I’ve been too busy to blog about all the things I wanted to this month. From the Black Lives Matter protest to the Ophelia Benson departure to a weird John Loftus flameout currently going on. So here I’m quickly trying to catch up. Second on deck: the Benson departure…
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Ophelia Benson has left FreethoughtBlogs because of critics expressing suspicion of her being a little too friendly to the ideas of Trans Exclusive Radical Feminism (for reasons best summarized by Stephanie Zvan, though unfortunately without links; though I’ve checked, and the things she says happened, happened—even if you want to quibble about how it’s described).
I care about this issue. I have written on it before. People should get to represent as and be identified as the gender that suits them. And we should work on ourselves at accepting that. In this respect, Benson’s behavior wasn’t evil. But it was suspicious and bizarre. And I think she kept deflecting from the real issues people were raising, dismissing many calm and valid critiques (even the general absence of actual critique) as a witch hunt, rather than seeing that some of them had a point, and that she could do better on this issue, and might want to rethink some of her conclusions and affiliations.
I didn’t raise a voice in this, partly because my voice wasn’t needed (I think Gabriel and Dadhabhoy and Thibeault were doing fine, and I worried a further pile-on might not have been helpful), but mostly because I had just recently transgressed on Benson’s blog on a separate issue, and I worried, given Benson’s suddenly unusually paranoid defensiveness in this case, that she would have made any criticism I voiced about this, about that, thus creating a distraction from what everyone else was already capably saying. But she has left now, so it doesn’t matter.
My take: it really comes down to the fact that Benson refused to say she believed trans women were women, and though she insisted she supported their legal rights, she peculiarly refused to denounce the anti-trans-rights letter sent to the UN by anti-trans activists (which they even followed-up) whom, and whose groups, she kept consulting for advice on the issue (and whom she also refused to disaffiliate from).
On believing someone is a woman when they say they are, this is no different than believing someone is an atheist when they say they are. There are legit questions of what it means to be a woman, but imagine saying, “I support full political rights for blacks, I just can’t say I believe they are the equal of whites,” because that doesn’t sound far different than, “I support full political rights for trans women, I just can’t say I believe they are the equal of cis women.” And Benson never adequately explained why anyone should believe trans women aren’t women. Apart from harboring the thought that they aren’t. And that’s worrying.
The letter she wouldn’t denounce, meanwhile, called for worldwide opposition to trans person rights, especially in respect to the silly matter of bathrooms, essentially declaring trans women to be really men intent on raping women in bathrooms. In other words, a la Trump, they were calling trans women rapists. (They also, a la Trump, added a “maybe some of them are good people” qualification, of course.) And that’s pretty shitty, and very clearly anti-trans. As is their required assumption that trans women are “really” men. Concerns Benson never adequately addressed, but avoided addressing by calling it all a meaningless witch hunt.
No one here called for her to depart. She chose to on her own. We all maintain many disagreements with each other at FreethoughBlogs, and criticize each other often, without this result. It appears Benson didn’t think colleagues should publicly criticize each other, particularly in ways she saw as paranoid for some reason. I hope at least she enjoys less stress in her new home.
Meanwhile, let’s not make things harder for trans persons. Don’t chum around with people who oppose their civil rights. Don’t go asking them for advice. Condemn their efforts to oppose the rights of trans persons. And recognize gender as a felt and performed identity. Because that’s what it is. As I’ve explained before.
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Richard,
Thank you for your explanation and your comments. Right on. What the heck difference does it make what bathrooms people go to? Aren’t we beyond that? I totally agree with you. If a person says they are a woman, we should accept that. It reminds me of my parents generation who said, well, she’s only half-black. Really?
Haven’t we all learned that life is more complicated than a simple duality? There is a continuum and people are all over it. Let them choose where they are on it and call themselves what they want.
Sad.
Karen
That’s beyond naive. She wasn’t just criticized, she was attacked. Are you following somebody else’s summary?
She wasn’t “attacked” by anyone on this network. All that came from here were the same kind of measured criticisms we have voiced against each other on occasion for years on other subjects. If you can’t tell the difference between “these are the facts that concern me and why” and an “attack” then I can’t help you.
There’s a bit more to it then that. While the letter thing was noteworthy, what really broke the dam was when Thibeault and others notice Benson was part of a “gender critical” forum. As M.A. Melby puts it,
Shortly afterwards, a number of people like anteprepro took a closer look and found Benson did a lot more than observe, she participated in the group and seemed to approve of it. Jadehawk has the most extensive documentation on her Facebook page, but for those who’ve sworn off FB I updated the end of one of my posts with two specific examples which I walk through in detail.
It’s also worth pointing out this wasn’t a one-time event, just the straw that broke the camel’s back.
You don’t get it, do you? SOme of us can’t answer if trans women are women because we can’t even answer that for ourselves.
If the definition is what are people LEGALLY, like when I have to fill out a police report, or when purchasing an airline ticket, the sure, if the trans women we’re talking about have LEGALLY changed their gender.
But that doesn’t cover all trans women, does it?
Am I what gender I FEEL like I am? HOw I identify, when I’m not filling out a LEGAL document?
Problem with that Identification is that 99.99% of the sighted adult population would IDENTIFY me at the other gender at 100 yards, no matter what I’m wearing.
Seriously, are you going to tell me that they are right and I am wrong?
So if the LAW says I’m one gender and I visibly that gender, then I have to BE that gender, right?
Even though I’ve been wanting a sex change since Renee Richards did it, but I’ve been gifted with an anatomy which would never pass, no matter how much carving or hormones you gave it (unless you brought in a serious bone saw, but that might cripple me).
So what is it?
How I FEEL?
What I WEAR?
How I LOOK?
What TSA and the law think I am?
What the rest of humanity outside of this echo chamber of political correctness thinks?
And if I think all of those things when I’m faced with the M or F boxes on a webform, where the hell do you get off saying I have to say YES to are trans women real women?
I. DON’T. KNOW.
You aren’t addressing anything I said.
The linked text, “refused to denounce” (in the paragraph beginning “My take”) just links to Ophelia’s (old) blog. I assume you intended to link to some actual refusal.
Good catch! Yes, the link is supposed to be:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2015/08/a-horribly-effective-silencer/
Thanks.
Ophelia has said “People have pointed out that letter to the UN – that looks like a bad idea to me, but I don’t know enough about it to pronounce on it”
Is it wrong to not have an opinion on something anymore? Do you have to have a position on everything even if you are not entirely sure about all the issues involved? I think that’s an unreasonably high standard to hold.
This isn’t “everything.”
This is a specific act that people had pointed out to her was appalling, and as the reason the people she was affiliating with are the enemies of trans people; and people had been pointing this out to her for months and providing her with all the information she needed to just check and realize she was affiliating with awful people and why, and yet she refused to look into it (or so she says), and refused agree that she was affiliating with people who were in opposition to the civil and human rights of trans persons, and refused to agree that that is what that letter was doing.
This is a particular problem, particular to why people were suspicious of her as a dubious ally, and particularly explained to her repeatedly. She can if she wants refuse to address it. But then that’s the story of her: someone who continues affiliating with people involved in a hate agenda and “refuses to look into it” and who refused to denounce their hate agenda. Because she can’t be bothered? That’s not a flattering excuse to be making for herself.
I should not have to explain why this is worrying to trans persons and trans rights advocates. It is certainly not reassuring.
There were many opportunities for everyone to deescalate but Benson generally responded in kind. I have some sympathy for reacting harshly to what one perceives as torches and pitchforks, but at some point she decided face is worth more to her than magnanimity and chose to leave rather than write a post cussing out the aggro-jerks amongst her critics and ending by repeating herself from the comment where she agreed trans* peoples’ identities should be taken at their word. (http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2015/07/the-land-of-ambiguity/comment-page-1/#comment-5230230) While her posting frequency was too high for my taste (and may have kept the fire stoked, I don’t know if she keeps reading comments or for how long,) I did think her coverage of the Charlie Hebdo attack was excellent, I’m sad to see her go but more sad that she’s so beset by the slymepit and too pig-headed to find another path. I’m not sure if cis people are their gender because I don’t really understand what being a man/woman means (aside from a sort of heat map of cultural labels and bio-falacies,) so I can’t be sure about trans* people, but I do think everyone, including trans*, is the gender they think/feel (and closets aside) say they are.
As for repudiating the UN letter, that seems really easy to just do for an ethical person, but I haven’t decided where I sit on someone who believes themself the victim refusing to give their perceived attackers’ any satisfaction. If I gave some indication that I thought Eddie Murphy was serious and a bunch of white people were jerks to me and then demanded I repudiate the old song, I’d give serious thought to refusing on the grounds of “go fuck yourself.”
Are you really going to say that everyone was harassing Benson and that everyone confronting Benson as acting on bad faith? Really? That’s just not a reasonable position to hold. Many of those people were (former?) colleagues, co-bloggers, and friends.
“Recognize gender as a felt and performed identity.” This request takes as a given that female and male are different. In society as it exists now, they certainly are, so, it is reasonable to accommodate that reality. However, I would much prefer a society where we didn’t have different expectations of people depending on either their sexes or their genders, resulting in no need of any “performance” of anything.
Performance is an essential part of our aesthetic enjoyment of life. So I do not want to live in a world where no one performs the identities and themes and moods they want to express (as long as they are authentic to them, i.e. honest and free).
But if all you mean is that describing certain performance sets into a gender binary is annoying, then that could be argued. A world where people could just express themselves and not be gendered at all, might be a better one, depending on what organization fills the gap. But we are a long way from that.
And I’m not sure. Because I think I’d rather have a world where gender, as much as style or culture or fandom etc., is treated the same as a category choice to affiliate with and express as all those others, e.g. Trekkie vs. Whovian vs. Neither vs. Little of Both. As long as all are treated equal, and without false beliefs attached, then the existence of the affiliation categories and expression coding that goes with them won’t be annoying anymore, nor remain the anchor for bias or mistreatment. But again, we aren’t quite there.
It seems it largely depends on how you frame it. Take your analogy:
What if I change it into the following:
I support full political rights for blacks, I just can’t say I believe they are white.
Or how about:
I support full political rights for women, I just can’t say I believe they are men.
AFAICS, there was never a denial of equality from Ophelia Benson.
Except for not denouncing the letter opposing equal rights. And not disaffiliating with the people who wrote it (and who support a lot else in the hate category, as others in this comment thread have also pointed out).
That’s why your revised analogy doesn’t fit what happened. I’m talking about the stuff above. Not her insistence that she supported trans equality; but the evidence that contradicted that. In other words, the stuff that was actually making people concerned.
There is also the fact that a trans woman isn’t analogous to a white person claiming to be black (you must be confusing gender with sex; but in any case, see Kat Blaque on this point). Which is precisely why her not believing trans women were really woman was also concerning.
Just one point, largely tangential… a slight alteration of the analogy may clarify.
“I support full political rights for blacks, I just can’t say I believe they are identical to whites,”
That may be closer to the idea Benson et al were riding, and it’s much harder to dispute. It’s problematic because this sort of defense is one people use to elide and avoid particular issues.
My point mainly is that from a certain perspective the question ‘Are trans women women’ doesn’t actually make sense, which I think is why Benson had difficulty with it. The problem lies not in the question, but in the perspective, but it’s one of those things where the various sides of the issue may as well be speaking different languages.
To an extent, yes.
But also, see my related comment.
“I support full political rights for trans women, I just can’t say I believe they are the equal of cis women.”
That’s tendentious wording. What Ophelia said could be better expressed as “I just can’t say I believe they are identical to cis women.” “The equal of” carries a value judgment.
Indeed, that’s the problem. See my other comment on this.
You’re clearly talking about the bloggers on the network, but for the sake of completeness, I will point out that there were a few commenters who voiced a wish or Ophelia to leave. However, those were distinctly in the minority and most people, including most of her critics, didn’t want her to go.
Except of course, Ophelia did say
http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2015/08/i-did-say/
Though she did say she thought the letter was a bad idea but that she didnt know enough about it.
But lets assume Ophelia is a TERF or trans antagonistic or whatever. There are 4-5 bloggers who have “denounced” her at FTB, maybe(some hedged their criticism with this is my view). I guess the rest of FTB must be TERF or trans-antagonistic , Ophelia supporters right ? The idea that one MUST denounce actions that one has not participated in ,is weird and to use that in a with us or against us determination is remarkably silly.
See my other comment on why this isn’t analogous. And my other comment on why the problem is the stuff you aren’t addressing. In other words, the stuff I actually mentioned.
Sorry – I don’t do guilt by association. As an example – someone could read Dawkins to find out about evolution and based purely on that fact , you cannot(and should not) deduce their views on sexism – no matter how much of a sexist Dawkins turns out to be. If you want to complain about the letter , complain about the people who wrote it or signed it – Don’t complain about their Facebook friends – six degrees of separation after all. Do you have any proof of support of the letter from Ophelia ?
The other problem I have is the attempt on the part of many people to be mind readers. Oooh Ophelia only thinks about gender identity when the question is about trans-women. She wouldn’t say the same about cis women! How the heck do you know ? Did you ask that question to her about cis women? She does sometimes use herself as an example and she is cis , right? You keep saying that Ophelias position is trans women arent really women – when her objection was what does it mean to say one is a woman (for people who dont strongly identify with man/woman – basically anyone who has given the matter some thought).
This isn’t guilt by association. See my comment.
To repeat – Do you have any proof of support of the letter from Ophelia ? Do you have anything that says she favors legal discrimination of trans-women ? Or if she wants safe spaces for biological women only ? (which is what I believe the letter to the UN had)
If not then drop that from the list of your problems with what she did – right?
If you do that you are left with what one objectionable analogy and one poor joke(by my count)?
Learn how to read. I said she refused to denounce the letter or those who wrote it. That’s a fact. I provided a link with the evidence plainly in it. Deal with it.
And a lot more evidence has been provided here for the other concerns as well, by others in this comment thread. Links, highlighted sentences, everything.
I don’t disagree with you here, Richard, and disagree with the notion that transgender women are not women. The idea that they have not experienced what lifelong females experienced, while true, is irrelevant. Everybody has different experiences. I cannot begin to imagine what it is like to live one’s whole life feeling like you aren’t living as yourself. I cannot imagine the discrimination one faces when deciding to live life as a gender other than the one you were born into. But (and I don’t mean to say, yes, but, I stand behind everything above), I am mixed ethnicity, and I have to say that I do not believe a person can choose to just live as a different ethnicity or in fact, use minority ethnicity to enhance one’s personal power when people who are actually of that ethnicity suffer discrimination and segregation. I do not think it is legitimate to grow up with white privilege and then in college adopt a new ethnicity. I see a distinction, but it maybe there isn’t one and I am just speaking from my own bias?
I’m not sure what you mean, but see my other comment, and it’s link to Kat Blaque on this issue.
Of course, some trans persons do get to grow up as their preferred gender (such as when they have trans supportive parents and are allowed to explore gender identities early). Some trans persons are trans men, not trans women. And we also have intersex and gender queer categories, as people who also get thrown under the bus of transphobia and anti-trans rights campaigns.
And on top of all that, the oppression a trans woman experiences is generally worse than and certainly at least as bad as what a woman endures. And this can amount to decades of experience in some cases. Moreover, even before a trans person realizes or is allowed to explore their actually preferred gender, culturally they are often driven to express themselves in ways that face oppression anyway (e.g. as an effiminate man, or being read as “gay,” and so on), and when not, internalized discomfort escalates in its place, which is a torment all its own.
So the differences here with race are even more than Blaque points out. And the claim that trans women share none of the background enculturation or experience of birth-assigned women is a false generalization, as is the assumption here that trans men aren’t a thing. For example.
In general, a human being has innate rights, so it’s technically not necessary to say that transgender persons have rights, too – it’s redundant. But, this is reality, and of course we have to discuss what people are discussing.
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I might have to disagree with the APA’s decision to remove gender identity disorder as a mental disorder, which you referred to in the post you linked to. It’s not a good thing that someone is severely dissatisfied with what they are. I accept trans persons – but they cannot accept their former selves. That’s a problem.
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Then again, is being transgender the same kind of solution as stitching a wound, or correcting a limp, or curing a disease? After all, I would not be satisfied if I had to live with an open wound or a bad limp. I think not, but I don’t want to go on and on about it.
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The same-sex marriage ruling (in American and Mexico anyway) does at least solve the problem of whether a trans woman can marry a man. Mind you, if a trans woman says she’s a woman, she is for legal reasons (as you say in this post), so you don’t need a same-sex marriage ruling to solve that specific situation. You would need it to solve the issue of whether a trans woman can marry a woman, if you indeed think that actually matters.
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Now, I don’t really care either way about that ruling, but then again I do think it’s much ado about nothing (and love and marriage are not tied at the hip, so I don’t get the ‘love wins’ slogan).
If discomfort with a forced expression of identity is a mental illness, then most atheists (particularly in religiously oppressive countries) are mentally ill. Likewise with being gay. If all the mental anguishes that come from being gay in a gay oppressive culture are indicative of mental illness, then you are saying homosexuality is a mental illness.
You might want to rethink your logic on that.
When it is the culture that’s sick, not the person, we are no longer talking about psychiatric disorders. We are talking about oppression. And its psychological effects on the oppressed.
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There are things that are connected here, but I’m having trouble separating them (conceptually) and seeing how they connect: equality, identity, and difference.
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If the members of GroupA and the members of GroupB are equal, then would it matter much if private individuals in society mistakenly identify members of one group as members of the other group?
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In cases where there is no equality, then identity matters in a very obvious way. If someone in the United States in the late 19th or early 20th century looked “white” but was really* “black”, then it would matter if they tried to vote or sit in the first class car on a train. (I’m thinking of Walter Francis White and Homer Plessy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Francis_White https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plessy_v._Ferguson)
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But if white people and black people are equal, then it wouldn’t matter if someone (say, a train conductor) couldn’t tell if a passenger was white or black, or misidentified a passenger as white or black.
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So why exactly is it that misidentifying someone as a member of GroupA rather than of GroupB ends up being the same as saying that members of GroupA are not equal to members of GroupB? The move from misidentifying to inequality happens very quickly here. I feel like I’m missing a lot. (HJ Hornbeck has tried to fill in the gaps for me elsewhere*, but I’m still not seeing all of the pieces or how they fit together).
*https://sinmantyx.wordpress.com/2015/07/25/so-your-favorite-blogger-is-problematic/#comment-3769
We aren’t discussing misidentification. We are discussing oppressing people (actually denying them their rights) for their choices to authentically be themselves.
@ Richard Carrier
Then you are most certainly no longer discussing Ophelia. Ophelia Benson has never supported, endorsed, advocated any legislation or other measures to deny rights or choices or to oppress trans people in any way whatsoever.
For a much more clear-eyed view of the situation with Ophelia than anything you’ll find on FtB (apart from a couple of comments by PZ), I recommend to readers this article in Slate.
It isn’t that Benson said “I support opposing trans rights,” but that she refused to say she opposed those who do, or their efforts, and refused to disaffiliate from them or stop asking them for friendly advice in dealing with trans rights activists. Hence, as I said, she is not evil. She is just behaving in a way that justifiably worries trans people and their allies.
Her confusing inability to fully recognize a trans woman’s womanhood was also concerning, and her explanations of it not satisfactory. For example, suddenly saying what she believed was not important and no one’s business, for an atheist who knows full well that’s not a reasonable thing to say about belief, comes across as avoiding something. Something not good. Whatever the reality, that’s the perception she left. And she has never corrected it. She just kept perpetuating it.
Regarding the response to #8: To a person who’s experienced the oppression of being female, your answer carries a whiff of “separate but equal” about it. I am not saying this to provoke you (I respect your work). I’m only saying that if we retain largely binary male and female genders, I am extremely doubtful that the female gender will ever gain a level of privilege equal to that enjoyed by the male gender. I am pretty pessimistic in this regard.
So again, I would much prefer that we work to eliminate prejudices and expectations stemming from a person’s gender, rather than reinforcing them. We can respect that those prejudices and expectations exist and make sure that we’re not denying rights on those grounds, while at the same time acknowledging that the prejudices and expectations themselves are not desirable.
Cressida, I understand your concern.
But I also know a lot of women (and men) who very much enjoy expressing their gender, and using or playing on social tropes that exist for the purpose. So abolishing it would not do any more good than abolishing a distinction between, again, Trekkies and Whovians. The problem isn’t the existence of distinctions with labels. The problem is with attaching biases to them. We would have the same problem if we organized our society to treat Whovians poorly and privilege Trekkies. And the solution would again be not to dissolve the distinction, but to dissolve the bias.
I’m thus even more pessimistic about our ability to dissolve the distinctions that we create for expression, than about our ability to dissolve the biases. I see two centuries of progress on the latter (very slow, but very significant). I see much less change in the former, other than to allow more fluidity, which is actually a byproduct of reducing the bias. For example, women wearing pants was not accomplished to erase their gender, but to free their expression of it; and their ability to do so was caused not by a slackening of recognition of women being a thing, but by a slackening of a bias against women.
@”the people she was affiliating with are the enemies of trans people”
An unvarnished attempt to apply Guilt By Association. Shameful, ridiculous and anti-intellectual.
Ophelia Benson and others are right. This is Shunning of the lowest order. You sound like a Scientologist. Yuk.
It’s not guilt by mere association. It’s suspicion by affiliation. It’s the particular way Benson sought advice from them, refused to disaffiliate from them, and refused to denounce their actions, even occasionally liking bad things they said. That’s all evidence of bad faith. These are things she did, not merely the people she hung out with. It is very worrying. And that is exactly what everyone said, and documented. Add to that her strange waffling about whether she believed trans women were women, and the worry becomes even more justified still.
Meanwhile, what is shameful is calling her own voluntary departure our “shunning” of her. Bullshit called. We were not shunning her. We were engaging with her. Then she left. That’s the story of her.
“If all the mental anguishes that come from being gay in a gay oppressive culture are indicative of mental illness, then you are saying homosexuality is a mental illness.”
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Well, yeah. If a person is dissatisfied with themselves, they have a problem. Sometimes it’s just insecurity, lack of self-confidence, which is not a huge deal and can be dealt with. Sometimes it’s self-loathing, sometimes it’s something else. Some people want voluntary amputations. Some people want to be blind. Those are disorders. Something happened, maybe, for these disorders to occur. Was it upbringing? Was it delusion? Who knows.
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If a homosexual is dissatisfied with themselves, they should not try to change themselves, they should learn to accept who they are. They were born gay, as we were born straight; they had no say in it, as we had no say in it.
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If a person is happier by changing their gender identity, it’s not my business. By all means, do it.
In the case of trans and gay persons:
People become dissatisfied with their inability to be themselves because of an oppressive external culture. That’s indicative of a sickness in the culture, not the person. If we never recognize that, then we will never fix diseased cultures, and instead just continue to oppress individuals, and even worse, treat them as if they were the problem!
It wasn’t just Benson’s position that was an issue, it was the way she attacked other people for disagreeing with her that was the bigger problem. And this wasn’t the only occasion on which she would pull that stunt.
Claiming that people are engaging in nasty personal attacks just because they take a different opinion is a despicable tactic.
That’s also true. Her reaction was bizarre and over the top, and completely out of line with reality. In fact, it looked a lot like the Dawkins-and-Co. calling witch hunt every time they were merely criticized. Which, ironically, Benson rightly demolished as ridiculous. Then she forgot her own position on that, and did exactly what she herself had previously condemned as ridiculous. I can’t explain it. It’s just all so strange.
“that one has not participated in”
Why is this still being repeated when evidence to the contrary has been provided?
It was never about her simply being a part of the group. I’ve had trans activist friends who have decided to join Hungerford’s group, though they got frustrated very quickly. I’ve even considered joining myself, just because I know just being present would be disruptive to them. (I have a bit of a rep.)
The issue with the group wasn’t *that she was there* or *what she “liked”* but that she participated *with them* on several occasions in ridiculing the entire concept of a trans woman being a woman. It was because of what she SAID there – not her “associations” not her “affiliations” not her “likes”.
https://storify.com/MAMelby/to-answer-your-question
The story that this issue was about her “stumbling” about a complex gender question has made it to the mainstream press and appears to be how Benson is spinning it. http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2015/08/14/ophelia_benson_is_the_blogger_transphobic_or_a_trans_ally_who_decides.html
To be fair, Hungerford did start commenting on Benson’s blog – and that didn’t last long – because Hungerford’s transmisogyny is unmistakable. Benson hasn’t bought into *every* TERF trope there is out there and few people called her a “TERF”. However much she repeated it – nobody thinks she’s the worst TERF on earth – trust me, that would be a horrendous feat.
I tried to keep a civil relationship with her and discuss these issue with her, but her personal hostility, her intense defensiveness and her ridiculing trans women’s identities (when she was within the FB group) made that impossible. She seemed to have a very different face on her blog as she did among the FB group and, at this point, I don’t even trust her sincerity.
Oh well.
Thank you. This is an important point. And people need to grasp why.
M A Melby
Im assuming that response was meant to be directed to me ?
“that one has not participated in” ==> This refers to the letter to the UN and that Ophelia did not denounce it. I’ll ask you the same question that Richard hasnt answered in 2 attempts – Do you have proof that Ophelia supports the letter (on record shes says it was a bad idea) – Did she sign it ? Did she compose it ? If not then does one HAVE to denounce it ? You have multiple things that you object to that Ophelia did – i may even agree on 1 or 2 of those – but Im limiting myself to the UN letter for the scope of that comment.
And then, as if to prove us right, this happened.