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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My governor decided to commemorate TDoV by signing the two anti-trans bills sent to his desk. Gotta love this state
That’s Idaho for you.
@Naglfar
Ironically in my life as a bi woman who’s been pretty active in the queer community and events, I’ve only had one trans woman that was aggressive with hitting on me, and made me uncomfortable. All the other trans women I’ve met have been really nice and actually try really hard in their approaching to me respectful and non threatening.
I have however had about 5 cis lesbian treat me badly, be aggressive, or get really nasty with me when finding out that I’m a bi woman who dates men as well as women.
Don’t get me wrong I know a lot of amazing lesbians that are wonderful people. but the framing I see a lot of lesbians being like this superior lover, romancer, seducer of women over men, makes me really uncomfortable. So much so that I’m often accused of lying or misreading a situation when I talk about how a certain cis lesbian made me uncomfortable. I get accused of being a straight woman who went to a gay scene and then got upset that I was hit on by a lesbian. I’ve been told that a cis lesbian should never make me uncomfortable because they aren’t like violent men who abuse women.
I think it’s because lesbians have been mistreated so horribly as a group, that many in community want to put them on a pedestal as a way to counteract that. but of course that doesn’t help anything as lesbian are people. There are those who treat others well and those who don’t. to pretend other wise does nothing but hurt others. At least I am no longer on the dating scene and have to deal with this.
Now it’s just people telling me I’ve clearly chosen a side because I married a straight man.
@Naglfar
I seem to recall hearing somewhere that in media presentation, men are shown to be sexual (as in taking action; bad because leads to violence?) and women are shown to be sexy (more of an aesthetic thing; bad because is exploitative?), so maybe the TERFs view trans* women as both at the same time?
Hey, I have a totally unrelated-to-this-post request, if that’s okay. Does anyone here have any sort of summary of what’s wrong with Christina Hoff Sommers, or know of which of her videos show her more unpleasant takes? My sister had a professor cite CHS as a good example of a feminist & she’s wanting to push back.
@Jayne
Her RationalWiki page is probably a good place to start, as that summarizes what she does wrong. Some deeper cuts include her 2000 book “The War Against Boys,” her 5-season long show with conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, her pro-GamerGate interview on MSNBC, her article railing against gender-neutral toys, a debate in which she opposed abortion rights, and the episode of her podcast where she invited TERF Meghan Murphy on to talk about how she thinks trans* people are ruining sports.
That’s to get started, I’m sure there’s more out there. As anyone can see, Sommers is not a good example of a feminist.
@Naglfar
Thank you! The particular professor seems to be an example of what I’ve started calling “smart idiots”, he’s apparently outstanding in his academic field, but gullible as fuck when it comes to right-winger talking points. In the same lecture he was going on about how “Neo-Marxism is blowing injustice out of proportion & it’s making liberals unhappy”. *facepalm*
@Jayne
I’ve known a few of those. I had a calculus professor in college who was brilliant at calculus but had some sketchy political views. He said he didn’t vote because he didn’t understand politics, but that might have been for the best seeing as he had some problematic thoughts on women and a few other things.
Jayne,
There’s been a number of CHS posts on this site too. Might be worth searching the archives.
I have an off topic question too, actually. I’m working overtime this week and since I’m 99% not in danger of losing my job anytime soon, I was thinking I should donate the extra funds I’m making this week.
Does anyone have a good idea of who to donate to that might be getting overlooked in this crisis? Something besides the standard causes that are popular now? I may just make another donation to RAICES, but I’m all ears if people have other ideas.
@TDoV/Transphobes
If it weren’t for a voice that sounds like Tom Waits gargling gravel, I’d never have been able to reliably pass for male even before transition.
@Jayne
I’m not at all sure where it’s originally from, but I’m minded of a quotation to the effect that nothing is more dangerous than an educated fool.
@Surplus
What do your links mean? Were you diagnosed? If so, you are not fucked, I know someone who lived to 89 with the disorder. It is just something that must be managed, there’s no reason to be hopeless.
If you were not diagnosed, then… I don’t know what your links mean. Please clarify?
@wwth
Food pantries everywhere are running out of food because of exponentially increased demand from all the job losses due to coronavirus, without any corresponding increase in food stamps. They are also receiving less donations from grocery stores of expiring food (which is still edible) due to hoarders buying everything up. I donated to this cause.
@WWTH, Jayne
Here’s a search link to save some time.
Out of curiosity, what was the context for the prof’s original statement?
@dalillama:
IIRC there’s a line in Shakespeare to that exact effect, though I can’t remember the play right now, I just know that I’ve read it and I keep thinking it was while reading Shakespeare … Of course, since I can’t remember the specific play, I could be wrong. Still. It’s a place to start if you’re curious and trying to track it down.
……
…so before posting I went to look it up, not wanting to get it wrong and lead someone down the wrong path. Turns out there are no citations to Shakespeare, but plenty to Molière, albeit without a specific play mentioned. That was all I needed to pin it down: it’s from Les Femmes Savantes. IIRC we have a resident Molière expert, perhaps Susan can chime in with some expert commentary on the context?
On the “smart idiot” phenomenon, there seems to be a variant of the Dunning-Kruger Effect where someone IS an expert in a field… and therefore believes themselves an expert in all fields, because obviously everything else works just like their area of expertise. (They are almost all straight white cis men, for Some Reason.)
A great example of this is eugenicist douche Richard Dawkins, whose many accomplishments include inventing the pseudo-science of “meme theory” because obviously psychology and sociology work exactly like genetics, so he can just transpose his genetics framework onto them without the need to actually, say, learn anything about them.
@Allandrel
This seems to be common among alternative medicine cranks who may have actual credentials in other fields but claim that that gives them medical knowledge. They then blather about their titles but conveniently never state that those are not at all related to the woo they’re selling.
Lord, give me the confidence of a mediocre white man…
Dawkins is a piece of work. IIRC he was at one point somewhat respected as a biologist, before he went off with his his Islamophobia, sexism, racism, rape/pedophilia apologia, and ableism. Plus, as far as I can tell he hasn’t really contributed much to biology lately anyway.
Semi-OT, since I believe cooking, like cats/other cute animals is always OT around here, plus I thought it useful as a distraction from TwitterTERFs being idiots.
A commenter over on the Slacktivist blog posted this today, and I thought folks here would like to see it too. It’s an Ancient Greek recipe for cheesecake, with a few adjustments for things like modern measurements added.
I haven’t made this yet, but the ingredients seem easy enough to get, with the exception of the bay leaves (would parchment paper work in its place?). A diet killer for sure, if nothing else. 😀
Yes, parchment paper will be fine.
All of these ‘trans rights are mens rights’ comments seem odd to me, because I only know three trans folk personally, and they’re all trans men.
So, I suppose in my experience, trans rights are (trans)mens rights- although I don’t think that’s how they intended it.
@Naglfar:
I seriously doubt he suddenly developed sexism, racism, ableism, or a tendency for rape apologia. It seems to be a thing that after 9/11 people who didn’t think about Islam one way or another suddenly starting applying their existing tendency to stereotype, generalize, demean, and other to muslims as a group in ways that they hadn’t bothered to before, so that might have been new.
Instead what would have been “new” was that twitter came along and all the shit he’d been saying at his dinner parties with his rich friends he now said to the entire internet … which means that people who weren’t going to laugh off his bigotry could actually hear what he was saying. That’s all.
It’s almost certain he wasn’t saying different things, just saying them louder until he was overheard. In fact, that’s the best way to explain how incredulous he was at the criticism. After all, if you’ve been saying the same things for decades and none of your wealthy friends had batted an eye, then you might actually believe that there really is nothing to critique in your upper-class, paternalist sexism, your insistence that not making waves is more important than stopping sexual assault, and all the other dipshit pronouncements you’ve been laughing about over aperitifs.
I do give him a pass on this, however. Old people should get a chance to retire and not have to work themselves literally to death. In fact, I wish he’d retire a little bit harder.
@Crip Dyke
By “went off” I meant that he became much more obviously vocal about all his views. Elevatorgate, for example. I should have been a bit clearer in my word choice.
Agree. Maybe he could start by retiring from Twitter.
So, Women Make Glasgow is going to use No True Scottwoman arguments ?
(An easy one, i know. Sorry, need a bit of laught in those confinement days)
“I can care about more than two people at once. What about you?”
Only response needed to that disingenuous tweet.
I remember my first brush with what would now be called Terfism, it was back in 1995. I was a baby lesbian of 20 and was at university, I had also been attending a discussion and social group in the same city at the Lesbian and Gay Centre, every one else was in their 30’s and maybe early 40’s. They were all nice people, I had a laugh with them and all was good.
Then one day a trans woman came to the group. She wasn’t greeted by outright hostility but there was definitely an iciness that dropped over the group. Afterwards when we went for our usual drink, she was left sitting alone. So I went and sat with her, and being my usual blunt self, just asked her about herself. She was the nicest, sweetest woman I ever met and she was on the older side and told me all about her life, her struggles trying to be the gender she wasn’t and how despite everything she was happy now. I hoped she would return to the group, but obviously she didn’t come back, and I had been left with a very nasty look at my fellow lesbians. I ended up quitting that group, not long after.
I actually did Gender Studies as part of my Media Studies degree and there was lots of fascinating stuff about what we’d now understand and label non-binary and genderqueer etc. Enough that I went on to do a MA in Women’s Studies (and tangled witha Terf there, but that’s another story). I was already finding some things about the lesbian community stupid. I worked out, I lifted weights, I had quite a muscular physique with broad shoulders and I have a deep voice. I never wore anything coded as feminine, lots of jeans and check shirts, but because I had (and still have) waist length hair, apparently I was straight. So when I was trying to get into the gay clubs I’d have to snog a woman to “prove” I was actually a lesbian. Oh the mid-90’s.
@Varalys
Does that kind of thing still happen a lot?