The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I should have done this to begin with, but I read through some of the stuff that J.K. Rowling is being pilloried for (by some). I didn't really care all that much beforehand, just saw the memes, etc.
I read this article which summarizes her essay, includes some tweets, and includes quotes from a few of celebrities.
I read her essay from 2020
There's not that much in there that I take all that much issue with. I think fearmongering about people fraudulently changing gender to predate women isn't much of a real concern (though I can see how survivors/victims of assault, etc would feel that way). It probably happens but not often. Prisons and shelters already have systems in place already for preventing inmate-on-inmate violence/assault, and clear cases of fraud can be caught (isn't there still tons of inmate-on-inmate violence in prisons anyways? Is the sex of inmates really the issue there?). Could probably make a utilitarian argument that allowing gender change is good enough and improves lives for enough people that 1-in-a-million (this number isn't really fair, maybe it's one in 10,000 or 1 in 1000) cases of fraud are fine.
But I think what you're saying is that even if you don't believe that the trans-in-women's-spaces issue matters, that's the worst of what J.K. Rowling has said, and this can't be construed in good faith as transphobic. Is that right? I don't think transphobic is a good word to describe J.K. Rowling, but I think some of what she said can easily be construed as offensive or threatening.
The reason I say this is cherry-picked is because it's not relevant to the reality of the debate-- it's such a rare example that it's mostly useful for rabble-rousing.
This doesn't necessarily follow. Sometimes a good debate amongst friends is fun. I'll admit that in this instance I was being flippant and making a cultural reference, and that "destroying her with facts and logic" would not be a good approach. What I meant by this was "One approach I am considering is disclosing my true position to her and laying out a reasoned, rational case for why I feel that way."
This is good advice, I am thankful for your responses here. I might try something like "I support you in any of your efforts to boycott the new Harry Potter game. Someone recommended me this cool adblocker that can do keyword filtering on YouTube. [provide reference to uBlocker]. I need to confess that I am not personally offended by Harry Potter content and won't be filtering it out of my own internet experience. I understand that this might offend you, but I value our friendship and want to be honest about my personal and political views. [hopefully this leads to a good discussion about why she feels so offended by J.K. Rowling and the new Harry Potter game and I can further refine my position].
In hindsight this approach would have been preferable to avoiding the subject, if the opportunity presents itself I will give it a try and report back.
Part of the problem is that some of my trans friends have expressed that they don't feel like pushing their views on other people, they would just rather avoid the issue entirely. So I want to be careful about bringing it up to be sensitive to their expressed desires (back to that filtering out offensive shit idea).
More options
Context Copy link