News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
I need some help with this topic.
I never got into Harry Potter; I watched some of the older films, but I've never read the books. I was born in '83, so it never hit me like the folks in my younger brother's and little cousins' generation. I only knew of Rowling's statements about trans people over the years tangentially and largely dismissed it as background noise. I assumed that she considers herself a TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist), as opposed to a TIRF (trans-inclusive radical feminist).
On the assumption that I'm correct about her position, what is the true essence of the disagreement between TERFs and TIRFs?
Is it that the presence of the Y chromosome in male-to-female trans people inherently adds a fundamental "maleness" that "true feminists" must inherently oppose due to the overt and implied threats to women that "maleness" represents?
Is it simply a feminist version of a "No True Scotsman" fallacy or an "Appeal to Nature" fallacy?
Maybe both?
TIRFs are not opposed to maleness. TERFism is a conservative psy-op that started when Mary Daly (who wrote magical divine goddess mother bullshit) and Janice Raymond (who accidentally kicked off trans studies by outing and harassing a trans woman named Sandy Stone - The Transexual Empire leading to Stone’s The Empire Strikes Back)
TIRFism recognizes that there is an axis of oppression that lies at the roots of imposed sex roles. The vast majority of women over history have been unarguably subject to men. Many women live in systems which are focused on controlling their sexuality, and are often barred and restricted from certain activities - due to both explicit and encultured messages.
The ideal TIRF society eliminates gender as a restriction. If anyone had actually read Andrea Dworkin, instead of taking Rush Limbaugh’s pastiche of her work at face value, they would find the TIRF society is one where gender is essentially just self expression. If we got rid of “man” or “woman” - maybe girls in Afghanistan would be able to go to school, or maybe sex wouldn’t be understood as a defilement of women (which I think is deeply connected to the problem of rape - rape is less an act of sexual desire and more a desire for subjugation that is tied to sexual power through this messaging that we desire to eliminate.)
The project of the TIRF is ultimately that the only way to truly end sexism would be to understand all humans as fundamentally ambiguous, to not hold anyone to any kind of sex role.
This is the fundamental irony behind the TERF movement. Rather than reject the gender and sex binary, they reify and enforce it. Daly was a wacky Catholic theologian who turned God into a mom, and decided that women were just special magical spiritual beings. This devotion to some kind of divine womanhood is common among the lesbian separatist types (it’s really disturbing seeing that space have the same deranged arguments of the 70’s…)
The problem is that TERFs are just not feminists. If Rowling cared about women, she wouldn’t be finding these women who realize that they can get their 15 minutes by intentionally throwing a boxing or fencing match. TERFs gleefully team up with the same groups that attack women’s reproductive health care - which I view as the most critical feminist issue at the moment (along the world wide surges in fascistic ideologies - which do tend to be expressions of a threatened male gender role, attempting to reassert those boundaries. The goddamn President is a serial rapist.)
That’s probably confusing and elaborate, there’s a lot of theory behind what I’m saying. I’m happy to answer or clarify, I think a critical part of countering this shit is to stop letting Rowling and the alt right redefine the term feminist.
I have to admit, I had to re-read your response several times to comprehend your points properly.
No slight intended to you; this subject has always been difficult for me to parse correctly and, in turn, respond with any thoughtful or logical relevance. My expression of thought tends to be more clumsy than I would like to admit.
After some consideration of your reply, I think the answer to my question is that TERF position suffers from both of the fallacies I listed in my original supposition, and probably many more that I'm not recalling or aware of.
Considering your two following statements:
and...
...would it be safe to conclude that TERFs do (in a way) oppose the "maleness" of the Y chromosome as an affront to the purity of their "feminity"? I know I'm repeating my question, but their ethos reminded me of the "single-drop-of blood" policies on ethnic identity from the segregationists of the American South.
It's certainly an absurdity, and many times a dark one at that, observing upon what proverbial hills people choose to die on publicly these days.
I wonder: does she admit to identifying with or publicly support the Tories, Nigel Farage and/or other "Brexiteers", or other conservative personalities and politicians within the UK? Generally speaking, I refuse to use the "Alt-Right" label, as contend that there's nothing "alternative" to naked authoritarian conservatism about it.
I suppose I should just look it up, but I thought I'd ask.
her books do allude thier her transphobia, and a little anti-semitism quite a bit, its low key.
The opposite of a TERF is a Non Exclusive Radical Feminist, because it's NERF or nothing
TERFs can also be called Feminism-Appropriating Radical Transphobes, or FART
terfs also love to collab with nazis too.