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Contrapoints released her newest video yesterday. As someone who has found a number of her past videos to be well done and interesting (they're generally better the further back you go), this one was disappointing. Some random thoughts:
Contrapoints made a name for herself through actually engaging with the "alt-right" and by being willing to make real arguments in response to conservatives; now it seems like she's totally bought into some of the worst argumentation styles of the woke left. Most annoying to me is the frequency with which Natalie begs the question by referring to "trans rights" as if they're some unobjectionable, neutral thing that only "bigots" could oppose. Interestingly, the only time she actually concretely discusses a supposed "trans right" (males competing in women's sports), she agrees that there is a debate to be had here. Of course, no mention of kids transitioning, males in women's prisons, etc. Just "trans rights" in the abstract. The one thing Contrapoints is clear about is that not acknowledging that "trans women are women" is at the least "transphobic" (if not a violation of "trans rights" in some hard to define way), which is interesting. What does it mean to be "transphobic"? Could one not be "transphobic" and still refuse to acknowledge that "trans women are women"? Because I would like to say that I'm not "transphobic" on the basis that I don't think trans people should be denied rights that we accord to others, or that they should be forcibly prevented from dressing like women, or even (if over 18) allowed to surgically alter themselves to match their desired gender identity (perhaps with some reasonable safeguards).
I think she makes some good arguments about the fact that there are always limits to debate. She talks about how LGBTQ activists essentially "cancelled" an old anti-gay activist Anita Bryant, with the implication that most people nowadays would agree with that cancellation. Of course, I would simply say that there are meaningful differences between gay activism and trans activism (e.g., gay people were fighting against laws that criminalized consensual behavior between adults; trans people often are fighting to allow children to mutilate themselves). Nonetheless, I do take her point: Arguing against "cancellation" or "illiberal" tactics in the abstract is kind of pointless, because almost no one is a true free speech absolutist here. If, say, someone was going around and gathering a following by literally advocating for the murder of Jews, I think a lot of us would agree that public shaming (at the least) would be appropriate. That means that one must always have some object-level discussion about what people are being cancelled for before one can reasonably argue that any given cancellation is unacceptable. It's hardly a groundbreaking observation, but it's true nonetheless that there must be a line somewhere that would make "cancel culture" type tactics acceptable; we're all just debating where that line is.
Finally, I was surprised to see how much more aggressive Rowling has gotten in her anti-trans rhetoric. Not that I necessarily disagree with her, but it looks like I can no longer say that she's being unfairly smeared as an enemy of the trans movement.
Anyways, I would be curious on others thoughts here (assuming anyone is willing to watch a nearly two hour video by someone most would consider an ideological opponent.
To state a truism, words gain meaning through usage, rather than through some sort of application of logic on first principles. "Transphobia" might have components that imply that it should mean something like "irrational or severe fear/hatred of trans people," but that's not what it actually means. In practice, the people who use the term "transphobia" - and hence the people who most get to define what it means - use it in such a way as to describe people who refuse to acknowledge that "trans women are women" and more generally just disagrees with self-proclaimed trans rights activists on anything trans-related. Obviously that's an imprecise definition, but words tend to have imprecise definitions, and I think, based on observations of self-proclaimed trans rights activists, refusing to acknowledge that "trans women are women" is solidly in the "transphobia" camp.
This looks like the fallacy of gray to me. Yes, (just about) everyone carves out an exception to free speech when advocating for literal murder is involved, but the advocating for literal murder is one of those things that's close to black and white, with many mostly well understood and mostly agreed-upon boundaries. And for things like the kind of things that fall under the "transphobia" umbrella, it's quite clear which side of those boundaries they lie on. This, I believe, is why so many self-proclaimed TRAs claim they're fighting against "trans genocide," in a way to evoke the affect of crossing that boundary, even as each individual specific example of such "genocide" clearly falls on the other side when examined closely. Self-proclaimed TRAs aren't unique or even unusual in this, though.
The problem is that things that seem morally obvious now weren't always so. In the antebellum United States, there were millions of people who thought slavery was totally acceptable, and many others who thought it was in fact a positive good. I think we'd all agree that someone advocating for a return to chattel slavery (at least assuming they had a real chance of success) would justify the use of "cancel culture" tactics today (if anything could), but this simply wasn't a morally obvious truth in the 1850s. You could make a similar argument about Jim Crow, which wasn't all that long ago. Activists would simply argue that their cause is today's slavery/Jim Crow/Holocaust/etc., and I think to justify why their use of "cancel culture" tactics is wrong you have to engage in the merits of their arguments to some degree
You think wrong. I would disagree, and on the strongest possible terms. Not unless that advocating took the form of, say, literal kidnapping and enslaving of people or even calling for specific sorts of actions by his followers to do the like. If someone were to write essays, make YouTube videos, give speeches, run for office on a platform, etc. where they explicitly called for the repeal of the 13th Amendment and legislating the chattel slavery of certain types of people, I would support their right to do so without impediment or difficulty in their livelihood and such. Now, the "assuming they had a real chance of success" is a very difficult theoretical to imagine, as such a world would look vastly different from the current one, but if we're in an environment where someone like me would find chattel slavery to be as obviously morally wrong as the real me does now, it would have to be one where that person also has a very real chance of failure due to the incredibly strong political will to prevent return chattel slavery. And I would direct any and all energy that might have been used in "canceling" this person towards amplifying the voices of the political figures who would defeat this guy and his ilk in the polls, as well as other influential people who could sway opinion in the masses. Perhaps I wouldn't have the energy left over after that to fight against whatever people might be trying to "cancel" this guy, but I would certainly want such "cancel culture" attempts to not exist.
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In other words, they are being intellectually dishonest in order to delegitimize their outgroup and/or views with which they disagree. How is that ok?
I'm not sure it's "ok," but does that really matter? People choose to do things not based on whether or not it's "ok" in some abstract moral sense, but based on whether or not they can get away with it. The people who are defining "transphobia" to mean "disagrees with me on trans issues" seem to be able to get away with it. They're probably being intellectually dishonest - at the very least, intellectually lazy - but it's not like we can impose negative consequences on them for being so. My personal approach is to just embrace and accelerate the redefining; yes, it's transphobia, and transphobia is the morally/logically correct position to take.
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Why was it ok for "homophobia"? I mean, you're not wrong, but the argument applies equally well to things that we've already allowed to become completely ubiquitous, doesn't it?
I don't think it was. Or "Islamophobia", for that matter.
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Homophobia refers to an actual phenomenon --discomfort with or dislike of gays (whether it is aptly deemed a "phobia" is another question). It does not refer to a set of policy beliefs.
Your logic continues to baffle me, sir.
If homophobia is not an actual phobia, what possible purpose is achieved by calling it one? And the claim that it is not used to refer to a set of policy beliefs is beyond credence. I am confident that I can find you an arbitrary number of examples of prominent progressives referring to laws, policies, rules, and so on as "homophobic". Certainly I have not seen a time in my own life where the term was applied narrowly to an actual phobic condition, rather than broadly to anyone skeptical of the LGBT social agenda.
"Homophobia", from its introduction to the public vernacular, has been used to label people who refused to validate homosexual behavior and lifestyles, in precisely the same way that "Transphobia", from its inception, has been used to label people who refuse to validate transgender behavior and lifestyles. Ditto for Islamophobia, for good measure. The entire [thing_we_like]phobia family has, from the very moment these terms were coined, been a weaponization of language, an attempt to frame dissent from Progressive values as mental defect. Such framing is never applied to fears or dislikes or even hatreds that Progressives approve of, only to those of their opponents.
Indeed, the best attempt their opponents have made to do the same thing is "hoplophobia" (fear of weapons), and of course it has not caught on generally, because the progressives control the culture.
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You are confusing the noun and the adjective. I am sure that you agree that some people, and almost certainly most people in the not-too-distant past, had a visceral aversion to / disgust with gay people. That aversion/disgust was labeled "homophobia." The claim that a law or policy is "homophobic" is simply a claim that said law or policy is rooted in homophobia. Just as a practice of refusing to hire Catholic teachers can be labeled "prejudiced" if it is rooted in prejudice.
Now, look at what the OP said. OP did not say, "transphobia" is an aversion to or disgust with trans people, and these laws are transphobic because they are rooted n that aversion or disgust; rather, OP said the exact opposite:
Sure, in exactly the same way that a whole lot of people currently have a visceral aversion/disgust reaction to Trans people. On the other hand, I don't agree that all or even most opposition to the normalization of homosexuality or was reducible to that visceral aversion/disgust, as opposed to more serious social, philosophical, religious or political objections. In the same way, the fact that a lot of people find transsexuals gross doesn't mean that grossness is their only or even main objection to the various demands of the trans movement.
All objections to homosexuality were and are rounded to "homophobia" without distinction, and this was done because it was correctly perceived to be effective. "Transphobia" is being deployed in exactly the same way now, again to great effect. It's the same shit it always was: pretend the only sources of disagreement are stupidity, insanity, or irrational hatred, ignore the legitimate concerns, shout down anyone who objects. And again, this only goes one way; there are no culturally-recognized *phobias for anything Progressives don't like, no matter how irrational, bigoted or divorced from reality their dislike of those things may be.
I did. They're describing exactly what I laid out above: the term is constructed to imply "irrational, unhealthy fear/hatred", and then applied overwhelmingly in situations that do not involve irrational or unhealthy fear or hate. It's exactly the same thing that was done with Homophobia: abusing language to smear the opposition. They're claiming "what it actually means" is based on the objective reality of who it's used on, not on the implication meant by the user and drawn by the listener. This has no impact on "what it actually means", in the sense of the intended message and the received message.
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Yes, it does. The phrase "internalized homophobia" is typically used specifically to equate homophobia-as-in-active-opposition-to-homosexual-coexistence and homophobia-as-not-privileging-homosexuality-above-heterosexuality.
The latter, of course, is what progressive political policy seeks to establish (the best example being plastering the Pride flag everywhere; if all sexualities are as equal as all religions, the State should not be [doing what equates to] plastering symbols of Islam everywhere).
No, "internalized homophobia" is homophobia by gay people: "Among lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals, internalized sexual stigma (also called internalized homophobia) refers to the personal acceptance and endorsement of sexual stigma as part of the individual's value system and self-concept. It is the counterpart to sexual prejudice among heterosexuals (Herek, Gillis, & Cogan, 2009)."
And see here
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...Does this apply to "Groomer" as well? I mean, I think the argument is spurious in this case and not actually what's happening with "groomer", but doesn't this position completely undermine the arguments of those who disagree with me?
That is exactly the meaning that both the people using it evidently intend, and the people listening to them evidently derive from their arguments. If words derive meaning through usage, where can that meaning possibly come from but how they're used and understood?
I do think it applies to "groomer" as well, and the people who call others "groomers" for advocating for minors to take steps towards transitioning, particularly in-secret-from/overruling their parents may very well be successful in their (re)defining of the term. Who knows how it will play out; certainly it's being pushed back on heavily, not least because "groomer" is a slightly more generic word than "transphobia."
This is a fair point, and the other half about how they're understood is something I didn't consider properly above. What I think is happening is that the people using that term are relying on the inertia of the term to get the people who listen to the term to experience negative affect from the term. That is, when someone hears "-phobia," it automatically triggers a sense of observing some sort of irrational/severe fear, hatred, or bigotry, and the people using the term are relying on this. However, the actual concrete thing that they're describing do not fit those things; they're merely things like disagreeing that trans women are real women. This is probably an intentional tactic, learned from observing the success of similar usage of other terms like "misogyny" or "white supremacy" in similar ways. As they say, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, and so they're able to bankrupt plenty of their perceived enemies along the way while the market sorts itself out and figures out what they actually mean when they use these terms.
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Of course it does, but why should that matter? Nobody is going to be swayed because from a descriptive linguistic stand-point, "groomer" means X and "transphobia" means Y.
The people who say something like, "J.K. Rowling has never said anything that is transphobic" and the people who say that she has, don't necessarily disagree about what she has actually said. They disagree about whether what she said is bad or not.
The people who say something like, "Left-wing groomers are brainwashing children to mutilate themselves" and pro-trans people, don't necessarily disagree on certain statistics like the number of transitioners or detransitioners. They disagree about the causal web that leads to that, and whether schools with more permissive policies nudges the causal web towards bad outcomes or not.
Because a lot of people here have spent a fair number of comments accusing people who use the term "groomer" of playing deceptive word games, of using the term to insinuate a false picture that can't be supported by facts, and now someone is arguing in a top-level comment that this exact strategy is totally acceptable when Progressives do it. I'm highlighting the fact that these two viewpoints are contradictory.
Blues objecting to the term "groomer" have insisted (incorrectly, in my view) that "groomer" exclusively refers to preparing a child for pedophilic rape, so applying it in the way you're saying is uncharitable and waging the culture war, in exactly the way OP refuses to recognize for "transphobia".
Being one who made that argument, that wasn't what i said. Groomer does have other connotations but how you frame it is part of which connotation you are trying to communicate.
If groomer as its use is intended by people "attacking" trans ideology had positive or neutral valence then it wouldn't be an attack. So it wouldn't be a problem. Their communicative intention HAS to have specific negative valence otherwise they are not actually criticising trans ideology. As they tell us they are (and we should believe them!) then we can infer their intended meaning, ie, the negative usage of grooming.
If they said "that groomed teen sure looks shiny and new and resplendent while transitioning" then they might be refering to grooming in the looks sense. But thats a positive not a negative!
If they don't mean that grooming is bad then why use it as part of an attack?
That grooming can be (and often is!) used in positive ways doesn't mean people complaining about kids being groomed into becoming trans mean it positively. Because if they did then they aren't complaining, they are being supportive. Which does not appear to be the case i assume you agree?
If you are telling me they mean in the positive sense of grooming your sucessor, or grooming a horses mane, or grooming yourself to look better, then are you saying conservatives are pro-trans?
Can’t it be both?
“Groomer” is an insult and an attack. Both sides know this. It would be foolish to deny it.
BUT I think it’s also an apt description of a certain pattern of behavior that Very Online trans people engage in. Kid joins a discord, says he’s having trouble fitting in with the other guys at school and he doesn’t feel “manly” enough, people start telling him “hey why don’t you use she/her pronouns for a while and see how it goes, oh by the way there’s a guide for DIY HRT pinned in the #resources channel”… I think it’s accurate to refer to this as “grooming”.
It’s kind of like how “stupid” can be both insulting and true.
Call it "proselytizing".
You know perfectly well that "grooming" as an insult typically means something like "mentally conditioning a vulnerable victim to agree to a sexual relationship with the perpetrator". By talking about "grooming", you implicitly bring up this sexual aspect of the conditioning. Do trans activists want to have sex with trans children?
If you mean "mentally conditioning a vulnerable victim to adopt the same belief as the perpetrator" instead, that's what churches do. Physical harm? Circumcision and Hussainia qualify. Targeting minors? Actually banned in Israel. Negative connotations? Everyone dislikes JWs going "Do you have a minute to talk about our lord and savior?"
I would once again like to remind people that at the height of metoo it was not uncommon to use "grooming" to describe consensual relations between adults, and that progressive literature used a broader definition of the word until the it was used against them, for example:
"Grooming is the predatory act of maneuvering another individual into a position that makes them more isolated, dependent, likely to trust, and more vulnerable to abusive behavior. Grooming is a insidious predatory tactic, utilized by abusers. Grooming is practiced by Narcissists, Antisocial predators, con-artists and sexual aggressors, who target and manipulate vulnerable people for exploitation."
"In this phase, the predator will start to use the target to meet their needs. With children, this is generally sexual in nature, but predators will use victims for money, to accomplish morally questionable things for them, or even just to fill an emotional need."
"While grooming is often associated with sexual abuse, it can be as simple as filling an emotional need. For example, a boss grooming a direct report to fill a narcissistic need for superiority. When a target fights back, or confronts their offender about what is taking place, the groomer will use gaslighting tactics to keep them within their control."
Converting other people's kids behind their parents back is a big nono, and would at the very least get you labelled a cult, and no one would balk at "groomer" either, but that's not what most churches do.
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I completely agree! Trans ideology is a type of religion, and what they do is a type of proselytizing.
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Sure. And the argument, from you and others, is that the only specific negative valence attached to "grooming" is from pedophilia, correct?
Nope. But when used in reference to kids with the rhetoric being used then its intent is clear. And this isn't some secret. From Red State talking about a teacher assisting a child socially transition:
“This is the very definition of child predatory sexual grooming. Predators work to gain a victims’ trust by driving a wedge between them and their parents.”
Another article
"They want grooming and pedophilia to be something our society embraces.…"
And another:
"Yet you have people on the left side of the aisle who seem to have issues when Americans call out pedophiles or groomers. …"
They aren't talking about being groomed into a cult or a terrorist group. The language is very specific. Wedding together the concepts of grooming and pedophilia so the connotation is clear, when it is used on its own.
I also want to point out, this is a smart and useful thing to do. Its good strategy. Out in the world its exactly the type of rhetoric I would have suggested back in my days of political consultancy. From a pragmatic point of view the right should hit this hard. It's effective.
But here i think we should at least admit when our side uses things as a weapon. Doesn't mean we have to put the weapon down! But we try to discuss, not wage the culture war.
And just to be clear this is not a right only issue. Nazi is a weapon wielded by the left for people who are kind of on the right and "therefore" a Nazi. Its a rhetorical weapon. Fascist, similarly. Trump is not a Nazi or a fascist. He's not an existential threat. Those are weapons used against him. And..some people actually believe it. Just as some people on "your" side probably do believe its pedophilic grooming. But its still a weapon. And both can have collateral damage.
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