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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32428 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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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.

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.

Wax vehemently denies being racist, and takes umbrage at that word being used. What’s unclear is what beliefs or attitudes the word “racist” denotes to Wax that she doesn’t hold. If one believes, as she has said she does, that Black people are cognitively deficient to other groups for likely genetic reasons, that Northern European people have an objectively better culture than any other group, that America is better off with fewer Asians, what word ought we use?

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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