Some people can't bring themselves to admit that cancel culture is a thing. The way I see it, if you lose your job for talking about things that would have been uncontroversial five years ago, it's a thing. So what can we do about it?
I got into a spat with someone I've muted and no longer follow on Twitter because it seems that merely being a natal woman is transphobic. I'm having none of it. I'm all onboard with inclusivity, but correct me if I'm wrong, doesn't "include" mean "as well as," not "instead of?" Asking for roughly half the population of the planet, hence the collar and chain in the graphic. I will not accept "cis" as a descriptor as I find it demeaning and no amount of passive aggressive whining, threats, or shunning is going to convince me otherwise. I'm willing to discuss it with whoever wants to engage in good faith instead of trying to coerce me to ignore my five senses to spare someone's feelz. My dignity and safety come first. That it's even up for discussion says more about the Opposition than it does about me. So, then, how did we end up in this situation?
As I've said before, most of it is down to good old-fashioned gaslighting and the weaponisation of misogyny by incels, MRAs, and a variety of trolls and dodgy types (do a Twitter search on "map" if you think you can stomach it) who invoke wokeness as a fig leaf for their horrible attitudes. That this is considered to be public opinion says more about the people who believe that than it ever will about me and gender critical women in general. As a result of this aggression, public discourse is pretty much dead. We're shouting at each other from silos rather than engaging and coming to a genuine consensus. So, then, how exactly did free speech chill public discourse? There are four factors at play here:
- Very bad, no good speech
- Righteous outrage
- Over-tolerance
- Safetyism
Okay, let's dig in.
Very bad, no good speech
Some speech is so off-the-scale evil that most of us would think it reasonable to protect traumatised people from being exposed to more of the same kind of thing as they had suffered before. In 1978, the ACLU had such a case.
In 1978, the ACLU took a controversial stand for free speech by defending a neo-Nazi group that wanted to march through the Chicago suburb of Skokie , where many Holocaust survivors lived. The notoriety of the case caused some ACLU members to resign, but to many others the case has come to represent the ACLU's unwavering commitment to principle. In fact, many of the laws the ACLU cited to defend the group's right to free speech and assembly were the same laws it had invoked during the Civil Rights era, when Southern cities tried to shut down civil rights marches with similar claims about the violence and disruption the protests would cause. Although the ACLU prevailed in its free speech arguments, the neo-Nazi group never marched through Skokie, instead agreeing to stage a rally at Federal Plaza in downtown Chicago. - ACLU History: Taking a Stand for Free Speech in Skokie
It's easy to have a go at the ACLU for defending the neo-Nazis then. However, if you dig down a bit, you may find that America has a deep vein of right-wingery that continues to this day. It recently surfaced in the high-profile killings of Armaud Arberry, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd. It's pretty blatantly there when a policeman can kneel on a man's neck till he dies of it right in front of a screaming crowd of people begging him to stop — and he knows they're filming him. So the fact that neo-Nazis existed in Chicago and planned to troll the survivors of the Holocaust shouldn't surprise us at all. The case made legal history and went all the way to the Supreme Court. Ultimately, the First Amendment won and the Nazis were permitted to march. They decided of their own accord to move it to the Federal Plaza. On the day, only twenty marchers showed up and 2,000 protesters sent them on their way.
What is very bad, no good speech?
I would personally say that very bad, no good speech is speech that causes actual and reputational harm to an individual or group by encouraging people to think badly of them. The blood libel that plagues certain religious and ethnic groups to this day is the kind of speech I'm thinking of. This affects them by making them objects of suspicion, scapegoats when something awful happens, and if there's enough of it floating about, some people feel moved to solve the problem of the existential threat by murdering them. The tendency to spread lies and exaggerations about Black people no doubt contributed to the murders of Arberry, Taylor, and Floyd. I believe this because before the bodies were even cold the perpetrators and their enablers were spreading negative stories about them on the internet. Basically, blood libel and negative discourse about individuals and groups can and does get them attacked and killed. Hold that thought.
Who decides what constitutes very bad, no good speech?
My opinion of what constitutes very bad, no good speech is my own. I'm certain that other people share it, but that doesn't make it definitive at all. I know this because the speech I routinely engage in is considered, in some quarters, to be extremely hateful and harmful. This is despite the fact that I've never actively tried to make anyone think badly of trans folk, I use preferred pronouns and descriptors, and don't deadname anyone. On the occasions when I've tried to explain my discomfort at sharing intimate spaces with male-bodied people I've had to resort to digging up links of criminal activities by certain male people who have claimed trans identity, apparently to either get a lighter sentence or to gain access to more victims to prey on. I shouldn't have to explain the need for boundaries, but when people dismiss my right to them, what else can I do? What's interesting here is that when medical and biological flat-earthers dog-pile on people to get them fired, it's "criticism and pushback." When we gender critical types push back and criticise their drive-by accusations, lies, and flat out gaslighting, we're a transphobic mob.
Who decides this? Why, the Woke columnists and journalists who have been paid to write this drivel by lobbyists for powerful interests. Vice is all about promoting TWAW (transwomen are women) and will brook no opposition thereto. Given the concentration of ownership and a platform bigger than Twitter, the publications that people trust as sources of news are currently the arbiters of what is or isn't acceptable, truth and evidence be damned.
“They miss the point: the irony of the piece is that nowhere in it do the signatories mention how marginalized voices have been silenced for generations in journalism, academia, and publishing,” the response, published in the newsletter The Objective, said.
“The signatories, many of them white, wealthy, and endowed with massive platforms, argue that they are afraid of being silenced, that so-called cancel culture is out of control, and that they fear for their jobs and free exchange of ideas, even as they speak from one of the most prestigious magazines in the country.” - 160 Journalists, Academics Rebuke Harper’s Letter on Cancel Culture: ‘They Miss the Point,’ by J. Clara Chan for The Wrap
What, this point?
We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement. - A Letter on Justice and Open Debate, from Harpers Magazine
The point, dear readers, is it doesn't matter so much that certain people have been marginalised, etc., for generations. They're being marginalised now by a group of unelected Grand High Inquisitors who decide what is or isn't offensive.
- "Kill the TERFs!" - not worth the bother of mentioning.
- "Men can't become women just by announcing that they're women." - "TERF central!"
So basically, as long as you're all about
Righteous outrage
The trouble with very bad, no good speech is that the people who are making all the decisions about what is or isn't acceptable these days aren't having a conversation with the rest of us about what constitutes very bad, no good speech. They're dictating it to us as a done deal and enforcing it with shaming. You're obliged to accept it, however ridiculous it is, on the grounds that failure to ditch pesky old empiricism puts you in the same moral bracket as the neo-Nazis who wanted to troll Holocaust survivors in their own neighbourhood.
What if you're not woke?
This is a problem for anyone who isn't steeped in the latest woke notions; I'm basically conservative and anyone who tells me I'm evil for ignoring what my eyes see and my ears hear, and refusing to share intimate spaces with male-bodied people on the grounds that they might be lying about being women (do they really believe that people are incapable of lying about being trans?) is going to get short shrift. I don't care who they are, I'm not falling for an obvious con and my personal boundaries are not on the table. Basically, not being Woke automatically means you're evil, whatever your views on anything not related to trans people.
Will the real bigots please stand up?
Meanwhile, there are very horrible people running around spreading horrible stories about some people who belong to ethnic and religious minorities, the idea being to encourage violence against them. There are other very horrible people running around spreading horrible stories about those women who are not buying TWAW, the idea being to encourage violence against them. The question here is, when is outrage righteous, and when is it just manufactured DARVO? Most people only read the headlines, assign "goodies" and "baddies" roles to the players as assigned by the author of whatever they're reading, and don't bother to question it. Woke folk do this a lot. It's rare (though it sometimes happens) that some of them do agree that "inclusive" means "as well as" not "instead of," but it doesn't happen often enough. So it is that peer pressure is added to DARVO and shaming and the people who claim to take an evidence-based approach to All The Things wouldn't be caught dead doing anything so ____phobic. What annoys me is that the "-phobic" label isn't extended to people who bash natal women, religious minorities, or anyone who's not near the top of the Woke victim pyramid. The trouble with political correctness is that it creates target groups as well as protected ones. Thus the people who march against Nazis, etc., would also make a point of opposing natal women standing up for their sex-based rights on the grounds that the media they get their information from says we're evil. And they say we're evil because powerful interests are using them to push a narrative they profit from. Win-win for them while natal women, gay people, religious minorities, and anyone who's not up-to-date with the latest Woke thinking gets absolutely shafted.
Over-tolerance
Now that we've established the fact that the bigots are whoever offended people say they are, and that anyone can be a bigot if they're not careful, let's take a look at the role of over-tolerance in the chilling of free speech.
Causes, consequences, and the mob
We tend to choose who to trust and who to ignore when it comes to our media choices. The people who write for the media outlets tend to share a set of views that we generally find acceptable, though we don't always agree with them. This gives them the power to shape public discourse and therefore the public's views on what is or isn't acceptable. When they regurgitate the Stonewall Diversity Champions pack without question in the name of diversity, they fail to take into account the Equality Act 2010, which lists sex among the protected characteristics. While Stonewall pays lip service to it, the only gay people they consider acceptable are those who ignore sex for gender identity. So it is that you can be a female prisoner raped by a trans-identifying inmate and deemed transphobic for reporting it. Pushback and criticism. Nothing to see here, move along. We've been over-tolerant of TWAW, which throws safeguarding out the window because feelz.
Popular pseudo-science
I've see a disturbing trend towards pseudo-science being used to prop up the rickety framework on which TWAW is built. While I'm thankful that there's counter-speech (while it's still allowed), it's not the speech being made on the Scientific American (counter-arguments provided by Zach Elliott) or by pop scientists Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, or Alice Roberts. It's not even about science, per se, but queering it.
To queer something is to ask what it is not, to disrupt normal constructions, and to release the possibilities that normal constructions hide. - What Does Queer Theory Have to Do with Teaching Science in Elementary Schools? by Kristin L. Gunckel for STEM of desire 25/02/2019
You know, gaslighting. It's bad enough that we're being told we're bad and we should feel bad if we don't ignore what's standing right in front of it and suspend our disbelief, but now we're downright anti-science. As Jo Wuest points out for Cambridge University Press, this fudging is deliberate in order to push the trans agenda that people are who they say they are and this must be accepted at face value no matter what. It's the "what" that the rest of us take issue with. We've been over-tolerant of queering All The Things.
Safetyism
Given the disruption to pretty much everything as a result of over-tolerance, which has resulted in uncritical acceptance of the most ridiculous premises (and gifted us with Rachel Dolezal), why has nobody pushed back on transgenderism? Transracialism has been kicked into touch, as is right and proper. Why give these dictators the right to bulldoze over the rights of everyone else in the name of entitled (mostly white) male people (a fact they tend to fudge by pretending to care about trans people in Forn Parts)? It's embedded in intersectional left-wing thinking. But how? And why? Let's take a look.
When feminism let men in
Uncommon Ground has an excellent series of posts about the beginnings of the trans political movement and its impact on feminism. This was confined to the fringes of US colleges and had not yet made its way across the Pond, hampered, no doubt, by the lack of instant mass communication. The first one details how transgenderism was built on men seeking sexual pleasure from attention from both men and women, and how, from the beginning, they demanded entry into women-only spaces. At first, they were firmly rebuffed, but Angela Douglas, an intact male, convinced another woman to share carrying a banner on an anti-war march in 1971. She wrote about it later on, scolding those women who had objected to her presence there while describing herself as a lesbian. The rift in the women's movement had begun. The following year, Beth Elliott, an intact male who identified as a lesbian, was admitted to membership of the Daughters of Bilitis, a lesbian civil rights group, on the grounds that she had been helpful and it would be mean not to. Elliott allegedly attacked and tried to rape Bev Jo Von Dohre, but was protected by enablers who accused Bev of transphobia. In 1973 the West Coast Lesbian Conference was split between women who were happy to accept transsexuals into their movement and those who were having none of it. The "woman with a penis" trope began, and has been promoted ever since by the intersectionalists. Until I read these posts I had no idea that this has been going on for fifty years. I'm not even sure that Woke folk know this.
Political protectionism
While the intersectional feminists, or libfems, as they are often called, mean well and "only want to help," what they end up doing is pursuing their own agendas to the detriment of others. I baulk at the mean-spirited attacks on trans folk by the radicals (radfems). That's what drives women who want to be kind and do good in the world to the intersectional side. Unfortunately, the shibboleth is trans and that means not just indulging a social fiction to help out a distressed person with dysphoria (which I'm happy to do), but fully accepting Gender WooWoo as our Leader and Saviour and spreading the gospel of TWAW (no way). The trouble with intersectional feminism is it doesn't just admit men who identify as women, it admits any and all men, and they have pretty much taken it over and set the agenda, which must not just include but centre trans women. This is the root of the refusal to even discuss it.
Apparently transwomen need females not to have *any* rights or resources that are not open to transwomen. Which makes it impossible to take action against sex discrimination without being labelled transphobic.— slightlyatsea (Deb) (@slightlyatsea) July 31, 2020
It certainly explains why "menstruators," "pregnant people," and "individuals with a cervix" is a thing. The defenders of these words, which reduce us to our biology and don't acknowledge our personhood, will reveal their misogyny if you poke them hard enough.
Gratuitous mention of women existing?!— Wendy Cockcroft (@wendycockcroft) August 1, 2020
Try saying that about transwomen and see how far you get.
You'd be ratioed into the floor, and would deserve it.
I've blocked the stupid misogynist berk, so here's a screenshot of the offending tweet. pic.twitter.com/R4tLOObTMZ
If we object to being reduced to sexual functions and body parts we have ideas above our station. If you have any lingering doubts that biological women are being erased by the intersectional left, that screenshotted tweet ought to sweep them away. Political protectionism is about protecting people from the possibility of being offended. This protection is devised and delivered by people based on theory and the conclusions they arrive at are via queering rather than engagement. Since the paradigm of critical and queer theory is about escaping the bonds of our patriarchal society, they throw the philosophical baby out with the bathwater; empiricism is disdained. This is why they won't debate; they have little in the way of evidence to back up their assertions, so the only way they can enforce them is to present them as a matter of morality and use shaming and passive-aggressive bullying to lock them down. Appeals to authority and morality are common in their literature and in media presentations. Notice that the gender pseudo-science in the Scientific American is restricted to the opinion blog; they know it's junk. But since it's *in* the Scientific American, these opinion posts are presented as settled science. It's an uphill task to debunk them because the people pushing them are well-funded and the people pushing back are not.
One of the biggest mistakes we keep making as liberals who do value debate, dialogue, conversation, reason, evidence, epistemic adequacy, fairness, civility, charity of argument, and all these other “master’s tools” is that we can expect that advocates of Critical Social Justice also value them. They don’t. Or, we make the mistake that we can possibly pin Critical Social Justice advocates into having to defend their views in debate or conversation. We can’t.
These principles and values are rejected to their very roots within the Critical Social Justice worldview, and so the request for an advocate to have a debate or conversation with someone who disagrees will, to the degree they have adopted the Critical Social Justice Theoretical ideology/faith, be a complete nonstarter. It’s literally a request to do the exact opposite of everything their ideology instructs with regard to how the world and “systemic oppression” within it operates—to participate in their own oppression and maintain oppression of the people they claim to speak for. - No, the Woke Won’t Debate You. Here’s Why, by James Lindsay for New Discourses 30/07/2020
The basic premise is that reason, critical thinking, and empiricism themselves are "master's tools" and must therefore be rejected as constructs of the patriarchy. It's the foundation on which TWAW is built. We have to accept the authority of TWAW on faith alone, else we are a part of the patriarchal oppression that threatens natal women, gay people, and trans folk. We're either the problem or the solution: pick one. They won't debate because we will use the master's tools, which they reject on principle. Why bring evidence when evidence itself is offensive and as much a symbol of oppression as a Swastika? As is debate. And that's the problem.
And that will bring us back to d'oh!
The failure to effectively tackle right-wingery has resulted in its evil twin, left-wingery, going on a theory bender and leaving a trail of destruction (by which I mean people's careers) behind it. When we don't tackle rampant nonsense on one side and hold those who utter falsehoods to account, people on the opposite side will be empowered to do the same thing. Neither the Left nor the Right are the political goodies or baddies; each side has its own problems. Indulging nutters because they're *our*
nutters has resulted in a proliferation of nutters. Now criticizing and pushing back is getting harder to do because neither side accepts an absolute standard, i.e. empiricism, as the arbiter of what is true and real and what is not. It's dictatorship by feelz.
Free speech has been hijacked by well-funded special interest groups who decide for us what is or isn't acceptable speech. That is not okay. If "freedom" only means "freedom to express approved views if you want to keep your job," we're not free. If "inclusivity" means the word "woman" is considered offensive so can't be used in official communications, we're not inclusive. We can add descriptors to it so people who don't identify as women or men are included in matters pertaining to our biology, etc.
I want to have a say in how consensus is reached, which, right now isn't possible in an environment in which debate is stifled because feelz. If we're going to beat this tyranny the only way forward is to promote objectivity, empiricism, and debate. Who's with me?
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