Putting the “Judge” in “Prejudice:” Siobhan in compos mentis

Putting the “Judge” in “Prejudice:” Neutralizing Anti-discrimination Efforts Through Mischaracterizing the Motives for Prejudice

Abstract

In 2018, Kate Manne argued that framing misogyny as hatred of women had the effect of neutralizing efforts to organize against it. She held that criteria for “hating women” were so rarely met that virtually no one could be said to have done so. Taking for granted that the situation against women was unfair, she argued that those who sought to correct the situation should reconceptualize what misogyny means: not as hatred, but rather understood by its perpetrators as righteous punishment for violating a perceived moral code. I argue here that every point she made against “misogyny as hatred of women” is at least applicable to “transphobia as hatred of transgender people.” I say instead that this character of righteous punishment is also well-evidenced in negative responses to the civil advances of transgender people, and invite the reader to consider what this would mean from a policymaking perspective.

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Free for whom? On Meghan Murphy’s speech

Meghan Murphy has exactly two possible explanations for my existence: I’m either lying; or I’m deluded.

It must be said that in the months this post took to write, the moral panic against trans people has accelerated a breakneck pace. Maya Forstater made headlines for arguing she had a right to abuse trans people at her workplace, a paper in Australia published 68 articles rooted in anti-trans conspiracies, half a dozen faceless astroturfing campaigns mysteriously appeared with swanky websites and generous, unsourced financial backers. And, as you guessed, Murphy launched a speaking circuit where she will no doubt repeatedly state how censored she is–a contradiction that she and her fellow travellers will quietly ignore.

Trawl the hashtag #TakeBackTPL (Toronto Public Library) on Twitter, used to track the protest against Murphy’s speaking piece for TPL, and another curious dichotomy will begin to emerge: Meghan Murphy’s supporters will consistently make platitudes about the principle of free speech (whilst remaining vague and unclear as to what, precisely, Murphy’s speech is); and trans people and our supporters will tell you exactly what Meghan Murphy has said, even if we aren’t always clear about why it’s immoral to say it.

Consider the statement, “I’m in pain.” Right now, I am in pain! I’ve been struggling with a flare-up of tennis elbow which may or may not be a chronic condition. At the height of a flare-up, the pain can be quite debilitating. But can I prove it? What happens when you ask me to prove it? What neutral, measurement-based evidence can I provide to support the claim? There exists no tool to stick in my arm and declare “she’s measuring at 4.5 whines out of 10.” I could double over and hold my arm, complain when asked to use it, drop groceries or dishes to make my point–but there is nothing stopping you from replying that it’s all an act.

How do I know it to be true? I feel it. It’s quite intrinsic. I didn’t need to perform pain by dropping dishes or groceries to prove that I felt it to myself–the act of feeling it made it true. But how do you know it’s true? The skeptic could reply, “you’re clearly exaggerating!” and I would have no empirical way to dispute that. Everything I could do to try and reinforce the fact that I am feeling pain in my elbow, from grimacing to crying, can be handwaved away as further play-acting. How do you know it’s true, the same way you know it’s true my pen will drop to the floor when I let go of it?

You don’t. The information is unknowable to you except by the act of my telling you, either in words or body language. In comparison to gravity, the closest you can ever achieve is a sneaking suspicion. I can know it to be true whether I am in pain, and you can know it to be true whether you believe me, but these views cannot be reconciled with observation and experimentation (“BASIC SCIENTIFIC FACT” as the rhetoric goes) to “break the tie.”

That entire process I walked you through is a good analogy for the Meghan Murphy dialogue. I started with a claim about morality, which I will defend in a moment. But the dialogue pivoted without being explicit about it. We switched from a claim about ethics, to a claim about ~epistemology~– or instead of talking about “morally right” and “morally wrong,” we started talking about “factually right” and “factually wrong.” This unspoken gear-change is why so many people don’t “get it” or can’t explain the protest against Meghan Murphy. I’m asking for assistance taking my groceries up the stairs because I can’t bear a load with my fingers, and she’s telling me to prove it, then accusing me of lying when I try to honour such an awkward request. The pain of my tennis elbow is immaterial to someone who has decided it is not true, and they have the option to unilaterally decide it is not true because I am the only one feeling it.

The crux of the matter, then, is the morality of making that unilateral decision, intertwined with the politics of credibility and the meeting point of knowledge and ethics. This is why it is incorrect to describe opposition to Murphy solely in terms of factual disagreement (though she is also factually incorrect at times)–the claim, at least some of the time and in particular in #TakeBackTPL, is that her work is morally objectionable, not merely inaccurate:

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Calgary Physician Calls Transgender People “Demented, Distorted”

Below is the result of an investigation that was originally commissioned by a Canadian news publication. The piece was killed two days ago. I believe the findings to be important enough that it is in the public’s interest to be reported regardless. I discuss further after the piece.

 

A Calgary pediatric surgeon employed by Alberta Health Services has taken to social media to call transgender people and their supporters “soft headed” and “dangerous,” among numerous other inflammatory remarks.

Between November 18, 2018 and December 21, 2018, Dr. Jacob Edward Les wrote several articles at length on his website, during which he described being transgender as “identifying as a cucumber” and compared them to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, an anecdote by neurologist Oliver Sacks on a patient with visual agnosia. In another post, he wrote that teaching children about the existence of transgender people amounted to “indoctrination,” and that androgyny occurs “as a civilisation is starting to unravel.” Responding to a January 9, 2019 article from the Daily Mail about a transgender man giving birth, Les described support for the man as “blithering idiocy” and said that the child would be born into “distorted transgender reality.”

Shortly after I attempted to authenticate the social media profiles, Les deleted his Twitter and several blog posts. His Twitter was restored on Jan. 28, 2019, along with a new blog post stating “How dare you impugn my integrity and professionalism?” after characterizing the Canadian Medical Association’s findings on gender dysphoric youth as “conjecture.” He also included several remarks directed at me after I wrote that I was looking into medical ethics governing bodies in Alberta that can receive complaints. “[Trans activists] seem unable or unwilling to make their points without hurling F-bombs or insulting their interlocutors in the most vile manner possible,” wrote Les.

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Trans Activism and the Success of the Victim

If you’re on social media and separated by no more than one degree to trans media spaces, you’ve likely heard about the days-long continuous charity livestream of video essayist Hbomberguy. He promised to host an uninterrupted livestream of a 101% completion of the Nintendo 64 game, Donkey King 64, while collecting donations for a peer facilitator group for trans and gender questioning youth in the United Kingdom called Mermaids. When I started drafting this post, he had raised over $150,000 and streamed 38 hours uninterrupted.

Why now? Hbomberguy admits that he doesn’t know much about trans issues (which in the internet age of rewarding confident but wrong punditry, is something to be applauded), except that trans people should be supported and that that support shouldn’t look like calling us frauds or trying to change our minds. But another reason is that a former comedy writer turned full-time anti-trans activist, Graham Linehan, has been repeatedly defaming both Mermaids and its CEO, Susie Green, with his latest stunt being a social media campaign to revoke the charity’s funding earmarked by the National Lottery Fund (it’s currently “under review,” presumably a second time, since you have to be “reviewed” to be earmarked in the first place). Hbomberguy wanted to perform the stream in part to spite him, as evidenced by a donation incentive jokingly titled “Erase Graham Linehan From History”

His last motive, which is that he never completed the game as a child and wants to do so now as part of his enthusiasm for video game speedrunning, is self-explanatory.

Months prior to Hbomberguy’s tremendous success, an incident circulated among journalists that was significant for its explicit detail. Harron Walker reported for Jezebel on leaks that proved the existence of a secretive listserv populated by nearly 500 journalism insiders, in which several conversations were held to workshop Jesse Singal’s slanted and ethically questionable coverage of trans issues, alongside at least one confirmed attempt to defame a trans journalist. If the listserv contains any trans journalists, they’re closeted, as known trans people are excluded by design. In other words, the media’s frequent inability to cover trans issues fairly isn’t merely convergent incompetence and arrogance, but is at least in part the result of an explicit conspiracy to discredit us as authorities on ourselves while simultaneously privileging cissexist coverage as reliable. However, there was one particular line from Jesse Singal that came to mind from this incident during Hbomberguy’s livestream that’s bothered me enough to write about it.

Singal’s privileging of cissexism is no better demonstrated than his first foray into writing about trans issues, when he wrote a fawning apology for Kenneth Zucker in New York Magazine. As part of his piece he contacted three trans women, including Dr. Julia Serano (whose PhD is in biology, and whose published work includes numerous contributions to gender variance as a topic). All three of his trans sources informed him as to what the research actually says and where he should look to get a complete picture of the problem. He used none of them in the final article. And that brings me to my bother.

The leaked conversations revealed by Jezebel include the line from Singal seared into my brain ever since I saw it:

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Media debates

Juno Roche reflects on the sustained onslaught of misinformation published lately about trans people, especially in the British press. While I’m a bit dubious as to how their reflection concludes, I thought I’d still share it:

Then something changed. People started to ask more questions about the spaces in which trans bodies, they felt, might collide with theirs, with others, with cis bodies. How would we manage the spaces in which we might mix; toilets, changing rooms, prisons, swimming pools, marriages, beds, dating? The question of how would we keep these spaces safe started to become a narrative – first innocent and then toxic.

Often I’d sit in a room discussing trans pupils and their aspirations, and the toilet issue would come up. Somehow the trans pupil, often between the ages of eight and 15, would change from being brave and wonderful, to being perceived as a danger – a potential rapist, aggressor, abuser or assaulter. I defended these pupils, feeling that people would realise the spite inherent in their often hysterical unfounded fears. And so I would bat back and forth: the facts we had that there had been no cases of trans children abusing others, in fact quite the opposite; trans kids being bullied right across schools; trans kids dropping out of school and becoming fearful non-attendees. I felt that if I presented the truth and a sense of moral reality around these brave kids, then there would be an end to the panic and a sense and sensibility would be restored. But then the insidious concept of ‘trans femme as dishonest male danger’ started to grow legs and leave the playground, the myth splashed across the news.

It only takes one voice to make that happen.

Read more here.

-Shiv

Friendly fire

I mentioned in my last “real” published piece that a lot of self-declared left leaning media outlets were seriously shitting the bed in their coverage of trans issues. As it turns out, one of the mother’s anonymously interviewed for one of the pieces I criticized–Katie Herzog’s “They Were Transgender–Until they Weren’t”–has echoed many of my concerns.

I didn’t pull this two-in-one-hundred ratio out of nowhere. I got it from the articles themselves, which both quote a Swedish study in which just 2.2 percent of transgender people experienced “transition regret.” That means the other 97.8 percent didn’t. Herzog cites a therapist who had worked with transgender clients for more than 20 years, who “knows of only one client who fully transitioned and then later detransitioned.” (Let me just restate that: One client in twenty years.) The program manager of the Seattle Children’s Hospital Gender Clinic told Herzog that they have “never had a patient fully transition and then transition back.” (Never? Never.) And both articles point out that the number of people who regret their nose jobs is eight times greater than transgender people who regret their medical transitions. It’s actually kind of bizarre how these authors carry on about the perils of transition while simultaneously citing statistics and quoting experts that illustrate the rarity of both transition regret and detransition.

…

Perhap the most troubling feature of both of these articles is that they are, strictly speaking, largely “true” (with the notable exception of the bogus 66-80 percent statistic). Yes, some people change their minds. Yes, peer pressure exists. Yes, transition is not without its risks and complications. These are all important points to make. What’s wrong here is that the choices the authors have made about what to include and not to include add up to a highly misleading whole, one that makes transition look a lot scarier and more controversial than it actually is. When you’re telling a story, everything hangs on which details you include and which ones you leave out. For example, Herzog and McCann both highlight the potential health risks of taking cross-hormones, but make no mention of the far greater health risks that transgender people face: The widespread lack of access to any kind of quality medical care, let alone health care that is responsive to the particular needs of transgender patients. They also makes no mention of the alarmingly high rate of suicide attempts among trans people (upwards of 40 percent; but this rate goes down when people are able to transition). I’d call suicide a pretty significant health risk, wouldn’t you? Nor do either of them mention the fact that research shows children who transition exhibit levels of psychological health indistinguishable from their cisgender peers. In pieces that purport to be represent balanced presentations of the pros and cons of supporting the transition of young people, surely this kind of information merits inclusion, no?

It’s a long read (cis journalists come up with a lot of bullshit!), but there is more here.

-Shiv

“Ridiculous straight panic” is my new band name

Take it away, Samantha Allen:

Remember how I joked that that there aren’t enough of us—something like 1.4 million transgender people in the United States—to go around? Our rarity also makes the internet a lifeline for us—just as it is for any other minority—allowing us to connect with each other across great distances and feel less alone.

So it’s especially unfortunate that we can’t talk about a vast swath of human experience without being surveilled by people who are obsessed with hating us.

Those haters act as if we’re complaining that no one wants us when what we’re really complaining about—more often than not—is that the people who do want us can’t seem to be chill about it.

The same survey that found that 27 percent of Americans wouldn’t be friends with a transgender person also found that four percent of Americans said that they had been on a date with a transgender person in the last year.

Considering that just 0.3 percent of the population is estimated to be transgender, that is staggering. Unless there’s a small handful of transgender people who are cleaning up while everyone else stays home, it means that a great number of us are dating. But tellingly, the survey also found that over 25 percent of people wouldn’t tell anyone if they did have sex with a transgender person.

The fact that transgender people are desirable is one of society’s worst kept secrets. And people are still trying to keep that a secret because they’re worried what other people would think about them if they slept with us.

I’m so over this panic, too.

Read more here.

-Shiv

A misogynist by any other name would smell just as putrid

On August 10 earlier this year, I concluded that the weakly supported theory of autogynephilia (AGP) remains popular among a certain subset of sexologists because of its utility for dismissing trans women. A careful look at the methodology that produced the theory quickly demonstrates its fatal flaws, and yet the theory is, to this day, occasionally cited as a reason to dismiss a trans woman’s opinion as unreliable. In brief review, the theory posits that there are two (and only two) etiologies by which gender dysphoria is produced in trans women: The first, the bizarre and easily falsified notion that it is easier to be a trans woman than an effeminate gay man; the second, sexual arousal at the thought of oneself as possessing culturally female attributes. The former are confusingly named “homosexual,” (as in women attracted to men), the latter “heterosexual” (as in women attracted to women). Science!

Ray Blanchard was only able to propose this conclusion by ignoring vast portions of his data and framing his subjects as liars, thus rendering his theory unfalsifiable when tested with his own methodology. The theory, naturally, doesn’t pan out when investigated by Blanchard’s peers.

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Speaking different languages

Yesterday I recommended a humorous and justifiably salty piece by Sex, Drugs, and Mental Health regarding the predictability of anti-trans claims. Today I want to switch modes to one of their more serious recent pieces about the problem of ignorance. The author writes a good blag:

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Social constructionism in sex

My inestimable colleague Crip Dyke reminded me that I’ve never justified the vocabulary I use in my writings on trans issues. In her post, “Every Other Trans Person is Wrong,” she explains that consensus is seldom achieved among minority communities, and yet this does not excuse inaction in the face of oppression on the part of majorities. It’s true–I couldn’t possibly hope to wrangle in the entirety of all trans people on the planet, but she is correct when she writes elsewhere that my word choices on trans issues are deliberate and calculated to achieve specific ends, despite the lack of universal agreement among those for whom the terms may apply. So today I’d like to show my work and demonstrate that calculation. I can’t form The Official Consensus of Teh Trans, but if you understand why I use the words that I do, you’ll be better equipped to respond to differences of opinion within the trans community, and thus the lack of apparent consensus may be less intimidating in your wish to materialize your good will towards trans folk into substantive action. (This post obviously assumes you have that good will. If you don’t, that’s a tirade for another day.)

Content Notice: I am going to invoke cissexism and endosex supremacy specifically as a means to discuss it. In addition there is a sex ed component where I show variations in genitalia in a non-sexualized fashion, but in our sadly unenlightened society that is nonetheless NSFW.

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