Even traumatized people can make a bad decision. That her abuse informs her opinion is not in question.
The "Cancellation" of J.K. Rowling
- Thread starter Dwarvenhobble
- Start date
You mean diagrams like this don't exist showing that difference in synaptic connections pretty clearly?
Dr Verma's research found a pretty clear difference.
The 30% claim you're citing I'd also kind of like a source on.
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Ok can we stop this. I'll give you Pizzagate (assuming you mean the cult one not Pineapple vs no pineapple) but this is kind of the same bullshit allegation going both ways.
Cernovich accused Gunn of being a pedeophile.
The claims against Cernovich that he's a rapist are kind of equally bullshit really and just as politically motivated in their deliberate malice as his claims were against Gunn.
I likely agree with Cernovich only very little but can we stop the "It's ok for us to do it because we don't like the guy" hypocrisy stuff?
Looks up the wiki...
Huh, what do ya know? Well, least Riordan's walking the walk on that front.
Heh, another librarian? Neat.
Question about Harry Potter though. Were adults reading the books because they sought them out, or because they were exposed to the books through their children and/or bought the books through their children? Because adults no doubt still enjoy Harry Potter, but I'm curious as to how many of those adults weren't first exposed to the series as children or teens, or through their kids. I do know that the HP books did have prints with 'adult covers' on them, in a bid to entice older readers, but I don't know how well that worked.
So that leaves us with Percy Jackson. Lightning Thief came out in 2005 - that's long enough for kids who read it to become adults at least, and adults would be buying the books for their kids as well.
I guess what I'm asking is whether there's evidence that adults got into Harry Potter on their own volition, and not Percy Jackson? Because I can't say either way. Both series seem to be this "thing" that attracts kids/teens, which then spreads to adults.
It the name of honestly in this case.
There have been cases of abuse that have happened
Transgender prisoner who sexually assaulted inmates jailed for life
Karen White, 52, admitted sexually assaulting women in female prison and raping two other women outside jail
www.theguardian.com
Female prison officers were raped by inmates claiming to be trans, Rory Stewart reveals
A former justice minister has claimed that female prison officers have been raped by transgender inmates
They're rare but the incidents have been happening even before the introduction of a new Gender identification thing where social transitioning isn't required.
Alex Jones may be a crackpot but sometimes he does pick up on things others don't seem to. He takes them to a completely insane place but in among all the nonsense is sometimes a nugget of truth that relates to something actually going on.
Gay frogs
Pesticide atrazine can turn male frogs into females
The herbicide atrazine, one of the world’s most widely used pesticides, screws up the sex lives of adult male frogs, emasculating three-quarters of them and turning one in 10 into females, ac…
Elite Vampires sucking the blood of the young
The super rich are injecting blood from teenagers to gain ‘immortality’
The super rich are injecting blood from teenagers to gain ‘immortality’
www.bbc.co.uk
he wasn't right about it but he was onto something going on.
Alex Jones is useful because he does make people question things even if the conclusion is almost always "Yeh Alex Jones is wrong".
Pizzagate wasn't real but wasn't Epstein accused of trafficking young girls?
Anything anyone says or does can influence people. I mean the Baseball shooter in the USA was a Bernie supporter, the youtube shooter was a Vegan yoga enthusiast who believed youtube was suppressing her channel
Do I agree with them asking the question? Well, I don't really think the essay merited that question alone, although there's several other statements of hers that I find to be pretty questionable and worth questioning as I've already outlined. Overall I get the impression that she means well, doesn't have ill intent, but has several baseless notions about trans people.
To be frank, I don't really understand why you seem to be expecting me to side with these people, and I don't understand why in the last post you asked me whether such-and-such "makes them a transphobe" when I used no such term. This all seems like such leading, condemning language that I wouldn't tend to expect from you.
And I've already stated that the abuse she's suffered isn't justified.
You specifically asked about what data there is available, and I provided what background I could, including a very relevant example of a nearby country operating a near-identical policy (RoI). It's not at all a reasonable response to say that what I provided is just "believing" and "hoping", putting these terms in scornful italics as if I'm being naively optimistic. I'm the only one to provide any data of substance.
When MSM are only a fraction off from the facts like Alex Jones is, they get called Fake News.Alex Jones may be a crackpot but sometimes he does pick up on things others don't seem to. He takes them to a completely insane place but in among all the nonsense is sometimes a nugget of truth that relates to something actually going on.
Gay frogs
.Pesticide atrazine can turn male frogs into females
The herbicide atrazine, one of the world’s most widely used pesticides, screws up the sex lives of adult male frogs, emasculating three-quarters of them and turning one in 10 into females, ac…news.berkeley.edu
Elite Vampires sucking the blood of the young
The super rich are injecting blood from teenagers to gain ‘immortality’
The super rich are injecting blood from teenagers to gain ‘immortality’www.bbc.co.uk
he wasn't right about it but he was onto something going on.
Alex Jones is useful because he does make people question things even if the conclusion is almost always "Yeh Alex Jones is wrong".
Pizzagate wasn't real but wasn't Epstein accused of trafficking young girls?
Anything anyone says or does can influence people. I mean the Baseball shooter in the USA was a Bernie supporter, the youtube shooter was a Vegan yoga enthusiast who believed youtube was suppressing her channel
Sure, listen to Alex Jones. If he got something right, let us know. But if he’s going to pretend to be a journalist, then people are going to hold him to that standard. Right now, the standard is stupidly high. You can’t report anything without being blamed for bias. If Fox or CNN can’t reach that standard, Jones isn’t.
His reporting of ‘facts’ got some people killed. That doesn’t get outweighEd by the times he’s been semi-right. It would be really cool if he took his role more seriously and did some fact checking
People don't or shouldn't be expecting hard factual news from Alex Jones though. He's never really been positioned as that to my knowledge. He might think of himself as that but I doubt anyone else does.
Who has Alex Jones got killed?
Didn't Pizzagate happen because of Jones?
Even if no-one died, peope's lives were ruined, and a lot of that is on Jones.
- May 6, 2020
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There were a fair number of right-wing podcasts that propagated that hypothesis. I don't know who lit the match, but Jones wasn't the only one fanning the fire.
Like every other domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor I know, I feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with trans women who’ve been abused by men.
In JK Rowling's detective novel The Silkworm, protagonist Cormoran Strike, war veteran and famous detective, investigates the mysterious disappearance of a member of the literary publishing establishment and the possible involvement of various characters in his literary circle. One of these characters is a young woman named Pippa, a pathetic, weak willed individual who is figuratively depicted as a "slave" to one of her friends. In one scene, Pippa attempts to stab Cormoran, only to be trapped in his office. He demands to see her ID, and discovers that she is trans. Time is then devoted to describing her visible Adam's apple, and special note is given to the fact that she keeps her hands in pockets (do you see what is being said here?). After Pippa tries several times to escape, Strike, our protagonist and the hero of this story, says the following line:
“‘If you go for that door one more time I’m calling the police and I’ll testify and be glad to watch you go down for attempted murder. And it won’t be fun for you Pippa,’ he added. ‘Not pre-op.’”
How do you think a domestic abuse survivor who has pondered the potential abuse of women, and who claims to feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with transwomen victims of abuse, managed to write a scene in which our macho cisdude hero forcibly outs a trans woman against her will, mockingly dresses down her appearance for the amusement of the audience and then forces her into compliance by threatening to send her to a mens' prison, where she will be raped, and while also managing to draw explicit attention to her penis? Moreover, how does she manage to frame this as both a comedy moment in which a pathetic character is humiliated and put in her place (again, through being threatened with rape) and as a victory for our hero, (a man who threatens women with rape).
Pippa is consistently depicted as pitiful, weak, delusional, irrational, emotionally unstable and perverse. There's also the implication that she began a sexual relationship with the missing author without informing him that she was trans, only to have him be disgusted and reject her upon finding out. Almost every aspect of her character comes back to her body, which is constantly framed by the story and characters as grotesque or revolting. The closest thing the novel manages to an empathetic depiction of Pippa is pity at how pathetic, worthless and miserable she is.
Abuse is a huge problem for incarcerated transwomen. While an obsessive lens has been placed a handful of cases of transwomen housed in womans' prisons committing acts of sexual violence against cis women, there are over a hundred transwomen in prison in the UK who lack gender recognition certificates and are consequentially housed in mens' prisons, where they are typically subject to constant harassment, bullying, sexual abuse, which have resulted in numerous cases of murder and suicide.
I am a domestic abuse survivor. Most of my friends, and most of the people I have lived with, have been domestic abuse or sexual assault survivors. Those two things are probably related. Empathy is not a thing you can turn on and of when it suits you, it is a persistent, involuntary, often very painful identfication with the state of being powerless, frightened or unable to resist someone else's control. I have no doubt that JK Rowling has genuinely suffered in her life, and I have no doubt that her experience of suffering has helped to build an empathy with the victims of suffering. However, I don't believe that includes transwomen. If Rowling could not manage empathy for a fictional transwoman she created, and who could have been anything. If she cannot manage empathy even when that fictional character is facing the all-to-real threat of sexual violence, I can't see any possibility of empathy for real transwomen either. If you can, good for you, you're more charitable than I am.
I'm going to quote something you said earlier.
If J.K. Rowling had said things like gender dysphoria was a myth, that trans people were just mentally ill people who needed psychological care to be brought round to the right way of thinking, that gender reassignment should be banned, that trans women can't be considered women, I could understand the extent of the hostility.
She didn't say that all gender dysphoria is a myth, but she did say that teenagers can be tricked into believing they have gender dysphoria when they actually don't, and that the vast majority of trans teenagers will just grow out of being trans if untreated. Now, imagine I'm a trans or gender variant teenager, and my parents read this essay and decide that I don't have gender dysphoria, but instead I have sudden-onset-gender-dysphoria. They refuse to let me see a doctor, and try to restrict my access to information, support and peer networks to prevent the "social contagion". They punish any instance of gender non-confirming behaviour and are deliberately confrontational and antagonistic to provide negative reinforcement. If I'm that teenager, then JK Rowling did say that my gender dysphoria was a myth. Not all gender dysphoria, but mine, and I suffered for it.
She didn't say that all trans people were mentally ill and needed psychological care to be brought round to the right way of thinking, but she did say that children become trans as a way of coping with mental health problems. Again, she did say that environmental factors can influence whether or not a person is trans, and she did say that most trans teenagers can be cured or will spontaneously cure themselves. Again, what if I am the trans kids whose parents read that? What if they refuse to let me be referred to a gender identity clinic and instead insist that my symptoms of dysphoria are due to mental health issues and that I need highly invasive psychotherapy and medication (this actually happened to me, and I'm still kind of angry about it). What if I'm the kid whose parents decide to take "negative reinforcement" to the next level by sending me to conversion therapy in the belief that I can be cured through dissuasion. Again, definitely not all trans people, but if I'm that trans person, then it is me, and I did suffer for it.
And yeah, she didn't say that all trans women can't be considered women, but she did make very clear that transwomen who don't take hormones, who don't have surgery, who don't make sufficient effort to look like her version of what a woman looks like aren't women (despite also insisting that a woman isn't a costume - Schrodinger's transwoman, I guess). What if that's me? It may not be everyone, but what if it is me? Do I have to take hormones even though I don't want to just to fit in with someone else's idea of what my transness is? Do I have to go through the difficult and agonising process of having my genitals reshaped so that I don't offend this random cis millionaire? And moreover, what does it mean that some random rich woman who literally has no clue what she is talking about is claiming to decide what does and doesn't make me a man or a woman? Is that the world we want to live in, a world where some transwomen are women, but if JK Rowling doesn't think you're trying hard enough, sorry, you're out.
And let's not forget actual me. I'm non-binary. JK Rowling absolutely knows that people like me exist. It's been pointed out to her many times. There is literally no mention of non-binary people in her essay. The assumption is always that gender dysphoria is explicitly aligned towards being male or female, and other than a sarcastic reference to clownfish and people "denying biology", there's literally nothing that could even reference people like me. Gender critical theory does not accept that non-binary people exist. Medically, non binary people exist. I have a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, and my doctor is obliged to recognise my gender identity. Legally, however, non-binary people do not exist. I cannot apply for a gender recognition certificate (something that was possibly going to change, but isn't going to now largely thanks to these wonderful people). Again, not all trans people, just me, and people like me.
There are always exceptions. There are always the good transsexuals. The problem is, that category is hard to stay in, and easy to fall out of. For the rest of us, sure, it's not all trans people. But it is me (and many, many other people) and that sucks, and it makes me angry that someone who has no understanding of my life, or the lives of trans people more broadly, feels they get to make that determination for me.
I'm gonna take a break from this thread, I think.
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Isn't he the biggest in that group?
But fair enough. He wasn't the first either. He was just signal boosting. And adding overexaggerations. And I'm pretty sure he said something like someone should take out that specific place
I know there are some structural differences. But what do those differences mean? What behaviour has been proven to differ because of them? The UPenn study is only actually examining a tiny, miniscule minority of brain connections; it's looking at adolescents (boys and girls mature at different rates), with no compensation for things like brain size.
Let's take hydrocephalus, a condition where the fluid-filled areas of the brain are abnormally large and the grey and white matter of the cerebrum correspondingly reduced. Some people with extreme hydrocephalus (where brain mass is about a tenth of normal) are, understandably, severely mentally impaired. But about half of them actually have normal behaviour and IQs averaging over 100, much like the non-hydrocephalic population. How do we make sense of this, that people can have such a huge difference in brain structure and be behaviourally normal, and at the same time that other people also with a similar huge difference from normal, are so different?
I don't presume to supply an answer, because I don't think we have one. But I do think that until there are sufficient experiments that prove a difference in behaviour based on an anatomical/phsyliological difference, we're never doing any more than hypothesising. A lot of hypotheses are wrong.
Okay, this a gross simplification of complex scientific argument muddled through simplicities in order make things digestable and engaging to the public.
The idea of male and female brains goes back a very long way. Men and women acted differently in society, so it was assumed they must have different brains. Charlatans a century or more ago claimed (wrongly) they could identify a brain as male or female just by looking at one (presumably removed from a dead body) and its gross features. So this has been a common baseline assumption rumbling along for generations, despite never really having a solid basis. The idea women and men might differ in large part because of the way they were brought up and the social roles they were squeezed into wasn't equally considered. Social roles were assumed to be the product of different behaviour from different brains.
Let's skip forward a long way into the era of neuroimaging, where possibly the most useful start point might be Simon Baron-Cohen, mostly known for autism research, who defined brains as "systematising", "empathising", or "balanced". He then popularised the notion that the "male" brain is systematising (autism being ultra-systematising), and the female brain empathising. Now, he didn't say "male" and "female" brains in his academic publishing, but he and others did pass that notion on to the public. He wrote a book "The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain" (which might be more accessible to read than his hard science articles for non-experts). Thus from him and others, with weight from centuries-old assumptions, people latched onto this idea that gender differences were true and provable by anatomical/physiological studies. As for the inaccuracy of this male/female distinction, it is there in Baron-Cohen's research itself: whilst men mostly have systematising and women mostly empathising brains, it is far from absolute. (Incidentally, the idea of autism as being extreme male is also very dubious.)
Subsequent experiments show all sorts of extreme complications in trying to define "male" and "female" brains. To give one example of many (and bearing in mind almost no scientific papers should be considered the final word), try the one below as it's a relatively well known one. The long and short of it is, as I said, that I just don't think we know anything like enough to make firm conclusions.
Sex beyond the genitalia: The human brain mosaic
Sex/gender differences in the brain are of high social interest because their presence is typically assumed to prove that humans belong to two distinct categories not only in terms of their genitalia, and thus justify differential treatment of males and females. Here we show that, although there...
www.pnas.org
Hope this helps.
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Fine. But not to me, in response to my post #36 which was explicitly about that - instead I felt you were arguing with me over a tangent. I do not have time to read every post in every thread I comment in.
I find this strangely defensive. I'm simply asking for your opinion on the issue I raised, seeing as you chose to engage with me in the first place. I don't personally see it as requiring clumsy and crass taking of "sides".
You definitely read the post in question (#39) because you responded to it and quoted it.
Firstly, there's a reason why in this thread I didn't quote you in my first post: because I wanted the points I made to stand aside from any existing exchange we'd already had about it in the other thread. In this thread, you engaged with me.
It is defensive. The reason for that is that I get the sense that you're projecting various positions onto me that I never adopted. That's what I take from posts asking me "why such-and-such makes someone a transphobe", asking me to justify it as if that's a position I took. Accusation prompts defensiveness.
I provided the only tangible data on the impact of the law in question, from countries operating similar policies, and it's been swept under the rug.
As near as I can see, men who want to abuse and attack women pretty much just go ahead and do it. They don't need to pretend they're something they aren't. People who want to appear 'reasonable' and 'decent', on the other hand, might couch their dislike (generously) of trans people in language that suggests they care about them (and the mistakes they're making) and that there are 'real discussions to have' about safety and women-only spaces.
Still very vague on the difference between boycotting and cancelling.
Still very vague on the difference between boycotting and cancelling.
You ignore the many examples of serial killers and sex offenders that go to quite a lot of effort to commit their crimes and the reason they can be serial is because they hide how they really are rather than "just going ahead and doing it".
You also must see the irony here where you are saying that someone saying there are "real discussion to have" are just covering for their real feelings and so discussion is not needed and harmful. That's what cancelling is about, removing the discussion by removing the person form their ability to communicate through removing their platform or dismissing anything they say.
Do these example include many men pretending to be trans women? I've had a quick read through Wikipedia's serial killer list and that isn't mentioned as far as I can see.