FEMINISM IS A MEN’S RIGHTS ISSUE – A [trans] woman calls out feminist indifference to trans women and appeals to the MRM

First off, please understand if my ignorant terminology in discussing cis/trans issues is unintentionally offensive – I do not mean to offend. I am certainly no expert in the subject, and my being silenced repeatedly for my “male privilege” leaves me with little interest in navigating the verbal nuances of gender identification/reassignment.

As an MRA I do feel pride for our warm embrace of trans men – great example of this can be found here: http://www.avoiceformen.com/misandry/chivalry/from-woman-to-man-to-red-pill/

Also as an MRA, I am appalled at the naked transphobia of foundational feminists like Germaine Greer, who said “No so-called sex-change has ever begged for a uterus-and-ovaries transplant; if uterus-and-ovaries transplants were made mandatory for wannabe women they would disappear overnight. The insistence that man-made women be accepted as women is the institutional expression of the mistaken conviction that women are defective males.”

Unfortunately, when it comes to offering financial support, most MRAs have few assets that haven’t been stripped away from them by divorce or other feminist-driven state seizures, and so have little left to allocate to causes other than our own survival.

Now, men have always had a natural instinct to provide protection and provisioning to the immediate women (and children) in their lives. Up until recently, this was an honorable role for men, AND those men who weren’t up to the task left few viable progeny to follow them, meaning that evolution has in the past selected in favor of male generosity to women. Certain white knights will still surrender their last farthing to an unrelated woman in need (or not) without really grasping why he feels compelled to do that.

However, nowadays this venerable social contract has been breached at the behest of feminism, and the state has taken over the role of the chief provider and provisioner of women.

What this means is that, despite our inborn instincts that men provide and women consume, men no longer are rewarded with sex, or children, or family companionship in exchange for their labors and sacrifices. Instead of being the intimate partners of women, men have to compete with them in workplaces that are increasingly hostile to men’s desires for sex and offspring – desires that are NOT shameful, regardless of what feminists say about them.

As a result, I contend that perhaps for the first time in human history, men no longer owe women ANYTHING.

Certainly not protection – if women desire protection, they can dial up their new state protectors at 911, or if that is inadequate, women can forego or sell off a couple of pairs of shoes and hire a personal bodyguard.

Certainly not provisioning – if a woman wants to eat, she can get a job, earn money and buy food just like men are expected to, or, if that is inadequate, she can get help from whatever state agency or women’s shelter she can get to toss free money at her.

Certainly not healthcare or shelter or whatever – when a contract is broken, the obligations under that contract cease.

Thanks to feminism, men no longer owe women ANYTHING AT ALL.

I know that won’t stop women from trying to cajole, then shame, then compel, then threaten or otherwise force men into surrendering our resources without recompense, but honestly, why the fuck should we? As someone who also identifies as MGTOW, I say – good luck with that, but the check is NOT in the male any more.

Is it misogynistic for a man to ask for compensation from women in exchange for his assets? Perhaps – but not more so than it is misandric for a woman to DEMAND money or other support from men in exchange for nothing.

Presently I have no healthcare insurance and because I have several pre-existing conditions it has been impossible for me to obtain it. Every dollar I give away is a dollar I have to weigh against the value of my own life, because giving away that dollar might COST me my life. Asking me to die so that anyone can have HRT leaves me rather unmotivated, however sympathetic to the suffering of others I might be.

Yes, men are supposed to be disposable at the whim of a woman – and under the old contract, they were, by the billions. But now, the manslaves are waking up and breaking free of those expectations, which are now GONE FOREVER – the old regime is dead, and good riddance.

Now that I have freed myself of my desire to live up to the expectations of women, I find my life is absurdly happy – solitude is JOYOUS for me, my time is my own, and find myself intoxicated by my newborn freedom. #Sorryfeminists – you probably should have factored that into your plans to dominate men even more by replacing them – oops.

Now, do cisfeminists owe YOU, Valerie, for your support of them in securing abortion rights, etc? That sounds just and honorable to me, but some corollary of Briffault’s Law likely excuses them.

Valerie, I’ll fully approve of whatever gender identity you feel you must have. All I ask is that you not rape my wallet in your rush to get there. You will discover that there is fine sense of accomplishment in taking personal responsibility and doing something for and by one’s own self.

Enjoy.

Incidentally, on the Greer quote, Lili Elbe died of complications of a uterus transplant.

What do the MRM get out of this exactly?

The moral high ground just doesn’t feel stable enough these days.

@Bibo

That was the most condescending pile of horseshit I have ever read, and I’ve debated radfems. My transition expenses covered by single-payer medicine consist of four doctor’s visits, three of which were unnecessary, and three blood tests, so a grand total of $300 bucks if I’d had the same right to HRT that a cis woman does.

So howabout before you begin worrying about your precious wallet, and by the way, you should really go watch Kirsten Schall’s Daily Show sketch, Money Rape, you and every other straight cis person fork over their share? Cover the potential 1.1 pregnancies which are also covered by single-payer health care. Or the invitro fertilizations? Or the vasectomies?

Why are your elective health needs needs and mine are luxuries which must be earned?

whatever gender identity you feel you must have.

Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, pal. It’s neurological sex, just like yours, or maybe you want to take estrogen and anti-androgens for a decade and tell me that my body is a frivolity that health insurance should not apply to at that point.

@0gun What do the MRM get out of this exactly?

Well, if the satisfaction of standing up for your principles isn’t enough, note that most of the nominally misandristic abuse men receive isn’t aimed at the alpha dogs… it’s aimed at those who don’t conform well to the cismasculine role, which is much narrower than the cisfeminine role. Move trans women’s rights forward and you make abuse directed against amasculine CAMAB folk a lot harder to get away with… you also create more flexibility for cis men to defy gender norms.

Improving trans rights narrows the window of acceptability for oppressing all marginalized GSMs. Actually, some radfems implicitly get this. It’s why they leapt on Drew Devaux’ discussion of The Cotton Ceiling, comparing it to pushback against the pathologizing term Nice Guy Syndrome.

Radfems know that if you tug on the string that is transmisogyny, you find a lot of other sexist stuff, which they very much want to preserve, far too well-attached to ignore.

I can understand why feminists hate transexuals so much. Any privileged group would be outraged if people of their enemy group could transition into the in-group. Imagine how outraged the Nazis would be if the Jews could turn themselves relatively easily turn themselves Caucasian.

You’ve got my support Valerie, which is worth pretty much nothing as I am broke and not in great repute with MRA organizations. Maybe I’ll start a forum topic on AVFM or some such.

Unlike most MRAs I’m leftist and I have no problem with helping pay for your sex transition surgery as long as you help me with my medical problems when and if they arise. I’d have to withdraw any support from you if you can’t do that.

I’ve been interested in transsexuals for quite a while. Maybe that’s because I think shemale on female porn is the hottest thing in the world (is shemale an offensive word to you? I don’t mean offense by it.) It combines everything that’s awesome about straight porn with everything that’s awesome about lesbian porn. Helping people escape the horror of the mismatch of neurological sex and physical sex is certainly a worthy cause in-and-of-itself but the fact that it incidentally results in more hot porn for me shows the existence of a beautiful karma in this case.

This topic is already a mess.

However your answer is acceptable, despite my personal ambivalence towards amasculine males and transgender peoples.

@Iron Lightning

While non-operative, (no surgery involved unless you count a blood test) and not so much changing my sex as my presentation, I remain a staunch supporter of single-payer medicine, so yeah… I support everyone’s right to efficacious medical care.

Yes, that word you mentioned is commonly used as a slur, so you probably shouldn’t use it in polite conversation. Also, trans women being female as well, it’s fairly inaccurate. What you say in private, with or without partner(s) is a completely different matter.

@Bibo, you ignorant slut:

I was too busy reacting to your smarmy points as to how single-payer medicine is rape of the wallet… see, I was meeting with my fellow public transit users / money-rape survivor group discussing how the government pays for roads we personally don’t use, so I was too distracted to notice your subtle trap, or whatever the fuck it was.

At any rate: Where I come from, my right to medical care is incumbent on my accepting the responsibility of participation in a progressive tax system, which I ALREADY do. Asking for the same standard of care cis people receive is hardly asking for rights without responsibilities.

And finally, I should take the time to mention that you really are the worst kind of person, and I have yet to see you add anything to this site that wouldn’t have better fit on the New York Post’s comments page…

Tired attempts at humour that stopped being funny about the time Bil Keane stopped seeming original, using othering language which you would never use in relation to yourself, and pretending disingenousness is a subtle, much-layered debating tactic designed to expose the problematic nature of allowing for self-identification*, are all wearing very thin.

As to whom my post is aimed at, cisfeminists or MRAs, why the hell can’t it be both?

*In that spirit: Eat Shit, Shithead. Hope that didn’t set off any bullshit triggers you claimed to have so that you could mock people with real triggers as just being huffy.

Seamus’s comment was odd; what do MRA sites have to do with misogyny, except in the paranoid imaginings of radical feminists?

As far as I can tell people don’t like having labels thrust on them. For me, and maybe it’s just because I’m an asshole, when people say I’m “cis”anything…I get turned off. Once one leaves the gender-sphere notions of cis xir and such terminology are ridiculed. And although I do not advocate for people being mean, here is what people liken “cis” “xir” etc jargon to …”s/h/it”. (Stands for “he/she/it”). So IMO if one wants to get more people on board with their particular issue, speak a language that isn’t going to make people feel like they are being accused of something. Use the language they use. Do not impose or police words!

Ok got that off my chest.

/carry on

“Wow, Seamus, since that isn’t your real name… how nice of you to demonstrate my point for me.”

Valerie, don’t you just love it when your enemies do your work for you? There should be no doubt that “Seamus” has the same searing hatred of men. She’s a fine example of Creepy Bitter Girl.

Bibo,
“Now, if you are serious in enlisting MRAs to your cause, try framing it as a challenge: “Betcha can’t prove you are better than feminists by supporting free healthcare for HRT and related procedures for the transwomen that feminists hate!” Men find it hard to resist a good challenge, and engaging feminists by morally upstaging them is fucking catnip to MRAs.”

You and Valerie are are the same page on this one.
“because cis feminists aren’t really interested in having this
discussion, so maybe MRAs, or at least the people they deride as MRAs,
can take this up and shame cis feminists into reclaiming the moral
authority they used to have.

However I would reword this “engaging feminists by morally upstaging them ” as “enraging feminists by morally upstaging them…”

Bibo, remember that Valerie is on a war footing, lives on a war footing. You know how smoky and foggy and confusing it can get on a battlefield, and how hard it can be tell a T-72 from an M-1 in the heat of that moment, and how very little time one has to deliberate? When it comes right down to it, it is better to be on the guilty side rather than the wrong side of a friendly fire incident. We call it the All-American firefight, or in this case I guess it would be the All-NATO fire fight. It is a sad waste of resources, so let’s try to avoid it.

“So IMO if one wants to get more people on board with their particular issue, speak a language that isn’t going to make people feel like they are being accused of something. Use the language they use. Do not impose or police words! ”

Born women, biological women, real women, just “women” with the tacit implication that it excludes trans women?

Cis women is like heterosexual women.

Do you object to being called heterosexual? Do you feel accused when someone says you are heterosexual in a discussion involving homosexual, asexual and bisexual people?

Well yeah. Feminist just love calling people like me white cis hetero privileged men.

@Debaser71
I’m a white trans lesbian working-class woman, and I’m still pretty goddessdamned privileged. Kyriarchy is magical that way.

Often they’re using it as a derail, and often they’re using it because that’s what they think they’re supposed to do because they’ve seen it used a hundred times.. Don’t conflate their shitty tactics with non-normative respect for trans folk. Trust me, they don’t like trans folk… and I bet if any descriptor is left out of that grab bag you just mentioned, it’s cis.

Also, you know, if you learn to be a really awesome trans ally, you can shut them down when they do say that shit…

“Why on earth did you mention cis? We weren’t even talking about trans issues. (Of course, cis feminists rarely talk about trans issues unless it’s to score points while standing on other women’s backs.) I think you included cis because, once again, you needed to create a little carveout in progressive space for your transmasculine buddies… You know? The ones you claim to respect as men, but then treat like special-snowflake feminist-approved men-lite. Of course, you know… there are countless trans women who would kill to have the kind of rights to HRT that cis women have to abortion in Mississippi or Utah, but please, keep ignoring them and subconsiously repeating the meme of Two Legs Good, Three Legs Bad… it’s not like doing so increases their risk of death or anything.”

There. You have now shut down the vast majority of people who will try to derail the discussion onto your privilege by invoking their cissexism and implicitly reminding the audience of their privilege.

“Ah yes, I’ve also heard the “genetic girl” or genetic woman. Same problem as the others.”

How about “neural woman”, Schala? We are talking about brian wiring after all. That’s also why “trans” seems a little wrong. It isn’t you that’s transitioning to female, it’s your body.

@Gingko

Not so much the body as the presentation.

Ultimately, radfems, actual radfems, not just unifems who disagree with you (and me) would be happier with the kind of words that people here are asking trans feminists to use. Anything which centres cis as genuine, they’ll go for. So with radfems, CAFAB becomes FAB, trans womyn becomes transwomen, transfeminine becomes M2T and neurological sex becomes “shut up you deluded tranny.”

Helping non-masculine males in this way has got to be the most insulting form of “trickle down social justice” I’ve ever read.

I can imagine it right now: “Hey, you shy, awkward, dork, with a tiny penis, not much muscles and no confidence what-so-ever! Sure you haven’t even mastered male-bonding 101 but because transwomen are now accepted as ‘legit’ we won’t mock you… as much”. “Of course you are still stuck in the crevasse of the uncanny valley given how you’re not quite a transwoman and certainly not a masculine male, so… what are you exactly!? You’re a failed male and too much of a wimp to just transition, I pity you”.

Whoever that guy is who is on the receiving end of that, I hope he’s got a really sharp Kitana because that impending suicide will go a lot smoother.

This is trickle-down social justice and kind of unworthy of a cause to be frank. Non-masculine males shouldn’t be coddled anyway, and certainly deserve more of an effort than this.

@0kun I can imagine it right now: “Hey, you shy, awkward, dork, with a tiny penis, not much muscles and no confidence what-so-ever! Sure you haven’t even mastered male-bonding 101 but because transwomen are now accepted as ‘legit’ we won’t mock you… as much”. “Of course you are still stuck in the crevasse of the uncanny valley given how you’re not quite a transwoman and certainly not a masculine male, so… what are you exactly!? You’re a failed male and too much of a wimp to just transition, I pity you”.

That is a complete distortion! I would never write trans women as one word.

And again, amasculine men aren’t failed men.

Frankly, I get tired of those who play into the radfem narrative that wants every CAMAB person to be Apollo, sycophant, or corpse. Talking about the Cotton Ceiling weakens the intellectual underpinnings of hatefule rhetoric around romantically passive men. Talking about the right of CAMAB women to health care weakens the argument for male disposability, since, you know, cissexism is still a thing and a lot of policies tend to fall on people based on birth assignment. Talking about greater reproductive freedom for trans folks, moves “my body, my choice,” beyond cis women, weakening the argument against paper abortions… It’s not trickle-down. It’s moving the Overton Window, and also, gaining moral authority, which is important.

It was the moral authority that unifems got after the (long overdue) victory on legalizing abortion that gave them the political capital required to roll back sexist vestiges and also engage in overreach. Because when someone says feminist, the word may conjure up negative stereotypes for some, but for others, they remember reproductive freedom and an end to workplace discrimination, two of the most morally defensible causes of the last century.

Anyone who wants to turn the clock back on Roe or Title IX is rightly seen as retrograde, and this has often shielded cisfeminists from justified criticism.

You really think the SPLC would get away with calling the MRM a hate group if it were MRAs fighting for trans rights and shaming cis feminists on the issue? If Warren Farrell were demanding a public apology from everyone who ever shared a dais with Raymond, Daly, Greer, or Steinem for their condoning of transmisogyny?

@Gingko

I consider myself more of a fellow-traveler.

Valerie:

That I think that trans women need a bit of cultural feminism in their lives to help divorce the community from its own internalized self-hate, and from depending on cissies for validation, does not, a radfem, make.

Don’t be obtuse. What makes you a radfem is your expressed wish to genetically engineer men out of existence. Nobody who holds opinions like that is a friend or ally of men.

0gun,

It does sound condescending. But the people who don’t fit in any given system are the ones who put the most effort into changing that system.

So feminism disproportionately attracted womyn who were more tomboyish than they were allowed to, or were lesbian, or just didn’t fit in for other reasons. And they put a lot of effort into challenging the idea that womyn have to be heterosexual and conventionally feminine. But they didn’t put as much effort into challenging the ways that our society devalues femininity and traditionally-feminine roles.

But if it were more willing to include trans womyn, most of us didn’t fit in, or don’t fit in, for one or another reason. [Sorry Valerie if the tenses erase pre/non-transitioning trans womyn, I don’t know how to address this.] Some didn’t fit in because they were too feminine to be accepted as men, before/without transitioning. Some don’t fit in because we are too butch. Some don’t fit in because of body differences before or after. Because there are so many different reasons we might not fit in, there isn’t this filter selecting for butch-of-center lesbians in trans womyn’s gender activism.

Because there isn’t this filter, there are more perspectives, and there are more people putting more energy into challenging the ways that our society devalues femininity and traditionally-feminine roles.

If our society stops devaluing femininity, that could create more gender freedom for men.

If our society stops devaluing intersex bodies, that could create more gender freedom for intersex and physically androgynous men.

etc.

Valerie:

So you degender both cis women and cis men? And you want a gold star for that?

Either way, your “utopia”* is insulting to anyone who identifies as a man. Worse than insulting, its disgusting. You feel that the solution to problems in society is to play god with the lives of those that are yet to exist. And best yet, I get strong feelvibes that it is less of a rhetorical tool, and more of a masturbatory fantasy. I very well could be wrong about that, since this is text based communication and all, but I’m letting you know, it came off that way to at least one person who heard about it.

*Thank whatever you want that it is literally a utopia, i.e. doesn’t exist.

@Marja Erwin

That NEVER works. Trickle-down social justice just doesn’t work. For instance western youth cultures are very receptive to Japanese and Korean youth cultures; however that has not resulted in any concessions for Arabs, the Chinese, Indians or anybody else throughout Asia.

Human beings tend to be able to COMPARTMENTALIZE their curtsey. I personally feel “amasculine” males won’t get even an iota of freedom out of concessions awarded to transwomen (is it supposed to have a space or not?). That’s not to say I don’t want concessions to be granted to trans women (I’ll try it from now on with a space). It’s just that with compartmentalization amasculine males will have nothing to show for this. Rather than going this back-handed condescended route why don’t we actually TARGET amasculine males?

This trickle-down, third-party help system is silly. This is the same shit which fragmented black and white feminists. I personally don’t want that schism in the MRA. Some may also be opposed to the idea that amasculine males are being helped in a tertiary way by ‘women’ and not directly by men that they should consider brothers in arms.

This all just stinks.

@ Marja

“But the people who don’t fit in any given system are the ones who put the most effort into changing that system.”

I disagree. Often it’s those who are most well appointed by a system who work to change it because it disagrees with their understanding of themselves as moral beings.

And the people who the system hurts most are often most invested in maintaining it because many people will endure depredations if it means avoiding being thought a complete fool.

Ginkgo:

But wanting a provison of sex change therapy in individual cases is not the same as advocating for gendercide

Yep. Blind.

“But wanting a provison of sex change therapy in individual cases is not the same as advocating for gendercide
Yep. Blind.”

Yeah, no. She’s talking about parents getting hormone therapy for a gender dysphoric kid before puberty. It’s just not the same thing as some twitchet aborting a male fetus beause he’s male. Do you really see no difference between the two?

“I disagree. Often it’s those who are most well appointed by a system who work to change it because it disagrees with their understanding of themselves as moral beings.”

This is the theory of the vanguard party. It’s practically the history of revolution.

And by the way, Patrick, in practical terms it makes no difference if what you say of her is true. In terms of theoretcal purity it may matter hugey, but not in practical terms of getting policy and culutre and law changed.

Allies are allies, not your own people. No war is ever really over until the allies have turned on each other and decided what the outcome of theoputcome is goging to be. That’s why Helmut Kohl said basically that WWII ended in 1989. (That’s how long that took.)

So where’s the probelm? Do you think peple like Valerie’s thinking will ever pose any kind of real threat? I don’t see it. And in the meantime, she beats the radfems like a brass gong. It’s not the end of the world either if she gets some good out of our efforts.

My Dear God, this thread has been both fun and educational, but my work here is done.

@Valerie, it is always a pleasure, and best wishes to you – keep up the great MRA support work, and good luck going it alone on your SJ concerns. Although your name means “strength” (as in valor), I will always think of you as Branwen, the Goddess of Empathy, Healing Love, Prophecy, & Healthy Bowel Movements. See ya on another thread, soon, and may the batteries in your vibrators last forever.

@Gingko – I’m not sure what you mean by Valerie’s “war-footing” – sounds like just another pair of pricey shoes to me. That such a gentle, feminine soul could be bellicose seems rather farfetched to me.

And…. 😉

@Equilibrium Shift

No. She does not imagine a world where parents can get HRT for pre pubescent children as the ideal.

Actually, HRT on demand is pretty ideal

She specifically said she imagines the ideal as a world where male fetuses are given spironolactone. Of course they will remain male (according to Valerie’s brain essentialist doctrine), but they will not receive any of the prenatal androgens that turn them into cis men.

You’ve gotten it completely wrong. They most certainly would NOT remain men based on the only legitimate metric for a sapient species, or as you put it, “my brain essentialist doctrine.”

Best evidence indicates that testosterone in weeks 10-13 is responsible for masculinization of the midbrain. Months 3-5, testosterone is responsible for androphilia… Cis and heter-normative midbrains are such a balancing act, by comparison, so the major effect of such a policy would almost certainly be an increase in the GSM population, which, currently hovering around an avowed 10%, is not the worst thing in the world… or is it only okay for a GSM to be reduced to about 10% of the population if this happens as the result of long-standing normative attitudes and practices and a failure of human biology to keep up with planetary carrying capacity, instead of a radfem pipe dream?

Jupp: “I don’t believe this, as “trans woman” is an identity distinct from the group of men.”

Yes it is, but ironically I think soft transphobia makes Valerie’s point likely. No, trans women and cis men are not the same, but even the nominally tolerant still tend to believe they are and that being a trans woman is just a really strange but allowable lifestyle choice. I’m not sure that’s going to change. So I think relaxing transmisogyny will indirectly benefit men, and yes, relaxing traditional male roles will indirectly benefit trans women.

Harrow: “So I think relaxing transmisogyny will indirectly benefit men, and yes, relaxing traditional male roles will indirectly benefit trans women.”

How and why?

@Valerie:

“It’d be sex… and just because I hope that cismasculinity will eventually fall out of fashion, and support the right of parents to select a child’s neurological sex, ”

So you want other people to respect the gender you experience yourself to be, but you despise the gender that cismasculine people experience themselves to be, and wish to see it gone?

Why on earth do you demand from others what you do not offer in return?

And given that a large percentage of MRA’s are cismasculine, why on earth do you think they would want to answer your “appeal”?

You rail against people coercively assigning gender to people at birth, but are in favour of parents coercively assigning gender via hormones before birth? How does that work?

I am not trying to be cheeky. I may be wrong.

I am not convinced that cissexism is the causation of the “nominally misandristic abuse amasculine men receive”. If one is to accept this then they may need to confront the possible reality that they are merely performing a mental gymnastic feat in the form of a correlation proves causation fallacy.

The problems amasculine males face maybe corollary to Trans women but they are by definition MISANDRY not cissexism. It’s like when feminists say that the misandry men face isn’t misandry at all, but a particular form of misogyny brought to them by the patriarchy. It’s a straw man argument, albeit a very subtle one. So subtle I bet you don’t even see it. It does beg the question of whether the issues Trans women are facing are actually MISANDRY or Misogyny. They cannot be both. Not with the essentialism in the midst of the whole idea.

@Valerie: ” She specifically said she imagines the ideal as a world where male fetuses are given spironolactone. Of course they will remain male (according to Valerie’s brain essentialist doctrine), but they will not receive any of the prenatal androgens that turn them into cis men.

You’ve gotten it completely wrong. They most certainly would NOT remain men based on the only legitimate metric for a sapient species, or as you put it, ‘my brain essentialist doctrine.'”

First off, this discussion isn’t derailing as there is no MRA who would want anything to do with someone who holds this patently offensive viewpoint.

If it’s coercion for your parents to assign you as male without your consent before your neurological sex can be detectable then how is it not coercion for parents to alter the neurological sex of their children without their consent?

Parents should not have the right to permanently alter their children as they see fit. I can’t abide by that for the same reason that I can’t abide genital mutilation, eugenics, forced HRT, or dexamethasome (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdhUw9VHRb4&feature=related .) I’m sure that you wouldn’t like it very much if your parent’s decided that you weren’t growing up to be suitably masculine so they pumped you full of androgens. Oh wait, you weren’t thinking of that just as you weren’t thinking about endocrinologically eliminating masculine (oh sorry, cismasculine, because masculinity is only a problem when being exhibited by cis men.)

“…the major effect of such a policy would almost certainly be an increase in the GSM population, which, currently hovering around an avowed 10%, is not the worst thing in the world… or is it only okay for a GSM to be reduced to about 10% of the population if this happens as the result of long-standing normative attitudes and practices and a failure of human biology to keep up with planetary carrying capacity, instead of a radfem pipe dream?”

GSM people haven’t been reduced at all, 10% is their natural ratio. Anyway, I see your justification is population control. I think there are better ways of going about that, especially considering that GSM people are capable of reproduction. The best way to curb population expansion is to improve living conditions. Most well-off industrialized countries reproduce at the replacement rate. Sure, that’s difficult to do but it’s about as realistic as your idea. Especially considering that such extreme hormonal therapy will certainly result in a lot of unforeseen medical problems.

“I don’t have a lot of time for Budweiser, and would like to see them taking up less than nearly-all of the facings on the shelves of the liquor store, but I do not imagine that replacing some Budweiser permutations with local craft-brews is going to extinguish any and all demand or sales of Budweiser…”

This analogy would work if not for the fact that people are living beings and unlike beer, are not just there for your pleasure. You do understand that, don’t you? You are not entitled to having more people like you engineered just because you’d like them better.

Look, I’m a rational man, so if you have a good, logical argument I will accept it. However, this looks pretty sick to me right now.

“Parents are already able to select the XX/XY chromosomal configuration of their child (There is a company that does this). ”
That’s pretty fucked up. What’s the name of that company?

“Parents are able to select for the genital morphology of their child through selective abortion.”
That’s pretty fucked up but sadly there’s no effective way to prevent that without criminalizing all abortion.

“Parents are allowed to test for what we consider birth defects and are allowed to abort those children.”
That’s pretty fucked up barring the most extreme cases wherein the child would simply be surely unable to lead a happy life.

“Parents are allowed to give their children up for adoption based on any of the above reasons.”
That’s pretty fucked up.

“Parents are allowed to attempt to force development of a child’s worldview in ways they prefer, despite all evidence that children will perform better under different circumstances, and they are allowed to punish a child for not outwardly expressing that worldview…”
That’s pretty fucked up as you seem to agree.

“Oh, and parents are allowed to prophylactially prevent a non cis-hetero midbrain from developing in certain circumstances.”
I’ve already said that’s pretty fucked under the Youtube video that I linked which is talking about how dexamethasome is sometimes used to prevent lesbianism and make women more interested in having children.

“But sure, letting parents select FOR queerness would be the thin end of the wedge… Honestly!”
That’s pretty fucked up too but fortunately unlike a few of the things you mentioned above we can ban such a practice through legal means.

Way to not address any of my points and instead constructing a strawman of me as a guy who thinks that the above actions are okay are implying that I’m a hypocrite. Maybe that’s not your argument, though, maybe you’re saying that since the above acts are already practiced it would be fine to do one more similar act. Which is like unironically saying that since male genital mutilation is in practice then we should start practicing female genital mutilation. Perhaps I’m still wrong and you’re saying that since society accepts the above acts they must be good. If that’s the case then I have to say that I never expected a member of an oppressed minority group to use the argumentum ad populum fallacy. This argument doesn’t make any sense in any way that I can see.

Please address my actual arguments if you choose to respond as I have addressed yours.

But again, you’re engaged in an ad hominem fallacy in the first place, not addressing my points about control over ones own body, and instead derailing onto what is a largely rhetorical exercise which is intended to strike at transmisogyny in cis-dominated lesbian spaces.

That and, as I said, if you’re going to do away with a gender, it’s far better that it be done on a voluntary basis. Besides, there will be plenty of male uteri, and I’m sure you can convince your brothers to bear sons in equal measure.

0gun: The misogyny/misandry thing gets a bit more complicated when you’re talking about trans people. Ultimately hostility to trans women is misogyny because the person being attacked is female. But that’s mostly not what motivates bigots; instead it’s misdirected misandry, because they don’t really believe she’s a failed woman, but a failed man. That’s certainly what motivates cissexist feminists. Just to make it more complicated, there are also offensive stereotypes that really are rooted in misogyny, like being hypersexual sluts, something men rarely get (unlike feminists, I don’t say men never get it).

And certainly misandrist sexism explains hostility to dudes who can’t or won’t fulfill their traditional gender roles, effeminate men, etc. Which is why I believe relaxing coercive roles for cis guys will benefit trans women and vice versa.

P.S. “Besides, there will be plenty of male uteri, and I’m sure you can convince your brothers to bear sons in equal measure.”
Wait… what…? I don’t understand this sentence. Is this some joke that I’m not getting or are we talking about entirely different things here?

“There should be no doubt that “Seamus” has the same searing hatred of men.”

LMAO!!! Don’t give up your day job for prognosticating.

Valerie, since you apparently want to mind control people, I’ve mailed you a mind control ray. Because I don’t know how else to respond to Mr. Smith here.

In MRA talk, she’s every inch a Privileged Princess.

Seamus, if you’re going to make such strong assertions about someone, it might be better to give reasons rather than just insistence. It’s clear you have some kind of long-running problem with Valerie but I can’t make head or tail of it.

Also, how often are hands, feet, or knees condemned as violent, as weapons, the ways penises get condemned as weapons?

“Despite his obviously false protestations to the contrary, he doesn’t just want control over his body. He wants control over YOUR rational mind — or at the very least, the ability to censor you and silence you. He wants to find a way — using the law and government as necessary — to force you to either agree with his delusions of his fake femaleness or at the very least to force you to PRETEND to agree with his delusions of his fake femaleness.”

Seamus, you’re apparently so bothered by someone else’s status as male or female and supposedly fraudulent entry into womanhood that I would think you are the one with mental issues. Most people, even haters, don’t fucking care about people they don’t personally know’s maleness or femaleness. At worst they’re bothered by “not knowing for sure” when someone appears androgyne enough (and then it’s mostly because they can usually tell men and women apart, and suddenly fail, questioning their worldview – rather than being interested in the person).

Only a certain brand of radical feminists and traditionalists (which aren’t that far from each other…see Heart as an example) even care. And it seems, at the heart, to be about damseling credentials, and about who can be a real victims, as measured by the most oppressededed in the world, white middle-class or wealthy cis women. With a side dish of white knights to do their dirty work (men who are radfems and men who are chivalrous traditionalists, and who can’t bear to think that some people might “usurp” the victim cred of their women without having been born with a vagina). Funny enough, those men (the radfem ones anyways) are usually extremely self-flagellating, as if they were making up for some huge mistake and saying sorry metaphorically for an eternity. The huge mistake is expressed as having been born with a penis, but they’re not trans, they’re just tainted with the sin of oppression, forever and ever.

People like me, who are seen as women by most, yet keep their penises, scare you Seamus. Because we’re not wearing a yellow star where “people can tell”, so we are seen as spies by people like you. Evil violent raping spies, somehow. Because penises themselves are evil. And trans women more evil than cis men. And non-trans women are incapable of evil, of course.

Oh and, there is no police patrolling the borders of manhood.

Even though some will say maleness is more desirable, more valued, more fun, more wealthy…yet no one is there to say trans men are not real men, and not entitled to maleness privileges.

Why is that, if it’s all cupcakes and sundaes, is there no one trying to keep the maleness “club” exclusive and prevent “intrusion”? At worse, there’ll be generic “I’m better than you” transphobia, as an additional one-upmanship argument used against trans men.

Why is that, if it’s all so horrible, oppressive and the worst thing ever, is there a ton of people trying to keep the femaleness “club” exclusive and prevent “intrusion”? Bathroom panic at the idea that the oh-so-precious essential femaleness of cis women could be intruded upon by penis owners, who would, as all penis owners do somehow, rape those cis women.

It’s simple:

Men are the working class, women are the aristocrats.

Men won’t prevent other people from becoming working class on a permanent basis (they would be against slumming temporarily though). Women (and men who want to win points with those women) will try to prevent other people from becoming aristocrats on a permanent basis, and will find it done on a temporary basis (cross-dressers, drag) to be distasteful to the level of how they view porn. They will also find androgynes/agenders/bigenders and anyone who could be seen as female to be a problem, if they didn’t start off with a vagina anyways.

This is a recent development. In the past, when people worked farms in majority, both sexes were more or less equally oppressed, wearing functional clothing most of the time (unless they actually were aristocrats) in order to do the work they did. The roles were strict and didn’t allow variety and eccentrism. Both had to do what we would consider ungodly amounts of hours of labor, just to get by. We didn’t have labor saving devices, and we didn’t need to artificially inflate housework hours by raising standards of cleanliness from “clean and neat” to “extremely clean, neat and tidy at all times”, we were busy almost all the time without needing to clean the same room twice a day (like the women in cleaning commercials who apparently NEVER get a minute to themselves, but thanks to swiffer get 5 minutes off – when doing the entire cleaning up should take 2 hours a day at most, not 20).

@Schala

With a side dish of white knights to do their dirty work (men who are radfems and men who are chivalrous traditionalists, and who can’t bear to think that some people might “usurp” the victim cred of their women without having been born with a vagina). Funny enough, those men (the radfem ones anyways) are usually extremely self-flagellating, as if they were making up for some huge mistake and saying sorry metaphorically for an eternity. The huge mistake is expressed as having been born with a penis, but they’re not trans, they’re just tainted with the sin of oppression, forever and ever.

I will say, that sounds pretty goddess damn closeted-and-trans.

“I will say, that sounds pretty goddess damn closeted-and-trans.”

I talked with Julian Real in 2011 on his blog. He was extremely apologetic about being male. He also accused me or misogyny, racism, and homophobia, because I dared think I should have routine access to women’s space (like bathrooms and such).

Schala,
This:
“It’s simple:
Men are the working class, women are the aristocrats.”

has enormous explananatory power. It explains male disposability, concerns about the Glass Ceiling but not the Glass Basement, the general and traditinal division of labor around gender and it even expalins the ruels around clothing – men dress drabbly and women like lords.

Long post coming, maybe after the wedding if not before.

An off topic tip. I came across the term testosterone poisoning in a comment on another blog and figured it might be an interesting topic for you to look into at some point. THis is the comment:

From wikipedia, for your bemusement:

An early printed reference to “testosterone poisoning” came in 1975 from actor Alan Alda He said:

“Everyone knows that testosterone, the so-called male hormone, is found in both men and women. What is not so well known, is that men have an overdose… Until recently it has been thought that the level of testosterone in men is normal simply because they have it. But if you consider how abnormal their behavior is, then you are led to the hypothesis that almost all men are suffering from testosterone poisoning.”

Ten years later, that same sentence from Alda’s article was quoted in the 1985 book A Feminist Dictionary

Carl Sagan gave the phrase more publicity when he praised Moondance magazine writer Daniela Gioseffi’s American Book Award winner Women on War:

A book of searing analysis and cries from the heart on the madness of war. Why is the half of humanity with a special sensitivity to the preciousness of life, the half untainted by testosterone poisoning, almost wholly unrepresented in defense establishments and peace negotiations worldwide?

Some took offense at this phrase. A Los Angeles Times op-ed piece referred to Professor Sagan’s use directly:

Carl Sagan even pompously informs us that the whole planet is imminently endangered by “testosterone poisoning.”

@Marja Erwin: “As for the ethics, unless we have external artificial wombs like Shulamith Firestone argued for, then you can’t separate the bearer’s control over their own body from their effects on the prenatal development of the fetus. Dexamethasone horrifies me. But the same line that separates abortion from infanticide, I think, separates many prenatal and postnatal actions.”

So then it’s okay for a mother to drink excessively in order to intentionally give her child Fetal Alcohol Syndrome? It’s okay for a mother in no abnormal danger to abort her child a week before it’s due: when it is physically indistinguishable from a post-natal infant?

I wasn’t even writing to you, Valerie, you silly sod. I was addressing Marja’s apparent notion that it’s okay to do whatever you want to a fetus.

Looks like somebody wants to be the center of attention.

Yeah, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is worse than forcing a baby to become queer through chemical alteration with the objective of very kindly destroying a gender (“That and, as I said, if you’re going to do away with a gender, it’s far better that it be done on a voluntary basis.”) as long as there’s no damage from such chemical manipulation (which would certainly happen in a fair number of cases.) Genocide is also worse than murder so I guess that makes murder okay, right?

Looks like somebody doesn’t want to think rationally.

Ok, so what is the conclusion to all of this? Are the MRM going to listen to the ‘appeal’ or not? I’m more interested in that than foetus fantasy.

Thanks, much appreciated Iron Lightning.

“Actually, I’d say that concerns about the Glass Ceiling disprove Schala’s thesis…”

It helps prove it. It’s an example of the putative elite clamoring for privileged positions. It’s like a white kid expecting to carry the class flag to an assembly but whining when she’s told to take out the trash.

I’m not familiar with cisfeminists’ models for an ideal society, but so far all their brave talk of separatism all depends on men supporting and subsidizing their utopias in one fundamental way or another

Well Gingko, I think I got my answer.

Valerie, I have deliberately stayed out of this clusterfuck, but I need to ask: Have your views been presently correctly in this thread? You have not refuted what various commenters (such as Patrick and Equilibrium) have claimed as your beliefs, and in fact, have added some pretty incendiary statements of your own.

You wrote: That and, as I said, if you’re going to do away with a gender, it’s far better that it be done on a voluntary basis. Besides, there will be plenty of male uteri, and I’m sure you can convince your brothers to bear sons in equal measure.

Exactly what do you mean by this, and please, no snark or sarcasm, as if this is some heavy philosophical exercise and those of us with inferior brains just aren’t getting it. I admit: I certainly AM NOT getting it, and that is why I am hereby asking for a clarification. (This is your chance to make an official statement and set the record straight.)

Iron replied: Valerie, seriously, what the fuck? Why the fuck should we do away with a whole gender? What are your reasons? Give them to me.

I have to echo this. WTF? Seriously? Why are you saying these things? Are you signing onto the Mary Daly-edict that men need to be reduced or eradicated to “save the planet”?

If this is not your reason, what IS the reason, exactly?

I confess that I am pretty surprised to hear this stuff from you.

Daisy,

I can’t really keep track of this thread. I can’t tell what people are thinking Valerie – or I – are thinking.

Iron,

How do you protect the fetus from Dex without compromising the bodily autonomy of the mother? That’s why birth is such an important dividing line. That’s why I mentioned artificial external wombs too – they would change the ethical context of abortion and of Dex.

Marja

People are assuming that Valerie (and you?) wishes for people to start voluntarily using some medical process or another to start altering cis male fetuses (at least, no one’s mentioned whats to happen to cis female fetuses yet) so that they will instead be trans and or queer. If I’m reading her right (and frankly her posts are so full of jargon and medical terminology I make no guarantees of that.) She’s hoping for a societal shift in the direction where people will stop desiring cis male babies, and we the testosterone soaked will eventually be rendered obsolete and phased out.

Now, if that is *not* what she (and you?) are saying, then it is frankly up to her to make that clear. Especially considering she is the one asking for our help. Now, regardless of her stance I, personally, am very much for the end to transphobia, transmisogyny and transmisandry, and will continue to work in my own small way towards that end. However, I am not interested in being the useful idiot for someone who secretly desires to see me and people like me gradually phased out of existence. Therefore, if she wants to consider herself *my* ally, I feel she owes me and everyone else a plain english explanation of just what her stance towards cis men is, because I get the feeling she sees cis men as some sort of rabid dog she can use as a weapon against her radfem enemies and put down when it’s no longer needed.

I don’t think that’s what Valerie sees ‘cismen’ (I’m really disliking this term btw) as. I think it’s similar to the whole trans-humanism idea in that humanity just becomes a palette of ‘make who you want as your child without any social ramifications’.

This seems to be all about SOCIAL trends hence why Valerie says “fall out of style” and not “do away with completely”.

Yes I think Valerie made more enemies with every passing sentence here, I mean I was showing some of the women I know these ideas and they were horrified. The irony is that if the 3rd world had access to this, you could say goodbye to homosexuals, and transgender people forever. Assuming we could also create cismen and cis women.

If we’re capable of making cismen and ciswomen that’s all they’d make. It’s not like in the west, or on the net where a few will have designer babies once in a while. In developing nations they world they’d use this as “corrective” birth insurance. I mean most places already practice crude eugenics, if this was cheap, and 100%, goodbye to all of you who are ‘maladjusted’.

No ‘cismasculinity’ (fuck this term) will not go out of style anytime soon, there’s an entire world outside of the middle class shires of the anglosphere, especially north America and they could give a fuck about your social ramifications, trends, opinions and terminology.

Just to clarify, the original comments that raised my hackles regarding Valerie’s personal utopia occurred in a different, much older thread.

As fas as I can tell (not really well informed on the medical/biochemical side of transitioning), Valerie would like the world to be populated by cis and trans women, and that’s it. Parents would give their children sprironolactone in the womb, which somehow makes the baby develop as a female (ask her how, I don’t know).

In this trans lesbian utopia, as she called it, reproduction is still possible, apparently, because this process would not interrupt the sperm production of the trans women? So, I guess it’s viable, as opposed to the Redstockings/Mary Daly?

I am waiting, and hoping, that I have it wrong, but I don’t think I do. As you said, Daisy, she hasn’t stepped in to correct anything I have brought up, and and I am starting to believe that is because I understood the main points of her gedanken correctly. The only thing I misunderstood is that I thought the spironolactone would produce female-brained, female-bodied (in the genital essentialist view) people, but it seems that it will produce female-brained, male-bodied (once again, in terms of genitals) people.

@Paul et al

I have little interest in answering a question with the inflection of “when did you stop beating your wife?” Go rail against someone who actually wishes you dead, your chromosomes erased from the gene pool, and your rapists to go free until such time as the first two can be accomplished. I would like an end to normativity, both cis and hetero, and I would like an end to the is-ought fallacy that assumes that just because a preponderant group has been preponderant that it should remain so.

I do NOT see pre-natal sex selection as some great crime, whether it be an embarrassment of men in China or India or some theoretical first steps towards a “lesbian utopia.”

Beyond that, think whatever the fuck you want to think and know that you have completely derailed an avenue for pushing for bodily autonomy that doesn’t end with cis women.

You actually do need moral authority to take on cisfeminists. You actually do need to put them on the wrong side of the mainstream, on the wrong side of their own issues, if you’re ever going to seem to those not paying attention (pay attention to that clause because I swear, if I hear that characterized as my opinion of anything but the progressive movement’s perception of the MRM, I’m gonna snap), as anything more than a pack of kvetching men trying to preserve lost prerogatives to treat [cis]women like shit.

It is not merely enough to be right-ish.

@Marja “How do you protect the fetus from Dex without compromising the bodily autonomy of the mother? That’s why birth is such an important dividing line. That’s why I mentioned artificial external wombs too – they would change the ethical context of abortion and of Dex.”

Well that depends on how you define the extent of the body of the mother. To my mind a fetus is not part of the mother’s body but rather a seperate parasitic organism. It’s fine to kill a fetus up until the point at which it becomes suitably human. However, if the fetus is intended to be born then it should be subject to the same basics rights as a human as the effects of the mother’s choices will be seen after birth. One’s right to bodily autonomy ends where it infringes on the rights of another. As a fetus being kept will one day be a human it is right to hold the mother accountable for the future consequences that her actions will have on the infant.

But secondly, who the hell made you the judge?

Not me. I’m a classical conservative, and I am of the opinion that, in reference to Burke, that it is more than appropriately conservative to insist that the unborn do not have the inalienable right to be free from the culture into which they may be birthed, a right which those who have been born and are people, not just potential, or high-probability even, people, do have.

Um… again, nary a gene to be manipulated.

Eugenics, and the moral disgust at it, both predate the knowledge of gene manipulation.

You don’t want to manipulate genes. You just promote pre-natal hormone-modulating drugs, chosen precisely for their ability to alter the developmental expression of genes.

That’s a very legalistic parsing of what eugenics means, and too flimsy a minor difference, to hang your moral defence on.

And I don’t fall for the way your moral equivocation as you try to re-frame your support for parents choosing children’s “neurological sex” as a mere matter of “freedom from surrounding culture”.

I personally think it’s dangerous for minorities, as in like the proposal J Michael Bailey made of aborting known-to-be-gay fetuses, once we had the technology to detect it (some will do it regardless, like the Middle-East, but he was advocating it for the US).

His argument was that since they’re not born they don’t suffer, and sure. But then gay people become an even smaller minority, more persecuted than before as “unwanted and bad”.

“I’d much prefer to exist alongside them, in tandem. ”

Given cis male are BY FAR not a minority, they’re in no danger of extinction or extermination or “being phased out”. You’d always exist alongside them.

The extent to which she’s proposing seems to be that you’d have more queer people, not 100% queer people. If we ever hit 20% it would be something incredible already.

Cis men are about a bit above 50% of births, and 49% of the living population (somewhat more boys die in childhood – which could be biological – and they die sooner in adulthood – which seems to be socially constructed). There’s no way they’ll reach even 10% of all people, even if they were exterminated. There would have to be a sex-selective virus like in some dystopian stories, where all males (or almost all males) die, which I doubt would ever happen.

Well, personally, I’m for eugenics favoring superhuman mutants.
All hail Magneto! 😉

Schala, am I reading you correctly? Your position seems to be that Valerie’s goal of cis male elimination through prenatal hormone manipulation is unobjectionable because it wouldn’t completely work. I absolutely reject that proposition for reasons that I hope would be obvious, but just in case they aren’t let me be explicit: the desire to eliminate a group of people based on characteristics over which they have little or no control is inherently abhorrent. At best it’s wrong-headed, at worst it’s a Godwin violation. There is nothing commendable about it.

I agree that minorities are more vulnerable, but it does not follow that non-minorities are invulnerable– nor does it follow that transforming non-minorities into minorities leads to a net increase in good. This is particularly suspect when the mechanism for that transformation is chemical manipulation of the unborn and unconsenting fetus (and let’s not even begin to discuss how hypocritical it is for Valerie to propose this while decrying the “coercive” assignment of male or female gender to infants).

All of this reminds me just a little too much of arguments for neonatal circumcision which many of us (rightly, I think) find unpersuasive, viz. “they don’t experience/remember any pain,” “they won’t know what they’re missing,” or “if we don’t do it now, they won’t get it done themselves.” Even if all those things are true, it still shouldn’t be anyone’s decision to make other than the person who is affected. Would it be cool to have more queer people? Yeah, I actually think it kinda would. Does that mean it’s acceptable to chemically create queer people out of the unborn? I don’t think so. Why not focus on de-stigmatizing queerness and allowing people to freely express their gender atypicality?

Sorry if I have misunderstood you and spent the last couple of paragraphs tilting at windmills. I’ve been lurk-reading many of the blogs where you comment for some years, and your position here seemed really out of character to me.

Hey, I’m not here to defend coercive gender assignment– it happens and it leads to bad outcomes for a lot of people. But I’m very skeptical that the answer to interpersonal social gender coercion is intrapersonal chemical gender coercion.

Without downplaying the potential harm that can result from coercive gender assignment at birth, it is at least possible to reject that assignment later in life (as you well know). It isn’t possible, barring the development of some new and unforeseen technology, to reverse changes in neural organization that happen early in the development process. So, the difference is the potential for deliberate choice. At least in my mind.

Who’s to say these forced trans created children wouldn’t WANT to be full male or full female (though it sounds like from Valerie’s explanation this would only apply to prenatal boys).

Trans people are their identified sex… fully. Stuff your hubris: This is the height of cissexism.

@Schala: If it’s immoral to try to force a person into a gender by social coercion then how is it moral to force a person into a gender by chemical coercion?

@Valerie: Hey, it’s good to see you still reading this thread and feebly trying to argue by nitpicking your opponents for using the wrong word. Since you’re hear, please satisfy everyone’s curiosity and tell us why you think that the male gender ought to be eliminated.

Else, we’ll all have to conclude that you’re a simple transsexist bigot. You know, I liked you before this thread. I didn’t think that you were so hateful. I’d love for you to prove me wrong but so far I see no alternative.

“@Schala: If it’s immoral to try to force a person into a gender by social coercion then how is it moral to force a person into a gender by chemical coercion?”

That’s the thing, it’s the same degree of morality.

Except one is just accepted as “what always happens” and the other as “something horrible modifying unborn people’s future sex assignment”.

They should be equivalent. Either both is something that is viewed as so normal it’s like water to a fish, or both are horrible machinations we should get rid of forever. You can’t just accept the status quo because it’s the status quo however.

I think a lot depends on safety and damage.

I am against infant circumcision because it violates the baby’s bodily autonomy, and because it’s not one of those cases where the parents *have* to stand in for their parents for immediate decisions on childhood vaccinations, nutrition, etc. which cannot wait until adulthood. I am also against infant circumcision because of the harm it inflicts and can inflict.

I am against prenatal dexamethosone, although I don’t want to interfere with parents’ bodily autonomy, I do think the parents deserve more information on the known risks, the experimental status, etc. I am against it first because of the very real risk of brain damage, and second because of the message that sends to the child, that their parents were so determined to have a gender-conforming heterosexual girl that they risked brain damage to try to ensure this.

I would be against analogous drugs with similar risks and similar lies about the risks.

If there are no risks, I don’t know if that would have the same alienating effect: “we wanted a daughter, but we are glad to have a son” vs. “we wanted a daughter and risked brain damage to make sure.”

But I know I used to have internalized a lot of disgust towards my “medical condition” or “birth defect” and I needed to hear that to be trans is just as good as to be cis, or to be autistic is just as good as to be allistic. I now hear calls for cures and preemptive treatments as, well, horrifying, and sometimes I don’t know how to respond except by arguing for a sort of cure in the other direction.

Valerie: You actually do need moral authority to take on cisfeminists.

And in your (deliberate? non-deliberate?) alignment with the Dalyites, like it or not, you have forfeited that moral authority, entirely.

Thanks for your reply.

Unbidden Karma,
“If this is allowed then anything is allowed so long as we can do it before the child is capable of expressly forbidding it. For a people that usually come out on the side against circumcision I’m shocked this even seems acceptable.”

It’s unacceptable. Thank you for laying it out so clearly. Parents simply do not have standing to make either decision. They certainly do not have authority to coercively assign gender, whatever the means. Decisions about gender belong to the individual and to no one else.

@Daisy, that I find good intellectual underpinnings in Burke does not mean that I endorse everything he’s ever said, same goes for Farrell, as we mentioned in an earlier discussion.

Also, my desire not to rule out a fairly benign option in combatting the kind of cisnormativity that has killed countless men and women, which is, to increase prevalence and allow for queerness to be an intergenerational thing, is far different than wanting all men gone. This is not a new derail. Kruschev talked about peaceful coexistence, but all any cold warrior wanted to bring up was “we will bury you [eventually, through superior economic and social organization]”

@Gingko Gender is already coercively assigned now. Don’t believe me? Ask someone who’s waited years for transition medicine, or ask a father who has to decide between exposing his child to ostracization and possibly losing that child to the authorities, or letting that child’s body not be forever scarred by a cis puberty they both know to be a horrible prospect. Gender is coercively assigned and coercively maintained.

Further someone’s neurological sex is never a choice. It’s always predetermined before birth, just like sexual orientation. The difference is, with coercively assigned sex, you’re forcing someone to be something they’re often not capable of being. With pre-natal assignment, you’re forcing something that doesn’t exist yet to develop in the manner of your choosing. You are merely ending potential life in favour of another one… I see no moral difference between this and abortion. None.

“(I would hypothesize that:) Most parents who coercively assign a sex/gender to their children do so because they can’t imagine anything different. However, the more people like you who simultaneously exist and are trans sexual or trans gendered, the more parents will be able to imaging, to concretely grasp the concept of trans sexuality and the fewer parents will be left to hurt their children. ”

This is pretty much what Valerie wants, btw. More trans people and fewer will hurt children as it becomes higher than the estimated incidence of 0.2%.

And it’s transgender, not transgendered, lest we be gayed, whited or lesbianed.

I’m not “visibly trans” by the way. I’m out on the internet and to relatives in real life. But I have few friends really. I’m not much for the social scene. I look between androgyne and female normative. And people will usually default to female, because androgyne isn’t an option in most people’s mind, and I really look far from male normative.

I was seen as male pre-transition mainly because I lacked most clear/obvious female cues (like breasts, however small), not because of the active presence of male cues, except maybe having shortish (3-9 inch long) hair until 17 (where I grew it to 30-36 inch long, its terminal length).

“@Gingko Gender is already coercively assigned now. Don’t believe me?”

I do believe it. That’s my point. I see no reason to increase that.

“With pre-natal assignment, you’re forcing something that doesn’t exist yet to develop in the manner of your choosing. You are merely ending potential life in favour of another one… I see no moral difference between this and abortion. None.”

It’s worse. You are forcing someone to live with it. That can be worse than death, as you will agree from the number of trans people unable to get therapy who choose to kill themselves.

“Let’s once again flip the genders and posit a poster named Valiant who declares: “Cis masculinity is normal and natural, and a big F-U to anybody who interferes with that. However, I hope that trans people diminish and die out voluntarily as medical technology reaches the point where such things can be adjusted.”

Now, what sort of label would we apply to Valiant?”

Your Valiant wants 0.000000000000% trans people.

Valerie doesn’t want 0.000000000000% cis men. In a extremely female-preferred kid world I think their ratio wouldn’t go below 40%, and that’s because most people simply won’t pick (either can’t afford or don’t want to), and those people would go 50/50% normally.

In an extremely transphobic world, the ratio of trans people would go below 0.000% easily, becoming like penile cancer (1/100,000), so low as to be negligible.

That’s the difference. One prefers a lower ratio, the other prefers a zero ratio.

An analogy would be an extremely misogynist parent who selects for girls only as children…and then abandons them because he’s misogynist and hates girls.

It simply doesn’t make sense.

Schala, I understand your perspective as well as I can, but you are wrong. Valerie was specifically imagining a world in which cis men did not exist.

I don’t mean to say that you need to participate in trans pride parades in order to help other trans people, I mean that you already have, assuming people close to you know. That is because when another parent is having trouble understanding their child’s self-identification being at odds with their parent-identification, your family/friends will be able to talk to them and say: “I have experience with what you are going through. It’s normal (in the popular sense)” and can then go on to explain the issues, situation, etc.

And, slowly but surely, the incidence of people who publicly self-identify as trans will increase, because the ignorance, and fear born of ignorance, will decrease.

At no point does this increase the number of people who could be identified as trans by an objective standard (other than the objective standard of “do they self-identify as trans?”). The same number of people will still feel at odds with their presentation. More of them will express that to others, and I suspect a higher proportion will attempt to take steps to make their presentation align with their identity, which should make those steps easier to take.

Now that we’ve made it clear that this isn’t gendercide-in-motion, can we go back to the original points?

The MRM helping trans women as a “I thought you were about helping all women/all people” ‘gotcha’ towards feminism.

Basically, filling in the blind spots with what even feminism sees as a “worthy victim”. If you help cis men, they won’t be impressed. If you help trans women and trans men (with what is in the OP), then it’s a big “Why didn’t you do it before?” call towards feminism, and they’ll have no choice but to recognize the MRM isn’t all right-wing go-back-to-the-kitchen people.

“The hypocrisy, it burns.
I am pleased that copyleft and Iron and others who identify as left/progressive (go team) have been the ones to identify and call out this offensiveness for what it is. ”

Yeah, they brought me around. The diference for me is real world effects – the Daly’s have had a lot more effect than Valerie will with this, and especially now that the Daly’s have so discredited the meme that everyone recognizes her Reinheit shit for what it is. So the whole meme, while unacceptable, is not a real threat. That’s just the soldier talking, I guess.

Schala: Now that we’ve made it clear that this isn’t gendercide-in-motion, can we go back to the original points?

Made it clear? I thought that was exactly what you were DEFENDING?

But as we have established, *you* are apparently allowed to say whatever crazy shit you want, and they just wink and say “Isn’t she cute?”

Me and Amanda Marcotte? Not so much.

The MRM has different standards for different women. Got it.

Must. Stop. Reading. Must. Stop. Reading….

Honestly, Daisy, the only thing I’m going to take issue with in there is you calling me post-modernist. I’m out of energy for trying to correct this meme, which, by the by, started with me responding to yet another round of radcis kill-all-teh-menz fantasizing, and pointing out that if they weren’t cissexist, they’d be more successful, and also that maybe it’s not a terrible thing that queer people be able to pass queerness on intergenerationally with some degree of success, just as hetero-and-cis-normative people are. But yeah… a post-modernist?! Seriously? This classical conservative’s going to need some scotch and Hemmingway with her bemoaning the fall of the post-war-consensus after today.

I mean, for such a plan to work, first you’d have to get cis lesbians to respect trans women as women, which ain’t happening any time soon, which is why I wrote this fucking piece in the first place.

And 0gun, transition prevalence is up to 0.5%, avowed trans prevalence is at 0.1%, and avowed cisGLB prevalence tripled in the last 30 years as we went from making cishomosexuality just this side of criminal to sorta unpopular. I would not be surprised to see larger effects when it’s as easy to get estrogen as an abortion.

When people are stating extrapolations as fact, it would be nice if they actually had some, y’know, facts.

@Gingko It’s worse. You are forcing someone to live with it. That can be worse than death, as you will agree from the number of trans people unable to get therapy who choose to kill themselves.

Let me repeat the operative phrase:

unable to get therapy

A little bit of gender dysphoria isn’t a bad thing. A society that’s hostile to identifying (through allowing self-identification) and treating said dysphoria is what’s killing trans people. Living with being trans is no more horrible than people living with being cisGLB or for that matter living with being male, cis or trans. Or do those suicide statistics not count, just the trans community’s?

Schala, I just can’t seem to get on the same page with you on this issue. To me, it doesn’t have to be gendercide to be wrong. But moving on…

As I’ve said, the MRM should embrace transpeople because embracing transpeople is the right thing to do, and not because it makes feminists look bad. Nevertheless, I don’t think the MRM is likely to be very receptive to hearing this message from someone who advocates out of the other side of her mouth for making cis masculinity “fall out of style” (even if it wouldn’t be eradicated) through forced hormonal treatments.

Valerie’s message, to the extent that it boils down to “the MRM should support transpeople in their struggles with access to HRT and other treatments,” is a good one. But the context that message is freighted with (“so that feminists can regain moral authority” and “so (some) male fetuses can be forcibly converted out of cis masculinity”) taints it. To paraphrase Hitchens, it’s a poisoned chalice– and I for one push it away. I support transpeople, but not for Valerie’s reasons, and frankly I see little value in having Valerie for an ally.

But that’s just me. Others, I’m sure, will differ.

Patrick, if your mom ever said, “The only thing worse for me than hearing you say you were a man would have been if I’d found out you were a pedophile,” then you can talk about acts of gendercide with some semblance of moral authority.

But hey, I’m sure the radfem who popped up to degender the fuck out of me is thrilled that this is the discussion going on: What I said jokingly in response to the latest radfem round of “kill all teh malebornz” and developed from that offhand remark, is way better than taking on cissexism. This way they get to keep their men in the closet, pretending to be women, indoctrinating them to hate anything with three legs, oh, and abusing their Wolffian kinder too. Well done MRAs: So long as the man who lives a hellish life lives it closeted, you get to pretend he’s a woman and ignore him, and the TERFs get a resentful footsoldier in the bargain.

Do you think it would be a bad thing if more womon-identified womyn spent a year in boymode and more man-identified-men spent a year in girlmode?

Even if this is purely social, not medical, temporary-transition, it would give a sense of the screwy social expectations that everyone faces, depending how they’re perceived, and that they might not notice without this temporary-transition.

Either this or the no-default-assignment scenario I’d outlined earlier would change either the meaning of cis or the number of cis people. Neither this nor that would be gendercidal.

I posted some pretty screwy fictional stuff to do with my personal issues a few months back, but it isn’t something I’m working for, it involves a dystopia partway through.

@Equilibrium Shift:

You won’t get second place. You’ll get a government that’s actively hostile to you if you’re not an appropriately subservient underclass. Forget a dejure sentencing gap, you’ll get a de-facto one. CASAB-segregated schooling, as though separate-but-equal ever worked before, because obviously you’re far too disruptive for the womenfolk. Financial abortions? Hah! If these people get their way your goals are going to move along with the overton window until you’ve gone Mattachine, until you can only dream of having them stop hitting you. Oh, and don’t forget babies by parthenogenesis becoming the norm in cis lesbian spaces, because, hey, there’s nothing gendercidal about that, is there?

You want to tell me that can’t happen? Look at classism, look at how we deliniate between the poor and the “deserving” poor… you internalize memes long enough they can dominate governance, so that in the span of 40 years the approach to poverty will move from a basic income to making single parents spend 30 hours a week looking for a job while trying to raise a child, and live on $600 a month, and that generous state of affairs is only available for five years.

While I’m generally confident in the long-term’s ability to get better at not oppressing people, the long-term can take centuries, and as Keynes noted, in the long-term, we’re all quite dead.

Valerie I was specifically responding to Patricks comment that he appreciated my efforts, but that Daisy won the thread. I simply mean that that is good enough for me, I’ll take it.

Valerie, you originally mentioned this radical trans lesbian utopia on Genderratic as some kind of teaching tool you use when talking to radfems, but you immediately went on to say how great it would be if it was real.

Yes, I do write lesbian socio-historical porn. Totally guilty. And yes, with the current level of medical technology, the idea that cishet folks should be the only ones to have a reasonable expectation of intergenerational continuity in that regard is privileging straightness and cisness.

@Valerie I was quoting Schala’s 0.2% figure. However thanks, next time I need to be patronized, you’re the first person I’ll call.

I’m shocked… 0.6%? Cool story bro! Thanks! 0.6% maybe a bit more even? Yeah, that’s only slightly more people that I could care less about.

I think our business is done here though, the MRM seem to be quite keen on helping trans folks but not so much in the forcible manufacture of your kind.

You seriously think that even more than 1% of people are going to choose to have a trans girl instead of a cis boy? Seriously?

Schala, you keep hammering on the notion that since Valerie does not want to eradicate 100% of all unborn males, but only some percentage less than that, that supposedly makes it OK.

That is a morally depraved excuse.

I’m going to take flak for this, but here goes:

I’ve noticed for some time that some transgender people conceive of rights as a zero-sum game, and that any increase in trans rights must therefore necessarily come as a result of some detriment done to cis people.

For example, many go beyond arguing that some since some fraction of humans are trans, those people deserve rights – into actively denying that cis people have any basis for believing themselves to be cis. I’m referring to the whole “it’s a delusion that masculinity/femininity exists, all people are a blend” meme.

As far as the “coercive assignment” of sex at birth goes, the fact that 0.5%, or 1%, or however many people it may be, have great trouble from being assigned the wrong sex at birth, is a social problem to which a just solution must be found.

But to flip this around: what would be the unforeseen consequences of withholding recognition sex from the other 99% of people for whom there is, in fact, no discrepancy between apparent and self-experienced sex?

The willingness to talk about the eugenic modification of the many for the sake of the rights of the few is just another example of this.

If you want justice, do so by fighting for your own rights. But that does not make any amount of fighting against the rights of others just.

Ginkgo,

A person’s ability to do harm, or not to do harm, may influence the pragmatics of how much energy on expends on opposing their actions.

But it should not make one iota of difference to one’s judgment of the morality or not of the actions they propose.

If someone promotes murder (for example) one may publicly pooh-poohs that because one doubts they’ll be able to murder a single person in any case. But that may give comfort to others with similar desires but who are able to do it for real. And it would weaken your position if you ever wish to denounce people who promote murder at a larger scale.

Actually, our society tolerates talk about exterminating autistic people, trans people, and sometimes gay and lesbian people. And probably many other people from many other communities. There are reeducation and torture camps. There is the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center. There is a real problem.

I don’t think I’d be the same person if I were straight or allistic. At least I can understand – I’d like to be able to remember faces and read them as easily as most allistic people can – I’d like to do that while remaining autistic, if possible.

I wouldn’t mind something, though, that had prevented or cured my asthma. Two of my grandparents were chain smokers and, epigenetics being what it is, my dad and his brothers grew up with problems and I grew up with more problems including an inherited allergy to nicotine which means I have to avoid tobacco smoke and I have to avoid eggplants or I get very sick.

This is a long one, you’ve been warned.

@Marja I understand where you are coming from with the similarities between this and Roe v Wade and how bodily autonomy can be complicated. I however think it’s faulty to compare the two. Roe v Wade doesn’t protect against late term abortions (within the US legal sense) and it doesn’t remove duty of the parents to the wellbeing of the child i.e. see fathers and child support. A mother possesses the right to eject the tenant from her body this does NOT mean the baby as long as it’s in her womb is a blank canvas with which she can do whatever she wishes. This of course creates some grey area, can a women be held accountable for say alcohol poisoning? I tend to think deliberate malicious acts are the cut off. If there was a reason the baby may have been as a side effect influenced is different than if the baby was the intended thing to be influenced. Without this type of standard it would allow women to biologically maliciously cripple their children with no moral fault to themselves, I find this stance wrong.

@Daisy “This is misandric-light years past anything either of them have EVER written.” I agree. Although I could perhaps get into a line of thought that terrible decisions coming from positions of authority are worst then those coming from positions of non authority, but I’ve never been a fan of that when feminists use that line of thought. If you notice a lot of us, even a few longtime readers seldom posters, in the second half of this thread have been very much speaking out against this type of proposition. You seem to be carrying some baggage with feminism/mrm labels and history with other commenter’s on these boards and I really can’t speak on them much but I think your argument that if everyone doesn’t post that means they consent or that we can read some level of their intentions from it is fairly facile. They may not have had the opportunity to read this thread or simple think the rebuttals as they are stand well enough.
Still though I’m glad that you’re against this proposition regardless where your views are on other things it’s good to be able to find commonality with people.

@Marja “But I know I used to have internalized a lot of disgust towards my “medical condition” or “birth defect” and I needed to hear that to be trans is just as good as to be cis, or to be autistic is just as good as to be allistic. I now hear calls for cures and preemptive treatments as, well, horrifying, and sometimes I don’t know how to respond except by arguing for a sort of cure in the other direction.”

I can empathize and agree completely. But herein lies the crux and the problem with the proposition. You can’t have parents make the decision to chemically coerce a little boy without some implied transex(well whatever this may be considered) > Cismale attitude. When does protecting other identities potentially insult cis identities.

@Marja, Schala, Valerie This is an issue of Natural vs coerced intentionally. I’m not arguing that Cis is natural or that allistic is natural or “normal” is natural but what is not coerced to a reasonable degree certainly is natural. If we want empathy and respect to govern things and we don’t want to come into situations where we are trying to decide whether it is better to be cis or trans, male or female, homo or hetero, autistic or allistic, then we have to treat all naturally occurring states with as much respect as is possible.

@Schala when we start saying things like well we’re not talking about completely removing cis males you miss the greater point that it doesn’t matter if it’s 50% females 10% cismales or 40% (I don’t have a proper word to describe these new proposed children) Any ratio we CREATE is going to have some implied value of where and how certain groups fit into this “better” society.

@Valerie For good or ill it’s the state of the system that you are born male or female in most cultures. This creates a problem that all trans identifying people are moving from that position towards this new trans identity. What happens when in your new scenario someone’s parents made them (again I don’t know what to call this) and due to this new culture or their experience realize that maybe they’re shyer then they wanted to be or less daring and assertive and now really wish they had been left as a cismale. It’s the height of hubris to see this as not coercive and or potentially damaging. In the end we don’t have the right to enforce our ideals, sometimes it’s just better to let the system play itself out. Especially in regards to what is a person if anyone has any connection to Kantian ethics this fails so hard in the using others as a means to your own end avenue it’s scary.

Yes culture is coercive. Many of us are trying to make amends where and when it’s possible. This does not give us the right to introduce our own bigotries in genetically “correcting” the system. Let’s focus on how we can make society better for all rather then this fucked up ? > cismale fantasy.

Now I’m going to go pour myself some scotch because I really didn’t imagine I’d be writing a paper on why eugenics is bad.

@Daisy: You and I must be kindred spirits for I feel exactly the same way about this apparent Bizzaro World that we’ve found ourselves in. Fortunately, I’m much harder to shake into speechlessness as I have been in situations of extreme duress and still maintain my rationality. The ultimate test of rationality is when your emotions are raging and you have a knife pressed against your own throat and you resist because you’re still rational enough to see the problem of suicide.

@Schala: You do understand that we’re talking about people here and not numbers. right? The Wahhabi Muslims want to eliminate all Jews but they are highly unlikely to succeed. Does that mean they’re not anti-Semitic? Wanting to reduce a group for who they are by any amount is still bigotry.

@Valerie: I’m sorry, I thought acceptance was about accepting everyone. I wasn’t aware that it’s okay to not love your child for who they are if you’re queer and your child is not. You don’t have the right to a child that’s just like you. I hope that you never reproduce since you’re willing to chance giving your child brain damage with risky neurochemical alteration just so they don’t turn out straight. It’s absolutely disgusting to me that you should hate your child for his sexuality and the connection between his neurological sex and bodily sex. I gave you every opportunity to prove that you’re not a bigot and you have absolutely failed.

So, in closing, I say: fuck you, you bigoted cunt.

I’ve ut off asking this question, but I just have to know:

If it’s, apparently, ethically neutral to “alter” a fetus so that it produces a queer and/or trans child- on the basis that it (the fetus) is not a “person” yet, is it also therefore ethically to “alter” a queer and or trans fetus so that it produces a cis and het child? If not, why?

And: assuming that whatever process science creates to fascilitate this event *does* work both ways; which, given the current state of the world, would be the more likely scenario?

I’m not in favor of designer babies, regardless of what you’re “designing” them for. And anybody who is, regardless of reasoning, should think long and hard before letting *that* particular genie out of the bottle,

“If it’s, apparently, ethically neutral to “alter” a fetus so that it produces a queer and/or trans child- on the basis that it (the fetus) is not a “person” yet, is it also therefore ethically to “alter” a queer and or trans fetus so that it produces a cis and het child? If not, why? ”

I said why before, it would be reducing a much smaller minority to oblivion, nothingness.

Choosing that a child becomes trans instead of cis is likely to:
1) Be chosen by very few, probably trans themselves.
2) Not really affect any other demographics.

Choosing that a child becomes cis instead of trans is likely to:
1) Be chosen by many/most (become routine, like screening for trisomy).
2) Artificially eliminate trans people from the planet entirely.

Daisy,

I find this whole conversation pretty fucking outrageous. This is misandric-light years past anything either of them have EVER written.

Yes. Btw when reading Valerie’s redesign idea I wanted to post something like “Now, what again was the problem with Jill F from Feministe?”.

If the MRAs (and MRM-friendly) posters here continue to trash Amanda Marcotte. Jessica Valenti, et. al. as being simply (cough) ANTI MALE on the face of it, simply for being “gynocentric” and/or “unidirectional” feminists (or whatever the hip word is this week; I can’t keep track of them all), yet seriously engage Valerie and Schala’s utopianism re: eradicating and/or reducing “cis-masculinity”

Many men will rather argue against insane and vile positions, than shouting them down, at least when the proponents of such ideas engage in the discussion in a halfway civil manner. This would also be true for Marcotte, Valenti or you (though most people here would expect better from you, I think).
You argue because you believe you can take your opponents ideas apart and because arguing is fun.

Schala

2) The child in question is not born, so the child is not hated for some characteristic he or she never even had. This is a fallacy.

Of course you can hate somebody for a characteristic they don’t have. There are plenty of examples in the history of mankind, like witch trials, Antisemitism, Homophobia etc.

I say we can/could make decisions prior to the child’s birth if those decisions have no negative impact (and circumcision definitely does, plus its post-birth).

Not being male has a negative impact.

“@Schala: If it’s immoral to try to force a person into a gender by social coercion then how is it moral to force a person into a gender by chemical coercion?”
That’s the thing, it’s the same degree of morality.

How can it be the same degree (and by whose standards)? In the former case you put them in a gender role that might not fit (and it also might not fit if you are cis, the problem is rather the existence of gendered expectations, than how they are distributed.), in the latter you additionally alter somebodies sex without their consent, which seems like a significantly more severe offense.

“In the former case you put them in a gender role that might not fit (and it also might not fit if you are cis, the problem is rather the existence of gendered expectations, than how they are distributed.)”

It’s not about the gender role, it’s about the sex assignment itself.

Assign someone as male, tell them they are a boy, and then tell them they can do anything at all that they want, the sky is the limit, no gender role limitation – and you’ll still end up with a trans woman.

It’s NOT about the role. I repeat, NOT about the role.

The role can strengthen one’s resolve to transition (nothing to lose), but it’s very unlikely to be the main motivator. It’s a body thing, an endocrinological thing for many.

“Of course you can hate somebody for a characteristic they don’t have. There are plenty of examples in the history of mankind, like witch trials, Antisemitism, Homophobia etc.”

This is a strawman. I mean a characteristic that doesn’t YET exist. It CANNOT exist. It’s not just projected by people onto people they hate. It’s inexistent.

You can’t hate the roundness of a non-existent ball. Your analogy says I could hate the roundness of a cube, by misattributing it, or that I can hate a characteristic generally including in people and objects that don’t yet exist (go ahead and try me in a court for hating planets we haven’t yet discovered).

““Genitals, not bodily sex. Brain is body too, you know. Brains are the main organs of a body. Become braindead and you’re just a sack of meat.”

Ah, hair-splitting on the usage of words: the last refuge of a failed debater.”

The hair in this case is important.

Your usage centers cis people’s sex as legitimate, and trans people’s sex as “a favor we do to deluded people, by recognizing their delusion”, by saying I have a mismatch of brain sex with bodily sex, when there is only one sex, the brain one. Reproductive capability is rarely the one thing docs care about. They’ll go on about trying to cure trans people. Believe me, it’s rarely because they want them to reproduce at all costs. They want conformist little robots, is more like it.

Choosing the gender and orientation of your child is light-years different from choosing a flavor of ice-cream. Hint: how many people are affected by that choice?

Bonus question: What makes you think you have the right to make that choice for ANYONE but yourself, ever?

@Jupp: “Not being male has a negative impact.”

Wait what? Did this come out wrong? Certainly it’s not a bad thing to be female or intersex.

Hating stuff hasn’t been outlawed. Only what you do as a result of that hatred.

If you don’t have kids because you hate certain kids, you’re not hurting anyone, are you?

If you select a certain breed of dog, because you hate other breeds, maybe even all other breeds, are you being dogist, or simply preferring the one race you don’t hate? Many people seem to hate on puddles for being too effeminate (whatever that means for dogs), are they to be tried in court for hate crimes?

The individual also won’t be affected.

And it’s other people who were scared of all cis men being made to never live.

I’m ambidextrous. I use my left hand to write. I throw with my right, and its generally my dominant hand for doing “strength” stuff. I use right-handed scissors. And I can use potato peelers and make-up applicators with both hands indiscriminately.

50 years ago I’d have been ostracized for using my “Sinistrous” hand to write. Maybe physically punished, by authorities.

Nowadays it’s as normal as having blue eyes.

Being trans will eventually become like that, and you won’t see it as “a horrible thing to do to a kid” anymore than moving to a certain country, or indoctrinating him or her into no religion at all.

Iron Lightning:

Wait what? Did this come out wrong? Certainly it’s not a bad thing to be female or intersex.

I wasn’t trying to day that. We can’t say that being male is better than being female, but we also can’t say that being male is equally good to being female. Being male and being female both have a set of advantages and disadvantages (by this I mean we would reach a consensus that those characteristics actually are advantages and disadvantages) and there is no “right” way to calculate the balance. Of course every individual has preferences wrt to the advantages and disadvantages.
My point is that choosing a sex causes harm in any case, that is why we should not make this choice for somebody else.
Schala:

Being trans will eventually become like that, and you won’t see it as “a horrible thing to do to a kid” anymore than moving to a certain country, or indoctrinating him or her into no religion at all.

Wrong. You don’t seem to understand the objections people here have articulated about messing with somebodies sex.

It’s not about the gender role, it’s about the sex assignment itself.

So saying you are a boy/girl and treating you as such is as bad as coercively altering your sex?

The role can strengthen one’s resolve to transition (nothing to lose), but it’s very unlikely to be the main motivator. It’s a body thing, an endocrinological thing for many.

Of course, if you have a condition which requires medical care, you should be able to get it.

“I wasn’t trying to day(sic) that.”

So I hoped, I’m glad. I too sometimes wonder what it would be like to be a different sex. If perfect genital reassignment surgery was available or I had another life to lead then I think that I’d like to try being female (in fact, I remember reading a book as a child wherein just that happened.) It’d certainly be interesting and I bet it would be a lot of fun not having to deal with the male refractory period.

For me, one of the central issues here is whether one believes there’s something defective/inferior/bad about men. Changing the balance of the population so that everyone is more equally represented is not something I’d consider lightly, but clearly there’s a difference between that and decontaminating the planet of men because they’re sweaty, violent and horny, or whatever justifications the extreme feminists have.

The comments of Valerie’s that I have most difficulty with here are when she said “I’ll advocate for reduced T[estosterone] as much as the next girl, but […]” and when she said “I hope that cismasculinity will eventually fall out of fashion”. To me, those comments seem pretty close to saying there’s something wrong with (cis?) men, rather than wanting to increase diversity in the general population.

I’m open to the possibility I’ve misunderstood, and taken the above quotes out of context. But I would certainly appreciate some clarification of those comments in particular.

And a question too. I don’t understand where gender identity (if that’s the right term) comes from. As far as I’m concerned, I’m a man because that’s my anatomy and I tend to fit into traditional male gender roles to an acceptable degree. But what if we got rid of gender roles? Apart from anatomy and traditional gender roles/expectations, what is it about a gender that has you identify with it over another? If we did away with gender roles, would gender still be a meaningful concept (distinct from sex)?

” If we did away with gender roles, would gender still be a meaningful concept (distinct from sex)?”

People with gender dysphoria generally dis-identify with their assigned sex, and may identify more with the other sex, or possibly with neither, a third designation etc.

They don’t care about gender role enough to do something drastic like screw their social life, their endocrinology and spend thousands upon thousands on a result that would only matter privately (ie its not like breast surgery, it’s unlikely to have other perks than “not feeling depressed about being alive”).

I identify as female. If gender roles didn’t exist, I would STILL identify as female. And extremely strongly dis-identify as male (ironic given how I defend their right to expression and right to be helped – I don’t hold a grudge towards maleness itself, it’s just NOT for me, it’s poisonous to me, literally).

Patrick,

Suppose someone has a metabolic problem that makes it difficult to get enough sodium and to avoid excess potassium. So she’s looking for cereal, and can’t find anything without added potassium. And she hears about policies to ban high-sodium foods, and knows that she needs high-sodium foods, and knows that cereal companies and the like add potassium salts to compensate for reducing sodium salts. They taste similar, but behave differently.

So is it unreasonable for her to describe potassium as a poison? To try to find other people who also experience potassium as a poison? To try to organize for greater visibility, and knowing they are in the minority, to wish they weren’t so much in the minority so they wouldn’t have to worry about practices and laws which violate their health needs?

I agree with all but the last 2 sentences. Women who say men suffer from testosterone poisoning typically get book deals.

Wow Daisy, got crazy today?

I said I’m for a neutral one. Have both cis men and cis women “not born” in this way, even if its extremely extremely extremely likely to be few numbers anyways (because it has to be CHOSEN) by parents, so it won’t happen by inertia.

Schala: Wow Daisy, got crazy today?

Not so crazy that I would post 29 times in a single thread, enthusiastically defending an indefensible idea at great length, and then claim I am “neutral” when I finally get my ass handed to me.

THAT is crazy. Or maybe just cowardly.

I find eugenics morally reprehensible. (and that includes ANY monkeying with fetuses, including dosing them with drugs and hormones for political purposes) I believe that such ideologies must *always* be condemned in the strongest possible terms, especially when so-called progressives start advocating for it.

If that makes me crazy, then I wonder what you would consider sane.

I take it you have no answer to my direct question then? I thought not.

“Should, to continue an analogy Schala used earlier, right handed kids be forced to use their left hand only for the purpose of “greater visibility of lefthanded people”?”

Following Valerie’s idea, it would be to make more kids left-handed before they’re born, hence they never even got that right-handedness to start with. They don’t need to be tortured to write with the other hand, that’s what will come naturally to them anyways.

Following my neutral stance, would be to have parents pick what hand their kid would use in the future, including being ambidextrous.

Schala: What makes you crazy is writing 10 paragraphs about insulting me and trying to dirty my name, just about the same question. Question I already answered before upthread.

Dirty your name? Hello, but didn’t you just write, in your last comment: “Following my neutral stance, would be to have parents pick what hand their kid would use in the future, including being ambidextrous.” (italics mine)

Thus… you think parents (that is to say, in our current system, MOMS) should be able to choose whether their children are gay, straight, cis or trans. Correct? CHOOSE, that is to say, change fetuses to suit them.

If not, how else could they “pick” one or the other?

Fetuses are not currently “neutral”–they are one or the other. To make them “neutral” is to CHANGE them. And you think that’s desirable, yes?

I am not “dirtying your name” when I call you what you are, a eugenics proponent. I am stating a fact, which you just stated yourself. You just don’t have the guts to embrace the label.

Schala: Do I really need to add that I’m neutral, but have no particular desire or fantasy for such a world where we pick whatever characteristic about babies?

We are talking about what is moral and immoral, right and wrong. There is no neutrality in such a discussion; there is what is right and what is wrong. Period. Being “neutral” about eugenics is IN PRACTICE to approve of eugenics and look the other way and shrug when people engage in it to change the social order.

You don’t really believe there is any such thing as neutrality regarding eugenics do you? I suppose you believe there is neutrality about genocide too?

If I said I was “neutral” about whether trans women should be permitted to have estrogen with MY medical insurance payments (a discussion we are currently having in the USA), you’d see this bullshit-neutrality for what it is. You are either for or against. There is no neutrality in such discussions, but there IS cowardice masquerading as neutrality.

I suppose you believe Switzerland was neutral too, with all that nazi money in their banks?

Whoops, there went Godwin, and I was trying so hard….

“Wait a minute, if you have no particular desire for a world in which we can engineer babies then why in the hell have you been tirelessly posting in this thread trying to argue for such a position?”

Because I’ve been arguing devil’s advocate of Valerie’s position in an effort to clarify for people who think it means Hitler is going to be reborn. However immoral and horrible it may be to some, it’s not the genocide some people fear.

I personally have no dog in this fight as I don’t really mind the status quo re-birth stuff. I’d love if we treated our autistic kids more humanely though, not paid 100k to intern them against their will and have them given electric shocks by staff who has no training or patience to deal with them.

Schala: I personally have no dog in this fight

33 enthusiastic posts, many of them epistle-length, and now she suddenly “has no dog in this fight”.

And she calls ME crazy.

Right.

Schala: However immoral and horrible it may be to some, it’s not the genocide some people fear.

As well as being a comedian, she can see into the future too!

To sum up:

Schala argues with me (and countless other feminists) nonstop, for a couple of years now, that men are oppressed and disposable etc etc etc… but now assures us that trying to eliminate the “cis masculine” ones, is no biggie.

Relax, Iron… Schala has spoken, and she is clairvoyant. Just not very consistent.

Just checking back in to this thread long enough to note that, in accord with the proposed alliance between trans women and MRAs requested by Valerie, I have made a comment on the AVfM site calling out feminists on their vile transphobia.

The comment appears on this thread:

http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/the-u-of-t-student-union-needs-your-help/

The comment reads in part:

TheBiboSez

Since they were making up the accusations against Dr Warren Farrell and AVfM out of whole cloth, it is interesting that the UTSU motion neglected to mention either transphobia or racism in their charges – could it possibly be that they actually support transphobia and racism?

This is not as farfetched as it sounds – the transphobia of feminists is quite well established, at least as far as trans women goes: http://www.buzzfeed.com/annanorth/why-feminism-cant-afford-to-ignore-transgender-wo

…and the racism of UT protestors Sophia “Kill all men” Guo and Emma “Kill all men hail satan” Kadey (including minority men, of course) is clear from their own writings, so perhaps they have some Ontario Human Rights Code violations of their own to answer for.

Of course, as far as I can tell, transphobia and racism are strongly condemned at AVfM. It is a shame that the UTSU can’t say the same of themselves. How the UT administration rules on this issue will be quite illuminating….

***

Checking back out now.

@Daisy: “Whoops, there went Godwin, and I was trying so hard….”

Don’t worry about it. Godwin’s Law has a caveat which states that it does not apply when your opponent is advocating things that were actual Nazi programs like eugenics.

“Relax, Iron… Schala has spoken, and she is clairvoyant. Just not very consistent.”

Whew, I almost forgot that she’s a member of the transsexual master race.

@Schala: “Because I’ve been arguing devil’s advocate of Valerie’s position in an effort to clarify for people who think it means Hitler is going to be reborn. However immoral and horrible it may be to some, it’s not the genocide some people fear.”

Oh, so it ain’t full genocide, just partial genocide, and I suppose that makes it okay. I’ve already explained it to you. Just because the Wahhabi Muslims are unlikely to be able to complete their missions of exterminating all Jews does not make it okay to try to exterminate Jews. Even one Jew killed because of the prejudice of the stupid Wahhabi Muslims is too many.

@Marja: “I think individual rights far outweigh group rights, but I don’t see any strong individual rights arguments against eugenics, except because of side effects and harmful modifications, but I see extremely strong species-diversity arguments against eugenics which allow for counter-eugenics to preserve the diversity the eugenicists are destroying.”

So, you’re saying “individual rights far outweigh group rights but group rights are more important than individual rights.”

Fighting fire with fire does not work. The solution to white-on-black racism was not black-on-white racism. If you want to stop eugenics don’t practice more eugenics. That just legitimizes eugenics as a practice. Also, cis people aren’t going to hate transsexuals less if they start turning cis people into transsexuals through eugenics. If people hate transsexuals for changing themselves then there are going to really, really hate transsexuals for changing others without the others’ consent. Start doing these eugenics and it may very well result in people trying to eliminate all transsexuals. Oh, and before I forget, as you yourself say, the good of the group should not trump the good of the individual.

If you want to help transsexuals be socially accepted then you’re really doing a terrible job of it. Honestly, this thread has caused me to be a little weary of MtF transsexuals. I’m sorry but when three out of the three transsexual regulars on this site all advocate for the vile and stupid practice of eugenics it starts to creep me the fuck out. I guess that people who saw their own masculinity as something poisonous that needs to be rectified might, due to the fact that the process of empathy involves imagining yourself as another, think that other people don’t like their masculinity. Certainly that’s not fair to other transsexuals and I will do my best to judge people on their individuals merits. However, this thread has caused me to lose an iota of my trust in MtF transsexuals. I’m sorry but I can’t help how I feel.

@Iron

“However, this thread has caused me to lose an iota of my trust in MtF transsexuals. I’m sorry but I can’t help how I feel.”

I’m sorry man but I need to step in here. I don’t really know you but I respect you after trying to articulate the point of view which I find myself also holding. You most certainly can help this to some degree, not that we can control our emotions completely but as is evident with the numerous attempts we tried to make towards logic on why eugenics is bad you sir are capable of doing more then just “feeling”.

The idea that just because a couple people who happen to be trans shared some scary positions or defended them on weird grounds cannot be reason enough to tarnish the well of MtF transsexuals. In fact I’ll go so far as to say that may be the second silliest thing proposed in this thread.

PS: If you could of taken first place I would of been impressed…. you know…. eugenics and all…. =P

Iron:

You’ve mentioned it a couple times now, and I feel I have to step in to clarify.

Whabi isn’t a thing. Whabi was a guy, who advocated Salafism. Those are Salafiyin. And the desire of many Salafi Muslims to kill all Jews has less to do with Salafism and more to do with being redneck-ass weirdos, kind of like the redneck-ass weirdos we have/had here in the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KKK.

Salafism is just Islam’s answer to fundamentalist Christianity. As with the fundamentalist Christians and KKK, there is a strong overlap between Salafiyin and the “kill all the Jews”-ers.

Iron,

I don’t want to turn it into a war. I just want something to offset the policies and practices involved. I don’t know what would or wouldn’t work.

My opposition to eugenics is rooted firstly, in fear of side-effects for the children [in the case of genetic engineering], in disgust at forced sterilization of prospective parents, and in the sense that we don’t know what diversity we’d lose and we don’t value diversity enough now. My consideration of counter-eugenics was based on the idea that there would be no side-effects for the children [since there is no genetic engineering], that this wouldn’t involve any kind of sterilization, and in the sense that it might be able to preserve diversity.

“else people like Typhonblue and Erin Prizzey would not be so widely accepted.”

Tastes are subjective, I guess. Although I sincerely doubt it’s why she’s welcome at Avfm, I think Typhon’s hot.

Also, seriously, on her own blog? Show some bloody tact, mate.

Ah, @Daisy…

In your blog post you complained that MRAs were only targeted young, pretty, silly feminist girls…specifically, you claimed:

“…these incidents always seem to involve young, thin, attractive women. What’s up with that? Are ugly, old or fat women/feminists just not as much fun to harass and rail against? Why not?”

Since you had asked, in my response to you at AVfM, I pointed out that young, pretty feminists wield more power over the male feminists they use as proxies to do their violence against other men, and hence, it makes strategic sense to use our limited respourses to target them instead of less influential, less attractive, and therefore, less dangerous older feminists.

That’s why it is smart to hire one pretty, young female security guard instead of a bunch of guys – if the pretty female security guard is attacked, 10-50 guys will automatically rush to her aid, and you don’t even have to pay them to do that. http://www.avoiceformen.com/a-voice-for-men/sophia-guo-placed-on-offenders-registry/

BUT, since you were pissed the no one was targeting YOU, I took pity on you, and thus I targeted you, too. Feel better now? Or would you rather I retract the “declawed cougar” remark? I’ll be the first to admit that, to my shame, I can be overgenerous in assessing the attractiveness of older feminists and the deadliness of their claws.

Finally, let me note that whereas I treated the young feminists as responsible adults and worthy adversaries, you treated them like silly, inconsequential girls. That makes YOU one fuckton more disrespectful and misogynistic towards those young women than me – but it is no surprise that, when it comes to hating other women, older feminists rule.

Patrick: Back in September, I decided that I’d take a months-long hiatus from all gendersphere-related reading and commenting because it was depressing me too much. My break ended today so I could stick a proverbial toe back in the water to see how I liked the temperature.

I decided I’m going back on my hiatus. Despite my desire to beat-back the misandrists, I simply wasn’t built for the task. I’m a much happier person when I’m playing video games.

@Tamen re: Lady Raine

Yes, FC banned her for that, but they should have banned her far sooner. A large part of what I took away from that episode (and I suspect this is what Patrick was referring to) was that a feminist has to literally be a Nazi sympathizer to get banned from FC.

That’s ancient drama, I know, but it stuck in my craw.

@Iron Lightning

It’d certainly be interesting and I bet it would be a lot of fun not having to deal with the male refractory period.

Estrogen. Why does every cis person who can propound at great length and with great authority about trans issues know nothing about the functioning of an estrogenic penis?

@Patrick Brown

I don’t know what percentage of people are trans, but figures given in this thread suggest it’s between 0.1% and 0.6% – one to six out of a thousand.

Then you haven’t been paying attention to what I’ve written about trans prevalence in this thread: We’ve already got an avowed prevalence of 1%, but a prevalence of transition of 0.5%. If you’d like to look at avowed US cisGLB prevalence over the last 3 decades, as being cis and gay went from this side of illegal to fairly well-tolerated, you’ll see that avowed prevalence tripled. Given the massive barriers to entry for transitioners in the West, I would be surprised if an end to institutional cissexism didn’t produce a similar or larger increase in trans prevalence.

My conservative lower bound, based on the understanding that organization theory works similarly for orientation as neurological sex, and that, if anything, since neurological sex is set at an earlier point in development, a fetus is, if anything, MORE vulnerable to variations in environment, is 5% (cisGL prevalence + 0.5* cis bi/pan prevalence).

@Sensitive Thug

To me, those comments seem pretty close to saying there’s something wrong with (cis?) men, rather than wanting to increase diversity in the general population.

More a bit of cultural trans feminism. We trans women do have to on some level have the right to celebrate who we are and what makes us awesome instead of being seen merely as noble survivors, as failed men. This stance is largely aimed at trans-misogyny by cisfeminists, but that does not mean that it is the only trans-misogyny that is encountered, nor that the stance should be deployed situationally.

@Patrick Brown
They never advocate denying girls their girlhood, only boys their boyhood – which shows that any claims they make to gender neutrality are a sham.

*sighs* Marja can vouch for me on this as we’ve had some discussions on the subject: I would call any “lesbian utopia” that doesn’t (flexibly) assign some children male at birth a transextermonationist state. Dysphoria, transness, negotiation of roles… these are as essential to the female experience as they are to the male experience.

But hey, make all the baseless accusations you like. Not like there’s any reason to change the tone of this thread.

@Daisy

I worry that when we get rid of the alcoholic genes, it is possible we also get rid of the Faulkners and the Hemingways. Does anyone care about that, or is that regarded as hopelessly retro now?

I care about that. I care about stopping a society where they’re bred out of existence too, and step one is integration into the cultural firmament, saying that the boozy have just as much right to exist as the straight edge… that they have the right to build their own subcultures and institutions.

I think that the theoretical social harm of, say, genital morphology selection in abortion is more than mitigated by a child not being born into a home that resents their existence. I wouldn’t want to ban genital-selective abortions any more in anti-CAFAB China or India than I would in an anti-CAMAB TERF colony. I think it would be child abuse to force raging transmisogynistic radfems to face a 50-50 chance of having a kid with a penis.

@Iron

However, this thread has caused me to lose an iota of my trust in MtF transsexuals.

Given that you can’t find the decency and dignity to call us trans women I’m not remotely fucking surprised, and I highly doubt you had any iotas to begin with.

@Patrick Brown

Ditto Patrick. Only now, only when bodily autonomy rights for trans people are brought up, suddenly does my advocacy of an abandonment of the appeal to nature fallacy when it comes to neurological sex and orientation become a 250-comment thread. Now is when there needs to be a massive backlash. Now, when I said nothing about it, is obviously when this needs to be brought up, so that you can use it as an excuse to avoid having to confront the actual issue in the post.

Not to mention the number of times my response to CAMAB-extermenationism by radfems has been taken as something that developed Tabula Rasa. This of course has to happen so that the chest-beaters can construct me as advocating gendercide as opposed to a Swiftian, “well, if you’re going to morally mandate someone out of existence anyway… this would be more humane, but something these supposed caring, loving, peaceful, nurturers from whom there will be no war when they rule the world, couldn’t even countenance because it would mean abandoning a core prejudice.”

Also, I think I’ve seen every lazy cissexist construction in the book on this one, so yeah, this is where I learned that there weren’t a lot of people here to take seriously.

Valerie Keefe (also Marja Erwin and Schala):

I can’t really participate in this conversation. I don’t do well with angry shouting and I don’t very much like to carry on a heated argument at all, let alone with more than one person at a time. I’m not any good at coming up with witty retorts or clever insults or captivating rhetorical devices. I’m not a biologist or a physician, nor am I a sociologist or any kind of expert on issues of individual rights or social justice. I am not even sure I could give a straight answer if you asked me to define the difference between right and wrong.

Nevertheless, there is something I feel that I have to say. I do not know how well I will be able to say it. It might come out unintelligible or it might sound like whining or it might end up meaning something that I did not intend, but I am going to try anyway, because I cannot hold it in any longer, so please listen.

I am, as near as anyone (myself included) can figure, a heterosexual cissexual male human currently living in a small, chilly room on the Northeast coast of the United States of America. I cannot say I really understand what most of that means, or if I am particularly happy with any of it, but that’s the way things shook out. If you were to ask me about my identity, about how I define myself, all I could honestly tell you is that I am autistic and that I am an aspiring translator of novels (hard at work on the first manuscript I intend to submit for publication, and hoping desperately that it leads to something I can live on). I am struggling to make some meaningful sense out of my gender and sexuality, to define myself in terms less horribly fragile than I have previously been able to, but thus far the exercise has achieved little except to make me often sad and desperately lonely.

When I read comments like those of yours which began this raucous squabble, and like those similar sentiments you have in the past expressed, they strike an emotional chord in me, and that chord is far from pleasant. I do not know how best to name that reverberation of feeling, but I believe that its greater portion is composed of fear, sorrow, and self-loathing. Perhaps I am merely of too sensitive a disposition (I know Wollstonecraft and her contemporaries warned against indulging such temperaments), but when I hear talk of “[voluntarily]” “[doing] away with a gender” and masculinity falling out of fashion and testosterone poisoning (I know that you are not using it that way, but that phrasing has already been thoroughly claimed and defined by others and you have not been doing anything at all to avoid conjuring up those associations other than trying to talk down the people you offend) and all the other things of that kind which have been put forward by the same people in several previous threads, it recalls to me all of those lurking fears and insecurities. It doesn’t make me fear some nebulous army of women breaking down my door to do away with me, and I am quite frankly shocked that you could imagine it produces that image for anyone. What it does is make me wonder if the world would would be better off without someone like me in it. It makes me wonder if I’m somehow, broken, defective, obsolete, the decaying remnant of a type for which humanity no longer has a need (if it ever did). It makes me wonder if I could ever aspire to a meaningful identity, to a deserved sense of worth and a more than half-hearted joy, or if it is hubris even to dream of such a thing. It makes me remember how ashamed of myself I once was and wonder if I should be so still.

I don’t know what I expect you to do with my statement. Certainly, I can have no claim upon you, and I can give no reason why you should care one iota how I feel. Despite this, I felt the need to tell you. Make of it what you will.

P.S. Valerie Keefe, you told me once that every group (perhaps even every person) is entitled to dream of their own utopia. I cannot claim to know if you are right or not, or even if you still believe as you did then. In any case, I will say this: You would have a full and equal place in my utopia, but I could never live in yours. I don’t know if that means anything. Maybe my utopia just isn’t very good (I certainly couldn’t imagine myself being happy in it).

Valerie Keefe:

I specifically said that you did not. In fact, I not only said that you did not need to do anything but that there was no reason to expect that you should. My only request was that you read what I wrote, and you appear to have done so. Thank you for that; it made me feel a bit relieved to finally write it all out. I appreciate the stylistic compliment (thank you very much), but I certainly didn’t put that there as some sort of reverse-psychology set dressing. If it makes you feel any better, I fully intend to continue not asking you to do things.

I won’t claim to understand you, but I do sincerely hope that you will be able to find happiness and that this world will become a better place for you.

For what it’s worth, I found your response to be much more powerful than the muddle of the technicalities of good and evil that the rest of the thread has bogged itself down in, even if I don’t really understand the part about families and back yards.

Out of curiosity, what is it that I “claim to need”, in your estimation? I wasn’t aware that I had expressed any such thing and consequently feel that your response, if you choose to give it, may be of some use to me.

I.L I can be accepting, but to ask me to shoulder a burden that normative people do not, when it’s in my power to ensure otherwise is unfair. And I’ve been with a left-wing child of left-wing parents, and I’ve known a left-wing father unable to accept his upwardly mobile son… I think you would not talk about how unfundamental orientation is if you were queer, which was somewhat my point.

I fully support trans-women. I would have to abandon the MRM if it displayed the level of hatred that the feminists routinely do towards trans-women. I am a part of the MRM because there is enough room for everyone. Not everyone in the MRM agrees with everyone else, but everyone wants to make things better for men and boys. For me this includes recognition for the entire breadth of male sexuality even those parts that are outside the narrow ideals of what it’s supposed to be.
I fully support gay marriage, the transgender community, and I’m (gasp) pro-choice.
Even if some of the more radical elements within the MRM wanted to they can’t throw me out because it’s not about ME, the movement is about making things better for men and boys, no matter their sex, gender, race, creed, orientation, or anything else you can think of.

“They have severe dysphoria for not having a penis. That is why they call themselves transexual. It is all centered on their genitals, not their behavior at all. ”

That’s what I was told too, I also thought surgery would be necessary for acceptance. Given I’m not very sexual as it is, risks and complications, “maintenance” stuff etc, and that it’s not necessary for social acceptance (though it still is for legal), I see no reason to change it. Even if paid for by the state insurance.

It can be important to the person…or not. But it’s not always centered on genitals. It’s always centered on genitals in the imagination of non-trans people.

“In FTM (this is their prefered nomenclature) “Truscum” terms: Men desire to have a penis and XY morphology, women desire to have breasts and a vulva and XX morphology. I personally do not believe that sex/gender is behavioral at all, simply the result of the body mapping neurology for what kind of body that person should have.

For them they would much rather be cis women and comfortable with themselves than be trans men. They live in interal torture.”

90% of this “I want to be normal” wether it comes from a certain cheerleader in Heroes who can generate indefinitely or from trans people, comes from a desire to not suffer persecution for being different. Having it harder for being different. Being thought of as “freaks” by some.

If you can transition, the internal discomfort pretty much goes away. You’re only left with the external discomfort.

” Valerie’s plan condemns people to that. ”

If you can transition, the internal discomfort pretty much goes away. You’re only left with the external discomfort.

And, as I said above. People go with the “I need surgery” line because that’s what they’ve been told to say, what they know the majority of people will accept. The only way they feel they’ll ever be accepted by anyone as a mate and as a member of their sex. And it’s not true. You can find people who will unconditionally accept you for who you are, penis and all, without finding that it fundamentally makes you not-female.

Social transition and hormonal transition are much more important to me. Hormonal to maintain sanity, because testosterone definitely was poison to me (not to my brother, not to my boyfriend, to me, just me, not all men, stop trying to pretend anyone said this). Social to function at all, but be assured that this doesn’t mean you have to wear certain clothing, wear your hair certain ways, etc. It just means being socially treated like other women are.

I personally felt I had to parrot the party line (surgery or else) to get medical help and social recognition.

I only changed my mind when I started dating my boyfriend and he accepted me regardless. That was 4 years after transitioning, long after having lost contact with support groups.

Those “anyones” who have said T is poison, to all men. Aren’t in this thread.

Schala:

Did I suggest that they were? No. In fact, my statements as to time and place would necessitate that they be elsewhere. I have too high an opinion of your powers of comprehension to imagine for an instant that you really believe such a fact to be at all relevant to the issue in question, and must therefore assume that you wish to forestall any genuine dialog by affecting a belligerent blindness. I am hurt that you imagine such a stance could fool me for a moment.

If you want to ignore my point, that is your choice, and you are perfectly free to make it, but please do not insult my intelligence with a shield of straw.

Marja Erwin:

I don’t think those is doing anything to “humanize” the term. Additionally, both of your examples occur in response to another person using the term as an insult, which is not the case I hear. What I see here is just one person displaying willful and deliberate disregard for the discomfort of others.

Bibo: Or would you rather I retract the “declawed cougar” remark?

I guess I don’t know what the word means. I thought “cougar” meant hot, botoxed-up older women who go after younger men. I have been married for 25 years and I am not prowling for men.

Is it just a blanket term for older women who dare speak up, or what? I just didn’t get it. Still don’t–and you didn’t explain it. Not that I expected you to, of course.

Daisy:

To the best of my knowledge, a cougar is a large feral mountain cat with terrorist sympathies and possible ties to organizes kidnapping of photogenic white women that everyone wishes would just go away already (not to be confused with Dancougar, which is a localization error that has embedded itself in the public consciousness). I think Bibo is jealous of you because being a living purple sheet with four eyes and a topknot isn’t as cool as being a skeleton Kikaider.

@Skidd

You robbed all context from my comment. I concede that there are trans people with genital-body-map issues, and I note that I know cis people who are the same way, transgenital cis people, for want of a better phrase.

What I am saying is that gendering a part of the body as one’s CASAB drastically increases the liklihood that a trans person will experience dysphoria wrt that body part. It’s why I cry myself to sleep wishing to be shorter, because I know my height marks me, and that ever time I’m with a woman who’s significantly shorter, I’m reminded of how I’m not built like very many women. It’s why I hate my large-but-proportional feet, because I can’t find women’s sneakers for them.

There are body map issues and then there are social recognition issues, both internal and external. The reason genital reconstruction satisfaction rates are generally low is because oftentimes surgery is sought for social recognition issues, and either create conflict with an existing body map, or there are negative side-effects without an improvement in body map satisfaction.

And there are plenty of cissexist trans people. HBSers, for example, are still full of shit, trying to redraw the line of cis around their entitled asses, whether or not they’re trans.

“I don’t “hate” them, I want them to grow up and learn to articulate arguments like rational people. There is a big difference.”

Those are oppoistes, Daisy – different enough.

Whatevs, PJohn.

Unlike with gatekept trans men and women who face an elevated risk of self-harm, you just won’t let this die.

Name another sub-group other than Gender and Sexual Minorities that don’t get to raise their children with a reasonable liklihood of sharing similar power dynamics, please.

This isn’t about victimhood. This is about extension of rights…

But it’s not even about that. This 300-comment-derail was originally about bodily autonomy rights, specifically making testosterone and estrogen as available as abortion.

Valerie Keefe:

“Similar power dynamics” in relation to what? Do you mean between parent and child, or in relation to social opportunities, discrimination, etc.?

For what it’s worth, the occurrence of autism and similar conditions appears to fall in to the same class of rarity (in terms of percentage of the human population. Actually, some of your projected numbers for trans* people would lead me to believe you to be in reality slightly more numerous). If I were to have children, it is not terribly likely that they would inherit my condition (similarly, it is not present in either of my parents). I imagines an examination of numbers for other conditions unrelated to sex and gender would yield several similar cases.

That said, this whole debate seems to hinge on the idea of the right to a child who is ‘like you’, and more specifically on the fact that there appears to be very little agreement as to whether or not it is in fact a right. As someone wary of the idea of rights in general, I will defer that question to the debate of those better equipped to address it.

I would also like to register my dissatisfaction with any term of the form ‘___splaining’. They represent the dismissal of a person’s arguments based on group characteristics (generally those over which they have no control), without providing any argument as to why contributions from people of that group should be considered automatically invalid. I can imagine no situation in which such terms could be conducive to discourse, the furthering of mutual understanding or the development of good will, although if anyone can imagine such a case I would be delighted to hear it and be corrected.

Hiding,

I think Valerie’s argument is that with racism, the parents can understand what their children are facing, and the children can count on their parents. But that’s not necessarily true even then, and that’s not necessarily true with sexism, neurotypism, ableism, etc. either.

In practical terms, I think it would be better to stop regarding lesbian and gay people, trans people, and autistic people as unsuitable parents, to stop blocking adoptions, and to start encouraging non-parents to help out parents. So if neurotypical parents have an autistic kid and autistic friends or family, maybe they can turn to autistic friends and family for help.

Marja Erwin:

That sounds perfectly reasonable and I very much doubt, based on the opinions they have previously expressed, that any of the regular commenters here would have any quarrel with such a position. I certainly do not.

Valerie Keefe:

Easily done: More than half a year ago I was still very new to the use of these terms had not yet had a chance to form a definite opinion of them. Additionally, I believe I may have been traveling at the time of that post (I do not have an exact calendar for the period, but I recall that I took a trip around that time) and had neither the time or the inclination to embark on any serious issue, knowing that I would in all likelihood be unable to respond to any rebuttal offered to my position.

Please note that I have not made use of any such term, nor do I believe I have ever expressed support for their use (quite apart from the low regard in which I now hold them, they have always seemed to me to be a bit gauche). If you know of any past comment in which I have done so, then I will sincerely apologize both for my inconsistency and for my poor memory.

For the record, I would like to say that I am also decidedly uncomfortable with the term “femsplaining”, for the same reasons which I have stated above, and that I would much prefer it to fall out of use.

“”And Valerie, surely you know that a requirement for being a supermodel is to be at least 5’10″? It is hardly regarded as a bad or unfeminine thing to be tall. Sophia Loren, Brooke Shields, Tyra Banks, Charlize Theron, Heidi Klum, etc etc… all tall. Every single woman I know wishes she was taller. I’d gladly take 3 or 4 more inches myself. (Just as you and Schala are saying that Skidd’s friends do not share *your* specific trans experience, I have read a lot of trans women who brag about their height, so your experience is not universal either.)”

I’m 5’6″ and happy being “short” per cis men standards, regardless of how this might affect my chances at being a supermodel. Might as well talk about having some rare characteristic in the hopes of winning some national-level contest where 0.001% of the people ever win.

Not banned, but put on permanent moderation: http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2010/10/29/a-daisydeadhead-digression-thread/

@Xakudo

I emphatically disagree with such a stance, […] Though, as always, I am open to discussion to change my mind.

I hope you do not.

Much is made of the fact that since abortion is acceptable, then this form of eugenics should be acceptable too.

But as has been pointed out, in the case of abortion, a non-sentient being has a purely hypothetical, non-existent sentient life taken from it. Whereas in the case of eugenics, the intended result is for the fetus to be brought to term, at which point we deal with a sentient human having to live an entire sentient life with whatever effects the pre-natal tinkering had.

Which brings us to unintended consequences. The promoters of this scheme seem hubristically confident that their proposed hormonal pre-natal tinkering with the neurological sex will have precisely and only the effects they intend. They don’t entertain the possibility that their treatment could have unforeseen effects on the psyches of their experimental subjects, that they will potentially have to live with their entire lives. This is most ironic, coming from people who supposedly should be more sensitive to the vast range of gender dysphorias that are possible.

This is ironically rigid thinking, coming from those who one would hope should know better. In the past, people used to think that they knew exactly how sex worked: if a baby had a penis, it was a boy; if it had vulva, a girl, end of story. Since then our understanding has had to broaden – yet, ironically, some here would have it that however far their understanding has come so far, to include “neurological sex” and the influence of pre-natal hormones, where they are now is the end, is the full summation of knowledge on this subject – a sufficient foundation from which to go tinkering with other peoples’ lives since.

At least, to the extent that I see no signs of a humble taking into account that there might be forms of gender dysphoria as yet unknown which do not fit their model at all, and that the pre-natally modified people might be condemned to these dysphorias when the hormones do not quite work out as simplistically hoped.

I believe: beware: if such basic moral premises are lacking, be very careful before lauding any other supposed insights coming from the same tree.

Valerie, you didn’t reply to MY reality, being the child of a congenitally disabled woman. That is where my particular viewpoint was born. It isn’t “bullshit”–you asked:

Name another sub-group other than Gender and Sexual Minorities that don’t get to raise their children with a reasonable liklihood of sharing similar power dynamics, please.

And I provided four examples of parents who have had lots of kids in this world… and have dealt with these power dynamics. And no reply from you. (Was that just a rhetorical question, in that case?) I’ll take that as a concession.

It sounds like you just want your own way. And no parent gets their own way; your future-kids will do whatever the hell they want. Mine is temperamentally EXACTLY LIKE ME and yet lives a lifestyle very different… genetics don’t mean shit. I am a vegetarian peacenik who recycles, and she drives a pickup in Texas, shoots guns and hunts. (Gross!) But see, she took what I taught her (feminism/do what you want regardless of gender) and my genetics (extrovert, in your face) and then decided on her own life.. which is not what I would necessarily have chosen for her. But that is how parenthood works. Even the kids MOST LIKE US will in some way, NOT be like us, because they are their own people. (Are *you* exactly what your parents planned you to be?)

P Iron Johns: This is ironically rigid thinking, coming from those who one would hope should know better. In the past, people used to think that they knew exactly how sex worked: if a baby had a penis, it was a boy; if it had vulva, a girl, end of story. Since then our understanding has had to broaden – yet, ironically, some here would have it that however far their understanding has come so far, to include “neurological sex” and the influence of pre-natal hormones, where they are now is the end, is the full summation of knowledge on this subject – a sufficient foundation from which to go tinkering with other peoples’ lives since.

I think you have isolated what I find most disturbing and weird about this discussion. Thanks, because I could not have phrased it as well.

We don’t know yet, what we don’t know yet. There is much to learn about gender and how it is formed, and yet, Valerie and Schala seem to be acting like it is all understood… even when Skidd provides examples and extensive commentary to the contrary. They just ignore it and refuse to answer.

And I still don’t know what “body mapping” is per this conversation… when I google it I get MRIs and 3D-images of brains and alla that stuff.

If yall are going to use esoteric jargon, you might try to define it for us when we ask. Or does your intellectual snobbery somehow prove that you are right, just because the rest of us don’t know what the hell you are talking about?

Valerie: Being cis too, last time I checked.

But like so much else, that is changing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isis_King

I expect a trans supermodel on the scene in less than 5 years. In that profession, the height would be a plus. Similarly, I also expect a young trans man to become a teenybopper idol, as Stephen Beatty presently seems to be doing. The so-called “cuteness” is likewise, a plus.

Aside: my grandfather used to say David Cassidy was really a woman, and nothing would convince him otherwise until he actually saw for himself.

Valerie: Fuck you. Just don’t talk to me. Ever.

Ohhhh, well aren’t we the hyper-emotional, judgmental Mean Girl/Queen Bee now? Sobbing hysterically, flouncing from the powder room in tears, texting friends to a freaking fare-thee-well, instructing them who they should not speak to this week. (sigh) I’ve met lots of you, Valerie. BTW, nice smokescreen/snowjob/way not to answer the questions. (PS: This means you have conceded the argument)

I think Patrick got it right upthread, when he called you a Privileged Princess… there can be no other explanation for this histrionic nonsense.

Do you think you are the only person here who has experienced deep emotional pain? Several of us here have outlined our own painful experiences and have tried to explain why we feel the way we do, but no, VALERIE suffers more than everyone else put together. (sobs!) Narcissus, call your office.

Perhaps you haven’t noticed, in all your melodrama, that I am the only person in this thread who is still seriously engaging your argument? I haven’t written you off, and they have.

Now, you write off the one person who is still talking to you.

I just hope your personal life is not conducted in the same fucked up manner, but I think it probably is.

Engaged my argument? Fuck you, you engaged my argument, you dismissed my fucking life, you smug, sneering, solipsistic, falsely heroic, decade-dropper.

“That said, I’d like to be able run the possibility of looking up at my girlfriend, thanks.”

A lot of men (myself included) could say the same thing. People tell them they’re whining. Am I supposed to feel some special pang of outrage because a woman is in the same situation? Also, I’ll trade you my barely 5’8″ anytime if you ever manage to figure out how.

Before you reiterate your response to Daisy, I would like to remind you that I have also both had an eating disorder in the past and have tried to kill myself (including an attempted suicide by bear), so I’m not feeling terribly overawed by you throwing your past around.

I usually refuse to engage with Daisy because she makes 500 lines of arguments about the same reply to someone, asking others how if person X said thing Y it absolutely means they are like horrible person Z. Basically propaganda.

For example, I’ve been accused of being anti-abortion, because I said it’s never been a problem here legally (ie, Canada has had it legal without a hitch since the 1980s, I’ve never known different). I don’t know what kind of logic it takes.

Yet I’m a socialist leftist who would want *ideal* communism to be the working monetary ideology: to everyone by their needs, from everyone by their efforts, or something like that (I don’t know the exact quote). Entertainment to a degree would be considered a need (so home internet isn’t going to be considered a luxury under that model), and the excess would be used to maintain, clean up and upgrade existing infrastructures (such as roads, metro network etc), instead of fattening billionaires accounts. The main amount would be giving a mandatory minimum income to everyone, a largely liveable income.

How I could reconcile that with also being a right wing religious regressive conservative who has dollar signs in her eyes? I don’t know. Propaganda would have me be both apparently.

“Because it makes me feel hideous, you fuckwit.”
Someone telling you that you’re beautiful makes you feel hideous? lol wut?

I’m fat and that makes me feel ugly. When my last girlfriend told me that I look cute it made me feel better about myself not worse.

Valerie, who for some reason, just can’t stop reading. Just stop dancing on what little… I don’t even know what, I have left.

Good God, the victim-chic, it burns.

NO. I am not forcing your eyes onto this blog. GET A GRIP and take control, Valerie… it’s called exiting the blog; it’s called STEP AWAY from the keyboard. We’ve all had to do it. Your turn.

Learn to control yourself, instead of seeking to control others. The first step is admitting you have a problem. Etc.

“smug, sneering, solipsistic, falsely heroic, decade-dropper.” — Valerie Keefe

OOOooooh love it. I am hereby putting this quote in the margin of my blog, if I can ever figure out how to do it. I’ve wanted to do that ever since Renegade Evolution first did it on hers. I will be adding her words (“Daisy is amazing and real”), as well as the time Noam Chomsky called one of my arguments “interesting” –so you will be in great company. (you forgot “name dropper”)

Iron Lightening: As evidenced by the above quote her father and mother are rather ashamed of her for being trans. That is, they are ashamed of her for not being what they wanted her to be: a son. She has turned out to be just like them and she feels that she cannot love a child that is not like her. Just like how an abused child will grow up to abuse too, Valerie has learned that parenting means only loving your child if they’re exactly like you.

Makes sense. This would also be one reason she can’t take compliments and continues to see a compliment as an insult. Very manipulative and weird… and then she blames her reaction on us rather than take responsibility for it. We somehow make Valerie mad (for complimenting her), so she is entitled to BE mad all the time. OUR fault!

Nice work if you can get it.

Iron: Incidentally, I find this rather funny. The most angry she’s gotten in this thread is when you told her that her height is beautiful. I guess some people get rather offended when tell them they’re not as much of a total victim as they would like to be.

I know right? When someone tells me that my weight makes me lovely, I eat that shit up. Most women I know enjoy being compared to models and informed that some aspect of their appearance is beautiful and much-coveted by other women… but Valerie is determined to remain a victim and remain unhappy. How dare I try to take her victim-status away from her!

Victims think it gives them some kind of cache, when it just makes them tiresome and predictable.

Hiding: Also, Valerie, since you were so kind as to call me a “fucking hypocrite” earlier, would you like a reminder of what you said to the last person who told you never to talk to them again?

Hiding, this is the ultimate MEAN GIRL threat… just as you are thinking “whew!”–they are back at it within 24 hrs, screaming and hollering in your face or pounding on the bathroom stall that you are a bitch. Don’t believe it for a second! They assume that because they are so wonderful, nothing could be worse for us than refusing to speak to us.

We should live so long, as my ex-mother in law used to say.

Schala, the mistake I have made in trying to make sense of your posts, is assuming you have any kind of consistency in your politics or any cohesive theory whatsoever. You don’t. You just spout whatever nonsense pops in your head, whether it be religious, atheist, MRA, feminist, left, right, eugenics crap from Valerie, whatever. You just borrow a random argument and type.

Then you are somehow shocked when we believe you are a eugenics-proponent… oh no, you say, you were just ARGUING like one! Now, how were we supposed to know that? You claim “I was arguing devil’s advocate” but at NO time made that clear to those of us reading. (FTR, I think you just changed your mind on the spot and suddenly became “devil’s advocate” when you realized how mad you were making people here.)

You have no ideological consistency and come off like some middle-schooler who just discovered politics last Wednesday.

For example, I certainly can’t improve on this:

Schala: Yet I’m a socialist leftist who would want *ideal* communism to be the working monetary ideology: to everyone by their needs, from everyone by their efforts, or something like that (I don’t know the exact quote).

something like that! I don’t know the exact quote! (ROFL)

You are a “socialist” who somehow doesn’t know (and is even unable to google!) the most important statement in the history of socialism? Hey, something like that! “I don’t know the exact quote”–are you serious??? ROLFMAO…. (gasps for breath)

Maybe you should get your head out of your ass, stop reading manga and watching cartoons and learn to google Daddy Karl and find the quote, huh? Maybe you should learn what socialism is and what the various theories are?

Once upon a time I would have engaged your post seriously and taken it at face value, and asked what kind of socialist you are. And I would get some ridiculous, inconsistent, irrational crap (rather like your unreadable, nonsense-phrase “working monetary ideology”– LOLOL–what is THAT?) that would show me that you have never read a single socialist book (not even a socialist comic book) or attended a single socialist meeting in your life… its all posturing and fashion and means nothing at all. Style over substance.

Lucky for me, this time, you mangled the most important quote in socialist history and made me laugh too hard… something like that! ROFL. Yeah, you don’t know the quote but it’s, you know, something like that!

“Well, like, that’s just your opinion man!”

You made my day, so thanks for that much.

This thread has taught me never to take you seriously again. I mean a socialist who argues for eugenics, what’s not to like? LOL

Schala: How I could reconcile that with also being a right wing religious regressive conservative who has dollar signs in her eyes?

Well, I keep waiting for an explanation, but I understand that one is not forthcoming. You argue one way on Sunday and another on Monday, or whatever pops up in your manga-mind. ROFL.

Something like that!

Clarence: But all the accusation slinging and name calling is just convincing me that some aspects of trans rights are a bridge too far for any mainstream political movement.

Since we are pulling out all the stops, I’d like to discuss this further. Why do you think this is? I used to think this was a problem intrinsic to feminism, but with the advent of this thread, now I am wondering if we are just not ready to discuss all aspects of gender politics?

In an old post of mine, I asked why a compliment in my generation (pardon me for ‘decade-dropping’, I plead old age) could be somehow regarded as an insult to THIS generation. I don’t think it is necessarily “progress” either… I think the sensibility has changed. Likewise, when I complimented Valerie, she saw it as an insult… this is not the first time this has happened to me.

Is this victim-chic invading the Body Politic, or something intrinsic to trans politics? I admit I don’t know, but this thread is Exhibit A.

” You claim “I was arguing devil’s advocate” but at NO time made that clear to those of us reading. (FTR, I think you just changed your mind on the spot and suddenly became “devil’s advocate” when you realized how mad you were making people here.) ”

Nah, it’s clearly an entirely theoretical proposition, not something on the ballot, so it was obvious I was debating the theoretical points, not the pragmatic things of applying it in the real world.

Too bad it wasn’t obvious to you and maybe others.

I can debate many positions without taking a stance myself or having a dog in the fight. I’m for men’s rights even though as a trans woman, it affects me way less now (radfem misdirected misandry at worst). I’m also for women’s rights, I just think they’re championed a bit too much (such that championing men’s rights is seen as being against women’s, because being for women is equality…being for men is ohsohorrible).

Marja: Haven’t any of your struggled with your body image and/or your body?

Is there anyone who has NOT? This is the human condition. I used to say it was just women, until I began reading MRM blogs. My radio co-host, Gregg (also a second wave feminist in his 50s), swears to me that men are more vain about their appearance than women are.

I’m sure that I weigh more than every woman in this thread, at my towering 5’3″ frame. I’ve had the usual eating disorders/amphetamine addiction and once dropped 40 lbs in a dangerously short period. My weight see-saws 20-30 lbs at virtually all times. I have only recently stopped classifying various periods in my life by what I weighed. I still think of myself as “on the upside” or “on the downside” of certain weights, but no longer judge myself totally on that account. But it has taken a lifetime.

I have a C-section scar and had a 8 lb-11 oz big fat baby, so I will match my stretch marks with Valerie’s any day. Now that I have aged, I have those breasts that Molly Ivins once described as looking like a billiard ball in a sock. 🙂 They ain’t perky. They were, but haven’t been for a long time. (I resent that my ex-husbands have photos of the perky ones and I never bothered to keep those.)

I’ve had varicose vein surgery, which got rid of the blue veins but had the bad side effect of giving me terrible restless leg syndrome. I also have plantar fasciitis from standing on my feet on jobs for decades.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

I love it when people say I look good. Why wouldn’t I? The “compliment” I most often get is that I look 35-40 (instead of 55), which I could scream about and call ageist, but I don’t do that, since I know they mean well. Since reading alla these boy-blogs, I realize the reason for this is my “neoteny”–I have large eyes, nose, mouth, and my so-called youthful appearance is more like ‘an optical illusion’. (Also, long hair) I didn’t know there was a word for this, so its cool to finally have the word. “Cute” is hell when you are young and trying to be sexy, but ages very well. (When people say I look young and whats my secret, I tellem its because I don’t eat meat and try to make vegetarian converts.)

No, I really don’t understand being nasty to people who are trying to make you feel better and point out the positives to a situation. I certainly appreciate it when other people do.

Schala: I can debate many positions without taking a stance myself or having a dog in the fight.

No, you can’t. That’s my point.

Your posts come across as a veritable mishmash of random, off-the-wall opinions with no cohesive ideological thread, and people consequently do not trust what you say (or can’t figure it out in light of what you claim to believe) and therefore disregard it.

To paraphrase Truman Capote, “That’s not debating, that’s typing.”

Me: ““working monetary ideology”– LOLOL–what is THAT?”

Schala: It’s as opposed to a government system itself.

No, its gibberish. Like your posts.

Paul Krugman, don’t quit your day job.

Schala: Argument by authority, fallacy.

(I see that you and Valerie are busily emailing each other, literally as we speak… that one came straight from her.)

Argument by literacy. Indecipherable nonsense is… well, indecipherable. Thus, no argument has been made unless you want to try to read the unreadable, and I don’t.

Schala: You’d probably argue that only people who have a Masters in some kind of economics degree can even argue about having higher taxes, even theoretically, right?

No, I argue that middle schoolers need to finish middle school before arguing with adults.

Not theoretically, but really.

“(I see that you and Valerie are busily emailing each other, literally as we speak… that one came straight from her.) ”

I don’t know Valerie’s email, so I doubt it.

Daisy:

Daran in the last paragraph of the last comment on the thread I linked to:

You are not banned, but will remain on moderation. If you make substantive comment without engaging in the behaviour described, they will be approved. If you don’t, they won’t.

Banned means that one is completely blocked from making a comment. One definition of ban can be read here: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ban&defid=4255827

I am not sure why I bother because it obviously suits you better to claim that you’ve been banned from Feminist Critics rather than say that you’ve been put on moderation. To me it sounds like an attempt to sound more bad-ass or as an attempt to claim victimhood. But hey, that’s just my impression, other’s may differ.

Schala: Except “being tall is fun for some people, you should be thankful” is not a compliment, it’s a point of view being forced on another.

Yes, as we all know, I can jump right through the computer screen and “force my point of view” on Valerie, just like the Khmer Rouge.

Grow up please. I am through with middle school for today, Schala, thanks for playing.

“Grow up please. I am through with middle school for today, Schala, thanks for playing.”

Too bad middle school doesn’t exist in the Québec school system, try again.

We have elementary (6 years), and then high school (5 years), then college (3 years professional, 2 years pre-university), then university (3-4 years for a Bachelors).

See middle school in there? There is also no Junior High. The first 2 years of high school are commonly referred to…as the first 2 years of high school. We have no title for someone who is in their first year (no freshmen here), their middle year (no sophomore here) and only have a name for someone about to graduate high school in their last year. A worst 1st year people will be called, the short ones, the young ones, the new ones, but they have no official appellation.

Middle school is so not-where-I-went centric.

And I graduated high school with pretty good grades (I have no idea what “Honors” is supposed to mean/refer to, it wasn’t talked about – of course no one in my school got any honors either, or I’d at least heard of it) in 1999. I got 75 out of a possible 72 units (36 units per year, counts only the last 2 years for graduation). Because I skipped my last grade in English second language (+4 units), but failed a useless 1 unit course by 1% (it’s like a free period, not motivating for a minute). I had strong maths, physics, chemistry options. Could have gotten into about any college course asking for high science to enter.

Then I outright lost motivation. It kinda coincided with puberty starting (at about 16, I graduated I wasn’t yet 17), but I can’t say how related it is. I didn’t get any higher degree since.

Pretty high depression and seeing no reason to live was pretty demotivating afterwards. Since then I just haven’t found a career I’d see myself doing on a lifetime-basis. Jobs need great structuring and clear instructions, or I’ll simply fail the employer. I can’t do creative or autonomous jobs (lacks structure), with-the-public jobs (bad with the public), heavy-weight jobs (too weak physically), specialized (electrician) jobs (no formation).

“she’ll dodge, distort, distract, engage in endless ad hominem attacks, and — when all else fails — blatantly lie in order to smear her rhetorical opponents”

Yup, that sounds awfully familiar with any of my “conversations” with her. I just called the last of those as propaganda.

“Propaganda often presents facts selectively (thus possibly lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or uses loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented. The desired result is a change of the attitude toward the subject in the target audience to further a political, religious or commercial agenda. Propaganda can be used as a form of ideological or commercial warfare.”

Nope, my goal is not to produce emotional response. Yours apparently is. I aim to produce rational response, and will try to dispel emotional response when possible.

I also don’t use ad hominems. I attack your arguments, not your person. I usually end up ignoring your arguments and your person, because you make brick walls of text with no substance and all insults and portrayals of me as someone who is unspeakably evil. That’s what propaganda is.

Making arguments about just your side to influence others, period, isn’t propaganda.

Daisy, I reproduced ballgame’s comment because I felt your characterization of it wasn’t accurate, or at least that it conveyed very little about what ballgame actually said. If ballgame’s statements are as damning of the FC moderation as you made them out to be (viz. “[b]allgame agrees that I’m a bad person”), then I’ve done you a favor.

If examining your claims is hostile, then I guess I’m the hostile-est motherfucker around.

“Of course I engage in propaganda, I consider myself a polemicist and wrote propaganda for a living for years. ”

Being a polemicist is outright being a troll. Stirring shit for the lulz.

If I “stir shit”, it’s usually my having big disagreement with the blog I’m at (like Feministe), my entire stance is construed as “stirring shit” just because I don’t agree with them (ie I think men are oppressed qua men, they don’t think it’s possible). But I don’t go there “for the lulz”. I do try to make a point for other observers who aren’t part of the echo chamber. I usually don’t like going in hostile environments as such, because it makes me very stressed.

I was very stressed in this way on Michfest boards, on Feministe thread and sometimes on Alas, depending on how controversial I thought my argument would be to the mods (like paper abortions, female privilege). Between visits to the site I’d have lots of angst. So I usually avoid it in favor of less hostile environments.

Daisy: “I actually miss Adiabat posting here. Where’d he go?”

I still pop in every now and again, read a couple of threads and sometimes add a comment to a dead thread, like this one.

I used to comment more here and elsewhere in the gendersphere when I still believed that feminism could still be redeemed; that maybe the ones that claim to be “progressive” would listen to reason and drop the whole “women studies” postmodernist bullshit and actually care about the problems that men and women experience in the real world. Instead I reached the conclusion that they cared more about their ideology and warped worldview than anything else and they were a lost cause. That, and real life has got in the way.

As for your banning at FC, I felt it was right at the time but since then you’ve changed (for the better). You’re still a bitch 🙂 but you’re an interesting bitch (the best kind in this assholes opinion!). It seems to me that you back up your posts more, support your arguments and have a more egalitarian outlook, then when all else fails call out shitty behaviour for what it is. Back then you pretty much used to troll, or at least it seemed that way. The change seemed to happen around the time Genderratic started and I remember commenting at how surprised I was then. You pretty much owned this thread as far as I can tell.

HidingFromtheDinosaurs: “suicide by bear”

… Hmm, I’m intrigued but don’t want to come across as insensitive. What a dilemma.

Nice to see you Adiabat! (((hugz))

You’re still a bitch 🙂 but you’re an interesting bitch (the best kind in this assholes opinion!)

Ohhhh, I hear this all the time! 😀

Actually, I attribute my sea-change to this Prince who lived a long time ago, named Siddhartha. 😉 Smartest guy EVER.

PS: If Jodi Arias is found not guilty or ‘self defense’ or whatever bullshit she is propagating, I am writing a helluva blog post and rending my garments and asking WHAT HAPPENED TO FEMINISM and will go utterly berserk. Stay tuned! My meltdown should be fairly entertaining.

If she is found guilty, I will breathe a sigh of relief that the whole world has not gone insane. But I will be writing about the trial nonetheless.

Love ya, and as the southerners say, don’t be a stranger! Hope you will drop by more often.

Danny: Let me thank you in advance for that post if you end up writing.

Ohhhh, I certainly will, but I have to struggle with my own speechlessness… like, what to make of the fact that a guy calling a woman “skank” on the phone (not even in person!) is supposedly tantamount to “abuse”? Are you fucking kidding me? If the jury buys this… good God, what to say? WHAT DO YOU SAY TO THAT? If they allow her to get away with slicing and dicing him for cheating on her and calling her a skank, Ima freak out.

I guess her testimony is working up to “what happened” that made her flip her cookies, but damn. Shot in the head, stabbed 27 times, nearly decapitated? More like Jack the Ripper than Lorena Bobbitt, doncha think? Jesus H. Christ. One Tweet pointed out that she waited to get him in the shower since you can stab someone easier when they are naked and the knife doesn’t go through clothes. That is premeditation. (If she had never taken photos of him in the shower, there would not have been any evidence that she was there… but like most murderers, she wanted a trophy.)

I can’t stop watching. The coolness and calculating nature of this woman is … beyond description. They are hoping that her uber-ladylike bearing, good vocabulary and Book of Mormon quotes will convince the jury she HAD TO have been harmed first… but she is only succeeding in creeping me out bigtime. (My daughter, a great judge of character, believes she is a sociopath.) Who kills a guy but saves pictures of his penis? Gah!!!!

She says she “just happened” to find his MySpace page open. Uh huh. She “just happened” to drive to his house at 3am and she “just happened” to crawl in the doggie door and wait for him to come back… and she “just happened” to snoop in his email. Of course a man would be accused of stalking.

This is outrageous that there is even a trial. A man would not be permitted to make such a flimsy-ass defense.

Danny: Also where are you watching the coverage? CourtTV? CNN?

I am watching TruTV (used to be CourtTV) and then at 3pm it switches to their sister-network HLN. Since its Arizona, testimony runs late here in EST.

I think one lesson is: Don’t buy your female partner any clothings with your name on it or any translucent shoes.

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