When is trans genocide not trans genocide? When you define trans people out of existence before legislating them out of existence. At least, that’s the logic of Daily Wire brain genius Michael Knowles.
On his podcast Monday, Knowles expressed his enthusiasm for a Kansas bill that defines a female as someone “‘whose biological reproductive system is developed to produce ova,” while male refers to anyone who is ‘developed to fertilize the ova of a female.'”
This, Knowles sad, made the bill a “beautiful” one.
This is a beautiful bill because it doesn’t just say don’t trans the kids … it bans transgenderism for all practical purposes in the state for everybody. And it has to. In order for women to have the right to have their own bathrooms, you have to ban transgenderism entirely. You can’t just ban it for the kids. It’s got to be entirely. In order for women to be able to have their own locker rooms at the gym, you have to ban transgenderism entirely. In order to protect businesses from having to participate in weird, occult sexual rituals like the transgender transition, you have to ban transgenderism entirely.
Occult sexual rituals?
When some online critics pointed out that effectively making trans existence illegal might be considered genocidal, what with eliminating a group of people from public life entirely, and all, Knowles asserted that he had said no such thing. In his next show, on Tuesday, he reiterated his enthusiastic support for the bill but insisted it had nothing to do with genocide.
The big issue that they had yesterday, which was then picked up in other media outlets as well, is that I called to ban transgenderism entirely. …
And, oh, my goodness, what these people say. They said that I was calling for the extermination of transgender people. They said I was calling for a genocide against – I said, what? … I don’t know how you could have a genocide of transgender people because genocide refers to genes, it refers to genetics, it refers to biology. And the whole point of transgenderism is that it has nothing to do with biology.
Genocide does not refer to genes unless you think various religious or ethnic minorities are genetically distinct from other human beings. (They’re not.)
He continued:
And the whole point of transgenderism is that it has nothing to do with biology. That’s what the transgender activists say. They say, forget about biological sex. My gender expression doesn’t have to have anything to do with my biological sex. Okay, well, then there can’t be a genocide. It refers to genetics.
Then he decided to define away trans people entirely:
But furthermore, nobody’s calling to exterminate anybody because the other problem with that statement is that transgender people is not a real ontological category. It’s not a legitimate category of being. There are people who think that they’re the wrong sex, but they’re mistaken.
You can’t exterminate trans people if they don’t exist!!1!
Well, that’s one way to escape the logical implications of your argument, I guess. Just redefine out of existence the people you want to ban from existence.
All he wants, he said, is to
return to the way that American society operated until approximately five minutes ago when we said that men do not have a right to present themselves as women in public life, and women don’t have a right to present themselves as men in public life.
So, in other words, to make it illegal for trans people to exist in public. Nothing genocidal about that!
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“If the Jews would just convert, we wouldn’t have to kill them. “
I feel incredibly sorry for anyone with a child that has atypical genitalia in this fascist’s state. The party of small government and personal freedom is once again neither.
Somebody who is a bit smarter, but no less transphobic, is going to be making the argument that what Knowles meant was that if trans people were forced to dress and act their AGAB [Assigned Gender At Birth, for the lurkers] in public, it wouldn’t be a violation of their rights, because everyone else would be forced to do so as well. Like how gay people’s rights “aren’t violated” by restricting them to opposite-sex marriage, since straight people couldn’t have same-sex marriages either. Or how the rich and the poor alike are often banned from acts of survival which no rich person would ever need to do and virtually none would ever engage in even where legal.
Knowles is being treated as some sort of “rising star” over at the Daily Wire. I haven’t seen much because I have better things to do with my time, but so far I’m not impressed; assuming it’s not an act, he doesn’t appear to understand that some words have more than one meaning, and/or that some common casual usages of words are inaccurate. He also appears to believe that gender is 100% performative and that it shouldn’t be a big deal for anyone to perform whatever role they were given. Which is somewhat at odds with the arguments which hinge around women needing protection from men, so possibly my impression of him is mistaken, because again I haven’t seen much of him yet.
JMS knew what he was writing about.
Then when you point out that intersex people exist, they bring out the ableist argument that it’s disordered and needs to be fixed. This is why these anti-trans bills all have exceptions to permit nonconsentual cosmetic surgery on intersex infants. This can lead to lifetime physical damage and wrong assignments.
They want to pressure people like me with hormonal intersex into treatments that are mostly about aesthetic conformity, but can have dangerous side effects.
But ghod forbid a trans woman be allowed to take estrogen even though plenty of cis women are on it (while it’s still allowed).
Binary gender is a Procrustean bed and they will cut off our feet to make us fit. Of course it’s genocidal!
I think the hysteria over trans men is linked to forced childbearing and replacement theory. It wouldn’t be “mutilation” for someone to yeet their breasts, or even their uterus, if it wasn’t their social role to bear children for other people’s benefit. Cis women seeking sterilization also may not be able to get it, even when they medically need it.
This is some of why I think terfs have abandoned feminism and are fash.
@Cheesynougats Exactly!
@milotha I’m really terrified too for what this will mean for them.
“In order to protect businesses from having to participate in weird, occult sexual rituals like the transgender transition”
So, when I used to run a cash register and ring out trans people. I was participating in a sex ritual? Me thinks you have been watching the weird porn again…
Occultism, Satanism, Paganism, Witches… There’s a rabid Christian Nationalist agenda going on right now trying to get rid of all beliefs outside of Christianity. Don’t think for a second that these people don’t include Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, and all other world religions under “occult”. They hate it all.
Charlie Kirk calls New Mexico “the most outwardly pagan state in the country… full of witchcraft.” Take one guess why.
From:
https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2022/08/13/now-theyre-mad-because-a-drag-queen-is-grooming-a-fictional-character/
David called it back in August.
.
Why are those who are “pro-freedom” so anti freedom? If a man wants to “present as a woman” then that’s his business isn’t it.
“return to the way that American society operated until approximately five minutes ago when we said that men do not have a right to present themselves as women in public life, and women don’t have a right to present themselves as men in public life.”
Except trans people have been presenting as themselves in public life for decades now.
@Steph:
Why are those who are “pro-freedom” so anti freedom?
Some of them aren’t actually pro-freedom, and don’t claim to be. Those are less noticeable because the vast majority of them don’t specifically claim to be anti-freedom either. They frame it like people need to be following “God’s Laws” or “the Natural Order” or whatever.
Some of them do claim to be pro-freedom, but they’re only for very particular freedoms. They might frame it as “the freedom from the offense of trans people existing as trans in public” or “the freedom to punish trans people for being nonconforming” in this particular example. They can come up with any sort of justification they want, but fundamentally, I’m reasonably sure that the freedom most of them really want is the freedom to live in a world where their cultural, religious, and ideological standards are acknowledged as superior and obeyed.
You might say “that’s not real freedom”, but as far as they’re concerned, it’s the only real freedom.
@ Tabby Lavalamp
I believe I have mentioned before there was a Roman individual who wanted doctors to make them an artificial vagina thousands of years ago, not long after the invention of writing. Trans is not some new invention of modern people “approximately five minutes ago”.
@ .45
They also invented the whoopee cushion.
@Steph
It’s pretty simple when you get down to it – for us freedom means “freedom from” (harm, fear, oppression), and for them it means “freedom to” (lord it over other people with guns and tanks and whatnot). Their “freedom” is in the same sense as a schoolyard bully claiming “It’s a free country, I can do whatever I want!” when confronted about his behavior.
@Cyborgette:
I wouldn’t put it like that. For one thing, you can describe almost anything in terms of “freedom to” or “freedom from” even if you sometimes have to use obscure words, awkward sentence constructions, or bizarre-out-of-context statements. This is more a limitation of whatever language you happen to be using than anything real or fundamental.
For another thing, it’s not like we don’t frame things in terms of “freedom to” all the time, like describing same-sex marriage in terms of “freedom to marry the one you love”. Likewise, they also want freedom from harm, fear, and oppression; they fear different things and have very different concepts of “harm” and “oppression”.
Granted that their fears mostly aren’t real, their concept of harm is largely focused on various forms of “community harm” and individuals barely matter (at least in the absract), and their concept of oppression involves keeping groups and individuals out of the “natural position” within the social hierarchy (as an example, poor black people “naturally” belong on the bottom of the hierarchy, while rich white people “naturally” belong on the top), so as far as they’re concerned, equality *is* oppression.
They are just as hysteric about transitioning the other way. I think it’s simply that they were born one gender, and they look a certain way, so everyone else should be the same. Anything that’s different, they don’t understand. And anything they don’t understand, they hate.
@Snowberry: Right, they could say they want freedom from trans people. Cyborgette is still pretty much right that the freedom they want is the freedom to interfere in other people’s affairs. They are being harmed and oppressed by people not doing what they want.
They are paranoid over being attracted to a transwoman that “passes” to the point they cannot tell she’s not cis.
@Dave: I agree, mostly (“mostly” because it can occasionally be difficult to know where to draw the line in regards to what counts as interfering with other people’s affairs). I was quibbling about there being a meaningful distinction between freedom from/to.
Something which was niggling at me which I didn’t really think about until later: “not a real ontological category”. I mean, he’s basically trying to say “trans don’t real” using fancy words, but I was thinking that maybe it should be addressed seriously? I have no idea what definition of “transgender” he’s using, like maybe it is a ridiculous right-wing strawman, but let’s be generous and assume he isn’t. Trans people say that they’re a gender which doesn’t match their physical sex. Given how many different concepts of “gender” which exist, how much time and effort has been spent trying to come up with various theories of gender, and no universal agreement… can we really say that it’s an objective statement? I mean, it might be, but until we discover an objective definition of gender (if it exists) or have a near-universally agreed upon concept of it (if there’s no objective definition) we can’t truly say, one way or the other, if it’s a “real ontological category”.
However, that just needs a minor fix: A trans person is someone who experiences being a gender which doesn’t match their physical sex. This statement is neutral as to whether said experiences are delusional or hallucinatory, or even whether their concept of gender is objective. Bam! Ontological! (Unless trans people are lying, or you’re going to argue that delusions and/or hallucinations aren’t “experiences”, in which case we’re back to things being indeterminate. )
@Snowberry:
Everything seems to be rising when you’re standing on the deck of a sinking ship.
Then he should also believe that banning certain people from performing certain genders violates their First Amendment rights.
@LIAWN:
And elsewhere, at the same time:
@https://freethoughtblogs.com/oceanoxia/2023/03/01/some-more-news-bad-things-we-only-have-because-of-lobbying/
It’s things like this that make me want to unplug my internet, marathon the four Avengers films, and spend the next 10 or so hours rooting for Loki, Ultron, and Thanos. :/
It isn’t evil if I say “Jesus is telling me to persecute and if necessary or desirable, kill!” – or even “It’s my sincere belief, so it’s my right, which trumps ALL of anyone else’s rights.”
And it’s EXTRA all right if you chuckle and smile while you do it! Like Norman Bate’s mother (in the original movie!), you wouldn’t hurt a fly! (Just in case they’re… watching you!”)
What sick, disgusting, and dangerously evil and cowardly sh-ts make up perhaps a significant minority of all “civilized” homo sapiens! And we have to trust in their cowardice!
I just want to weigh in on the ‘freedom to’ vs ‘freedom from’ discussion. It’s a phrase I find myself using quite a lot in political discussions as a way to explain that the right in general, but libertarians in particular really are working from a different definition of freedom, albeit a flexible definition. I think ‘freedom from’ refers to a libertarian, essentially objectivist view where freedom means only the lack of interference from human institutions.
From my point of view, I see this form of freedom as useless, as if you lack the resources to improve your situation then you are less free. To give a really on the nose example, if you’re dropped in the middle of the Sahara desert you’re completely free from interference from all institutions, but all you’re actually free to do is be un-alive from exposure within 72 hours.
I landed on this point from long discussions with Brexiters (I’m in the UK) as they would constantly make absurd arguments about how we’re ‘more free’ now than before as we can put crown symbols on pint glasses now (we could before) and control our own borders (we could before as well). I would always point out that we’re actually less free, as we don’t now have the opportunity to work abroad without a travel Visa or sell our goods without friction into the biggest market in the world. Anyway, I digress, and sorry to bring the B word into proceedings.
@Do I have a name
So many good and vital points here. It is, definitely, not easy for cis women to be sterilised. Obviously it varies depending on several factors, but if you’re cis and pre-menopausal, it’s quite difficult and sometimes impossible to get a doctor to take you seriously if you want a hysterectomy.
On the other point, terfs continue to give very explicit indications that they’re fash or at least heavily trad – both are the opposite of feminist. Just recently one (via twitter) was insisting that girls have no interest in STEM subjects, and this person claimed she was an educator (shudder).
But I think my ‘favourite’ example was the terf who said she was heartbroken by the idea of young girls having top surgery “before their breasts had ever felt a lover’s caress”.