I’ll say something more substantial about this later, but Jordan Peterson opened his mouth and said something stupid, and I got slapped in the face with it this morning, and I’m still trying to recover.
Morgane Oger is a transgender woman, and a court ruled that she’d been discriminated against and libeled by Christian flyer that was sent around that misgendered her and made various religious claims condemning homosexuality. This has obviously stirred up the conservative Christians and Jordan Peterson (but I repeat myself). What Peterson wrote is such flaming nonsense I’m going to have compose something to explain cell non-autonomous sex determination — and maybe some disambiguation about chromosomes vs. DNA vs. cells that I would have thought an “evolutionary biologist” like Peterson should already understand.
But then I made a mistake. A terrible awful mistake. I thought I honestly should look a little deeper into what Peterson actually says at length, because I know the first thing that will happen if I criticize that demented drongo is a swarm of his cultists would fall on me howling about how I have to listen to hours and hours of his lectures to understand him. So I tried.
I opened up one of his podcasts.
OH MY GOD.
That thing is 2.5 hours long. Hours of garbage about…this.
Lecture II in my Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories from May 23 at Isabel Bader Theatre, Toronto. In this lecture, I present Genesis 1, which presents the idea that a pre-existent cognitive structure (God the Father) uses the Logos, the Christian Word, the second Person of the Trinity, to generate habitable order out of pre-cosmogonic chaos at the beginning of time. It is in that Image that Man and Woman are created — indicating, perhaps, that it is (1) through speech that we participate in the creation of the cosmos of experience and (2) that what true speech creates is good.
It is a predicate of Western culture that each individual partakes in some manner in the divine. This is the true significance of consciousness, which has a world-creating aspect.
I listened to a half hour of it. It’s word salad delivered in a stream-of-consciousness fashion by a babbling loon who talks really fast. I gave up at around the 37 minute mark when he mentions that he’ll get around to talking about Genesis 1 shortly.
Now I have to get out of the house and go for a walk and spend some time in the gym to clear my head. I pity those people who willingly listen to this gomer at length.
Later. After I’ve recovered.
Holy shit. After reading that drivel by Peterson, read this letter defending him by…Richard Dawkins.
Once upon a time, I would have thought Richard Dawkins would have regarded giving a pretentious, empty-headed twit like Peterson a visiting professorship at Cambridge to be an “ignominious disgrace.” And jeez, whining about selfies is just so old-man-shakes-fist-at-clouds.
OK, now I’ve got to go out the door and away. Maybe I’ll also need to spend some time cooing over spiders to cool off.
As PZ Myers already noted, Peterson has declined to the point where he routinely spouts…pure gibberish.
You can tell when you need a Gibberish to English translator and a lot of guessing to even try to make sense out of it.
No it isn’t.
1. Western culture doesn’t even exist.
There are a vast number of cultures that have some things in common and some things that are different.
Cultures aren’t static and they change rapidly in real time.
The Northern California culture I live in now doesn’t have much in common at all with the rural far northern culture I grew up in.
.2. Using the Gibberish to English translator, here Peterson must mean Western culture claims we all have souls, immortal, invisible, ghosts somewhere inside us.
This isn’t at all universal in Western culture.
The parts derived from the Enlightenment and the rise of Rational thinking and science claim that souls don’t, you know, really exist.
Or that they are a belief not able to be proved or disproved.
The lie here of Peterson the xian is, that everyone believes what he believes.
The truth is that, no they don’t!!!
In fact, Peterson the hate merchant has taken his rightful place on the far right of the lunatic fringes.
Those clouds aren’t going to shout at themselves, y’know.
Peterson has copied the technique of the creationists.
This is a Gish Gallup of Gibberish.
Just about every sentence is wrong.
No it doesn’t.
This is a deepity, something that seems profound until you spend a few seconds actually trying to understand it.
As far as we know, there is an objective reality that is completely independent of us and existed for at least 13.8 billion years before we were even born.
1. The only world creating aspect of consciousness is the one inside our head that models the one our senses detect. The one that ends when we are dead.
.2. To be sure, we do modify the world around us, using our minds to direct our actions, such as bulldozing a tropical forest.
So does my cat.
That we effect the material world is a trivial statement.
The discovery that DNA strands contain chromosomes has radically overturned biology. It is the most important scientific breakthrough of our age. I don’t see how you can be unimpressed by the genius of the man who achieved this brilliant insight.
What’s interesting is that it seems like both sides of the “Great Divide” came to roughly the same conclusion:
I encountered all the misogyny and bullshit in the atheist community and realized that I shared more important concepts with the political left, regardless of basic religious beliefs, than I did with “atheists,” in general. Thus, I’m far more likely to ally with church goers who believe strongly in the social safety net, for example.
Dawkins and Harris and those goofballs have clearly decided that shared misogyny and bigotry and whining about where they’re allowed to say boring, dumb things means much more to them than religion.
So, I suppose I can’t criticize Dawkins for aligning with Peterson in a structural sense. It’s just that all the substance is such utter garbage.
Peterson is BTW wrong on his science.
When his isn’t spouting gibberish or lying, he is just wrong.
and
A lot of XY androgen insensitives don’t even know that they are…androgen insensitive.
This is often diagnosed when they come in for fertility treatment.
New Bingo square: “Muslims are the main victims of Islam!”
Also, since when did Dawkins start saying Muslimophobia is unforgivable bigotry? Was it right after he hurled bigoted insult after insult at an innocent curious child who brought a clock to school?
Peterson is pretty much alt-right Deepak Chopra.
Dawkins… Is he that devoid of logic, or is he struggling in any way to stay relevant? WTF
It would have been more consistent if Peterson demanded bodily cells to have penises in order to be assigned male.
He’s a psychologist, not a biologist. That’s just a tiny part of his problem, of course.
I never thought Dawkins would get more old man yells at clouds than the time he went on for 3 days about his honey pot. Yet here we are…
Everyone with androgen insensitivity knows something’s up as soon as they don’t get their period if not earlier.
Jordan Peterson is an idiot. Regardless, Morgane Oger is not a nice person. She successfully campaigned to have the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter defunded by the city because it maintained that it would continue to provide (natal) women-only safe spaces, which was its legal and moral right.
The shelter believes, understandably, that the presence of people with male bodies in safe spaces for people who have been abused by men might be counter-productive to their feeling safe and being able to recover. It believes that its clients might feel the same way.
That’s probably not going to be an issue any more, though, since Oger managed to get the shelter defunded and it will now have to rely on donations. There’s a good chance it could close, leaving its clients with nowhere else comparable to go.
I understand that Oger wants to make a point and it’s certainly one we need to discuss. But having the place defunded is just petty and horrific. She prides herself on having achieved something that’s bad for abused women in that city.
But Peterson is still an idiot.
Gah, at #13 I meant to say:
“for women who have been abused by men”
Dawkins has some justification to sympathize with Peterson on the grounds that both have experienced de-platforming.
Both for good reason, fwiw, but in both cases the host groups deserve scoldings for inadequate homework before extending invitations.
PZ, pls reconsider: cooing over spiders may cause them stress from thinking you’re a large mutant hungry pigeon.
And raven @ # 3, kindly call your cat inside and off of that bulldozer.
@13 Latsot
Except she is not talking about male bodied people; she is talking about trans women who are female bodied people. Also trans people are at an extremely high risk of abuse by partners many of which are male. They need those services very badly. There is nothing ‘moral’ about denying them services they need.
I suspect the funding is diverted now to shelters that service all women.
As a side note after the decision on the centre many years ago services at the rape crisis centre were discontinued to trans women in the city I live in Ontario. Having been recently raped I got zero services since there were no programs for trans women at all. So fuck you.
Dawkins has lost his mind. More accurately, his former mind has partially dissolved and become inoperative. Now he’s apparently telling Muslims they (ought to) hate Islam. This is a novel variant on mansplaining, for which I am having trouble finding a mellifluous term; suggestions welcome. Dawkins would be better occupied in explaining biology, if he still can, to Peterson, over the latter’s interruptions, no doubt.
@anna:
No, I don’t think so. I think she wants spaces that women want to be women-only because of male-caused crises to accommodate people with male bodies.
So? How does that translate into “defund services that cater to only natal women”? Which is what Oger wants and has done.
Agreed, but that isn’t what was happening. Nobody was ever saying that funding should be denied to services for trans people. But what very definitely happening now is that funding is being denied to services for women because of her malice.
I am horrified that you received no support. That’s awful. But that isn’t what I was advocating at all.
No, of course not. Just separate but equal, right? Nothing wrong with that.
You fucking bigot.
I mean, do I even need to explain? #18 with the deliberate conflation of trans women with men, the refusal to believe there is any difference at all (when the difference is FUCKING EVERYTHING), the explicit blaming trans women for the crimes of cis men.
Morgane Oger fights for the rights of one of the most oppressed (including by you), derided (including by you), and underserved minorities. Your hate is obvious.
@Lotsot
Trans women are women. Full stop. They should be in all services for women. Full stop.
What services would you have us trans women go to? What do you think the implications of your advocacy are going to have?
@21
Something else, somewhere else, Doesn’t matter where, as long as it’s where he doesn’t have to see or deal with the icky transes. After all, trans women are male invaders and trans men are just confused lesbians and nonbinary people are a left-wing conspiracy created by Tumblr,
@22
You are right. I don’t know why I bother. The shelter issue is the worst. The people who cry out on that one are despicable, equating the victims with the abusers. The harm they do is huge.
Is there like a TERF quota that has to be met any time a thread is even slightly about trans people?
@abbeycadabra:
Not at all. Crisis services should be open to everyone and where they are missing, we should all fight to make them happen.
But we should also be aware that sometimes different people’s needs are not compatible. Why shouldn’t a woman who has been abused by men feel secure that she’s housed in a facility that doesn’t include people she feels are in the class of her abusers? Why should their feeling about their gender overcome hers in every case?
It’s complicated, but in Oger’s case something bad happened. A centre that helps women might be closed down, the experience of their staff and the goodwill of the community lost. There should certainly be centres that help trans people and centres that help everyone regardless of sex and gender, but that doesn’t mean that all centres should include absolutely everyone, when that inclusion is seen as a threat by some of the victims.
It doesn’t sound like a reasonable approach to therapy anyway. If someone has a phobia (fear of spiders, let’s say), you can acknowledge that and try to reduce their negative feelings, partly by exposing them to such situations and helping them through that.
You don’t just say “okay, we’ll do whatever you say, even if that’s detrimental to how well we can care for you or others.” Doctors don’t just cater to patients, letting them dictate the diagnosis and the treatment. People who’ve suffered abuse can’t be isolated indefinitely, and what you can offer are ways of coping with those experiences.
Really? Gynecology services?
Cervical screening?
All services?
I’ll take “Deliberately Obtuse” for $1000, Alex.
And here we go. The only image transphobes ever have of us, “men in dresses”. No recognition that there’s a fucking lot of effort spent avoiding exactly that, or that there’s way more danger for us anywhere else. We’re just obviously all 6’7″, riddled with stubble, and making everyone uncomfortable parading around in dresses, invading women’s spaces.
@Latsot:
Say you live in a city where white supremacists run a shelter for victims of domestic violence/intimate partner violence. Say that they only allow white folks to use the shelter, and they get a substantial chunk of their funding from the city. They do substantial good for the white women that they serve, but a person of color who needed services was turned away because of race even though the white supremacist shelter was not full. Say further that the person ended up with nowhere else to go b/c other shelters were full at that moment.
Now say that the person turned away or another person of color who knows that person and felt terrible about the situation campaigns to have the city increase or at the very least maintain the same level of funding for victims services, but to shift all grants away from the white supremacist organization to organizations that serve clients regardless of race.
Given all this, is the campaign to shift funding away from white supremacist organizations “just petty and horrific”?
If the campaign is successful, has that person of color “achieved something that’s bad for abused [people] in that city”?
Please have the courage to answer these questions yes or no.
Separately:
First: you’re lying or mistaken about who is entitled to use VRR services. VRR has served women abused by an intimate partner of any gender for many years. It has been pointed out to them that serving cis queer women abused by cis women (setting aside trans* folk entirely for a moment) should shatter their service model if they had any intellectual consistency. If women deserve safe space after being battered by women, does that mean that all other women must be banned from the shelter? But they don’t believe that having non-abusive women in shelter with women battered by women is a derogation of their responsibilities. Moreover, in a white supremacist culture, why should white people be allowed in a shelter where women of color are aided in recovering from violence when we know that white destruction of communities of color and even white violence against specific individuals of color is a routine part of the lived experiences of people of color?
How do they maintain this bullshit stance? By recruiting useful idiots to lie about whom they serve. You’re participating in the problem here.
Second: The final sentence doesn’t help your case in any way. If there are white people using the white supremacist shelter who fear people of color and cite statistics about how people of color are more often arrested for violence than white people, does that justify using public money to provide white supremacist services to make sure that those people are comfortable?
Of course not.
@26
I think the point of the aforementioned center was to serve women in immediate crisis, and that the presence of men would be detrimental towards that end initially. Certainly, isolation from men indefinitely isn’t feasible, but it’s not unreasonable right at first.
@27
Post op trans women do frequently need gynecology yes. Been there done that.
@latsot:
Yes. Trans women are women who are also trans. Believe it or not, there are FtM folks who identify as women because “FtM” describes a direction of movement or momentum without specifying how far in that direction one has travelled. Likewise there are people born intersex who identify as women and also as trans. And, of course, there are MtF folks.
If you take the set of all trans* people and the set of all women, the overlap includes people who need cervical screenings. The overlap includes people who need obstetricians. The overlap includes people who may develop ovarian cancer.
If you start out by excluding trans* folks from some category of services, then some people who need that service will be denied it. Is it more of a problem to announce to the world that you welcome trans* folks at your local Planned Parenthood chapter and have one show up every decade or so, or is it more of a problem for all your Planned Parenthood chapters across the country to make trans* people unwelcome and find that lack of services kills one trans* person per year from back alley abortions, untreated cancers, etc.?
Even if trans* folk were so rare as to need gynecological services once per decade per city (and that is far more rare than is actually the case) what do you gain by preemptively excluding trans* people? If trans people are so common that out of your hundred patients per week ten are trans, what do you gain by preemptively excluding trans* people?
Whether trans* folks are rare or common, your statements are sheer, bigoted idiocy.
@starfleetdude:
First, you’re skipping the second half of CR’s comment #26:
If you run a shelter that is devoted to minimizing, ameliorating, and ultimately eradicating violence that depends on stereotypes, enforced roles, and oppression, then providing services determined by stereotypes, enforced roles, and oppression is counterproductive.
I know because I’m actually one of the first trans* people ever to have worked inside a women’s anti-violence shelter as an openly trans person. I provided shelter and peer counseling and case management services to women and children and trans* folks in exactly these circumstances for over a decade.
I have served as an ethics and inclusion consultant to shelters all over the US and in parts of Canada. After my trainings and after transitions to an inclusive service model, not a single one of my clients had their outcomes data go down. Several had their outcomes data go up.
So when you say:
You’re wrong. Reasonably wrong, but wrong. Of course, the first problem is that trans* women aren’t men. But even aside from that, your statement is still wrong. An accurate thing to say is this:
starfleetdude:
What does the immediacy have to do with it? If there’s no immediate gratification (assuming that’s true for the sake of argument), then that means I’m supposed to think it’s unacceptable?
CD already mentioned lesbians who were abused by their partners. (For now, I’ll just forget cis guys like me, who were sexually assaulted by other men, although I’m very uncomfortable with doing that.) So what we do is segregate by gender as well as by sexual orientation, but … only immediately, for some reason? This isn’t the emergency room we’re talking about … so what is that about?
It’s also beginning to sound less and less practical, as we start to consider the implications. We need this type of center, and we need that type of center, and another and another and another. If you lived in a rural area or small town, like I do, you’re lucky if there’s just one anywhere near you. But it could certainly be a very good one, which is very helpful to the wide variety of people who need it. Is there any evidence which should make me think that they must be doing something detrimental for some of those people, at least initially?
cervantes @4:
I’ll say. I always thought it was the other way around, but then who am I to disagree with a genius like Jordan “lobster” Peterson?
@34
What defines “woman” in this context though? I’ve been friends with a trans woman for 15 years of so now, and she’s very much presenting as a woman physically as well as acting. Another friend who was openly male and homosexual for most of his life in the past two years has decided she’s a trans woman now and is transitioning. But at a height of over six feet she’s complained about finding men who are taller than her, and her presentation as a woman isn’t as complete as you might expect. Then another acquaintance of mine who’s cis male for most of his life and has decided he’s a trans woman, but… he doesn’t really look or really act like a woman and I’m not the only person who has doubts about his sincerity.
So I think the point that women-only shelters have is that being a women in what’s still a patriarchal society involves a host of psychological factors when it comes to the power imbalance between men and women, and that for some women trans women are men to them. I don’t think the flat assertion that “trans women are women” period, end of story, squares with the reality that women in general face. So how this is handled in the context of dealing with women who are the victims of male violence (and consciousness razor, the fact is that the perpetrators of physical violence against women are very much men, not lesbians) isn’t as simple as believing that trans* inclusion is just a problem for cis women to get over.
Saad @24
I haven’t seen any evidence that latsot is a TERF, as opposed to a garden-variety transphobe. I think to be a TERF you have to be a Radical Feminist (or at least claim to be.) He simply seems to be one of those people who think that because they believe they are “rational” that their bigotries must be “rational” as well.
Unfortunately, a lot of medical people seem to have beliefs similar to latsot’s. I’ve been fortunate, but I’ve heard a lot of horror stories from trans people of being denied necessary medical care (including emergency care) or getting inappropriate treatment, in some cases because the providers hated the existence of trans people, or because they believed that none of their training could possibly apply to people who are so different from human beings. (snark intentional.) For that matter, an otherwise rather nice GP I know, when I asked about trans-aware medical providers, told me point blank, “I don’t think you’ll find anybody. They don’t teach us about medical care for trans people in medical school.”
I’m glad (I think) that there are people willing to blow holes in this bozo’s “arguments” (not that I think it will get anywhere), but I just get depressed. It doesn’t help that the country I live in (the USA) seems on the way to being taken over by the neo-nazis. I lived in Germany for a few years, and (for the obvious reasons) I couldn’t help asking myself: what would I have done, what would it have been like if I’d been living there in the 1930’s and 1940’s? What if the same thing had been happening in my country? I’m beginning to fear that I may just find out.
Jesus fuck, starfleetdude, are you even listening?
I have worked in these shelters. Have you?
The perpetrators of domestic violence against queer women include trans* people, cis women, and cis men. Queer women exist. Abused queer women exist. Queer women abused by cis women exist. The first shelter I worked in full time had had a policy accepting queer women into the shelter for years and years before I showed up – and I showed up more than 20 years ago.
Believe it or not, when we were writing the history of our organization we read through a piles and piles of old records and found notes of the meeting where the employees came to consensus on a policy forbidding adult women residents of the shelter from having sex with other adult women residents of the shelter because there were no truly private spaces in the shelter and kids were always present.
That’s right, queer women have been using the anti-domestic violence shelters originally imagined to serve heterosexual women, and we’ve been doing so for decades. The notes of that meeting aren’t about any one particular resident, so we don’t know the genders of the people whom those women originally fled, but we do know they existed. We know they used our shelter services. And we know that the rates of abuse within queer, cis-gender relationships appear to be close to the rates within straight, cis-gender relationships.
Plus on top of that, I’ve personally counseled and/or case managed I don’t know how many, but easily over 100 cis women and trans* folk who were abused by women.
Don’t you dare dismiss domestic violence in queer relationships as non-existent. The statement I’ve quoted is nothing short of horrible, and you should be fucking ashamed to have made it.
That includes me.
In addition to be denied care a few times, once from an emergency room, I also had the delightful experience of showing up to my regular provider’s office and getting an appointment with an intern instead. I’d had a persistent throat infection for 12 days. I’m not one to overuse anti-biotics, so I hadn’t run in just because my throat was scratchy, but throat infections that last more than 7 days are a viable reason to get an appointment with your doctor.
My intern, a recent graduate from medical school, was a queer man and was interested in serving trans* folk, I guess. But one of his first questions to me was if I’d had sex reassignment surgery. I asked him how that was relevant to a throat infection. He insisted that there were lots of ways it was possible, including contracting the infection through intubation. I told him that I’d had no major medical procedures or intubations in the last 6 months. He asked again about my genitals. I told him that I couldn’t see how it was relevant. He then told me that it was pointless hiding this information from me since he had access to my chart and could just go read it. I told him that he should go read it then, but that when he was in that room talking to me he should talk about throat infections because that’s why I made the appointment.
It’s hard to explain how his tone of voice was mostly polite and never raised his voice, but still managed to communicate (quite clearly!) through body language, facial expressions & even a bit of vocal shading that he was annoyed with me and that he resented my denial of information to which he felt himself entitled.
The level of arrogant intrusion, even if it wasn’t accompanied by threats or violence, was truly shocking. I hadn’t expected anything like that. My doc had been my primary care provider for several years, and though I was among her first trans* patients, and i was her first trans* activist patient, she didn’t rely on me for information. She was patient and asked questions about me and my trans* experience when they seemed relevant to her, but she got her general education on trans issues (not education about my needs specifically) when she wasn’t billing me, almost as if my paying for services meant that it was inappropriate to use that time to focus on her needs. Imagine! So it simply hadn’t occurred to me that 1) I would end up seeing a doctor that wasn’t her when I made an appointment with her, or 2) that any intern she would have would be so entitled, arrogant, intrusive, & fucked up.
Although I continued to use her until my insurance changed and I couldn’t afford her out of pocket, I have to admit to considering a doctor switch after that.
@39
The fact is that the majority of violent acts committed against women are committed by men. That doesn’t dismiss violent acts by men against men, or women against women as you’re mistakenly claiming I’m saying. Male violence is the overwhelming problem in our society, as we’re seeing even more with the metoo movement now. Not that it hasn’t been a problem for much, much longer than that, everywhere. The phenomenon of male violence against women is the predominant one, and recognizing that in no way negates other victims of domestic violence. That context does matter for women in general, which is why having an all-woman staff is a choice some shelters have made and operated with for years. It’s something women who have been victims of male violence have needed. Just saying “get over it, trans women are women, not men” is dismissive of how safe a woman feels after being assaulted by a man.
@starfleetdude:
But that’s not what you did. I would have no problem with that statement, but what you said was this:
Further:
No, recognizing the predominance of one dynamic doesn’t negate the experience of survivors of DV that didn’t experience that dynamic, but that that the perps are “men, not lesbians” exactly and precisely negates the experience of all those queer women who were abused in queer relationships by people other than men.
If you can’t say what you mean, I’m not responsible for the fact that your dismissal of queer women’s experiences of violence was unintentional. The proper thing to do is apologize and say,
Your intent is not magic.
Further, you still haven’t answer the question or acknowledged that you’re talking with someone who is actually expert on this exact question. Have you ever worked in an anti-DV shelter? Have you even worked in a DV prevention program? Are you able to acknowledge that the evidence shows that outcomes generally remain steady or improve after shelters integrate services to trans* people, or do you simply want to argue against facts because your emotions tell you that the facts shouldn’t be what they are?
Get it together.
Finally,
Fuck you. No one is saying that. I worked for literally years on curricula to train shelter workers. I worked with many women in shelter and in other programs on how to address their fears of the adolescent boys in shelter, of trans* residents in shelter, and of me. Never once did I say, “get over it, trans women are women not men”.
The people who actually do or have done this work professionally – yes, including me – have an incredible skill set and deal with seemingly intractable problems every day. Yes, prejudice exists. Yes, our reactions to trauma are shaped by the environment, including stereotypes widespread within a society, in which we live. But that doesn’t mean that we’re left with a choice of refusing to serve racist white women and/or telling racist white women, “Black women are women, get over it”. We actually work to solve problems.
What the fuck do you do?
I suppose I better discard my DVD of Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian?’ As being politically incorrect?
https://youtu.be/Dgp9MPLEAqA
@41 starfleetdude:
I think I can say “the fact is that the majority of violent acts committed against women are committed by cis men” with no loss of accuracy. So why does that determine how you want to treat trans women, considering they aren’t cis men?
In fact, aren’t trans women themselves particularly at risk from violence, most of which is still committed by cis men? If so, when you talk about shelters meant to provide a safe space from them, why are you excluding this portion of their victims? Where do you recommend they go, without being dismissive of how safe a trans woman feels after being assaulted by a man?
And in discussing how these shelters can best perform their function, why the hell aren’t you listening to Crip Dyke, given that she has actually worked in them and you seem to just be ratiocinating without such experience?
.
Alas poor Richard, I thought I knew you well. You seriously want Cambridge to legitimise Peterson?
oops.
So, am I “CIS” because someone wants to put a label on me, a label I did not need?
Lot’s of hive mind here, not much fee thought.
It is not possible to change biological sex. There is no agreed scientific basis for someone having the mind of someone from the opposite sex or being born in the wrong body.
Go argue with the professionals.
And so it comes back around to the point that you should actually listen to experienced professionals who know what they’re doing and are looking out for the best interests of the people they’re caring for. It works a whole lot better than asking random people to speculate based on nothing but their own preconceptions or prejudices.
And there’s still no reason to think this is somehow invalid, over short periods of time or in exceptional circumstances. But it looks like the whole immediacy thing has been tossed out. Maybe I was supposed to think that was bullshit all along, but if so, that was definitely not clear to me.
@42
If something isn’t clear the way to go about it is to ask for clarification, which I guess you did, if not in a direct way.
As for the matter of asking cis women to get over trans women, you do acknowledge that women can have a fear of men after being the victims of male assault. Do you think a woman who is very fearful of men in the shelter setting should be given a space where they can feel safe from men? If so, how?
Roj Blake, whenever a group gets a label, everyone outside that group gets a label. Even if the label is ‘not a member of the group in question’. So even before anyone called anyone cisgender, you already had the label ‘not transgender’.
Transgender people aren’t going away just because you don’t understand who they are, how they feel, or what they need to live safely, comfortably, and with dignity. So maybe just watch, listen, and maybe learn something.
Roj Blake:
We are indeed lacking in “fee thought” here. Maybe you’ll consider sharing some with us one day, if you have “lot’s” of it to spare.
Are you Roj Blake because someone put that label on you? You may not be Roj Blake, for all I know. Has anyone ever seen you and the real Roj Blake in the same room together?
latsot @13
Gosh, when the policy basically breaks down to “transwomen are just men in dresses” yeah… that’s fucking transphobic, and the shelter deserved to be shut down for it.
I looked, out of curiosity, for statistics on cis-women in domestic violence shelters harmed by transwomen. Couldn’t find anything.
I’m guessing that the folks asserting this is such a concerning problem have some evidence to support that position, right?
Roj @ #47,
One of the studies your linked article is heavily based on is deeply flawed.
Rebecca Watson debunks it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIiFQ5UJCJQ
The TL;DR of her response is that the study is just a survey of the parent’s rationalized reasons for their children ‘becoming’ LBGTQ.
I’ve several LBGTQ family members, and they’ve all felt either gender dysphoria or same-sex attraction, depending on the individual, for as long as they can remember. To assert that people decide to change their gender based on a socially influenced whim is nasty and cruel gaslighting.
If it’s not hijacking the discussion or anything, could I ask how shelters handle non-binary people?
@starfleetdude:
Magical Images of Ganesh-Jesus Sex On Toast, why the fuck can’t you just say, “My intent isn’t magic. I’m sorry for wording a reasonable idea badly such that it ended up invisibilizing the experiences of some people who didn’t deserve that.”
It’s such a banal mistake to make. We all word things badly sometimes. It was a really bad, bad wording in its effect, but the process by which you arrived there isn’t inhumanly awful. What do you gain by constantly sloughing off responsibility for your own statements? If you actually and overtly accepted responsibility for careless statements you’d be trusted as an honest & reasonable conversation partner to a much greater degree.
As for this:
Let’s break it down into a couple of things.
First:
Again, trans women aren’t men. Let me be perfectly clear: your writing on this issue is incoherent. Your definition of “woman/women” doesn’t need to be the same as my definition of “woman/women” but your definition sure as fuck should be consistent between two separate instances of women in your own damn sentence!
Whatever definition of “women” you’re using, “trans women” meet that definition or they wouldn’t be trans women. If you’re being at all consistent with how others use the English language, your use of “women” will exclude those who are “men” – again, according to your own definitions.
So what you’re saying here is:
Your statement, and, I imagine, your thinking, is sloppy and ridiculous. By definition fear of men doesn’t apply to women. It’s a completely nonsense, bullshit, unhelpful statement.
On the other hand, people who have worked on these issues for as long as I have can construct a sentence that gets to the root of what you cannot express without any trouble at all. How about:
That statement could be the beginning of a useful conversation between myself and professionals who serve survivors of domestic violence. In fact in my workshops I’ve answered such questions dozens if not hundreds of times.
Your statement, on the other hand, was an incoherent mess. This should show you that maybe you’re not ready to have this conversation if you can’t even express what you’re actually thinking. Maybe instead of assuming that no one in the field actually is addressing the problems of trans-integration in gender segregated service environments, or worse, that no positive responses to such problems exist, you should concede that your personal ignorance is not indicative of deficiencies on the part of professionals in the field.
The last part of your challenge is worse:
This is the basis of over a decade of work on my part and many person-decades of work by many people across the world. Any good answer would be something you’re not equipped to understand unless you’ve actually worked in a shelter setting for more than a few months. Any bad answer is not worth giving, because it’s more likely to be misunderstood and become the source of new misinformation than it is to contribute positively to the understanding of someone who simply doesn’t have a clue about the realities of trauma-informed case management and counseling in a gender segregated environment.
But you could possibly make a wee bit of progress towards understanding why this question is so complex and why you’re not ready to even have this discussion if you make an honest attempt to think about this question:
I’m not saying the questions are the same, but if you’re not equipped to provide an answer to that question, then you’re not equipped to discuss the other question either.
@Amarantha Dyuaaxchs
From the moment I started doing this work, I made a clear effort not to advocate too clearly for any particular policy unless and until an agency asked me to make a recommendation. I did not even advocate that any specific shelter be trans* inclusive on any specific timeframe, though I did advocate that our shelter system as a whole must migrate that direction. Primarily this was because the shelter workers themselves were often poorly equipped to implement new inclusion policies. The data show that when an agency makes the policy clear to its workers, answers their questions about the policies, and helps them develop tools to realize the policy and educate residents/clients on the policy, trans* inclusive policies – whether including non-binary folks or not – work. It’s not the detail of the person’s covered by the policy, it’s the thought, education, implementing measures and care with which the policy is put into place that determine whether it is a success or failure.
So I’ve had a chance to work with agencies who conceived of themselves as “for women” and weren’t willing to give that up, but welcomed all trans* women to their programs. I’ve worked with other agencies who decided that their core values included opposition to sexism, and that they would rather accept non-binary people in their programs than police the boundaries of the category of women, since that would inevitably reinforce sexism. I’ve also worked with other agencies who conceived of their mission as opposing oppression more broadly, though with an emphasis on gender-based oppression (which was inclusive of but not reducible to an opposition to sexism). For those agencies, they generally welcomed NB people as NB people rather than a necessary “error margin” around the category of women.
And, of course, the trans* exclusive shelters were generally exclusive to non-binary people in policy, but some AFAM non-binary folks were able to access services in part because trans* exclusive shelters were generally not knowledgeable enough to even ask the questions that would identify non-binary people or to draw consistent and coherent distinctions about how their trans* exclusive policies might apply to non-binary people assigned female at birth.
In short, it varies tremendously.
Thank you, Crip Dyke. I really appreciate your writing throughout this thread.
@me:
That “AFAM” should have been “AFAB”, of course. Sorry.
Trans women are women the same way that tall women are women. The word ‘trans’ is an adjective that tells you what kind of women they are.
Roj Blake @63: What a nasty blinkered dogmatic little man you are. I’ll take this opportunity to say “ta-ta, sunshine”.
Go fuck yourself, you smeg-spewing bigot
Roj Blake, you’re a shallow bigot. A moment of reflection would be sufficient to reveal that, but you seem unable to muster up the brain cells. Kindly take your transphobia elsewhere.
@Roj Blake:
No. It is not “surely” trans* men, although some trans* men will indeed need abortions.
You are confusing the category “trans* people assigned male at birth” with the category “trans* women”.
As I said earlier:
I know you read that because you’re replying to another, later portion of the same comment. And yet, there you are, flaunting your arrogant, uneducable ignorance for all to see.
If you can’t understand the discussion, you cannot productively participate in the discussion. That’s something you might want to think about.
Bye, Roj Blake.
It’s not a thread about transgender issues without some asshat showing up to get banned.
It’s almost a law: in any thread discussing Peterson, there will inevitably appear a Petey fan displaying that their grasp on the topic at hand is as tenuous as that of Petey himself.
Lobster’s Law?
Also, if someone could theorise as to why so many atheists – up to Dawkins himself – are lining up to defend Petey even after he’s revealed himself to be not only scientifically ignorant but a cut-rate Chopra-esque used-god salesman, that’d be appreciated.
I mean, if it’s just as simple as JP’s life membership in the PC Martyr club and his whining, publicly and endlessly, about all the things he’s apparently not allowed to whine about publicly and thus attracting Establishment Atheist approval, that’s as venal and self-serving and flat fucking stupid as any apologist activity I’ve witnessed.
If Petey had popped up with his verbose PoMo apologetic nonsense during the heights of the New Atheist era (2006-2011-ish?) I’m sure the reception given him by the Horsemen etc would have been markedly different. But I guess since the Establishment abandoned all pretense of advocating for equality after the Elevator thing had them anally inhaling their underpants, and the Shitlord Era began shortly after, Petey and his targeted bitching were perfectly timed.
You know what?
I’m a survivor of DV. I never needed shelter services, but if I had? I really don’t think I’d give a single, solitary fuck if I had to share space with a trans woman. We’re both there for the same reason.
Oh, don’t get me wrong — I’ve got a whole host of issues when it comes to men, now. And PTSD. But trans women are not men, and don’t deserve to be punished for male misbehavior just ‘cuz some of them have dicks.
The problem wasn’t that my abuser had a dick, it’s that he was a dick.
Does FRS stand for F#@*wit Ranting Shit?
When it’s not the people with overly simplistic understandings of biology who simply point out some of the obvious biological attributes as if trans people have somehow managed to remain oblivious to their own bodies, it’s quite interesting that people keep bringing up ‘issues’ with accepting trans people, which have seemingly been selected so they can be framed as conflicts between trans invaders and oppressed groups. It’s almost as if the issue is that they’re hostile to trans people and are desperately looking for an acceptable angle of attack against acceptance of trans people that they can try to frame as the defense of victims of trans acceptance.
RE: Peterson’s blather. It’s been said before in various ways, but it still amazes me. His fans are, like him, scathing – scathing – about the woolly, fanciful, impenetrable and just plain making-shit-up-edness of broadly “Post Modern” academic thinking.
They are firmly on that side that has been complaining for decades about the sort of worship of vague Foucaltian language and argument you find in Humanities class.
Yet Peterson himself produces the exact same crap. Or crap at least as bad (and probably worse. The po-mo humanities rarely claimed to explain everything the way he does). Yet he is the ‘logic, facts and reason guy’ to them. He’s told everyone that the humanities is all snake oil so that he can essentially peddle the same off-brand snake oil himself. Hilarious and disturbing.
To be fair to Dawkins, he was correct in his comment because the University used the tee-shirt worn by the purchaser of Peterson’s book as a major reason for rescinding his invitation. And that’s a poor reason, not worthy of such a major University. Dawkins was referring to the method and not the man. Much better would have been an explanation from the University citing Peterson’s utter plonkerdom and downright banality. Yes, some us may be pleased that his offer was rescinded, but we have no need of stooping to Peterson’s level to get our way.
Dear people with a first-hand experience of the topic at hand,
I was reading this thread with some interest, when I decided it didn’t have enough of my ill-informed, commonsensical thinking out loud in it. An obvious oversight that all too many people on the internet make in their haste to get down facts and nuance and compassion for those who suffer, and all those other confusing things I tend to live my life blissfully oblivious of.
I have a penis and wear trousers to work, so even though I don’t really know much about the topic at hand I definitely reckon something about it, and confidently expect that I will be able to sort it out to everyone’s satisfaction in a couple of sentences. I am doing you all a favour by exposing you to the sublime majesty of all my two-minutes reckons! I’m sure you’ll appreciate them!
Right, without further ado, the trans issue. So these men in dresses right? well… (sounds of being hastily bundled into a van and driven off at high speed)
Thanks cartomancer :D
Clearly, all this complex topic needs is some good old fashioned gender creationism to remind everyone what’s what and who’s who!
Roj Blake: your entire argument fails because you lied at the outset. That paper you quoted is NOT by “the experts.” The four authors have never published a single piece of research on transgender or sexual identity in their extensive publication histories. None of them work with transgender people. They are not experts.
They are transphobes laundering their expertise in other areas to marginalise and exclude trans people from receiving care. That is their agenda. For all their crap about “respecting” transgender people and wanting “more science”, their key goal is to restrict access to medical and surgical treatment for young transgender people despite huge amounts of published evidence that they doing do is massively harmful to >95% of young trans people. And their approach would make any further research into the benefits of medical/surgical care impossible because no young transgender person would ever be given access to major hormonal or surgical treatments.
The very fact that they insist that sex is chromosomally determined means they they have failed at basic honesty from the start. That lie is theirs to own. But you have misrepresented the authors as experts in the field just because they support your own brand of bigotry. All it would have taken is a small journey into the published research to see how full of shit they (and you) are.
And BTW that line you quoted has no supporting reference — something of a rampantly hypocritical thing to do given how much the authors complain about lack of evidence (when what they really mean is lack of evidence that they want to accept — the actual published evidence is 100% antagonistic to their primitive biological essentialism; saying someone with androgen insensitivity syndrome is really a male because they are XY shows how utterly contemptible their position is).
This is from the troll at #47 quoting from an article in the British Journal of General Practice.
As Chrislawson points out in #77, it is not by experts. Just having a few letters before your name doesn’t make you an expert in everything.
This is an assertion without proof or data and may be dismissed without proof or data.
It is just wrong!!!
Not being an expert in this field either, I put a few terms into Google search.
A whole lot of research articles from experts in the field came up that said these British authors are wrong.
So, it is also a fallacy, the common one. Fallacy of Appeal from authority.
David Milne@74–
Nope. No sympathy for Dawkins here.
He could have made a reasonable point if he had stuck to criticising the clumisiness of Cambridge’s actions. But no, he had to defend anti-muslim bigotry, create his own version of “what about black-on-black violence?” for muslims, and dissemble about Cambridge’s reason by describing it as Peterson being photographed “next to” someone wearing a T-shirt in a selfie when actually Peterson was photographed “posing with his arm around a man wearing a T-shirt that clearly bore the slogan ‘I’m a proud Islamophobe'”. Peterson was offered a visiting fellowship to the Divinity faculty, where it is especially important to act against such crude sectarian inflammation.
Oh bullshit. The place has decided that THEY would rather close down than serve trans women. They decided that those abused cis women could go fuck themselves.
This happens when your hatred takes over.
Yeah, trans women need gynaecological services, like breast screenings. And people who don’t have a cervix don’t need screenings for that, which includes a hell lot of cis women. It’s obviously a silly and over the top argument, but you’re actually smart enough to know that, but you’re also too full of hate to see it.
Starfleetdude
“he” has “decided”? Wow.
Oh please inform us about a “complete presentation as a woman” so I can check my daily routine against that list. Oh, wait, I don’t have to, because being cis means I get away with that shit but trans women are always judged for fucking shit like having had the misfortune to be tall.
Well, after you have finished telling us about complete presentation as a woman, please do tell us about male violence against women.
Allisson
That’s why I usually just use transphobe. Because when you scratch off the veneer, most “radical feminists” are neither particularly radical nor very feminist.
@56
The distinction that matters between cis women and trans women is that trans women were once considered men, and biologically male. Cis women are biologically female. This biological fact is what makes the cis/trans distinction possible in the first place. Now the claim that trans women’s brains incline them to identify as female is what’s put forward as the argument that there’s an essential “woman” kind that covers both cis and trans women, and is why gender dysphoria exists for both biological males and females.
This said, there is a range of behaviors that human beings exhibit along the masculine-feminine axis. There are kind boys, and bold girls, butch lesbians, effeminite gays, etc. And of course there are bi-sexuals too. Yet when it comes to sex-segregated spaces we don’t have bi-sexuals picking the sex they may identify with at the moment, but the one their biological sex lines up with. Why? Because what other people consider you to be matters when it comes to sex-segregated spaces. So now let’s return to the question of crisis centers.
Your white women having to deal with black clinic staff as a proxy for cis-women dealing with trans-women is flawed. Consider that there are “safe spaces” for people of color or LGBT people to take refuge from whites or straight people. These are defended by claiming that there need to be such spaces for members of said groups to take refuge in when they’re feeling under significant stress. Now, consider that women who have been victims of male violence may need to find refuge in a space where they don’t perceive a threat from men. The question of what the women who are victim of male violence perceive as being male is a valid one for them. Trying to re-educate them at the moment of admission when they’re in crisis does not serve them well. So the need for women-only clinics is there.
@starfleetdude:
Have you ever spent one day providing trauma-informed case management or trauma-informed counseling in a gender segregated environment?
Dude, I’m bisexual, and I have never been anything but a woman. If you’re talking about nonbinary people, they exist in all varieties of people and frankly know best which facilities to use. The only question left is why anybody should keep having a discussion with somebody as ill-informed as you.
starfleetdude, #81
As opposed to cis women, whose pancreas incline them to identify as female.
And I don’t think you know what bisexual means.
Saad@84–
To be fair, it is our brains that incline us to identify as…well, anything we identify as! (If starfleetdude understood the research he was pointing to rather than regurgitating what anti-trans bloggers say about it, then he would understand that minor differences in brain MRI/fMRI tell us nothing about causality.)
Someone really needs to create a Jordon Peterson word generator if they have not already.
Pure psycho=babble.
The only reason this right wing grafter got any attention was by pretending to a be a free speech martyr by being anti-trans (C13 debate in Canada).
Bachfiend@43,
Regarding the scene with Stan/Loretta and the People’s Front of Judea from “Life of Brian”:
OK, think about this. In the scene “Stan” says he wants to be a woman and he wants to be called Loretta. He is met initially with mockery and derision, true. However, Judith validates his experience, and even Reg ultimately goes along with it. Why? Because, they value Loretta as a member of the group and do not simply dismiss her subjective experience out of hand.
Ultimately, they even change the norms and the goals of their group. “Brothers” or even “brothers and sisters” becomes “siblings”–and as a result Judith isn’t an afterthought. Yes, the situation is comic. Human life is comic…or tragic…and given the choice, I’ll take comedy. So, no. I don’t think that bit is politically incorrect. In a way, it makes the point quite eloquently and provides us with an opportunity to be in on the joke that the transphobes just can’t get.
@85
Well, yes. It’s that there’s no pronounced difference between the brains of men and women that says “this brain is male, and this one is female” that one can look at and say whether someone is trans or not. Obviously, there’s a self-reported difference and a physical cause underlying one’s gender identification.
@84
It’s more like their biology (namely biological sex) and upbringing that underlies their gender identity. There are two basic sexes and two basic cultural genders. (I know about all the fringe genders already, and more power to them, thanks in advance.)
starfleetdude, #88
Why did you have to use the word basic there? Also, that’s like saying “there is one basic type of marriage”.
And by fringe you mean minority, right? Fringe has negative connotations in this instance like they’re abberations or something. I’m sure you didn’t mean that. People like you never mean that, right?
Can you post the link to the studies that looked at huge numbers of people who weren’t brought up a certain way based on their genitalia at birth? You’ll need to present those in order to make that biological sex claim.
@89
Because there are a few so-called intersex persons, and/or persons who have ambiguous sexual characteristics.
As for cultural gender, it’s precisely because people have been brought up in a male or female way based on physical genitalia that’s underlying the two basic genders. Of course there’s a lot of baggage that goes along with each gender’s role expectations.
There’s nothing like a cis dude explaining womanhood to you. Keep up the good work, Starfleetdude!
@starfleetdude:
Have you ever spent one day providing trauma-informed case management or trauma-informed counseling in a gender segregated environment?
CD
I notice that starfleetdude has consistently failed to answer that question, that failure certainly makes me suspect that they have not, and don’t want to be called out on their practical ignorance because they are too wedded to their theory to let evidence from life mess it up.