I got a long condescending mansplaining email from James Billingham today telling me how terrible and telling it is that I refused to answer a question that demanded a yes or no response, and how extremely simple and uncontentious it should be to answer the question with a “yes” end of story.
That claim betrays an unfamiliarity with thinking.
Thinking just doesn’t work like that. If you can answer yes or no, there’s precious little to think about. Yes or no is for simple factual questions, or practical plan-making questions. Is the light on? Did you get milk? Are you ready to go? Did you feed the cat?
Questions that are more complicated than that can pretty much never be answered with a yes or no.
You could demand of me, “Are women equal to men? Yes or no.” I would refuse to answer the question in that form.
Why? Isn’t it simple? Shouldn’t I just say yes, of course?
No, because I wouldn’t even know what was meant by “equal to” – so I couldn’t answer until I did know. Therefore I would have to refuse to answer at all, if the other party had been such an asshole as to order me to answer yes or no.
Jerks will be jerks.
Has James Billingham stopped beating his rentboy?
I’m still confused as to how JB got the job of PC Police Chief. Wasn’t he berating us all for not finding common ground with rape threat trolls and harassers like, 18 months ago?
Oh, so am I, believe me. When I first encountered him he was always popping up to say how hilarious the trolls and harassers are. How on earth he became the World Expert On Trans Issues I will never know.
On the plus side (?), your response did remind me that my job is, in some sense, to actually refuse to answer “yes/no”, but to reformulate into actually useful questions, and then figure out how to answer them and build a model out of them. And I work with people who (mostly) appreciate that. And you often help me think better about things.
Well that’s a very pleasant thing to hear, after the last couple of days. Thank you.
And not for the first time, I say: what a great job you have.
Heh – reminds me of If I offer you a million dollars to answer a yes/no question truthfully – do you accept ? Yes/No?
I find it all bizarrely inquisitorial. I mean this, and earlier related posts, and Alex Gabriel’s “smoke & fire” malarkey.
Some people seem very invested in unearthing some invisible heresy, and damned if I can see the motive.
deepak shetty @7, yes.
Silentbob@8:
And it’s been ongoing. Remember the fury directed at Ophelia for her Charlie Hebdo posts? And every single time, nobody can point to any single deadly sin that she’s committed. It’s all vague feelings, and “I get the impression”, and blah blah blah. Was it you, John Morales, who said recently, that evidence for Ophelia’s supposed transphobia is “always just over the horizon” ? I saw that somewhere and for the life of me cannot remember who wrote it.
MrFancyPants, yeah.
—
Silentbob, consider the consequential ratio of false positive:false negative* by an ideologically-motivated activist person.
* Abhorrent.
John Morales, thanks, I thought it was you but just could not remember definitively.
Sorry you took the email that way, I intended to only explain my own thoughts about trans inclusion and my own view that trans women are women. Not explain to you that this must be the case. Clearly you don’t think that given the post you made on the “Gender Critical Feminism” facebook page.
I will mansplain to you that saying you cannot say trans women are women because of the “trans” bit is possibly the most asinine argument I’ve ever see you attempt! Queer women, black women, disabled women ….
Ophelia: “.. how could it [The question] be unequivocal or uncontentious or not in need of nuance? Why is the word “trans” there if that is the case?”
I guess I should be happy the obfuscation about your trans inclusiveness is over?
“It should be simple to answer the question” is also a fundie dog-whistle. What it really means is that your refusal to answer is a confession of guilt. It “should be simple,” because your answer should be the right answer, and you should be forthright enough to say it. If it’s not “simple,” it’s because your answer is the wrong answer, and you’re not forthright enough to say so–you’d rather pretend you aren’t one of “them,” by lying through omission.
@John Morales
So will you either answer No to this question or will you pay me two million dollars ?
I’m having flashbacks to the eight years of “Whitewater indictments are just around the corner.”
There’s some parallel here with the kind of thinking that reduces reporting on complex issues to ‘both sides.’As if there was always a poised, single, balance between two positions.
Didn’t some goons have a slogan: ‘We report, you decide’…?
Ophelia, your appearance on that daft block bot was an inevitability. As is James Billingham’s, in due course, on his own damn list. Just watch.
Such is the lunatic soul of Social Media and the self devouring nature of the dummies who patrol it.
On Facebook, you asked
(Why is Dawkins straight, white, and male?)
Because trans is the adjective, explaining to strangers and the world at large that the woman is question was incorrectly assigned a different gender at birth. Just as cis indicates that a woman was correctly assigned as female. Critiques that this pronoun system that acknowledges nuanced identities that fly in the face of a patriarchal binary system is “reductive” or essentialist don’t make sense; by acknowledging trans women as women, women are not being reduced to a selection of body-parts. The existence of trans women who also must negotiate and overcome crippling misogyny and a perpetual Catch-22 within a male supremacist culture is not the reason cis women are also expected to identify with and conform to “the patriarchy’s construction” of women.
Your thinking has grown increasingly muddled and inconsistent; on the one hand, gender must be abolished rather than liberated from conformity and convention, but on the other, women must live up to very specific criteria in order to join your elite club (which is lower caste but according to the TERFs you link to, something to be celebrated because women are AMAZING!!1!). You are forever reminding trans women that you don’t “feel” like a woman, but now in the same breath are endorsing those who would gate-keep womanhood by perpetuating retrograde biological myths that don’t apply to all cis women. Trans women did not create a rigid and unyielding gender system and have never had the power to oppress you with the burden of being female.
Please mark this: you have the privilege of not “feeling” female because you’ve never had to explain and defend your female-ness, even having found gender consciousness through feminism. Like white people who feel they have no ethnicity and Don’t See Race, and who are resentful of people of color whom they imagine are overly obsessed with race, who are divisive and self-centered, your identity as comfortably default is being challenged. Now that you’re being attacked by women you perceive to be men, you are experiencing a small sliver of the hostility and uncertainty trans women have always had to confront. It doesn’t feel good.
1. Your thinking has grown increasingly muddled and inconsistent
Of course it has (or it’s been that way all along). Gender is a tricky, confusing, difficult subject. It’s full of tensions. I would like to be able to tease them out and think about them – but being denounced as a transphobe and a TERF is not conducive to doing that.
2. on the one hand, gender must be abolished rather than liberated from conformity and convention
I doubt that I’ve ever said that. I think I’ve said the opposite quite a lot, but not that. It’s not what I think.
3. but on the other, women must live up to very specific criteria in order to join your elite club
I’ve certainly never said that. That’s ridiculous. Also? It’s not an elite club.
3. You are forever reminding trans women that you don’t “feel” like a woman
What does that mean? Why do you say that? Why do you put it in such an accusatory way? Why forever? Why reminding? Why trans women? I’ve written a few posts about how I experience my putative gender. Why are you rebuking me for doing that?
4. but now in the same breath are endorsing those who would gate-keep womanhood by perpetuating retrograde biological myths that don’t apply to all cis women
No. I’m not. I’ve never said anything like that.
Oh, I forgot a bit.
No. You don’t know that, and it’s not true.
You get to define your experience, and I’ll listen, and I’ll try to understand. You do not get to define my experience. Why? Because I’m the one who has had it, and you’re not.
Ophelia,
There are undoubtedly many issues on which we disagree but at least to the extent I think I understand your position on this, I agree with you completely.
Yes, it is. Incorporating the existence and experiences of nonbinary, gender queer, and trans and intergender people provides even further nuance when analyzing gender, which I believe we both agree is a good thing.
I’m not rebuking you. I’m observing that whenever you feel uncomfortable in this discussion because your lived experiences are not identical to other women, you remind (remind because you’ve said it, and then repeat it, and have done over the past few weeks in different posts) the trans women addressing you in comments that you don’t “feel” your gender. You also regularly promote and re-blog cis women saying the same, as you’ve done today, as if it is evidence of something important and damaging. If it is difficult for you and others to “know” that you’re a woman, it does not follow that other women must be exaggerating the decisiveness with which they have discovered and assert their gender. (Which, yes, is at least partially even not almost entirely a social construct; as are all identities. Acknowledging this does not invalidate them or mean that asserting an identity is akin to perpetuating the oppression inherent in its limitations.) As you’re aware, it’s important for the safety and security of trans people to know that their interlocutors, in these discussions and in trans accepting feminist spaces, accept as automatically valid their gender identit(ies), that they will not be obliged to explain the means and ways by which they came to understand (or always knew) that their assigned gender was incorrect or incomplete. That personal history is private, not automatically up for minute dissection.
In short, repeatedly saying you don’t feel gender in the context of these discussions puts the burden on trans people to prove to you specifically that they do.
As for wishing to abolish gender but also police its membership, I believe wholeheartedly that you have expressed these ideas and have endorsed these ideas expressed in greater detail by others (through promoting comments without your own commentary, by linking to trans critical blog posts). But you say you do not, so I accept that as valid. My apologies.
I simply can’t figure out what “but I don’t feel like a woman” is supposed to mean or what argument it’s supposed to be advancing in this extended conversation you’ve been having since (or perhaps slightly prior to) your comments about Caitlyn Jenner.
If it means one individually can’t or is unwilling to conform to the arbitrary conventions and expectations imposed on women, that’s a universal experience. There is no woman who can meet such standards — there are few that would like to, given a real choice — because most of them are contradictory and tied to time and place, anyway. And while the meagre rewards for doing so are not that appealing, many women the world will nevertheless attempt to and, just like cis women, trans women face violence when they fail to perform adequately.
And so I don’t understand the logic behind condemning a trans woman for wearing lipstick while in the next breath celebrating a woman for wearing a certain frock; both signify liberation from one set of standards (oppressive as they are) in order to embody and embrace another set. Are these immoral political choices, lipstick-wearing and frock-donning? Would they continue to be so if we managed to de-cootify them (anything women do, have done, are expected to do, or are perceived to do is automatically an inferior choice, anyway, even in instances, as with vocal fry this past week, in which it’s been proven to be universal)?
On the other hand, not feeling like a woman because womanhood is an entirely or mostly ephemeral idea looks quite odd next to the assertion that only women who “experienced” girlhood count. If woman means nothing and everything, so does girl. Trans women as children were girls, whether they were allowed to identify as such or not. They were not reared in a cushy enclave where no amount of socialization could touch them, no amount of internalized misogyny (and transphobia) could harm them. They experienced the same unrequited yearnings and the same false consciousness, with the added burden that they could tell no one and the nauseating knowledge that disclosing such a “secret” could only ever lead to humiliation and ruin (such are the perils of being female, being trans–both dangerous and mildly disgusting things in this culture).
Again, I don’t think the burden is uniquely on trans women to work out what female and woman mean, as though they are not also burdened by the complexities of gender, as though gender would disappear if only they’d stop calling themselves women (the AllLivesMatter of trans-critical thought). And I’d like to explain that in your earlier comments, I unjustly perceived dishonesty in your repeating you don’t feel female and you don’t know what female is while endorsing feminists who are convinced beyond reason that whatever woman is, trans women are not it. Given what took place here, it seems as though you agree that trans women are not the ones perpetuating an antiquated and essentialist definition of woman, and so my assumptions about your perspective were clearly unfounded. Again, my apologies for the error.
Whoever said that “other women must be exaggerating…” follows?
Are you claiming Ophelia did that!?
Yes. I’m quoting you here, and pointing out a couple of those unwarranted assumptions, not to attack you, but to underscore how (other) people are misrepresenting Ophelia.
As best I can tell, from comments and from following blog entires, the original question was
But here’s the thing: that isn’t a question about women, or trans women, or people, or any actual thing in the world. That is a question about words. For questions like this, I always turn first to our foremost authority on words: Humpty Dumpty.
Someone who angrily demands a yes/no answer to a question about words is either
1. engaged in magical thinking. They believe that by manipulating words that they can affect real things in the world.
OR
2. engaged in 1984-style new-speak. They are trying to define words so as to make it impossible to express ideas that they don’t like.
Given the overall context, new-speak seems more likely in this case than magical thinking.
I think the original question (someone correct me if I’m wrong) was “Do you believe that Trans women are women? Yes or No.” The difference doesn’t invalidate your analysis, but it’s important because the question has been misquoted by so many people that the consequential claims made about Ophelia’s position (at least as far as I interpret it) are quite wrong headed . Heather, writing at Zinnia Jones, certainly fell face first into that – on top of showing a complete ignorance of the nature of a yes/no question.
It seems possible that the questioners intent was to ask the simpler form of the question “Are Trans women women?” But anyone who asks an intellectual writer who parses language carefully a sloppily worded question and then complains about intellectual parsing of the question is some combination of naive, not thinking clearly or not discussing in good faith to begin with.
Intellectuals will do what intellectuals do. You might as well complain about the weather. Discussing something in an intellectual manner doesn’t mean there is no empathy or compassion underlying that intellectual approach. Based on my reading of her own words, I believe that Ophelia is a good person who supports the rights of many minorities and marginalised people, Trans included. the fact that she has an interest/need to discuss the meaning of gender at a level that makes some peoples eyes glaze over doesn’t invalidate that.
arthur@18:
Was Ophelia actually added to the block bot’s list? I was under the impression that one of the admins just added a comment that she had made to their “reporting” page, where they keep what they consider to be evidence for justifying a future block.
I love that comment, Rob. Especially
So so right.
@swmcd
You know, just lately I’ve come to the other conclusion. I think there is some magical thinking going on.
Specifically, there’s a vague notion that Ophelia saying (or not saying) the right words will affect trans people in some way–not as individuals among other individuals reading B&W and responding intellectually and emotionally, but as a group. One of the reasons this is such a Big Fighy is that some people seem to believe that Ophelia saying the wrong words or not saying the right ones on demand is harmful, for some vague and plastic notion of “harm” (in the early days of this conflict, someone actually claimed that Ophelia’s words denied trans women’s right to exist.)
Big Fight.
I quite liked Fighy. Both meaningless and descriptive at the same time.