By David Futrelle
Tuesday was the annual Trans Day of Visibility and, as expected, the transphobes were out in force online, spewing venom and pestering any trans people they could find. Do they ever take a day off?
Some of them invaded the #TransDayOfVisibility hashtag on Twitter with their, er, thoughts on the matter. Their tweets ranged from slur-filled vitriol …
… to failed attempts at compassion.
The transphobes were quick to pile on any company or organization that put out a statement of support on Twitter. When Amnesty International UK tweeted “Trans rights = human rights” (repeating the phrase six times for emphasis), it was bombarded with hundreds of tweets from a veritable army of bigots, among them former-comedy-writer-turned-full-time-transphobe Graham Linehan, who thought he could outwit the human rights experts at Amnesty with this question:
Other commenters offered their own version of Linehan’s question or came up with equally uninspired (and sometimes incoherent) put-downs of their own:
Even the Merseyside Police — yes, a local police department in Northwest England — found themselves swarmed by transphobes after tweeting that they were “proudly flying our trans flag at Merseyside Police HQ.”
One inventive transphobic Twitterer attempted to inspire other transphobes to pester trans people and allies with a strategy that seemed likely to puzzle a lot of its intended trans targets; it only makes sense if you’re a transphobe to begin with and think that only cis women are “real” women.
While the tweet got quite a few likes and retweets, I can happily report it doesn’t seem to have inspired much of a pestering campaign; I only found a small handful of tweets asking either of these questions to trans people and their allies.
I hope your Trans Day of Visibility went better for you than it seems to have gone for these sad people.
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The identity thing is another of the absurdities of the Basilisk (it really is fractally stupid). Because the digital duplicate is (supposedly) identical to the long-dead you, the Less Wrong guys insist that it IS you, and therefore you would/should regard what happens to it as happening to yourself.
Nope. Even accepting their “indistinguishable duplicate” argument, the duplicate is a person who, at the moment of its inception, is identical to what I was like at a certain point in time.
Even if you used a The Prestige-like duplicator, you end up with two people, who stop being indistinguishable the moment that they both exist, because from that point on they have different experiences and thoughts.
On the Star Trek front, any claims that a transporter is really “reassembling you” rather than disintegrating you and constructing a duplicate went out the window with the second Riker. Transporters and replicators are functionally the same thing.
Oh, and one more thing: your self-identity is fungible. Because that coral-like thingy of accreting memory? It’s made of smaller bits woven around one another. Leave a project back burnered for a while and then come back to it some months later if you don’t believe me. Your memories relating to the project will have lain dormant in the interim and you may actually feel like a part of you is waking up from a deep sleep when you resume it. That’s because it is. The strand of your self-identity that’s bound up in that project is built from the project-related memories. When you back-burnered it that part of you went to sleep and was unconscious, as you weren’t consciously accessing those memories, for months. And if you never do resume that project, that splinter-of-you dies, in some sense.
So you’re a whole tapestry of fragmentary-identities that interact somewhat, but can also lie dormant for long periods and even end without all-of-you doing so. You’re not indivisible!
I like how the replies to the Amnesty International tweet are a stream of transphobic garbage and then just one single libertarian dipshit at the end looking very out of place.
I don’t know how that became treat instead of tweet and the site isn’t giving me the option to edit despite having just posted it 30 seconds ago. How odd.
@Talonknife
The thing that I noticed most among the replies were how so many were basically the equivalent of “all lives matter.” I’m not surprised. In fact, I’m guessing the kinds of people who pile onto tweets like the Amnesty International one are the same ones who go around saying “all lives matter” in discussions of race.
@weirwoodtreehugger –
If you’re still looking for charities to donate to, I’d like to suggest the one for which I work – GEMS – Girls Educational and Mentoring Services. We help girls between the ages of 12 and 24 who have been commercially sexually exploited and domestically trafficked.
https://www.gems-girls.org/about-anything
Sort of OT: I bet TERFs are going to have a field day with the whole “Karen is a slur business.” They love to declare words they don’t like or that are used against them as slurs. Case in point: they have called themselves “gender critical” for a while now, but now that people have caught onto what it means, they’re walking it back and claiming it’s a slur even though it’s a term they invented and propagated. Not sure what term they want to replace it, but they did the same to the word TERF, which they still call themselves occasionally despite saying it’s a slur.
How can “Karen” be a slur? It’s just an ordinary name.
Well, it is here in Podunk, Ontario. Is there some place or subculture where it’s something else?
@Allandrel:
Ahh, Less Wrong. I have been known to refer to Yudkowsky as ‘Exhibit A that engineers should learn more philosophy so they stop trying to reinvent it… badly’. And I say this as an engineer. He’s yet another case of the ‘yes, this is an interesting idea, that’s why we looked at it a century ago’ problem.
@Dalillama, Surplus:
Yeah, anybody who knows anything about how memory works knows that a lot of our ‘identity’ is straight up illusion. (As I’ve heard it put, ‘anybody who says there are two sides to a story has never had to interview three different witnesses to the same traffic accident’.) But sadly it’s pretty much an impossible one to escape.
@Surplus:
‘Karen’ has started to become a general slang term for the over-privileged white woman.
https://www.vox.com/2020/2/5/21079162/karen-name-insult-meme-manager
@Jenora Feuer, Surplus
My thoughts on the matter are, loosely:
When used by cishet white guys to shut down women, it is potentially an insult. I would recommend that cishet white dudes avoid using the term.
When used by POC, LGBTQIPA+, and other oppressed minorities, it is not harmful the way it is when used by cishet white men.
This whole “Karen is a slur” dialogue started not because of white men using it but because minorities were using it to tell upper middle class white women to let them speak. The “Karen is a slur” business is just another way to shut down discussions of privilege and silence minority voices. It’s very similar to how TERFs started claiming that was a slur when trans* people started calling them it (nevermind that the term was invented by a cisgender trans-inclusive feminist woman).
It is never a slur. That’s not how slurs work at all. Insulting or not, the name Karen is not a slur.
SoL5E8 not understanding anything completely, but