWTH
I don’t know if I’d describe myself as disappointed, exactly, but I’m also having a negative reaction to the way this has gone down. Obviously marinerachel and I are not in agreement, but there’s no reason why either of our opinions should be the subject of attack. There are attempts here to, again, silence people by making them feel like they can’t state a straightforward thing without someone jumping down their throats.
To be clear: I don’t feel that I have been silenced. I don’t prefer to participate in heated discussions with people I respect who are expressing hurt. That’s not the same as silencing and I want to be clear that I am accusing nobody of silencing me. But it certainly looks to me like there is an attempt underway, by Cyberwulf, to silence marinerachel. I’m not okay with that, and I’m not okay with the way this has devolved.
I don’t want to be involved anymore, but I am unwilling at this point to remain uninvolved to the point of tacitly condoning what’s happening here.
Policy of Madness:
Yep. Me too. I do not want to get involved in this. But this is not a fruitful discussion. This isn’t even a discussion, it’s people getting angry and hurt and screaming at each other. Nothing is being communicated. There’s no outcome or understanding being reached. This is just no good.
I third mildlymagnificent.
What is even going on here? Did kittehserf leave? I liked her posts.
Woah. Having been knocked out of commission for much of yesterday with another migraine I’m just catching up with this thread. I want to thank everyone for the civil tone and constructiveness that prevailed during much of the discussion here. But obviously the thread has taken a bit of a turn towards the nasty, and I don’t want it to go down that road any more than most of you do.
I would strongly suggest that we table the discussion of biology and “trans privilege” at least for now, as it’s mainly serving to make people on all sides of the issue angry and upset. I don’t want to have to shut down another thread but if this one goes the way of the thread of doom I will.
I realize that there are a lot of issues about the way discussion takes place here that are still unresolved, and I think we probably need to talk about those things. But unless the issues are being talked about in a fairly meta way, as was the case with some of the earlier discussion in this thread, I’m not sure we can do that in anything other than a carefully moderated thread (and not just moderated by me). And not until things have cooled down a bit.
I also think that, at least for now, this is a discussion that we need to restrict to people who are at least regular readers of the blog — and the comments. People who are not part of the community, especially those posting less-than-constructive comments, are not welcome. Just so you know, I have put Ally and Donna on probably permananent moderation, and will not be letting any of their comments through at least for the forseeable future. I am also not letting through comments by some on the other end of the spectrum who have shown up for the first time in the last day or so trying to post sniping comments.
I do want to get feedback from people who aren’t part of the community who can add some perspectiive to the discussion. But only if they are here in good faith and interested in constructive debates.
I copied this comment from earlier in the discussion, though now I forget who said it:
I really, really hope we can, but it’s tough.
I am sorry to see so many people leaving or contemplating leaving, and I hope at least some of you reconsider. I certainly understand some who simply want to take some time to clear their heads and wait for things to cool down.
Unfortunately, at this point it is clear that no matter how the issues here get resolved, some people will be leaving. It is literally impossible to craft a solution that will make everyone happy.
Thanks also to those who’ve been sending emails; I’m reading all of them, even if I haven’t responded to yours yet.
(Just so you know, I get migraines all the time, and have for about 25 years, they’re not a result of this thread or the other thread. I have meds that help a lot but sometimes they don’t help enough.)