The "gender critical" discussion, for example, contains Helen Pluckrose, one of the originators of the "grievance studies" paper, and Kathleen Stock, who got fired from being a philosophy professor for being anti-trans. Both of them take the anti-trans position.
If you consider Helen Pluckrose to be anti-trans, I worry that means you haven't actually read any of her writing on trans people, and rather only heard her opinions filtered through her very vocal and vitriolic critics from the critical theory swathe of twitter - and I certainly doubt you've seen the vast amount of vitriol thrown at her on a regular basis by gender crits either.
I'm not going to link any of the vitriol because it's mindless and horrible, but she gets called "a traitor to women" and told she wants her daughter to be raped on a fairly regular basis by such people.
To understand Helen's actual position, I recommend people read this:
It's somewhat long and somewhat nuanced, which means most extreme activists at both ends of the argument hate it, but I'd claim that it is, overall, very much more pro-trans than otherwise and the majority of trans people I'm aware of who've read it came away with the same impression.
That's a shockingly ignorant article, particularly when it comes to nonbinary people — it even uses "transtrenders" to try and separate the good, gender-conforming trans people from those icky blue-haired weirdos.
Thank you for confirming that Pluckrose is in fact deeply transphobic. If you think that is "nuanced" you are seriously mistaken. Consider re-evaluating your priors, in SSC speak.
The complete failure to understand enbies is, indeed, unfortunate.
I stand by my estimate that it gets a lot more right than it gets wrong, however.
My priors are based on conversations with a bunch of trans people; a mere assertion of "shocking ignorance" and "transphobia" largely leaves me thinking that you're so certain of your correctness you don't believe arguments need to even be made, which is not a position I can really rebut.
However, I shared the article, unfortunate parts and all, such that people can draw their own conclusions, and I'd continue to invite people to read and decide for themselves.
It is not just "unfortunate", it betrays their actual views, which is that we should be ready to sacrifice people's lives on the altar of patriarchal gender norms.
A lot of the more polite bigots will be comfortable making concessions to the trans people who conform to patriarchal roles (and hey, good on Pluckrose for being slightly less bad than charlatans like Stock) but will have knives out for anyone whose existence challenges them. This is a problem.
The only way to true gender liberation is through abolishing the patriarchy.
> It is not just "unfortunate", it betrays their actual views, which is that we should be ready to sacrifice people's lives on the altar of patriarchal gender norms.
Helen is hardly gender role essentialist and in fact quite substantially non-conforming to many female gender norms and visibly proud to be her.
To assume that her failure (as of the time of writing, at least) to comprehend non-binary identities "betrays" anything except a lack of comprehension is ... unfounded, at best.
The entire idea of "transtrenders" is a made up one designed to perpetuate oppressive gender roles and work against solidarity within the trans community. The fact that she takes it seriously is pretty goddamn founded, as far as evidence goes.
Not precisely true. IIRC it first came about during one of the iterations of the tumblr trans wars to describe people who identified as things like "AFAB demigirl" and kept claiming that people who wanted to medically transition "just wanted to be able to pretend they were cis" and therefore "weren't really trans", which understandably went down about as well as a shart in a spacesuit with the people with severe physical dysphoria.
There was a stupendous amount of circular firing squad style stupidity to go around back in those days.
Despite the bad ideas of a subset of trans people (morphological liberation is very important to me), the idea of "transtrenders" is bogus and oppressive.
My point is that it's entirely possible to encounter the term in a context where the people being described by the term were being bogus and oppressive, so it's impossible to know a priori whether somebody using that term is an enemy or merely an imperfect ally.
Successful activism generally requires forming as large a coalition as possible, and insta dismissing somebody as a bigot for not getting everything right first time is not an effective way to do that.
"Rather than coming off as a legitimate attempt to help legitimate problems, then, this form of gender activism appears to many like an unappealing combination of ideologizing and attention-seeking and raises the question of whether everybody who says they are trans is sincere or correct. It seems likely that some people have jumped on the train due to an ideological commitment to gender non-conformity and many trans people themselves have complained of this and coined the term “transtrender” to describe it."
This is pretty clearly "gender-conforming trans good, icky weird attention-seeking trans bad". The thing about "many trans people" is mentioned without any evidence and probably refers to people like Debbie Hayton and Buck Angel.
My demigirl friend microdoses on testosterone for the facial hair and voice deepening effects, though she would rather be read as a woman than a man. I know cis men who take the standard spironolactone and estradiol HRT combination.
Sorry, forming coalitions with people that seek to divide a marginalized community rather than work towards unity and solidarity is not a good idea.
> This is pretty clearly "gender-conforming trans good, icky weird attention-seeking trans bad".
That's a reductive view and doesn't fit with my understanding of their position.
> Sorry, forming coalitions with people that seek to divide a marginalized community rather than work towards unity and solidarity is not a good idea.
I'm the one suggesting unity and solidarity here.
You're the one suggesting dividing people based on your guesses as to their motivations.
But, whatever. I'm going to keep working towards a world where "trans people choosing bathrooms most suitable for the gender they are commonly perceived to be and everybody else accepting that trans people just need to pee" is just an obvious and comfortable thing and nobody gets beaten up for doing that.
You keep doing ... whatever it is you're doing. If you ever decide that trans people not getting the shit kicked out of them matters more to you than ideological purity, we can pick the conversation up again then, I guess.
This comment would appear to be a paradigmatic example of non-nuanced. Neither of those people is anti-trans except according to a narrowly doctrinaire definition. Pluckrose is a left-liberal who writes against critical theory and identity politics from a universalist liberal perspective. She has repeatedly written in defense of trans and gay rights, although she does not believe that "trans women can be accepted straightforwardly as women in every situation". Stock is a feminist philosopher who regards gender self-identity as potentially harmful to the interests of women. Both of these are reasonable and nuanced positions that can't be adequately summarized as "anti-trans" whether or not you agree with them.
> Neither of those people is anti-trans except according to a narrowly doctrinaire definition.
They certainly aren't "pro" trans either, though. The point wasn't whether or not they were extremists, it's whether they were representative speakers for ALL the relevant perspectives. And they clearly aren't.
The question isn't whether or not a representative discussion "could" be held, it's whether it happens or not. Letter was held up as an example of nuanced discussion, the specific example given was one-sided.
No justification of it being one-sided has actually been given, merely assertions of that.
The conversation in question was, in fact, an expansion of an extended disagreement on twitter that got derailed by a bunch of gendercrits deciding to scream at Helen until she had to lock her account.
If you're curious as to the actual conversation, I'd suggest reading it on letter for yourself.
How seriously this crowd takes her says a lot about its own values and methods.
edit: as a parody of the sort of meta-level discussion that is more concerned with intellectually bogus, self-absorbed notions of "truth" and "nuance" than the lives of actual human beings, the response is peerless. Well done!
As a parody of the type of nuance-free ideologically driven commentary under discussion, this is peerless. You managed to efficiently cram accusations of fraud and fascism alongside guilt by association and misrepresentation in very few words. Well done!
Edit: it’s a shame you decided to edit your post after I responded. The new version is not quite as successful.
The "gender critical" discussion, for example, contains Helen Pluckrose, one of the originators of the "grievance studies" paper, and Kathleen Stock, who got fired from being a philosophy professor for being anti-trans. Both of them take the anti-trans position.