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I forget whether I already posted this, but it occurred to me recently that it may be more accurate to say that J.K. Rowling, and perhaps TERFs in general, are sexist than to say that they're transphobic. Rowling supports the right of people to dress however they like and receive whatever medical intervention they desire. She uses preferred pronouns in polite company. But she wants spaces to exist that discriminate based on biological sex, without taking someone's gender identity or expression into account. The term for sex-based discrimination is sexism.
This is not what we are looking for in a top level post.
And is antagonistic.One day ban.Edit (14 hours later):
I may have misread the antagonism in the post. There was a report saying the same thing, so I thought I wasn't the only one seeing it. Mea Culpa, but the ban was primarily for the other thing anyways:
The main problem is that this is a short single thought top level post. Closer to a journal entry. Right beneath it in the thread was a short low effort troll post.
I have seen this happen again and again. A bad top level post leads to other people making bad top level posts. Normally there are no consequences for mediocre or bad top level posts. But in order to prevent more of them from happening ... I added consequences. The next post was higher quality. I'm not confident enough to claim that the ban tactic worked, maybe those would have been the next posts anyways. But it didn't clearly fail either.
I would also like to point out that there is now a quality post on the JK Rowling and Harry Potter situation. One of the specific reasons that we don't want low effort top level posts is that they tend to crowd out high effort top level posts. What if everyone already got in all the JK rowling and trans discussion down here, and no one responds to the high quality post above? It creates an incentive to post quickly, and not spend too much time writing up an effort post.
This is not what the community is looking for in moderation. Do better.
For example, better moderation would look like "This is not what we are looking for in a top-level post. We are looking for comments with features X and Y, and without Z, and your comment (while having X) has not enough Y and too much Z."
Also, as the comment reads as not at all antagonistic to me, you should really specify what exactly in it you find antagonistic. As it is, the moderation looks capricious and tells me nothing at all about what I should post to avoid a similar ban.
My original comment has been edited to add explanation
Thanks and much appreciated.
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I disagree. The less the moderator inserts himself into the moderation the better. I am not writing comments to appease the moderator. I am here to appease my own vanity. To that end I am writing comments to a standard that reflects what I want other comments to look like. I am here because the stated goals of the motte align with mine. The more the moderator inserts himself into the motte, the less space there is for my aspirational fantasy of what the motte is.
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This doesn't really seem antagonistic to me? He's using "sexist" as a neutral descriptor, not an insult. In the sense he means wanting to restrict sports teams or nude spas or bathrooms by sex is sexist, the same way that restricting them by race is racist. (Whether sexism is justifiable is another matter.) This is contrasted by how she doesn't actually seem to support any measures discriminating by transgender status, just dividing them by sex like everyone else.
This is particularly relevant to subjects like discrimination law, where some rulings have found that (for instance) a law banning discrimination by sex (and not mentioning transgender people) doesn't prohibit keeping separate bathrooms by sex but does prohibit preventing trans people from using the bathrooms they prefer. There is an extent to which stuff like "obviously X isn't what people mean by sexist discrimination" is just smuggling in the current Overton window, and under somewhat different social conditions it would be considered similarly obvious that prohibiting MTFs from competing in women's sports isn't discrimination against trans people.
My original comment has been edited to add explanation
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The openly intentional result of what you're calling her sexism is that biological men are excluded from using the services of the rape crisis centre that she funds despite those men calling themselves women, ie trans, and so is plainly Trans Exclusionary. More accurate would be to say that she doesn't believe a biological man can be a woman, which is to say that she is a trans denialist. She doesn't hate transwomen (the transphobia charge), she simply doesn't recognise "transwoman" as a meaningful category.
Calling it sexism is similarly trans denialist as it casts the question solely in terms of objective biological sex, which trans ideology takes great efforts to escape from by introducing the subjective frame of gender.
One major reason radical feminists and other trans denialists deny transgenderism is because it requires not only that women identify with and express their gender but that doing so is what makes them women, and by extension not doing so diminishes their womanhood. A woman who becomes a radical feminist because she's been treated like shit by men, often in part for not being very feminine, while also being vulnerable to all the disadvantages that women suffer will rightly bristle at the implication that she's less of a woman, particularly when it's coming from men.
I do think the limits of this debate have been badly drawn.
It is completely possible to believe that "transwomen are women" and also believe that some spaces should be for cis women and trans men only. Similarly, it is completely possible to believe that "transwomen aren't women" and also believe that no spaces should be segregated based on sex, but only on legal "gender."
In this sense, I think "trans exclusionary" is a better term than "trans denialist." I agree that both terms are good summaries of JKR's position, but I don't think there's actually any necessary connection between the two of them.
believing "some spaces should be for cis women and trans men only" seems straightforward to me, or its reverse, because those lead to policy positions. What does believing, "transwomen are women" mean? It doesn't seem to lead to any policy positions, and if it can be "believed" alongside all sorts of other policy positions, is it really a belief? seems to me like a floating phrase, disconnected from policy. What am I missing?
We're both in agreement. I don't think that "transwomen are women" means that we must treat trans women and cis women the same in all circumstances.
Cis women who have had too many sports-related concussions are women too, but they probably shouldn't play on certain sports teams with other cis women for their own safety. So too, there might be safety-related reasons why trans women shouldn't play contact sports or fighting sports with cis women, or "fairness"-related reasons to not allow trans women to compete in the same category as cis women in at least some sports.
The question is not really whether "transwomen are women" is true, but whether transwomen are relevantly similar to cis women on an issue-by-issue basis. The broader policies matter a lot more than tiny linguistic/philosophical quibbles.
It is completely consistent to say, "Screw the evidence, I'm highly risk-tolerant and don't care about 'fair competition' so transwomen should be maximally included in all sports." That's not even a "factually incorrect" opinion - it's just a consequence of a different set of values. What will ideally happen is organizations will discuss all pros and cons, and all knowns and unknowns, and come to relevant callings, like the World Rugby Association (?) did in not allowing trans women to play with cis women.
What does it mean then?
This sounds like its trying to answer the question? The word "relatively" here seems like its doing a lot of work. I don't want to put words in your mouth; this reads to me like you're saying transphobia is like a spectrum. One pole is treating trans women and cis women similarly on zero issues, and on the other pole is treating them the same on all issues. For you, treating them as relatively the same is good enough?
I can't think of any one issue on which LGBT activists are OK with treating cis women and trans women differently. Can you think of any?
Maybe cervical screening tests? Prostate exams?
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It means about the same as "step-fathers are fathers." I outlined this elsewhere in this thread, but I'm in favor of "translegalism" as the official line of the state on trans issue - the state creates a legal fiction of "adoptive sex", and decides where adoptive men/woman are relevantly similar to natal men/women, passing laws based on these decisions. Everything else is left to private individuals and organizations to decide for themselves.
The word I use was relevantly, not relatively. And I think we are in a very similar situation to any legal question of how individuals should be treated.
In a liberal democracy, we recognize the law is limited by a set of rights possessed by the people, but sometimes rights come into conflict, or people want to know the limits of a right. Does the freedom of religion allow for polygamy or animal sacrifice? No, we've decided that the state can limit these practices without infringing on religious liberty. Etc., etc.
Every society has to navigate these conflicts as they arise, and many will come to different answers. Compare French laicite to American secularism, and the different problems and circumstances these two policies were responding to.
I do think that a spectrum like the one you described can be said to exist. I'm not sure I'd call it a spectrum of "transphobia" though. If I wanted to locate "transphobia" on the spectrum, I'd probably just draw a line somewhere and say, "below this level of equality, trans people's lives are hell." Whether a regime that causes trans people to suffer unnecessarily is properly called "transphobic" is another question.
I don't think LGBT activists ever 100% agree with one another. I'm sure that some are okay with not extending trans inclusion to prisons and sports, while thinking that other areas like bathrooms are locker rooms are more central.
I consider myself to be pro-trans, but I'm not a trans-maximalist. I think there can be reasonable disagreement on trans-inclusion in certain domains, but I'm also in favor of policies like those adopted in my state that make discrimination in the realms of housing, employment, public accommodations, and credit and lending illegal. I'm in favor of minors being allowed to make informed decisions, with their parents and doctors, whether they want to transition, but I'm not dismissive of fears people have of sterilization, unknown side effects or the risk of overly permissive medical regimes resulting in a large number of detransitioners down the line.
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I think our culture, and how different sides choose to debate, is much more clever than you seem to think. Generally if lines seem poorly drawn it's because one side or the other thinks they can eke out an advantage by framing things that way. In this case, "transwomen are women" only matters as a statement because it inherently includes other things like "and thus we should treat them like women." Ceding the implications--compromising and saying that trans women are "women" but that the important category is "female"--is for those who want transgenderism to be accepted to entirely admit defeat.
This is just pretty common throughout the culture war on many different fronts.
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Please do not use meaningless insulting terms like TERF. It just tempts me to use insulting terms about you.
I don’t think it’s meaningless and insulting. It may be a loaded term which is overused, but “trans-exclusive-radical-feminist” is a meaningful concept which can be accurately applied to some people.
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Sex-based discrimination is not commonly believed to be sexist in all cases. The existence of girls’ restrooms, the Boy Scouts, and male wrestling divisions are not considered sexist by the median American.
She wants spaces to exist according to biological affinity and orientation, by shared hormones and shared cognition. She believes that a person’s natural state dictates more of their biological affinity and thus community than the utterance “I am a woman”, which is logical.
I am puzzled by people who do not think that sex-segregated bathrooms or sports teams are sexist. I want to be charitable, but I can't help but think that anyone who would deny that these things are sexist is someone who uses the term to mean "things that discriminate based on sex in ways that I don't like," rather than "things that discriminate based on sex, regardless of whether I consider them good or bad." People using words inconsistently has always caused me mild stress, but it causes me severe stress when the words are used inconsistently for the sole reason that people want to avoid negative connotations; this robs the words of their taxonomical usefulness while maintaining their moral power. I've spent a lot of time defending myself and other people from accusations of racism because I'm insecure and I don't want more reasons to hate myself, and I wish I could just noy care, and the only way I can prevent myself from caring is by using a value-neutral definition that doesn't have any moral judgements attached. Then if someone calls me racist, I don't have to have an existential crisis and spiral into depression, and instead I can just calmly assess whether the label is accurate and not care whether it is or not.
I read a Vox article about Amy Wax recently, and it was emotionally uplifting for me because of how surprisingly free of hatred and hostility it was. I don't think the person writing it likes racism, but they were talking about Amy Wax like a person with ideas that could be correct or incorrect, rather than someone who has done bad things and must be morally judged. This passage in particular excited me.
This person isn't saying "Of course you're racist, because you're bad, and vice versa." They're speaking of taxonomy instead of moral judgements. I find that beautiful.
Forgive me if I'm being less than coherent. Things that make me emotional tend to also make me less articulate.
I see this as a lost battle. There is nothing I can do to stop an army of journalists from constantly changing the definitions of words. Now it will be an army of journalists armed with chatGPT.
Embrace "-ism" or bend the knee.
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Words gain meaning through usage rather than from first principles, so I'm not sure "accurate" is the right way to describe this. You make a compelling argument for why one ought to call TERFs "sexist" rather than "transphobic," but my sense is that this argument wouldn't be particularly convincing to the types of people who actually tend to use these terms "in the wild" and thus have the most influence in what these terms mean.
Well, is it sexist to say "people with dicks should not be in women's prisons"? Is it sexist to say "people with vaginas should not be in men's prisons"? It's a very cutesy-poo logic-chopping way of approaching the subject, but I think trans activists would be outraged because "trans people are the sex they identify as, you bigot!" and the rest of us think that this is just dumb to say that "you're being sexist against a guy in a bad wig and skimpy dresses pretending to be a woman".
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I think I've already heard this argument on Tumblr in more direct wording; that you really could just leave out the "TE" in "TERF," since trans-exclusion is pretty much just a logical conclusion of honest-to-God man-hating radical feminism. Now, I don't think Rowling herself is an honest-to-God man-hater, but hardcore feminism demands the expurgation of everything male, and there is generally no exemption for "was male once" under the radical wing's ideology. So, you are right in that it is technically just sexism, but flipped.
I suppose I should also use this post to reply to Folamh below and say that, while I'm not sure that normies really do use "sex" and "gender" interchangeably, I think the real reason this argument won't work is more due to the perception that you can't actually discriminate unfairly against men--normies don't necessarily grok anything beyond the simplified narrative of feminism. Granted, I suppose the mainstream is at least weakly trans-sympathetic and thus will also fail to grok what Rowling's actual beef is.
As I mentioned in a previous comment about this issue, normies using the terms "sex" and "gender" interchangeably is common enough to seriously contaminate studies about trans teenagers.
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Well TERF does stand for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist, and while to be charitable to them they don't all hate men, you will probably find more people openly identifying as misandrist among radical feminists than among any other cohort. I don't think Rowling really is a TERF though, she seems like more of a liberal rather than a radical feminist and as she does support people's right to wear whatever clothing they like, to medically transition and she uses their preferred pronouns, she doesn't really seem all that trans exclusionary either.
Yeah, I think there's a strangely small sliver the trans debate is often fought over in practice.
I'm sure there are illiberal trans-exclusionists, but many "TERF-y" people seem to be liberals who just don't want trans people in certain sex-segregated spaces, and maybe have doubts about children transitioning. Even Rowling's original essay-length critique was more about malingering men using trans-inclusive policies to evil ends, and not trans people themselves. (Who knows if that's still her position, or if years of arguing with TRA's online and associating with TERFs has hardened her even against ordinary trans people.)
Even if there's a vast "metaphysicial" gulf between TRAs and TERFs, it seems like in practice the debate over how trans people should be treated really only hangs on a small handful of battlefields. Otherwise, Rowling's position isn't really miles away from trans tolerance in most domains.
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It's pretty obvious that the word "TERF" has disattached itself from its original meaning. Looking at "terfy" forums (like ovarit.com etc.), the "original terfs" - doctrinaire radical feminists - still hold influence, but a lot of posters just seem to be women from originally liberal circles who have become unmoored from them due to trans issues and now hold a mix of views combining elements from "original TERF" radical feminism, liberal feminism, conservative impulses they don't themselves even recognize, and various personal experiences and other stuff.
The "semi-terf" ideology really seems like an ideology in formation, something that could eventually give birth to a whole new outlook separate from original trans-exclusionary radical feminism but isn't quite there yet.
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While in this community we generally understand the term "gender" exclusively to refer to gender identity and the term "sex" exclusively to refer to anatomical sex, normies generally use the two terms interchangeably, and will not be impressed or persuaded by this rhetorical gesture. Rowling's "crime" is that she thinks that there are instances in which a person's anatomical sex is more important than their gender identity, which was sufficient to get her tarred as transphobic.
Right. I'm not making a moral argument here, but I am making a taxonomical one. Even if one thinks that locker rooms and domestic abuse shelters should discriminate on the basis of gender and not on the basis of sex, the two are obviously different. If normies don't distinguish between the two, then either they're all bisexual or have strong cognitive dissonance.
Well, yeah. No offense intended, but are you very new to this discussion? "Cis lesbians refusing to date trans women is transphobic" was an old debate five years ago. No one actually thinks gender overrides sex in all instances; only the anti-woke actually come out and say so.
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Or just think that trans women are (weird) men in dresses, as your 95 IQ redneck generally believes.
Not weird, charitably; mentally ill men in dresses, or uncharitably; degenerate perverted men in dresses.
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The logic of this position isn't founded on anything unstable.
It's not hard to build trans acceptance on an equally stable foundation though. It's not a popular move for TRAs, but I've always felt the "socially/legally adopted sex" model of transness is the way with the least problems, since it really doesn't commit one to any particular metaphysical view of transness, which can then be left as a matter of individual conscience. In a liberal democracy, that seems like a totally satisfactory way to deal with trans people.
It allows for "man" and "woman" to refer centrally to mature gametic males and females, and peripherally to those adopting the "socio-legal sex" of the same, the same way that "parent" refers centrally to biological parents, and peripherally to step-parents and adoptive parents.
Obviously there are differences between "adoptive sex" and "adoptive parenthood." First, the legal fiction of "adoptive parenthood" is justified by the good the parent does for the child and the benefit this provides society as a whole, while the legal fiction of "adoptive sex" would probably be best justified by a harm reduction model for the minority of dysphoric trans people (although I think a transhumanist or ultra-tolerant liberal perspective could also work in a pinch - I just doubt that that would be sufficiently popular with enough people to serve as a proper basis.)
The first-person psychology of the two is very different as well. An adoptive parent probably doesn't consider themselves a parent until after the legal process, whereas a trans person usually considers themselves to already be their identified sex before the law has recognized it.
But I don't think this model would be in any way "unstable" and it doesn't ask the 95 IQ redneck to believe any metaphysical propositions to strain credulity. It doesn't even commit us to maximal trans inclusion - we could have a legal fiction of adopted sex, and still distinguish between adoptive women and natal women where we consider it necessary for fairness or safety.
I appreciate the formulation but I think it has problems. The entirety of the reason it seems less controversial or imposing is because you aren't actually answering the policy questions that cause the debate to go red hot. It's essentially just responding 'no' to the "are trans women women?" question, so the super straight model but on all dimensions. On the other end it doesn't really buy the redneck anything at all either, it's just weird men in dresses that call themselves something different, maybe with some state enforced normalization. It only manages to be consistent by not actually engaging in all the places where other models bite bullets.
Can't the "bullet biting" just be done on a case by case basis? I see no issue with a negotiated settlement like:
Adding trans people to the list of protected classes in society, making it illegal to fire someone merely for being trans, or to deny them service on this basis.
Social transition allowed for minors, medical transition (including puberty blockers) banned or with many difficult hoops to obtain.
In public schools, trans minors participate on the sports team of their adoptive sex in non-contact, non-fighting sports. In fighting sports and contact sports, they participate with their natal sex.
For private sporting leagues, allow each league to judge for itself whether to be inclusive or exclusive.
Require all public schools and government buildings to have at least one unisex bathroom, and let private organizations do what they want regarding who can use what bathrooms. (Perhaps create standardized signage, or a sticker that can be used to let people know a bathroom is trans-inclusive or -exclusive.)
Keep all dangerous sex offenders, regardless of sex in male prisons.
Medical transition legal, but only covered under government healthcare for people with severe dysphoria. (Or limited to cost-effective options like hormone therapies.)
That would results in transgenders dominating every non-contact sport. Biological girls would have no chance at ever winning a sprinting or swimming championship. A lot of girls aren't going to be interested in sports if they have no hope of ever winning.
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If you apply your principles in half the cases, you haven't applied your principles. So I don't think a "negotiated settlement" will work.
There's also the problem you have with immigration or gun control, where any "compromise" becomes the new status quo and you end up constantly compromising on the remaining uncompromised portion. This has sort of already happened.
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The issue is we then wrap around to these compromises not really being founded on a single coherent world model. The trans camp wants full social acknowledgement of their described reality, even the phrase "merely for being trans" falls apart if you don't agree that this is a thing someone can really be. It concedes the entire frame of the condition being a real thing, and any formulation that doesn't concede this would be unacceptable to the trans camp. It's an unstable equilibrium, once the foot is in the door on this stuff it's only a matter of time before sympathetic enough case in sympathetic enough jurisdiction erodes all of these compromises, the question will be asked "well are they women or not" and if you're not able to say "no" then none of these guardrails will survive scrutiny and if you are then they won't be acceptable to the trans camp.
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And from the perspective of your average Bubba or Jimbob or Boudreaux, biting bullets is why mental models exist in the first place. If it doesn't give us answers to the questions anyone actually cares about(is that an ugly chick who can use the woman's locker room while my teenaged daughter is in there, or is it a weirdo dude in a dress and a heck of a lot of makeup who should be prevented from entering?), it doesn't do its job.
I'm not sure I agree that any amount of biting bullets is necessary for the "socially/legally adopted sex" model to function. All that's required is clearly spelled out legal/social policy about where adopted sex matters, and where it does not.
The state could decide important things that need to be decided like what locker room an adoptive woman uses, how anti-discrimination laws will be interpreted re:adoptive sex, or which sports teams they will play on at the high school level in public schools, and then everything else could be left to private organizations to sort out. So for independent sporting bodies for adult athletics, they could all decide on a sport-by-sport or organization-by-organization basis whether it makes sense to group by adoptive sex or natal sex.
The solution lets everyone use their judgement outside of a small group of top-down decisions that remove any confusion for any involved.
I think the bathroom issue is one where, as a practical matter, enforcing a trans bathroom ban is too difficult. It would be much easier to allow people to use the bathroom or locker room of their adoptive sex, and then just make stricter rules about harassment and unacceptable behaviors in bathrooms. With sufficiently strict and well-publicized enforcement, I think it's the best compromise between privacy, safety and accommodation.
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