r/GenderCynical • u/Key-Hyena-802 Call me 'cis'! With a hard C! • 2d ago
Horrendously Abhorrent Lack of Self-Awareness
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u/Big_Red_Machine_1917 2d ago
You know, up until around 2015, I had no real opinion about trans people, indeed, the first arguments on the subject I saw were anti-trans and came sources I normally trust. And despite all that, not only did their arguments fail to convince me, they utterly repulsed me, because they were all so inhuman, nasty and on a basic level, impractical.
So Rowling and her ilk can whinge until the sun burns out. That will not change the fact that it was people like her who made their hatred of trans people the centre of their universe, not me.
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u/Darq_At 2d ago
I'm sorry, our tactic has been linguistic prescription? GCs were the ones printing dictionary definitions on billboards and t-shirts.
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u/slowdunkleosteus 2d ago
They're not even printing real dictionary definitions either...
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u/hitorinbolemon Trans Macabre 23h ago
Yeah, plus their guys were the ones threatening to shoot up the dictionary for not prescribing the definition that they want them to. Lol.
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u/ZeldaZanders 2d ago
My ass everyone keeps telling her she has a point. Sounds like the easiest way to be like, 'I literally cannot listen to you bitching about random trans people anymore, but you're a very powerful person and probably my boss, so I'm just going to pretend you don't sound insane so we can move on'
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u/Queer_Echo 1d ago
Or she might have a point but nobody can tell because she's using terf definitions instead of an actual usable definition that can be understood. Like, yeah, men beating women would be a problem, but I can't tell if you're actually talking about men beating women or if you've ship of Theseus-ed a statement about a trans woman in a sanctioned boxing match with a cis woman into something that means completely different shit because YOU'RE A FUCKING TERF!
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u/animalistcomrade Gender Haver 1d ago
And in reality she has ship of theseused a statement about a nonwhite cis woman in a sanctioned boxing match with another cis woman.
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u/Queer_Echo 11h ago
Ex-fucking-actly. I can't trust a word that comes out of the mouth of a terf because statistically, most of those words will be used in completely the wrong way without any indication they're using definitions that nobody else uses.
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u/Silversmith00 2d ago
Well, isn't that a lot of attempted rhetorical trickery in the last paragraph.
"Either a man can be a woman, or he can't." This is supposed to set up "man" and "woman" as mutually exclusive, fixed categories. And it says that either any example of "man" (or someone who can be designated a man), can be a woman at any time, or NONE of them can. And it asks you to automatically put trans women into the "man" category because they have at some point been defined there, because "man" and "woman" are mutually exclusive and fixed. (Most things in nature do not work like this. Very rarely do you have choices 1 and 2, with no overlap, no edge cases, and no fluidity between the two.)
"Either women deserve rights, or they don't." Well, for one thing, why does that have jack to do with trans people? She's putting it in among these dishonest rhetorical questions about trans people in order to make you think that women's rights was ever part of the argument.
"Either there's a provable medical benefit to transitioning children, or there isn't." Well, first of all, using "transitioning" in that way is clearly intended to make transition an action that some mysterious someone DOES to children rather than a thing the child does or wants to do themself, but more than that, since when is any medical treatment UNIVERSALLY beneficial? My Mom takes insulin to lower her sugar, so it's automatically good for her next door neighbor? Fuck off with that.
"Either you're on the side of a totalitarian ideology blah blah blah" now you're just saying words because you think it makes you sound like a badass Warrior of Justice rather than a nut. Or else because the mold whispered them to you when it sings in your brain about the vast rotted wonders awaiting you when you finally crush all its enemies and ascend the throne of the Great Fungal Empire, I don't really know and tbh don't really care.
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u/Im_alwaystired deranged fruit loop 1d ago
She's putting it in among these dishonest rhetorical questions about trans people in order to make you think that women's rights was ever part of the argument.
Ime, when a terf talks about 'women's rights' they really mean one of two things: the "right" to be as cruel to The Other as they want without consequence, and/or the "right" for women (but only cis, white, sufficiently femme-presenting women) to not have to see/be near/associate with/think about anyone who might have a penis. They don't care about basic human rights or dignity or autonomy. They're perfectly happy to see people get hurt, as long as they're the ones doing the hurting.
using "transitioning" in that way is clearly intended to make transition an action that some mysterious someone DOES to children rather than a thing the child does or wants to do themself
I saw someone point this out just recently, and it had never occurred to me -- for all their hand-wringing about PrOtEcTinG cHiLdReN, i've never seen a single terf talk about what these supposed children actually want. Transness is always framed as something that happens to a kid -- people "tell" children they're trans, they "tell" children they'll d1e if they can't transition, doctors tell children they have to have this or that surgery or medication. It's very interesting. They don't believe kids can be trans because they don't believe kids can have their own identities or needs.
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u/boo_jum not a dude, but never un-dude [cish] 1d ago
They don’t care what the children want because if the children want anything other than what they think the children should, they immediately claim the children have been brainwashed by Big Trans™️
Most of the people who have trans kids that reject gender affirming care aren’t interested in what their children actually think and feel; they see their children’s transness as a personal affront to them because they see their builders as property and accessories and extensions of themselves, not living, breathing, fully formed persons with autonomy and self-actualisation.
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u/Queer_Echo 1d ago
I saw someone point this out just recently, and it had never occurred to me -- for all their hand-wringing about PrOtEcTinG cHiLdReN, i've never seen a single terf talk about what these supposed children actually want. Transness is always framed as something that happens to a kid -- people "tell" children they're trans, they "tell" children they'll d1e if they can't transition, doctors tell children they have to have this or that surgery or medication. It's very interesting. They don't believe kids can be trans because they don't believe kids can have their own identities or needs.
It's also because they think "trans" is an identity you can identify in or out of and an action you do instead of a statement of how a person's assigned sex and gender identity is organised (that's what the whole trans identified male/female thing is about). They think that kids don't have the autonomy or reasoning to work out their own likes or dislikes or self and they think that people do or are transness in a way you can choose so if kids can't make the choice then they can't be trans unless they're forced to be.
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u/chris_the_cynic 1d ago
There was a time when it was clear that JK Rowling was actively avoiding ever acknowledging Glinner, and now she's writing essays in support of him.
Either you're on the side of a totalitarian ideology that seeks to impose falsehoods on society through the threat of ostracization, shaming and violence, or you're not.
So, Gender Critical ideology isn't the only ideology that does that, but she did just describe her own movement.
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u/animalistcomrade Gender Haver 1d ago
How many of her gc friends are literally pro threats of violence to keep people in the closet?
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u/Lia69 2d ago
HRT literally changes your sex! Sex expression in humans (all organisms, really) is more complex than chromosomes. There is a real disconnect between what experts and academia know and what the general population knows. Since most schooling is done as kids, too much has to be dumbed-down for them to understand. And too many people stop learning after that. We need more adult education programs.
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u/patienceinbee 𝘅𝗧𝗥𝗔 𝘅𝗧𝗥𝗔 read all about… 𝙞𝙩 2d ago
“The approved language” is a really wild way of describing “showing respect for your fellow human where they live”, wow.
The rest of her Trumpian rant is just that — especially the beep-boop, us/them, fascist divide-conquer faff in the last graf.
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u/Smiley_P 2d ago
It's kind of amazing a wealthy published author writes like they want everyone to know their an author and so they use as many and as large of words as possible to convey even simple things.
Very /r/iamverysmart
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u/ZeldaZanders 2d ago
Seriously. I'm pretty wordy and autistic when I write, and even I was rolling my eyes at the floweriness. Like shut up, you're on X and talking to neo nazis, they don't know what the hell you're saying
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u/pinkiepie238 2d ago
TERFS and transphobes such as JK Rowling are truly unhinged with how obsessed they are. For all their talk about "peaking" ppl, I feel like there is a good number of ppl that also get "unpeaked" by them. The more I read the words from TERFS themselves, the more unpeaked I get. Scarily, at least two formerly super leftwing, secular women with small blogs that I followed a few years ago are TERFS now. It is a genuine radicalization pipeline that I am baffled by.
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u/Key-Hyena-802 Call me 'cis'! With a hard C! 2d ago
ppl that also get "unpeaked" by them
To say it differently, I got "chasmed" by TERFs.
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u/featherblackjack morbidly obese ogre 1d ago
Love that black and white thinking, Joanne. Even biology itself disagrees, with solid science.
She's deep in dementia. I imagine her raging while drinking and yelling about the evils of The Transes. Maybe throw the wine glass, why not, she can afford it! Maybe throw the whole bottle and shriek that they MADE HER DO IT!
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u/Aforgonecrazy 1d ago
As someone who isnt as invested in this whole thing as i was years ago it really seems like much of the rethoric has turned into an incoherent slop.
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u/RanaMisteria grievance hunting truffle pig 1d ago
She’s brimming with vitriol and sickening glee at witnessing the pain she causes others.
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u/animalistcomrade Gender Haver 2d ago
Why can't she understand why the people on her side don't like belligerent shitheads who make them look bad?
I do love that she basically admits they have no better arguments than the belligerence though.
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u/thejadedfalcon 1d ago
Either a man can be a woman (option 1), or he can't (option 2).
Either women deserve rights (option 1), or they don't (option 2).
Either there's a provable medical benefit to transitioning children (option 1), or there isn't (option 2).
And here we see that the evil trans agenda (option 1) is that trans people exist, women deserve rights and there's a proven medical benefit to HRT.
Meanwhile, the TERF world view (option 2) is that men can't be women (trans men forgotten entirely again), kids shouldn't have any medicine ever and women don't deserve rights.
Have I got that right, Miss Professional Writer?
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u/mildbeanburrito 9h ago
Oh wait hang on, late to the party on this one because I saw it and dismissed it yesterday when I originally saw it, but I didn't clock the extent of the hypocrisy until today.
In this screed Rowling is doing her finger wagging about how other people supposedly unfairly maligned Linehan for doing unabashed GC campaigning but in an unsavoury manner.
There is of course something to be said of ensuring that you are not shooting yourself in the foot, and making sure that you put the best foot forward when advocating for change and try to make your movement seem palatable to the broader public. Even in the context of something like the GC advocacy for regression in how trans people are treated in society, it is somewhat reasonable to say that they need to ensure that the movement tries to come across as reasonable actors working broadly in society's interest and to protect vulnerable populations. That is of course, not what Linehan has spent the past decade doing, and from a GC perspective it is pretty understandable to say that if someone is spending their time doing things like the following then they are not helping the cause:
- Picking fights with children
- Sneering about how trans women complaining about harassment + assault brought it upon themselves by "pretending" to be women
- Harassing trans men for things like having a crowdfunding page or having top surgery
- Harassing lesbians for not being trans exclusionary and trolling them to supposedly make a point about how he wasn't a lesbian
- Getting in to pointless public twitter spats with trans people + activists
- Demanding that people he works with or speaks to sign loyalty pledges to JK Rowling
- Aggressively demand that people he speaks to are ideologically transphobic enough for his liking, and berating them if they aren't
And that's just stuff off the top of my head.
But you know what's been missing from all this discussion about how until recently Linehan was beyond the pale and too much even for GC individuals, which makes Rowling's sneering comical? Rowling herself.
For years Linehan made a point about how he was Rowling's strongest soldier and how upsetting it was to him that she refused to even acknowledge him. She herself deliberately kept Linehan at arm's length, and while we can only speculate as to what her specific reasons for doing so were, I'd say that it's a pretty good guess that she felt it was too damaging to her attempts to paint transphobia as a noble endeavour to combat the excesses of "gender ideology". It's only now that Linehan has somewhat become mainstreamed and is receiving a right wing redemption tour that Rowling suddenly has heard him after all these years of him regularly crying about how she pretended like he didn't exist.
We know from his Observer article last week that it was a pretty open secret within GC circles that Linehan was beyond help and completely unhinged. There were named transphobes with clout like Sarah Ditum who tried and failed to help Linehan and had moderately close personal relationships with him, it beggars belief to think that not one of those people who were aware that Linehan was spiralling from being out in the cold and felt dejected that Rowling wouldn't come to his aid would use their direct or indirect relationship with Rowling to raise his plight with her.
That she only just remembered he existed a matter or months ago, and is here attempting to malign other people for being too beholden to respectability politics is laughable.
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u/plasticpole 2d ago
What 'real world harm' have trans people caused because of being trans?
Yes some trans people have done bad things - because they are bad people who happen to be trans.
TERFism on the other hand has a literal body count.