Jun
14th
2020
Trans-Exclusionary Radical Pegasus · 9:51pm Jun 14th, 2020
Horse Fly (Starlight and Pals Magical Half Hour, S2E6)
When Starlight tries to use magic to awaken the proletariat to the nature of dialectical struggle, she accidentally sucks all of Ponyville into an alternate universe where Daring Do is a villain! Can she put it all right before Twilight finds out about her mistake, and will her friends understand how social media is simultaneously a tool of the revolution and a threat to community self-determination? Find out this Saturday!
Only on the Hub!
JK Rowling seriously burned all her bridges. Only just we make fun of her pony standin.
For those who need help:
https://ostem.org/page/crisis-hotlines
You've definitely got the nature of commercials down pat. They're the predecessors of clickbait, complete with the lying.
This was magical, but not a half-hour.
7/10.
5284625
I'm pretty sure that's the joke.
I'm not sure those are words. Certainly not in that order.
I don't know what this joke is supposed to make fun of: J.K. Rowling for being a TERF, or the people who criticize her for being 'so emotional.'
If I hadn't accidentally run across "J.K. Rowling is a massive TERF" elsewhere, and then spent almost an hour figuring out just what a TERF actually was, I would have been so very lost...
5284620
TERF arguments always seem to be these absurd hyperbolic straw (wo)men: "But if we recognize trans people then women cease to exist forever! All women, all over the globe, throughout history!"
5284683
It's intended as the former
5284762
camo.fimfiction.net/4ztcn4xamRfaqF77zrdweq9EEIv953sPRc5-EV14e68?url=https%3A%2F%2Flh4.googleusercontent.com%2FJC_qxoRbkEUGgr9e8q0porLJtpVULMWVqHSxBpLv9FOJE_2oZe1eLlH6m43eYxG38DUZpGDfqkiOSGOUxSXBdi0MkTmyYUBgSMLnWcvysbR5I903g7Ps-SoxhDSSDjy6TBCfeCXq
5284762
I know right?!
It's as ridiculous as it is hurtful
5284765
This legitimately made me laugh and wince at the same time.
5284776
It's from the story! Giver it a read.
5284661
Couldn’t be. I know Jaxie. Jaxie never jokes.
5284757 For context, here is her actual article from her web site. Agree or disagree, it's a lot better than trying to piece together some of the fragments out of twitter mixed in with various angry rants from whatever side.
5284779
I'll need to wait a while for my winceometer to refill.
If you dared pronounce that as 'WINCE-oh-mee-ter' instead of the correct 'win-SAH-mutt-ur', I'll have to wait longer.
...Huh. Well, this should be interesting. :D
(I mean, you know. Safe bet here, they usually are, but still. :D)
5284762
...Er. That's an actual quote? Yeah, uh... preeeety sure I've never heard of any actual trans people trying to claim that sex isn't real. Really more the, you know, exact opposite, given that if sex wasn't real, wouldn't we expect trans people to have no interest in trying to cultivate physical traits associated with bodies more matching their gender?
Also, if there actually was no concept of sex, wouldn't that also mean there was no sexism, no concept of discrimination against same-sex attraction?
Also, even if sex didn't exist, why couldn't we discuss it? I mean, to pick a totally random example, lots of people seem to be able to discuss the Harry Potter series just fine even though so much of it is fiction.
And it's also not like not having a thing now means we can't discuss when we did have it in the past...
5284765
Yep, you get that talk of equality in here, and next thing you know, pegasi will be wondering why they can't seem to make their horns work while earth ponies forget they can't walk on clouds and plummet to their deaths. Do you want all those dead earth ponies on your conscience?!
5284798
Oh! Thank you. That's far more nuanced and reasoned than anything I'd heard about her TERF-ness before (not that I'd heard that much, but what I had heard made it sound like it was much more, well... "unthinkingly opposed and not open to discussion" might be a polite way to put it).
So I do have a lot more sympathy for the views expressed in that. Much less "Someone making a statement that sounds rather ludicrous and also harmful" and more "Someone trying to make a good faith effort to navigate the best path on a complex issue in the Great Big Mess Of Society". As you say, it's still something that can be debated, but it seems more something about which one could have an actual debate of to-be-applied philosophy regarding decisions of what set of risks, benefits, rights, and restrictions is best in a complex situation, rather than a "debate" in the form of a Twitter shouting match.
(And I do think that, for instance, the issue of trans teens and children is a very tricky one. Humans are humans and make mistakes, including very often about themselves, and teenagers in particular are somewhat famous for often poor decision making; I don't think that knowledge of one's own gender identity is somehow specially and universally (some people, from what I've read and heard, will know, very certainly, from a very early age, and be right) exempt from this. Very easy for them to make a mistake there, and a system that makes it too easy for them to take lasting action on it could do a lot of harm. On the other hand, they're on a ticking clock, because, as I understand it, the earlier someone's dysphoria is caught, especially before puberty, the easier it is to transition, both biologically and generally socially, and the same factors that complicate determining if someone that young is trans naturally complicate determining they aren't. So I don't have a solution there, and can think of good-sounding arguments for multiple sides, but I do think it's an important conversation, on a very complicated issue, to have, and not just rush off to either extreme. Complicated, of course, by the fact that the conversation itself is on a clock, since we can't exactly tell every current child and teenager concerned to stop growing up while we figure it out.)
...So I kind of think your comment there has actually inclined me to think that Twitter is the real villain here. ...Well, the blog post did talk about the twinned dangers and benefits of social media, and I've been working on this comment for a while, so I think I'll go ahead and get to the story. :D
edit:
To whoever downvoted:
I'm guessing that was about my response to the thing Georg linked? If so, sorry about that; I have since been shown more thorough examinations of it and realized I appear to have assumed too much good faith in Rowling writing it. I don't know if you'll look back at this comment and see this, but I thought I'd say it anyway.
(Though I do still plan to leave the upvote I left on Georg's comment; it did, after all, lead to the corrective conversation after.)
5284763
Okay. I've been very paranoid lately. Been seeing a lot of masks slip off in our current situation. I see Starlight and 'proletariat' together and I think "Oh, they're making fun of people who care about how horrible capitalism is to human dignity".
Probably shouldn't be on edge, but again... lot of masks have been slipping off on this site.
5284798
Oh Georg, it's really worse in many ways. She basically just comes out and lays out all the idiotic reasons why she's wrong. At least with Twitter she could have a smokescreen of plausible deniability.
5284849
I'm afraid, Reese, that it's really not as reasonable as you think.
I'm going to post two links that break down exactly why her essay is a trash fire:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/dawnstaceyennis/2020/06/11/this-is-the-sequel-jk-rowling-doesnt-want-you-to-read/#1da2439a5165
https://the-orbit.net/ashleyfmiller/2020/06/12/jk-rowlings-anti-trans-post-a-deep-dive/
The trans teen thing isn't an issue, not so much as you may have been led to believe. The only intervention done for trans teens are puberty blockers, and if they decide not to go through with transition they can be taken off them with no ill effects. They only delay puberty, and cause no lasting harm, and it gives them years to figure out their identities before anything serious is done. Rowling is full of shit if she thinks trans advocates are railroading kids into full medical transitioning. It's outright disgusting. Pointless concern trolling that doesn't reflect the reality of the situation on the ground and makes things worse for the teens, who are the real victims.
Hell, in Britain an adult who wants help will have to wait months just to get any help at all, if not years, and years and years more with many hurdles before surgery. This shit ain't easy anywhere, but they put tons more barriers in your way.
The "real villain" here was and remains Rowling. The only thing Twitter did was give her enough rope to hang herself with.
5284861
Ah, and thank you very much!
I mean, not happy news you bring, but important.
And I'm glad to know the trans teen thing isn't nearly as much of an issue as I feared. I, well, I think I'm more or less in agreement with the character Tedd here on what it'd be really nice to have, but in the absence of magical transformations as easy to revert after a day as they are to swap around weekly or keep for the rest of one's life, I worry about the human capacity, including my own, for making mistakes even, especially, on major matters, and tend to insert more caution.
And as for that last point, well, still not super fond of Twitter, but Rowling? Yeeeah. Would have been better, in my view, if she'd just stuck to her guns, as it were; that wouldn't have the aspect of malicious trickery. Somewhat annoyed that I so accepted that writing from her linked above as in good faith and so didn't look at it as critically as I might have, looking more at the stated views there than whether those statements were actually honest...
Kind of thinking of Dumbledore now, the man in most of Harry Potter canon the basically definitionally good top authority figure.
In quite a bit of the Harry Potter fanfiction I read, well... let's just say there are some varying interpretations there, but most of them I'm thinking of right now involve a stronger focus on the manipulative aspects of his character, and the "definitionally good", uh... yeah, not so much, sometimes by a little, sometimes by a lot.
(I mean, canon, though not always fanfiction, Voldemort is also terrible. I remember a comment by one author, I forget who, hypothesizing that people sometimes made the goblin civilization virtuous in Harry Potter fanfiction just so they'd have someone canon-compatible (given particular interpretations of the canon Good side and how little was defined about the goblins) to root for.)
5284902
Yes, in light of what we know about Rowling now, a lot of what came before in her writing has been cast into a darker light.
Snape as a creepy incel, Dumbledore as a manipulative old man who refused to do anything about systemic issues in his own school and rode high on his own glory, etc.
5284902
Also, like, I would talk to a gender therapist sooner rather than later if you haven't already, Reese. That's usually the sort of thing I hear from eggs.
5284984
Well, Snape was always a bitter bastard who was willing to work with Voldemort right until the point when the people he cared about, however possessively, got hurt. Dumbledore tells him off in one of the Pensieve flashbacks, though I can't remember the book. (And Dumbledore himself admits to Harry near the end of the books that he's been more manipulative than he should have been, and kept Harry in the dark even when he should have told him what was going on.)
None of which, of course, doesn't make Rowling's beliefs and statements about trans people any less awful. But these two characters, at least, were meant to be flawed people.
5284798
I debated with myself if I should respond with my thoughts on this. I finally decided to because otherwise I'm just going to keep thinking about it.
This is also much shorter than it should be because I'm on my phone. At work.
I would not have labeled J.K. Rowling a TERF based on that post alone. From what I've seen (I dont really Twitter) she fell down that rabbit hole by attempting to support a fundamentally flawed (but still understandable) position. For reference, I am very close to a domestic and sexual abuse victim. Some things will trigger anything from mild anxiety to a full blown panic attack (including involuntary memory suppression). This person would (and does to an extent, they're getting better) find any and every reason to avoid those triggers, or even the possibility of them. This includes making flawed decisions to support that avoidance. And, without some very difficult self reflection, would not back down from it. J.K. Rowling's post is thick with this kind of avoidance and justification. In it, she doesn't really have any ill will towards trans people. Her base worry is that bad actors will use an almost barrier free excuse to violate traditionally "safe" places. Is this logical? No. But the avoidance reaction isn't a thing of logic. And without some serious facing of personal demons, she is literally incapable of changing her mind. With the internet being what it is, I highly doubt she was given the chance to do that. In fact, since she received such a hostile reaction, any attempt to even bring it up is likely to only make her feel more attacked and shut out the message.
TL;DR Rowling had understandable, if flawed, reasons. But she didn't jump down the TERF rabbit hole, she was chased.
5285837
I think you demean her just as much by saying that she had no control over this, to be honest. JK Rowling is a powerful woman, and now she's using her platform to harm others. We should give her the benefit of assuming that she is in control of herself and her actions.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/dawnstaceyennis/2020/06/11/this-is-the-sequel-jk-rowling-doesnt-want-you-to-read/#1da2439a5165
https://the-orbit.net/ashleyfmiller/2020/06/12/jk-rowlings-anti-trans-post-a-deep-dive/
Seriously, read the above links. It breaks down all the many pernicious ways her beliefs manifest.
5284984
(Sorry it took so long to reply; things kept coming up.)
"Snape as a creepy incel"
...Huh. Yeah, he does spend round about two decades obsessed that, basically, the popular, rich, handsome bully
ChadJames Potter "got" Lily Evans, doesn't he? I mean, one could say that it lasted so long because of guilt over getting her killed (and as with so many other things, fanfics can take drastically different interpretations or just go full clear AU), but... his treatment of Harry, start to finish, is not really what I would expect from someone focused on the "last living remnant and beloved child of my dear friend (who I may very well have wanted to romance) who I betrayed to her death, which I regret to this day" and more, well, I mean, it's explicitly because Snape's seeing Harry's father in him, isn't it?And Snape being "denied" the girl was a key part of his turn to extremism...
"Dumbledore as a manipulative old man who refused to do anything about systemic issues in his own school and rode high on his own glory, etc."
I mean, like. He had, in canon, someone who was supposedly keeping an eye on Harry at the Dursleys, for at least years before Harry got his letter and possibly for his entire life. And McGonagall, who'd apparently spent more time observing the Dursleys than he had before leaving Harry there, warned him about them. So, at best, he set up little and poor enough surveillance that he wasn't aware that the Dursleys were treating Harry as basically a domestic slave, and the interpretations, both of his incompetence and/or actual support of the abuse and the severity of the abuse itself, just get worse from there.
Then, just for another example, we have Harry's first year, and... yeah, that gauntlet of "traps" was supposed to stop Voldemort? There's a good chance it wouldn't have stopped Tom Riddle when he was a first year, were he sufficiently motivated. Looking back, it seems really likely that Dumbledore deliberately engineered the Harry/Voldemort confrontation there.
5285256
Yes, but I'm not sure the magnitude was intended, or fully addressed (including potentially being brought up and then forgiven, rather than just, as I recall from canon (though it's been a while), a lot of things not really being touched on).
I mean, from one point of view, Dumbledore had actually been, by the end of Harry's first year, more of a personal enemy to him than Voldemort. Certainly, canon Voldemort was terrible, and attacked his family, killed his parents, and tried to kill him, but his parents were on the opposite side of a war, which they volunteered to fight in, knowing that family members could be targeted. Not saying they were wrong to do that, because again, canon Voldemort terrible, but Voldemort was just doing basically the sort of thing everyone expected him to do; Pettigrew betrayed the Potters but Voldemort just acted on intelligence he'd acquired about the enemy. Dumbledore, by contrast, was, like Pettigrew, supposedly a friend and ally of the Potters. What would you expect someone like that, with all the power he had, to do when his friends and subordinates were killed but their now-orphaned son survived, and furthermore apparently won this war for Dumbledore's side? Would it be "Stick him with people who another trusted subordinate, who observed them much more than I did, warned me I shouldn't, then keep very poor tabs on him for the next decade, allowing him to be abused, then set him up to confront the man who killed his parents again, then send him back to the people I now have even more reason to suspect are treating him badly and yet continue to keep poor tabs on him."? And again, that's the interpretation where he's just really bad at checking up on Harry at the Dursleys'. And, yes, there's the argument about blood wards, but there's seriously no other magic that would protect Harry? Really? You couldn't just have him raised, say, with a trusted family overseas behind excellent normal wards and a Fidelius with Dumbledore himself as secret-keeper?
So, yeah, canon Dumbledore may have had good intentions, but at best, he had some heavy flaws in carrying them out, and at worst, it does kind of seem like his difference with Grindelwald was more on what the Greater Good was than on what sorts of methods were acceptable to achieve it.
5286640
Or at least tell the Dursleys to lay the fuck off Harry and treat him right.
They're lucky Harry didn't end up a bitter, angry wreck.
5286818
Right. I mean, in canon, pretty much nothing seems to have been done, or at least nothing very effective, and considering all the resources Dumbledore could potentially bring to bear...
Or worse, aye. Of course, often times in fanfiction, they don't quite have such luck...