If someone says it, then you know it

I’ve squandered a lot of time today arguing (hello SIWOTI) with people busy claiming I’m a transphobe or a friend and helper of transphobes or at least someone who doesn’t point and hiss loudly enough when a transphobe walks by – and I was rewarded for my efforts by this staggeringly credulous and illiberal comment:

And you know what? Once someone points out her transmisogyny to you, congratulations. She IS a “known transphobe” to you. You thank them for helping you get yourself together…

After the ellipse there’s a stupid jibe about my getting my feelings hurt, which is not the issue at all.

The issue is the very thing denied by that ridiculous assertion. Oh right, once someone – anyone, everyone, it doesn’t matter who, and don’t you dare ask how that someone knows, or where that someone got the information – “points out her transmisogyny” to me, then I automatically know what that someone just told me, because there is no possibility whatsoever that that someone is wrong, or biased, or malicious, or passing on a claim passed on by forty thousand other people all of whom had no reason to believe it either. Listen up, atheists and skeptics: when someone tells you something, then you know that something, because someone just told you it. Believe what you are told, by anyone, no matter who; it’s the skeptic way.

Honest to fucking christ, what is the matter with people? Why am I supposed to take their word for this kind of shit, especially when they model such godawful epistemic practice themselves? What kind of politics do they think they’re creating, if we’re all just supposed to take everyone’s word for everything?

Guest post: Almost none of the people involved in the school operations were ever interviewed

Originally a comment by Jenora Feuer on The schools, financed by the government but run largely by churches…

never speak in your mother tongue to anyone, fellow student or staff, on penalty of a beating.

Yeah, “Kill the Indian, Save the Man” was pretty blatantly the point of the system. Forced assimilation and conformity. Utterly destroy any sense of being different and actually deserving of respect. Eradicate the local cultures.

Titles like “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” reek of cover ups,

Well, despite Prime Minister Harper officially apologizing on behalf of the federal government at the time this Commission was set up, his actions in general over the years leave little doubt that he’d be happy if that apology were all he had to do and he could just ignore the results.

The fact that the Commission had no authority to offer amnesty in exchange for testimony meant, unsurprisingly, that almost none of the people involved in the school operations were ever interviewed. [Read more…]

The schools, financed by the government but run largely by churches…

About Canada’s residential schools…

The New York Times reports.

OTTAWA — Canada’s former policy of forcibly removing aboriginal children from their families for schooling “can best be described as ‘cultural genocide.’ ”

That is the conclusion reached by the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission after six years of intensive research, including 6,750 interviews. The commission published a summary version on Tuesday of what will ultimately be a multivolume report, documenting widespread physical, cultural and sexual abuse at government-sponsored residential schools that Indian, Inuit and other indigenous children were forced to attend.

[Read more…]

Looking fabulous!

Ok as I’ve mentioned I have reservations about people talking about trans women purely in terms of (a familiar, approved, acceptable, what you might call cisnormative form of) beauty, not least because I think it puts yet more burden on trans women who can’t or don’t want to attain that form of beauty. People on Facebook are saying I’m the worst kind of TERF  as a result. But there are other contexts in which “you are GORGEOUS” seem right even to me.

This tweet by Kadar Sheikhmous gives one such context.

Kurdish women remove dark dress after fleeing #isis west Tel Abyad nr #Kobani.

Oh yeah. That is gorgeous.

But who put them on TV in the first place?

Jill Filipovic has a brilliant piece on the Duggars’ interview.

What viewers got was a long defense of the Duggar parents, a minimization of Josh’s crimes, and a fuller illustration of why a misogynist “purity culture” is bad for girls, boys, and sexual assault victims in particular. What the Duggars proved is that their own self-interest in gaining status, influence, and money outweighed the needs of their own daughters — and that Michelle and Jim Bob aren’t just kooky religious extremists, but parents capable of remarkable manipulation and cruelty.

Nobody’s a kooky religious extremist; that’s not a thing. Religious extremism is too destructive and terrible to be kooky.

Josh comes to his parents to say he’s molested his sisters in their bedroom. They don’t do much beyond feel “devastated” (that word comes up a lot in the interview), watch him closely, and tell him not to do it again. He does it again, this time on the couch. They feel devastated. They watch him closely and tell him not to do it again. He does it again, this time under their clothes. At some point he also molests a babysitter. They feel devastated. [Read more…]

Rerun: Turn the other what?

I wrote this post on March 27, 2010. For some reason it feels peculiarly relevant again today.

The LA Times notices that the pope has a problem. The problem is that instead of just saying ‘We did a terrible terrible terrible thing, and we did it for decade upon decade,’ the Vatican is lashing out at 1) news outlets that report the terrible things the church has been doing and 2) other institutions that do terrible things. This is infantile and disgusting, and it is unworthy of an institution that (to repeat a point I’ve made a few hundred times) purports to have a higher and better morality than anyone else. It is unworthy because it persists in caring more about the self than the object of the terrible actions. This fact all by itself shows that they are if anything morally worse than the majority of reasonably good people. There’s a reason for that. The reason is this: if you become convinced – if you have good reason to realize – that you have caused appalling harm and suffering to another sentient being, then the only thing you should be feeling about that is agonized repentance. That’s all there is to it. Your angushed empathy and regret should simply inundate all self-concerned feelings, blotting them out of your awareness. This is all the more true if you’re a huge powerful age-encrusted institution that is able to command deference and obedience – right down to literal kneeling – from millions of people and even from heads of state, and the sentient beings are underage, small, weak, and defenseless. You should be grinding your head into the dirt with remorse, in the intervals of doing everything you can to repair the damage to your victims. The last thing you should be doing is even thinking about how all this will affect you. Yet the church is doing exactly that. It’s not surprising, but it damn well is shocking.

Earlier in the week, New York’s archbishop, Timothy Dolan, used his blog to dismiss the New York Times’ reports and defend the pontiff’s record by arguing that authorities outside the church also are culpable…Sadly, this latest everybody-is-responsible-so-nobody-is-to-blame defense is of a piece with a little-noticed section of Benedict’s letter to the Irish church in which he seemed to blame the crisis, in part, on “new and serious challenges to the faith arising from the rapid transformation and secularization of Irish society.”

[Read more…]