It’s useful to look at who your friends are. Who is defending the Intellectual Dork Web
? Why, it’s the far-right conservatives, of course, like David French of the National Review Online. He’s got an angry defense, primarily of such right-wing luminaries as Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson, that is dotted with the usual buzzwords: “Identity politics! Political correctness!” But it’s also interesting to see what ideas he thinks are worth defending from the Identitarian PC Hordes of his imagination:
My email inbox is often a clearinghouse for dissenters from corporate America. They’ll forward me all manner of corporate communications in which their bosses establish definitive company political positions on all manner of hot-button political and cultural topics unrelated to their business. Banks, insurance companies, and technology companies produce statements about gun rights, fund Planned Parenthood, and conduct “diversity training” sessions that would make an Ivy League gender-studies department stand up and cheer. An employee “transitions,” and rather than relying on the good will, manners, and professionalism of an otherwise collegial and functional office, the company brings in “trainers” to teach a roomful of people in no uncertain terms that gender is different from sex, the man they worked with for years is a woman and always has been a woman, and dissent from these highly contentious positions is pure hatred and bigotry.
And everyone knows what happens to bigots in the workplace.
They rise to CEO positions, get appointed to the Supreme Court, elected to the Senate, or become President of the United States? Is this a trick question?
Curious, though, that what has steam coming out of his ears is gun legislation (we need more of it, I would think that’s obvious), Planned Parenthood (a good organization that provides necessary services to women), and … trans people’s rights? He seems most irate that we aren’t just shutting up and trusting in the good will, manners, and professionalism of an otherwise collegial and functional office
, which would be hilarious if it weren’t so harmful.
Remember, this tirade is primarily in support of Ben Shapiro, that man of good will, manners, and professionalism
, who has declared that “(1) Being trans is a mental disorder and trans folk need psychological help, (2) If you are born with X genitalia you are X gender, (3) Forcing people to treat trans people as their preferred gender is ‘thought policing.’” If we’re supposed to rely on the good will, manners, and professionalism
of Ben Shapiro and David French, that’s a pretty good argument that the offices of the National Review need some diversity training.
I haven’t forgotten, either, that Jordan Peterson was launched into notoriety by his ill-founded protest against pronouns and laws that would give trans men and women equal protection under Canadian law. Bigots, all. Shouldn’t we be calling them out?
Bigots are certain that everybody else is a bigot, too. It’s just that (a) some of them are the wrong kind of bigots—the ones who hate straight Christian white men with money, and (b) the rest of them pretend they’re not bigots in order to signal their virtue and curry favor with bigoted feminazis and race hustling identity politicos.
But basically, we’re all part of that big brotherhood of haters. Let’s all grab a beer and throw it at someone!
Corporations get to do what they damn well please: isn’t that one of their “rights” under capitalism? So, what is he whining about?
If dissenters don’t like the policies that the company has decided will prevail in their workplace, they can work somewhere else. That’s the free market, which should be completely free and unregulated because that is the only thing that upholds society in conservatives’ eyes, right?
So, if your company is so awful as to decide to uphold trans rights, donate to Planned Parenthood, have a position on gun control and actually *not tolerate bigots* (!), then get out.
I agree with Kip T.W. They know they are bigots and expect we are as well. There are excuses for the bigotry, and it isn’t constant.
They have a point – to some extent we have lots of different ways we see various parts of the world, and we all have elements where we might not notice our biasses and bigotry. But the biggest bigots are *proud* of their bigotry.
.
“Unrelated to their business”? No. Substitute “stakeholders” for “business” — employees, shareholders, customers, contractors, and so on do care, it’s not just profits and pay and dividends: To see this, substitute “child rape” for “gun rights”, “daesh” for “Planned Parenthood”, and “chemical warfare for “‘diversity training'”: .
Unrelated? Perhaps. Inappropriate? No. Hot-buttons, political, or cultural? No — those are some of the things stakeholders do not support, condone, or tolerate: It’s not just profits and pay and dividends.
Somehow I don’t think he has a problem with bosses denying women access to proper health care on religious grounds. What a hypocritical motherf*cker.
Why, yes, bigots never consider themselves bigots, and racists never consider themselves racists, and Nazis never consider themselves Nazis. They think “bigot”, “racist”, and “Nazi” are meaningless slurs that do not refer to actual people with actual ideas.
At the recent le penazi conference here in France, Steve Bannon said:
This same twisting was also recently exhibited in London, (The bellowing eejit in this case was Tommy Robinson, a former leader of the English Defence League (read: nazis).)
garnetstar@2 and Erlend Meyer@5 have it nailed.
Your employer refuses to offer health care or recognize a union? Tough luck. Quit and go find another employer who will, and if it’s really so damned important to you peons, then eventually market forces will compel all employers to do so.
Your employer wants its workers to treat trans people with respect? You’re being oppressed!
Your employer donates to causes you don’t like? Umm, before I answer, which causes are we talking about here?
Bigots, by definition lack self-awareness and “enjoy” throwing demeaning labels on anyone different than themselves.
// or so my bigotry against bigots tells me. /sigh
seems we’ve been infiltrated with bigots, enough to get ensconced in all 3 branches of our government.
?
You know what? I don’t think trans people should be expected to rely on the “good will, manners, and professionalism” of people who use scare quotes around the word “transition” and whine about how unfaaaiiir it is that being deliberately awful to a trans woman is socially unacceptable (in a few circles, at least).
If we could rely on “good will, manners, and professionalism of an otherwise collegial and functional office” WE WOULDN’T HAVE THIS F*CKING DISCUSSION!
Peterson’s protests against the Canadian bill were not even in good faith. Nowhere in the bill was their any talk about forcing the use of pronouns. Instead, trans-persons were added as a class that could not be discriminated against. I really can’t understand why protecting people from hate is a bad thing
Complaining about “identity politics” is just a way to shut down discussion of discrimination. You can’t stop people from being treated unequally if you don’t acknowledge what they’re being treated unequally for, like their race, gender, or sexual orientation. You may as well accuse the suffragettes or MLK of “identity politics”. Beyond denying the reality of certain groups of people being targets for bigotry, assholes like French use this argument to try to make it seem like opposing bigotry is inherently wrong. They refuse to acknowledge their own bigotry or that of others, and then accuse the people who call them out on it of being divisive.
Complaining about identity politics is identity politics. It is white identity politics.
@rietpluim:
+1
If we could rely on the “good will, manners, and professionalism of an otherwise collegial and functional office”, we wouldn’t be having yet another public fscking argument (#MeToo) about the prevalence of sexual assault and why it isn’t cute, fun for everyone involved, or polite, much less legal. When we can rely on the “good will, manners, and professionalism of an otherwise collegial and functional office” to ensure the average woman is able to get from one end of a working lifetime to the other while receiving as few sexual propositions from their co-workers as the average man, then maybe we can trust it to work for some of the other stuff. Until then, it’s going to be annual seminars about “what constitutes sexual harassment, and why it isn’t acceptable”, as well as regular training classes about every other bloody thing under the sun, because at present the “good will, manners, and professionalism of an otherwise collegial and functional office” is about as reliable as the average political promise.
The issue of bigots is that they think that their bigoted ideas are right and that others are nuts for not seeing it. If you believe that gay people are evil sinners, that transfolk are not only evil sinners but mentally defective… and someone tells you that you have to treat them nice… of course you will complain bitterly outside of work (or write a long screed on an internal message fora explaining why HR policies are treating you unfairly for being a straight white man).
You know what it’s like for transfolk to rely on professionalism, etc. in the workplace? Glad you asked… cause… I’ve seen it up close and personal for my entire life, having transitioned in high school (after having been bullied and abused for years by homophobic bigots for being obviously femmie queer in looks, body language, etc. having been sent to “therapy” since I was a pre-teen, etc.). Well… since I looked and acted like a typical girl, I had no problem at most jobs… but for others I knew, especially for those whose body and face gave far too many clues as to their medical history? The minute one discovers that one is trans and spreads the word, then it is a whisper campaign of ugly lies, vicious complaints to HR that there is a pervert using the women’s (or men’s if they are FtM) restroom, etc. Co-workers refuse to work with the transperson, sometimes only covertly sabotaging their work, sometimes very vocally. The company then tells the transperson that they can’t use the bathroom (any bathroom… as using the ‘wrong’ bathroom is even more disruptive… imagine a masculine looking FtM walking into the women’s room… or a cute 20something woman in a mini-skirt walks into the men’s…) so they have to “hold it” all day, or at least until break, to get into their car to travel to a random public facility elsewhere. No, I’m not making this up… this used to be a common experience for transfolk in my own lifetime (I’m 61 years old.)
On several occasions in my career, an old classmate or neighbor from my childhood, or even another transperson who knew me, showed up at work and let the cat out of the bag… I lost several jobs because of this… it being quite legal in most locales to discriminate against transfolk until recently. (I myself worked to end that lack of protection.) I even had to pull up stakes and move to another state because prospective employers would learn of my medical history from a past employer.
Later in my career, I founded a high tech company, raised VC monies, built up staff… one day, one of my subordinates sent out an email to the entire company asking for votes and money to support an anti-LGBT initiative… I had our Vice President have a talk with him about how our company has LGBT folk in it who were deeply hurt by this… and oh.. BTW, it specifically says in our company handbook that we don’t discriminate against LGBT folk. Emails like this are not allowed at work, period. He stopped his hateful campaigning at work… and I still have a professional relationship with him ten years later… though I doubt I would had he learned I was trans… or if he had continued in his efforts at work.
Yeah… so much for “professional”… sometimes (always?) we need to set a standard of behavior for everyone to follow.