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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Transphobes confuse me. I can’t get my head around the way they think. How is someone going about their life in a way that makes them happy hurting the transphobes?
I just… people are people, treat people as they want to be treated. If they need help , you help them, if society is inequitable, you try to change things to make it equitable. How is any of this hard to understand?
My gender is complicated. As far as I can tell it’s ‘meh’ -insert shrug emoji here-, I dress in whatever is comfortable and convenient that day. I get seriously uncomfortable if I wear or am gendered ‘wrong’ some days, even if it’s ‘right’ externally (presentation matching sex and gender assigned at birth).
Something that comes up a lot in these moral panic pieces is ‘women need their own toilets/changing rooms for *unspecified safety reason that implies all people born with penises are innately threats to all people born with vulvas*’. When I go to the swimming pool the locker room is mixed. I’m sure this Michael whats’isname would insist I was a woman and should be terrified of all the men in the locker room, and that the leisure centre was compromising my rights or safety by having mixed changing rooms.
Nope, I’m actually more scared of the teenagers because the ones round here like to harass weird looking or fat people.
@Waywatchers: That sounds like the distinction between ‘positive freedom’ and ‘negative freedom’ made by political philosopher Isaiah Berlin. In short: Negative freedom is the freedom from laws and instititions telling you ‘you cannot do that’ and the enforcement thereof. Positive freedom is having the means and capacity to pursue what you want.
Positive Freedom tends to be overlooked or ignored a lot whenever people claim nonsense like ‘just take another job’ or ‘just move’ or whatever simple fix they use to shut you up.
@RJ Dragon:
I think a lot of it comes down to two overlapping things.
First, some people just don’t seem to like complexity. They like having nice neat boxes to put things (or people) in. Things must be either good or bad, virtuous or sinful. For example, ‘consent’ is a messy complicated subject that could change over time, so just define all sex inside marriage as ‘good’ and all sex outside marriage as ‘bad’; problem solved! As nice easy boundary lines like that have been removed by society at large, they cling tighter to the ones that remain and lobby to re-instate the old ones. In other words, bigotry is their comfort zone, because they like knowing that everything is ‘the way it should be’ according to their simple set of rules.
Second, and more fundamental in some ways, most people don’t like to admit that they’re wrong about something. This feeds into some of the first issue, because if an issue is complex than it’s easier to be wrong about it, whereas nice clear-cut rules make it easy to be ‘right’. But it also ties into other things: like Love Is All We Need pointed out at the end of the last page, there’s the fear that they may end up being attracted to the ‘wrong’ person because the person passes well in public, and then they’d be mistaken and wrong themselves. And not just gender presentation for this one either: see also the ‘one drop’ rule on race which had aspects of this as well.
You’re thinking of people as people with all the complexity that entails; they’re thinking of people as categories and levels in a hierarchy where the important part is knowing whether they should bow in respect, bro-fist, or sneer at the other.
@Battering Lamb
Thank you, you’ve given me knowledge there.
Re: my summary. IDK maybe that was too simplistic. I’m too exhausted to come up with something better. Right now one of my friends is homeless, another developed long COVID, another has two partners trying to get out of abusive situations and only the resources to support one of them as a roomie…
The transphobic campaigns are working. They’re not supported by most of the public, but they’re working, because they are synergistic with already existing capitalist drains and strictures on us. And I am absolutely dead exhausted.
Are you sure they are not supported by most of the public? It seems to me that if you look at the comments sections of liberal newspapers, they mostly support liberal positions. Except when you have an article about one of these Red State trans bans, then the top comments are all about how Dems are going to alienate everyone with their pro-trans agenda. I think we may need to face that most people are in fact transphobic and figure out how we can change that as soon as possible before people start dying. Well, continue to die or die faster. Trans people are already dying.
Dave, I think most people are just ignorant of transpeople and trans issues, not opposed. The right wing rhetoric however is so loud and shrill and dishonest that it’s shifting that Overton Window, perhaps. Matt Walsh and his ilk are screaming that children are being “castrated” and given hysterectomies when that just isn’t true. This is influencing people who never thought about these things before and were “live and let live” types up until 2 minutes ago. You’ve even got gay people believing this stuff. Even some Transpeople. And then if they listen to the likes of Blair White, well, there you go.
Unsurprisingly, this idiot is wrong. The word ‘genocide’ has nothing to do with genes, it comes from Ancient Greek γένος (genos), meaning, a tribe, clan or race of people.
I’m expecting some state legislature (maybe mine!) to ban gender transitioning for everyone some time soon. In fact, I’m a little surprised I haven’t heard of some red state senator or representative already floating that idea.
With the fall of Roe, they’re already controlling which medical procedures I am allowed to do with my body. Now states are working to ban transgender healthcare for minors (I think I heard Mississippi just did that, and my state is probably going to do that during this next legislative session), and dressing in drag.
They did those first because they can use the “save the children” excuse, but mark my words, once they have those ticked off the to-do list I really think they’re going to end up trying to ban being transgender entirely. It wasn’t really that long ago that being gay was basically illegal (Lawrence v. Texas happened when I was in college at UT Austin – it was a big deal).
They have no problem legislating what people are allowed to do with their own bodies. Scary stuff. I’ve had three abortions and concieved my daughter with IVF. If they had their way, my life would be very different. I can only imagine how terrified transgender people must be right now.
@LIAWN
Thank you for explaining to Dave. And yeah – that one time as a woman that a cis man got physically violent with me, it was because he’d taken me for a pretty little cis girl and I’d had to tell him otherwise.
(He was an EMT, and I was having a medical crisis at the time. Fun fun fun.)
@Dave
Like I said I’m exhausted and don’t feel like explaining it. Suffice to say that the Republican agenda is, and for a long time has been, minoritarian. There’s a difference between most people being raging transphobes and most people not caring enough to help, which is what we actually have to deal with right now. As for the alienation rhetoric, that happens with literally, but literally, every single civil rights issue.
@Juniper
Best of luck 🙁
In case people don’t know, the UN definition of genocide:
Neither nations nor religions are defined by genetics. Ethnicity and race are rarely defined in this way, but are not defined by genetics in most uses by most people.
Moreover, killing people is not the only way to commit genocide. Inflicting negative conditions on a group until the group ceases to exist is, in fact, genocide. And the right have had a genocidal agenda for quite a long time.
There are, of course, other definitions of genocide that are slightly broader than this one, which codifies the **crime** of genocide rather than the concept of genocide. But even here, even in the legalistic definition set out in the UNCoG inflicting intolerable conditions on a group that is not necessarily genetically related still obviously qualifies provided the ultimate destruction of the group is “physical”. (The broader definitions include forms of destruction such that the traditions, knowledge, behaviours, and religion of the group are largely or entirely lost and thus the group loses cohesion and no longer functions as a group. These forms of genocide have not been outlawed by the UN, but clearly incorporate the trans-targeting activity we see here from the Daily Wire and other theocrats.)
@ crip dyke
As you know I have a bit of an interest in war crimes. I’m especially interested in the destruction of cultural heritage* offences.
Obviously, if the choice was, save a child or save a painting, you’d save the child. But that isn’t to say cultural heritage isn’t important.
As you say, you can eradicate a groups by physically eliminating them. Either by extermination or sterilisation. But you can achieve the same effect by obliterating anything and everything that made that group a distinctive ‘people’. Their language, their history, their songs, their stories etc.
After all, individual humans are transient, but a ‘people’ is the sum of all the, constantly rotating, members of the group at that particular instant. So the only thing that defines a group is their shared culture. Remove that; and you to all practical purposes remove the group. They just get absorbed into the dominant culture and lose any separate sense of identify.
That always comes to mind when I hear the phrase culture wars. I think that’s more pertinent and revealing than perhaps people realise.
Minority and oppressed groups don’t necessarily have a single homogeneous culture of course. But that doesn’t matter. You just target anything that deviates in the slightest way from the dominant culture.
So to give one example, you target anything ‘pride’ related. You target equal marriage. You don’t allow the same tax breaks to single sex couples. You just make it impossible to live except by wholeheartedly adopting the dominant culture and all its shibboleths and virtue signals (in the correct technical sense of the phrase).
Then you have a world where there may still be individual ‘queer’ people; but there’s no such thing as queer peoples. There would be no outward way of expressing membership of that group; so the group would seek to exist, as a group. A kind of Cultural Sapir-Whorf if you like.
[*the old term was cultural property; but that’s been superseded now with the recognition that property implies certain concepts of ownership that not all cultures have.)
The UN definition of genocide (as quoted by Crip Dyke above) seems to imply that a “genos” is indeed something that runs in families, though usually by cultural inheritance rather than genetic. Even when people join a religion outside their own family, it’s fundamentally about joining a new “chosen family”, a community that has historical continuity and unique tradition.
Therefore, one might quibble whether the persecution of trans people technically qualifies as “genocide”. After all, being trans or cis isn’t usually considered a “nation, race, ethnicity or religion”. There is a trans community, but it’s not the community that makes people trans. Although the people who seek to persecute trans people might very much overestimate how much being trans is socially transmitted – does that make their intent genocidal?
Ultimately, this is just quibbling beside the point, over a colloquial, possibly slightly inaccurate use of the word “genocide”. There is definitely a movement to persecute trans people (or rather gender non-conforming people, though trans people tend to stand out the most and bear the brunt of it). It’s serious enough to be described in dramatic terms.
Alan just reminded me to not underestimate the role of queer culture. Thanks. It’s too late for this level of discussion on my time zone. I’m going to sleep. See you all later.
There are a lot of transphobes who claim being trans is a religion. I don’t know if any of them actually believe it or if it’s all bad-faith.
Based on the discussion so far, it seems questionable whether you can genocide trans people as a whole, but it doesn’t change the fact that they’re trying to genocide trans communities. I mean, trans people do have a language and culture of sorts within their communities, and a lot of conservatives seem to think that it’s the language and culture (or even just joining the communities) which turns people trans. That they’re wrong about this doesn’t change the fact that the communities exist and that some of them are trying to eliminate those, which is genocide in the legalistic sense of the word.
Maybe they could try to weasel out of it by claiming that “transgenderism” is an “ideology not a culture” and if you can genocide an ideology, then Germany genocided their Nazis. That might speak to intent rather than outcome, but given that “transgenderism” is a strawman, and that their justifications are constantly shifting, it’s not a declared intent which we should entertain seriously.
…Although, returning to the original post, it seems in this particular case like the reason why they’re trying to define trans people out of existence specifically so that they can avoid any genocidal implications. On the individual existential level, they’re not murdering trans people (or at least not using social or government institutions to do so) or openly preventing them from having children or coercing them into suicide, they’re just defining what is and isn’t appropriate for AMAB and AFAB people. Which isn’t anything new, obviously, what’s changed is the justifcations which they’re attempting to legally enforce said “appropriate” things. Which gets back into why I said earlier that Knowles appeared to be treating gender as purely performative (again, I may be wrong on this, I haven’t watched that much of him yet) – like, it doesn’t hurt anyone to perform their assigned gender, but it does hurt certain communities if someone doesn’t, and in fact the “harm” is so severe that they’re “forced” to make laws against it. Something like that, anyway.
On the legalistic “destroying cultures” level of genocide, as much as there is any sort of intent or justification here (and there may not be much, if any) they appear to be trying to have their cake and eat it too. They’re trying to reduce “transgenderism” to a set of practices which no one should be forced to participate in (such as, you know, calling people by their preferred pronouns). On the other hand, they don’t seem to have any compunctions against forcing people into not participating (such as, you know, forcing people to categorize others by their AGAB even if they don’t particularly want or need to). The former is a matter of personal freedom, the latter is a matter of “community freedom” (the freedom for communities to police their own members). The former requires trans people to exist as a community, so that they can have a standardized set of practices; the latter requires trans people to not be a community, so that they can be individually policed by the wider culture without worrying about any harms done to their community.
…Not that most of them particularly care about harms done to communities which they aren’t personally part of, but the smarter ones do understand that they have to take that into account if they want to convince anyone else.
I just saw this pop up today, and it’s perfect for this site..
We were talking about chocolate companies with backlash before, but this one is about the fact that a local trans activist was involved:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hershey-fae-johnstone-transgender-1.6765214
Needless to say, the mere fact that a trans woman was one of the women honoured this way has led to a whole lot of howling, much of which is the usual ‘think about the real women’ from people who otherwise don’t care about women’s interests at all.
We are in complete agreement, Alan.
@Alan Robertshaw, Crip Dyke:
And it’s something that Canada has done as well, of course. Rather explicitly: “Kill the Indian, Save the Man” was official government policy for generations, even if the usual attributed source of that quote was American. And something we’ve only slowly been coming to terms with. For all that various organizational announcements of thanks to the original owners of the land can seem like empty words, they at the very least keep this uncomfortable fact in focus and remind people about it.
And many of the laws on the books for the last hundred and fifty years are difficult to unroot and disentangle from the rest of the system. Another recent CBC story:
Land back is complicated. Here’s what we can learn from a B.C. island returned to the Saanich peoplePart of the issue is that legally corporations can own land, but First Nations tribes can’t; all First Nations ‘reservations’ are technically Crown (federal government)-owned lands, held in stewardship for the people living on them. It’s like a trailer park where the people living there don’t own the land they live on, except that the landlord is way more hands-off for both good and ill. To give even this tiny island back to the people who have been tending it for centuries, people had to create a Land Trust to be the official owners of the title to the land.
In general issues regarding trans people are at least not that deeply enshrined in the legal system, mostly because they weren’t considered a thing at all back then, and most of the laws that might have applied have been mostly dealt with by the changes made to the laws both for women’s equality and equality based on sexual orientation. I don’t know if Section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has been explicitly tested with a case focused on trans issues. Bill C-16 (the bill that started Jordan Peterson’s extended temper tantrum) mostly makes it official, but there are still a number of corner cases that have yet to be worked out, especially involving people who weren’t born in Canada to start with.
At this point it’s my understanding any attempt to formalize anti-trans legislation in Canada would require use of the Notwithstanding Clause, and while things like that are possible (Alberta tried banning same-sex marriage at a provincial level that way) the fact that the current laws have been running since 2017 without the sky falling in will put limits on how easily someone can claim that it’s necessary.
@ jenora
This is related to why we shifted from cultural property to cultural heritage.
For example, if you were to ask “Who owns Uluru?”, the official answer is the Pitjantjatjara tribe who have granted a 99 year lease to Australian National Parks and Wildlife Agency.
But if you asked the same question to an actual Pitjantjatjara person the answer would be “Huh, how can anybody own it, it’s a big rock that’s been there for ever.”
This also crops up in a more practical sense with deaccession, that is to say returning cultural artefacts back to their rightful owners. But who those owners are is often a matter of debate. Boundaries change and populations shift.
This is a big issue with the Benin Bronzes. Some have been returned, but to the current Nigerian government. The problem there is that the people in govt tend to be the descendants of the people who nicked the bronzes from the Oba people in the first place.
More here on that if anyone wishes to delve further.
Maybe we all need to just start dressing in drag when out grocery shopping or walking our dogs in parks or doing other random stuff.
Uh, Jews have genetics from literally all over the place, notwithstanding greater prevalence of some genes in our population, so by his definition the Holocaust wasn’t genocide.
…and he’s wrong anyway, in a way that should offend conservatives: the ‘gen’ in ‘genocide’ refers not to genes but rather to the Latin gens, meaning a tribe or a people.
Note: sterile cis-women and cis-men do not have reproductive systems developed to produce or fertilise, respectively, ova.