TSN Open Mic for the week of 3/20/2023

DavidTC in reply to Philip H says:

We actually decided, between the 60s and the ’80s, that we weren’t going to have a legal distinction between men and women anymore. That the law would treat them identically.

It is hilariously and stupidly regressive to start demanding fine lines for the few weird exceptions we still have in society in that regard, instead of asking ourselves what we could do about those exemptions, and if they aren’t already outdated.

For example, the idea that people should only have privacy from people of the opposite sex is…really absurd. We shouldn’t be asking people to generally be observable unclothed to _anyone_ else, their gender or otherwise, and if there are situations where that is happening we need to fix the actual problem of that happening.Report

DavidTC in reply to DensityDuck says:

you’ll note that I didn’t only say “testosterone”, maybe you should scroll back and re-read that bit

That actually is the only thing you mentioned as causing physiological changes. What else did you mean to include?

it’s pretty awesome seeing “you haven’t figured out anything special, you’re just man-hatin’ jerks” change from a disgusting reactionary patriarchy-supporting idea to a progressive queer forward-thinking inclusive one

You have literally no idea what any sorts of radical feminism theory actually says, do you? Or what the difference between _radical_ feminism and normal feminism.

You don’t know what feminist separatism or lesbian feminism is, presumable. Or that ‘trans exclusion radical feminism’ is a way of talking about things _inside_ of lesbian feminism and whether or not trans women should be included inside that.

Anyone who wants to know the origin of the term TERF should read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesbian_feminism#Views_on_transgender_people

Those are the actual _radical feminists_ who reject trans women. They are the TERFs, not garden variety bigots who just hate trans people.

And yes, they are pretty ‘man-hating’, or at least man-rejecting, which is why both standard feminism (and even other forms of radical feminism!) reject them. They’re dead-enders that reject queer theory and usually aren’t great at intersectionism. (And they are closely related to political lesbianism, which _also_ has a lot of problems.)

Again we are in the ‘People who do not actually know anything about this are being pretty determined to make it clear that they don’t know anything’ territory. “How dare you call people ‘man-hating’ who *checks notes* think all men are dangerous and that associating with them is condoning the patriarchy.”Report

DavidTC in reply to DensityDuck says:

the comment’s right there, go back and read it

…so you reread the comment and realize it doesn’t say anything about anything else, but don’t want to admit that. Got it.

this is yet another example of the thing you do where you angrily agree with everything I wrote and somehow think it means I’m wrong

If you think that statement ‘the far-right likes to paint all feminism with a very broad brush that applies only to a very small minority of radical feminism called lesbian feminism that almost no one agrees with’ (Which is what people said back in the day in response to ‘disgusting reactionary patriarchy-supporting’ people.) is somehow in opposition to the statement ‘nevertheless, that small minority of very small minority of radical feminist that almost no one agrees with do exist’, I don’t know what to tell you.

You do understand that political philosophies can actually have bad, non-representative people who take that political philosophies to weird extremes? That there actually _is_ such a thing as lesbian feminism, which is pretty much exactly how the far-right decided to describe _all_ feminism back in the 90s?

And mentioning they _exist_ as a small and discredited subset is not the same as tarring the entire philosophy of feminism with their stupid ideas.

Next up in DD’s gotchas: The left admits 9/11 happened, which is an _interesting_ change from back when they denied the far-right screaming about how all Muslims were terrorists.Report

DavidTC in reply to DensityDuck says:

What is the purpose of having “Men’s Sports” and “Women’s Sports”?

Apparently the purpose is to justify society-wide oppression of trans people, including a bunch of completely unrelated things that merely use them as a wedge issue.

This line of argument is akin to arguing that scholarships for Black children mean we should start figuring out everyone’s blood quantum and exactly what race they belong to and enshrine that percentage into law, and also maybe Texas just recreated segregated water fountains for some reason, and Florida just introduced a bill to defuse health insurance to any medical condition that is due to being Black, multiple states are seizing children who are being supported in their Blackness, etc, etc.

And a bunch of idiots are acting like ‘PeOpLe MiGhT GeT UnDeSeRvEd ScHoLaRsHiPs So We MuST MeASUre eXaCT LeVeLs oF BlaCKNesS’ is a reasonable position to continue to hold after it’s clear what is actually happening.

To be very blunt: Women’s sport ARE NOT AS IMPORTANT AS THE ACTUAL LITERAL GENOCIDE CURRENTLY BEING ATTEMPTED. Sorry, if that’s the problem, then women’s sports go away. They don’t get to be used as an excuse to create some sort of situation where fascists get to _seize queer children from parents_.

The Motte and Bailey ratio here is near infinite. The Motte supposedly being argued is worrying about a problem that is microscopic and basically don’t exist (The percentage of trans athletes is basically nothing.) while politicians on your side are using the exact same arguments to do extremely horrific things. You don’t get to _pretend_ you’re suddenly concerned about women’s sport….which, incidentally, tend to be _incredibly poorly funded_ at schools, a thing that actually has an impact on young girls who want to do it, so maybe you could be concerned about that instead of the, like, one hundred trans grade-school athletes that exist in the entire country.Report

DavidTC in reply to Pinky says:

The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

…hey, look, Republicans are doing _at least two_ of those things, b and e, to trans people.

They are causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group by withholding medication (The State of Florida just outlawed insurance covering trans people…yes, all trans people, even adults) and doing other things too (Please notice the _mental_ harm bit), but the ‘withholding medication’ is the most obvious and easiest to prove.

Several states have also declared their intent to forcibly transfer children in that group to other people…now, it’s possible to misread that quote and claim it doesn’t apply, because they aren’t doing to ‘children of the trans people’, but to trans children, but…’children of the group’ can also mean ‘children within the group’, so, yeah, it applies.

Now, there is, of course, one actual objection to this: trans people are not a ‘national, ethnical, racial or religious group’. (Although a bunch of conservatives seem to think they are a cult, which would literally give it such protection.) Of course, the UN Convention explicitly picked those categories because they did not tend to change over time, their definition _in the treaty_ wasn’t intended to be all-encompassing but rather what they could convict people of.

And I could say more, but before we go further: Is this your actual objection? Do you assert that genocide can _only_ be committed against those group? You may want to think about that response _really_ carefully.Report

DavidTC in reply to Pinky says:

It seems reasonable to say that people who think they’re the wrong sex aren’t a national, ethnical, racial or religious group and thus don’t fall under this or any definition of genocide. Is there some subtlety I’m missing?

LOL. I warned you to be careful and consider this. And instead you’ve gone from ‘This is nothing like genocide, this isn’t even a figurative genocide! How dare anyone say that!’ to ‘I agree with the premise that this behavior is exactly like the behavior during a genocide as defined under international law but it is not targeted at one of the groups that can be the target of a genocide, ergo it is not technically a genocide’. I really could just stop there, because you’ve just admitted it is _analogous_ to a genocide, which was your original claim.

But instead I will make the point: That definition was written in 1948 as a way to codify, under international law, a crime with which to charge Nazis for the Holocaust. And of all the groups that had been imprisoned (and aimed at being wiped out) in the Holocaust, there was one group that wasn’t released by Allied forces, but kept in prison after under the military occupation, because the Allied forces thought imprisoning them was fine: gay people.

I.e., there’s a rather obvious claim that the reason that sexual orientation (And back then, transgender people were assumed to be of a different sexual orientation. You will find plenty of liars claiming the Nazis didn’t go after trans people, just gay people, and it is a straight up lie based in the fact that the Nazis _themselves_ didn’t believe trans people existed so generally classified them as gay.) was not included in the genocide definition was simply that it was a _more acceptable_ genocide, and _everyone_ was doing it, not just the Nazis. The British, after all, were sterilizing gay men, for an obvious example off the top of my head.

Of course, disabled people also weren’t included under those protections, too. I guess the systematic murder and attempted extermination of them by the Nazis doesn’t count as genocide.

That requirement also make it really hard to figure out if the Rwandan genocide is technically genocide , as you really had to stretch ‘ethnic group’ pretty far to define the Tutsi as different from the Hutu, there is basically no way to distinguish the groups except self identification, the difference is almost entirely class and how they live. They are political groups, not ethnic.

So the UN definition’s apparent requirement of ‘national, ethnical, racial or religious group’ is pretty well understood as not all-inclusive, even in actual legal cases.

There’s a wikipedia article that has collected various definitions of genocide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_definitions

You’ll notice that most of those do not specify genocide has to be against a ‘national, ethnical, racial or religious group’ and instead use terms like ‘communal group’, ‘social group’, or ‘minority group’. I favor the last example:

Genocide is the concerted, coordinated effort to destroy any human group or collectivity as it is defined by the perpetrator.

Genocide differs from other mass crimes against humanity and atrocities by its ambition. Genocide aims to not only eliminate individual members of the targeted group but to destroy the group’s ability to maintain its social and cultural cohesion and, thus, its existence as a group.

Because perpetrators very rarely provide explicit statements of genocidal intent, this intent can be uncovered by examining policies, actions, and outcomes, as well as the guiding ideology.

A CPAC speaker just called for the elimination of transgenderism.

I mean, the way you’ve looking to extend it, genocide would also include cancelling Firefly.

…and you’ve also gone from complaining that things are trivializing genocide to trivializing genocide yourself. The state has never done anything listed above to Firefly fans, or even created any laws that target them at all.Report

DavidTC in reply to Pinky says:

I looked over those definitions you linked to, and there’s only one that includes sexual groups. Twenty-eight don’t.

What, did you just search that page for ‘sexual’? You didn’t actually read any of those, as demonstrated by the fact you missed another definition saying _gender_.

And the reason they don’t use that word is that _they stopped defining the group_.

Only six of the definitions require the group to be one of the four listed above, and three of them are the UN definition and things _quoting_ the UN definition because they are listing the definitions of the criminal act, and the two others are the same person.

None of the definitions after 1988 require groups to be anything more than ‘social’ or ‘communal’ or ‘political’ groups. (Except the text of the Rome Statute, which was legally required to match the text of the UN.) Many of them just say ‘If the government thinks they are a group, they are a group’.

Let me ask: Do you think the systematic society-wide killing of disabled people by the Nazis counts as genocide?

Yes or no.

I’d argue that people who think that they’re the wrong sex aren’t a group, anyway, in that they don’t have a collective culture, tradition, ethnicity, et cetera.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_culture

Hey, you know what’s interesting? How often queer culture has been _completely annihilated_.

Queer culture was thriving in Germany under the Weimar Republic, with the first gay right’s movement, trans researchers, clubs, movies, etc. The Nazis destroyed it.

Queer culture was, if not thriving, at least getting there in the US during the Roaring Twenties and into thirties, as prohibition and the rebellion against it resulted in backlash against all sorts of social norms. This is where drag actually comes from. This was torn down by Hoover’s deliberate attempt to seize power by pushing a bunch of lies and creating the Lavender Scare.

Queer culture in the US eventually recovered from that, only to run straight into AIDS, which destroyed entire communities and was utterly ignored by the Federal government very very deliberately.

It’s really interesting how you are using the deliberate repeated destruction of a culture to argue that a culture does not exist and thus destroying that culture cannot be genocide.Report