A couple of weeks ago I watched "The Closer," Dave Chappelle's latest comedy show for Netflix, just to see what it was all about. It's basically Chappelle burbling semi-coherently about his views on trans people—again—and my main takeaway was that I still don't get Chappelle's appeal. As usual, I found it less offensive than just plain tedious. I know that everyone has different tastes, but the guy has just never struck me as very funny, let alone the greatest stand-up comedian of all time.
De gustibus. But now Netflix is in trouble with the trans community, which is hardly a surprise. In the same way that all labor unions are aggressive but police unions are really aggressive, the trans community is probably the most ruthless identity group out there. You really don't want to mess with them if you have a choice.
I've always wondered how well this works for them. On the one hand, a reputation for combativeness is an obvious asset. On the other hand, it can also put off people who would otherwise be allies. For example, I've never been comfortable with the ease with which they insist that even light criticism means you're teaming up with people who want to murder them. Likewise, in the workplace they've mastered the art of claiming to "feel unsafe" because that's a code phrase that gets HR involved and can cause real trouble for people. Emily VanDerWerff pulled this crap on Matt Yglesias a while back and I haven't read a word she's written since. It was a vile and baseless attack.
Beyond that, there's the trans community's problematic relationship with scientific and medical evidence about transitioning, especially among children and teens. Their attacks on working scientists who happen to produce inconvenient results are legendary.
As for the TERF community, I guess it's better not to even go there. Different TERFers have different views, and the ones who oppose trans rights obviously have to expect that they'll get attacked back. That's the public square for you. But there are also TERFs who just want to be left alone in safe spaces for people who were raised as women and have different experiences than people who transitioned later in life. What's the point in attacking them?
Looping back to Chappelle, the guy is a mystery to me. He's never explained—really explained—just what he's got against the trans community, but he sure can't shut up about it. I have no idea why. I suspect that maybe he doesn't know either, and I found his latest show to be more sad than offensive. He really needs to work out his issues in private, not in front of a hundred million people. That said, he's a wildly famous and popular comedian, and my take is that he crossed no boundaries that make him unfit for public consumption. Netflix was right to air his show because that's the business they're in. The critics are wrong to launch a nuclear war against Netflix over this.
You better embrace the trans community because no Democrat is going to win nomination without agreeing to everything they say.
I'd wager that if the Chappelle drama happened in October we'd be living in a second Trump administration.
Pretty sure Manchin has won both primaries and general elections as a Democrat without "agreeing to everything" trans people have to say. Haven't taken a survey or anything, but I simply cannot imagine he's the only Democrat nationwide currently in office who hasn't expressed 100% agreement with the trans community.
I'm with Seinfeld. As an authority on professional comedy, when Jerry says being a professional comedian is all about figuring out what is funny now, which includes what is now not funny but used to be funny, and that's the job, I mean, he's right.
To imagine that Chappelle doesn't spend as much time crafting his jokes as Seinfeld or anyone else is hard to believe.
Punching down used to be part of the repertoire. Now its not. Its that simple.
Examples are not hard to find, is the "Ambiguously Gay Duo" still funny? Or has its capacity for offense left it unbalanced and more offensive than funny?
Family Guy punches down like crazy and that is usually when they are the least funny. I do wonder how they have gotten away with it for so long.
Because they were on Fox, the home of the non apology apology.
It does help that they're on Fox. But it also probably helps that Family Guy is a cartoon, so there are a lot fewer people working "on the set" that are going to come out with exposes about how horrible it is to work with ____phobic people every day. That's usually what kills all the phobias on shows with real live actors: somebody in front of a camera on a talk or "news" show complaining about how "I had to suffer such humiliation..." or whatever.
Ambiguously Gay Duo was never funny.
I thought it was mostly an in joke for comic book people who had read Wertham.
It was just group sneering for the lameoid audience SNL was catering to exclusively in that period.
If they'd called it 'The Ambiguously Straight Duo' they might have gotten away with.
I agree Ambiguously Gay Duo wasn't funny but I was not terribly offended by it. How much it offended other people, I don't know.
it's been a long time, so i don't remember it really, but I do remember thinking it was funny, and for what it's worth anectdotally, when it's happened to come up several gay guys I'm friends with like it a lot. one couple did it as a Halloween costume. for me the humor/point was in the ridiculousness and terribleness of people being forced to remain closeted.
Well, maybe I didn’t really get it but (1) it is never made clear that Ace and Gary are gay, so one part of the schtick- “look how funny these gay antics are” - doesn’t age well, but (2) every other character, especially the villains, keeps wondering whether that are in fact gay, and the villains can’t even focus on their villainy. That second bit is what I thought the real attempt at humor was. Not sure if joke number 2 survives since is it funny now to joke about not knowing whether someone is gay? Not the same as 15 years ago it isn’t I would say. See also, Tobias in Arrrsted Development
“Well, maybe I didn’t really get it but (1) it is never made clear that Ace and Gary are gay”
This is your complaint… about a sketch… titled…. AMBIGUOUSLY GAY DUO
If you’re not trolling, you should seek mental help.
Well mental help is always advisable, but first of all I am not complaining about the sketch.
I mean, its not "The Gay Duo" - I didn't think any episode was about "look how funny these two gay superheros are"
No, the humor is "did anyone every think the 1960s Batman show was a bit, eh, gay?"
And Ace and Gary have every gay stereotype imaginable, except of course actually being gay.
Plus, the tag line, when either the villians or the commissioner or someone is looking at a faux-battmobile in the shape of a penis is Ace saying "what are you looking at?"
And the villians respond "Nothing!"
That to me was the whole joke - how straight people don't know how to react to gay behavior because they don't want to be offensive.
I didn't take them as being at all straight but as imagining they could appear straight or as too stupid to know they were gay, and that either way there is nothing conceivably ambiguous about their gayness, and that to illustrate their asinine stupidity.
Is how I understood it.
It's this whole theory of comedy where because something is feeble and worthless it's funny, isn't funny.
I suppose some here aren’t aware of it but back in the 50’s there was a psychiatrist named Fredric Wertham who was an anti comic book crusader and wrote a book about the evils of comics entitled “Seduction of the Innocent”. In the book Wertham stated that there was a gay subtext to the Batman/Robin relationship. For many years afterwards comic book people joked about that “theory” and it made it to various satiric comics and columns. I always thought that the “Ambiguously Gay Duo was just another riff on this.
Wertham cited various passages in the comics where he saw their relationship as gay. Their home with large vases of flowers. Bruce being embarrassed by a woman making a pass at him at a party while young Dick watches laughing, confident in Bruce. So the joke in the AGD was the “clues” to their homosexuality becoming more and more obvious.
At least, that’s how I saw it.
I used to have a copy of Seduction of the Innocent. I always intended to read it but somehow I don't think I ever even opened it, and now it's somehow no longer around.
Where do things go when they leave and I forget about them like that? I really have no idea.
People were always talking about the case Wertham made about Batman and Robin, but I always thought if he'd tried a little harder there was a lot more he could have come up with, none of it terribly ambiguous,
https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=79391&comicpage=&b=i
I still have the book. If you ever find your copy the stuff about Batman begins on page 189.
Found it!
https://b-ok.cc/book/5255069/8f8b68
Skimming a few paragraphs, I feel like Ed Wood, jr.
Dare I have the nerve to read it??!!
The main humor was the reaction of the other people when the duo did something “gay”.
The idea of a black American man being able to “punch down” is pretty hilarious.
But anyway this whole hierarchy is nonsense and the faster it goes away the better.
Punch people who need punching.
Ambiguously Gay Duo is still hilarious. We have a couple friends that we jokingly call them Ace and Gary.
Kevin, long time reader and I have a lot of respect for your opinions, but your insistence on asking groups like the trans-community or "the Left" or progressives to shift strategy, compromise, or change what they get upset about is baffling.
These are not organized interest groups. They're a sea of individuals whose voices are being magnified through modern technology platforms. No one has the ability to shift the conversation, except perhaps the underlying algorithms driving engagement. You're asking the wind to change direction.
Secondly, if you're going to make sweeping assertions about a community (trans-folks "problems" with the medical profession) include some bloody citations.
I don't perceive the trans "community" as very organized, but the very loud activists (who may very well not speak for most trans people- it's hard to really know because there isn't a lot of good data out there either way) certainly are extremely tight-knit and have the take no prisoners approach Kevin describes. (He refers to this obliquely in the post, but the attacks on Michael Bailey and Ray Blanchard, which were documented in Alice Dreger's classic "Galileo's Middle Finger", were clearly coordinated and cheered on by a broad swath of trans activists.)
And those activists make amazingly sweeping condemnations of the medical community. They hate gatekeeping. Their basic position seems to be that anyone who even hints at dissatisfaction with their assigned sex at birth needs to be immediately affirmed as a trans person and offered social transition, puberty blockers, and cross-sex hormones and placed on the road to full transition, with little or no medical intervention. They hate sex researchers most of all (see the attacks on Blanchard and Bailey), probably because sex researchers have a ton of data on the relationship between sex/sexuality and transition and that is information the activists do not want out there.
In my organization, it was exhibited by some rather nasty comments towards janitors who didn't pick up right away that there was a reason company policy changed to putting tampons etc in both bathrooms. Because after all, mostly Spanish speaking people from Central America who likely grew up in poor villages are going to be totally up to date on current thinking around LBGTQA people...
My sense is that Dave Chappelle is certainly not going to be "cancelled" and he's enjoying the publicity. Certainly he's enjoying (in the other sense of the word) the benefits of being "controversial". Netflix poobahs defended him. I'll believe he's in trouble when some big Hollywood stars refuse to work with Netflix over this, the way a bunch of them rushed to say they'd never work with Woody Allen. THAT would be a sign the trans folks have some real power. But I doubt they have that kind of power, in Hollywood at least. Chappelle is too popular. Hollywood is all about money, ticket sales, subscriptions. Unless the trans folks can seriously threaten the money going to Netflix, it's really just noise for noise's sake.
Just an additional thought. Of course it's entirely possible it's specifically BECAUSE trans activists are so sensitive and so loud that Chappelle chooses to tangle with them, over and over. It's great marketing for his shows! The shows get branded "controversial" (no better selling point for a comedian) but, as an independent contractor with a very devoted fan base, there isn't much the trans people can really do to Chappelle. Chappelle is nothing if not very savvy about money. I think he knows what he's doing.
Chappelle will not and should not be cancelled so to me everything is working out as it should.
+1
Kevin might be about to have a rain of hurtin' coming down on him but maybe since he's semi-retired he's too obscure at this point, I don't know.
I think his point about alienating potential allies with over-the-top absolutism is on point though. I'm completely in favor of people being left alone to live their lives how they choose to and without question people need to be respectful toward others, using the proper pronouns, names, etc. not being discriminatory in any way.
But the trans community also needs to realize that they are sometimes asking a lot of people. Even the most well meaning person over a certain age might feel foolish referring to a single human being as they/them and so might be somewhat resistant to doing that. This kind of thing can take a very long time to feel natural.
Also I get why the trans community wants people to say "assigned female at birth" or whatever when referring to non-trans women or girls, but this phrase is just taking political correctness to a very dumb place. As if genders are just randomly assigned by doctors or parents. You don't have to deny the fact that, for the vast majority of people, the physical manifestations of gender match the person's gender identity and that gender is an actual biological concept to be sympathetic and supportive of trans people. That just can't be the standard.
I am not sure why Kevin keeps wading in to certain issues as if a graph will just solve it.
I mean, people have no trouble referring to Gordon Sumner as "Sting" for his entire professional career, I don't think calling anyone who wants "they" is any sort of challenge. I mean, I have no idea what most peoples actual names even are.
No, what is going on here is (a) if a person identifies as other than their biological birth gender then (b) a certain number of people are going to be freaked out at that, and there is nothing the rest of us can do about it.
For a certain percentage of males, the thought of hitting on a woman who used to be (or is) a guy is just not something they will be comfortable with. Not only will they not be comfortable, a certain segment will be against it, or worse.
That leaves trans people in particular with a heavy lift just to get back to the same place everyone else is at in society, which is why I don't see how jokes about them is even close to appropriate.
I agree with you that "not misgendering" and "not deadnaming" are not big asks, and people should try to be understanding and inclusive to trans people.
And while the linguistic demands get sillier and sillier, the world isn't going to end if we switch to language like "pregnant people".
And bathrooms have stalls and we shouldn't worry about who, or what, is behind them.
The big asks trans activists are actually on stuff like changing rooms, sports, and prisons. And on youth transition. And especially on denying science and trying to suppress information they don't like. I.e., the Galileo's Middle Finger stuff I mentioned above.
... the world isn't going to end if we switch to language like "pregnant people".
Sorry, but that's misogynistic. Pregnant women are "pregnant people"? "Women" as a group is somehow ideologically suspect? Only women get pregnant. Women have had their own millenia-long struggle for recognition and basic rights. They finally start making progress on this and then trans people come in and take over their place? That seems wrong to me.
Sorry, that's a bridge too far.
As for Chapelle, I watched him do some non-trans "humor" and found him boring. Not my kind of thing.
That is one thing that rubs me the wrong way. The way they go on it feels like 50% of the population is queer when it's 15% max.
Yeah gender is a spectrum and even sex can be complicated but an overwhelming super majority of the population is straight and heteronormative.
The thing is, 15% of the US is still 52 million people. Even 1% of the US population is 3.5 million people. The percentages are small, and it does matter to some extent what the relative size of groups that feel the are in conflict truly are. But the absolute numbers are also important. I don't want to make life harder for 1 other person, but 52M is unconscionable.
I now understand why you and MJ had to part ways. This is a truly loathsome post and you should be ashamed of yourself.
Agree. Calling the trans community "ruthless", really? Walk a mile in their shoes - They face ridicule and violence from all quarters every damn day.
The community isn't ruthless. But the activists are. Read "Galileo's Middle Finger" and you will see what Kevin is talking about.
Or just read this paper for the cliff's notes version of it:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3170124/
I don't know. Jewish people as a whole have suffered a lot over millennia... yet one particular Jewish community, the one that Jared Kushner, Stephen Miller, et al, belonged to in the White House were pretty ruthless at siccing the government on Muslims, Latinos, and anyone else they opposed.
Any human can be both a victim and a monster... so any community of humans can be both marginalized and ruthless.
lol this is “loathsome” eh?
That doesn’t feel slightly hyperbolic to you?
Kevin Drum turned into Rod Dreher so slowly I hardly noticed.
Good lord, it is coming on 2022. Can we *finally* get better trolls?
This batch is just pathetic.
Announcer voice: “And Putin is coming out to the computer desk….. And now he’s signaling to the bullpen…. “
His main argument is correct. It's not even really about transpeople at all. It's about the rich white college-educated establishment that, you know, fucking covers up a girl getting raped at a high school in Virginia so as not to problematize self-id when all they had to do was say it's a vanishingly rare occurrence instead of simply denying it had ever happened.
p.s. If MacAullife loses, this will be why. And it will be because of all of the probelmatic dinosaurs in Virginia that don't want their daughter (a) to be raped and (b) to have the whole thing denied.
I'm not sure electing either Youngkin or McAuliffe will stop all Virginia high school girls from being raped or sexually assaulted on or off campus. Despite what governors like TX Gov Abbott claim, it is not possible to catch all potential rapists or sexual predators before they strike.
But you do you, boo. If you want to vote for Youngkin or against McAuliffe out of a belief that that will end the scourge of boys pretending to be girls to lurk in bathrooms and rape other "real" girls... that's your choice. Unless teachers/police are going to be looking at kids' genitalia before they enter the restroom, the possibility of a boy dressed or not dressed like a girl sneaking in there to rape someone will always exist.
Honestly I think his issue is that the gay and trans communities have achieved so much so fast compared to black people because the common idea of them is white.
Yep. I think that's a thesis worth examining, in fact.
Also is THAT why Yglesias AND Klein left Vox? Haha oh shit.
And better offers.
Klein went to the NYT.
Yglesias went to Substack for a guarantee of $250K/year+.
But of course. That's because they're MEN. Sure, they can demand that everybody call them "women", but those folks were raised with male privilege and they think they've still got it. They seem clueless about the actual female experience and/or feeling they are somehow privileged above it.
Yeah, these dudes' ignorant and vicious attacks on J.K.Rowling have really teed me off, and I'm pretty much a TERFer now, when previously I would have been neutral.
Apropos of nothing, whatever became of the All American virtue of TOLERANCE? You don't have to like, or love, or celebrate something; just shrug, put up with it, and MYOB. I miss those days.
I think MYOB went away when the Internet became a Thing Everyone Uses, and everybody suddenly had a worldwide platform for broadcasting all the shit they would've just bitched about to their family and friends or mumbled about at the bar or whatever.
I'm all for not mistreating trans people. Live and let live. However, "not mistreating" to trans activists does not simply mean leaving them alone to live their lives. Instead, "not mistreating" means accepting the political agenda of trans activists. If you don't 100% accept this political agenda, then you are declared a hater. There is no gray area allowed.
For example, a person born male, when playing sports as a teenager is going to have an advantage over teens who were born female. This is why, as adults, trans women athletes must take drugs to lower their testosterone levels. It's known this is the only path to make things fair. But for teen girls, they are supposed to pretend that competing against people born male is fair to them. To oppose letting trans girl teens play on girls teams is considered a crime against humanity.
BTW, 63% of Americans agree with my point above on trans girls playing on girls teams, and only 34% disagree. To most people this is just common sense. It's a matter of making sure girls are treated fairly.
Stuff like this is why countries need conservative parties to challenge extreme ideas that would otherwise go unchallenged. I just wish we had a responsible right-of-center party in the US. We don't, we have the party of Trumpism, so I will continue to vote straight ticket Democrat. But sometimes I have to hold my nose.
So, to counterpoint this, I have experienced many women athletes who have the attitude "I don't care. Bring it."
These are usually women who have actual experience playing with or against trans women.
Also, if this is our biggest worry, I think we don't have a lot to worry about.
FWIW, I endorse that trans women should be on blockers. But then, trans women usually WANT to be on blockers, and things like parents and teachers and meddling relatives prevent that.
I think you mean hormones, not blockers.
And FWIW, there certainly are people in the trans activist community who oppose hormone requirements in sports, and there seem to be quite a lot of them who take the (ridiculous and unscientific) position that AMAB's have no advantage at all in women's sports.
When I say trans woman, I mean an XY whose identity is female. So they want a testosterone blocker, right?
Usually "blockers" in the transmedicine context means puberty blockers, taken by a pre-pubescent person to delay puberty and facilitate a transition.
An AMAB (i.e., XY) who transitions into a trans woman would take cross-sex hormones, which would include drugs to suppress testosterone, but my understanding is they would be referred to as "hormones" and not "blockers".
Women athletes who say they "I don't care, bring it" can only say this if they assume the odds are trans women they face were not be great athletes before transitioning. If they were, they would dominate and I don't see how any woman could say that is fair. Just look at stats, like for sprint times in track.
Regarding teens taking blockers/hormones, if middle school and high school sports administrators say trans girls can play only if they take them, then schools are telling students to take drugs to alter their bodies. I don't think it's appropriate for schools to demand this of adolescents.
Yeah. As a thought experiment, imagine if Caitlyn Jenner's autogynephilia arose and caused her severe dysphoria long before it apparently did, arising before the 1976 Olympics, and causing her to transition before the Games. And then imagine further that she was allowed to compete in the women's pentathlon. She would have won it by 1000 points or something and shattered the world record.
So far, something like that scenario hasn't happened, and perhaps it never will. But if it did, even some of the elite cis women athletes who are currently sounding notes of trans inclusion would surely protest. The entire notion of trans inclusion in elite sports almost completely depends on no truly elite male athlete transitioning.
Chappelle's Archie Bunker schtick was crass when Archie Bunker did it, but there the crassness was the point, while Chappelle thinks it's wit because it's abusive and victimizing, like wingnuts everywhere.
Tennessee is trying to pass a law requiring businesses to post signs on their bathrooms warning the public a transgender person might be lurking in there,
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/tennessees-transgender-bathroom-sign-law-challenged-78619550
Yay, comedy! They're just joking about that!
I wonder whether there will be enough trans folks in the future to have their own division in sports. I remember when high school girl wrestlers had to wrestle boys. Now, there are enough girls in the sport that they have their own meets and state championships.
Cynically, if it pays off, then suffer the slings and arrows, be canceled. Like others have pointed out, comedy is about what is funny now. And because, generally speaking, comedians don't have an HR department to heel to, they'll just that. Or they won't be paid.
And so that ruthlessness referred to is warranted, otherwise nothing changes with such a tiny voice. This is the sandbox, and if you can't handle what the new kid is playing at and can't toss him out, adapt or head home. Of course this cuts both ways. Have at each other, my tea is cooling.
I have a dog in this hunt. My daughter is trans. The fear of going into bathrooms is real and present every day.
All I will say about this post is that I think Kevin needs to meet some trans people, or perhaps watch some non-fiction. Maybe find a trans health conference to visit and listen.
I haven't seen the special, but I suspect I would make the same prescription for Dave Chapelle. That said, some black people I respect said they feel his show was more about white privilege than trans people.
The fear of going into bathrooms is real and present every day
I don't doubt this is true, but trans women aren't the only people who have a dog in that particular fight.
Many of the TERF's or "gender critical feminists" in the UK are rape victims. They have their own fears about losing sex segregated places, and they are just as real as your daughter's.
At the end of the day, I support your daughter's right to use the bathroom that corresponds to her gender, but it isn't though only one side of this debate is entitled to any empathy or to have their fears taken into consideration.
Here's the thing. If someone tries something in a women's restroom that my daughter is in, they will be glad she was there. Now, that's unlikely. Predators are going to try to isolate people.
Yeah, lots of people have trauma and that trauma is driving their attitudes, and their desire for policy. I don't want to see someone raped. If we were to calculate the probabilities of that happening with and without excluding trans women from women's restrooms, they would probably be the same to the first 3 or 4 significant digits.
So, you are attaching huge significance to something that is almost never going to make a difference.
The good news is that the communal restroom seems to be reducing in importance. I see lots of places with one-person all-gender restrooms these days. That seems an improvement to me.
I agree that trans inclusive policies in bathrooms are in the end a no brainer, for much the reasons you state.
My point was more general, though. There's insufficient empathy in this debate, but it's not only the trans people and their families who aren't receiving enough empathy. A nice recent example of this was the Wi Spa controversy, where a pre-op trans woman exposed her (intact male) genitalia to spa patrons in a sex-segregated spa, including at least one little girl there with her mother.
The reaction of trans activists was (1) it was a hoax (it wasn't, but they got some credulous mainstream outlets to believe that for awhile) and (2) it was the fault of everyone else in that spa for not turning their head away and staring at her junk. Absolutely 0 percent empathy for the idea that cis women have real reasons why they want their own spaces and these sorts of experiences can be traumatic for them, and that maybe a pre-op trans woman in that sort of space might take it upon herself to conduct herself with some modesty.
Empathy does not resolve all the issues here, because it isn't only one side that has a claim to it.
On the other hand, shouldn't whoever keeps doing this add a minus sign to LGBTQIA+, just for inclusivity's sake?
And maybe the rest of the alphabet as well, just to get past it?
"He's never explained—really explained—just what he's got against the trans community, but he sure can't shut up about it. I have no idea why. "
This is the mystery to me as well. And if in one show he had made the remarks in this special, I don't think anyone would care that much. I'm sure the trans community would speak out, but with far less vociferousness. But Chappelle's insistence on attacking trans people (or if you don't read it that way, speaking out about them) make it far more problematic to me.
It’s the fact that their every demand is taken seriously even when the demands are unserious but black people STILL aren’t real people to many of those rich educated whites who push the trans nonsense.
"He's never explained—really explained—just what he's got against the trans community, but he sure can't shut up about it."
I think this is not quite correct. Although Chappelle isn't super clear or direct about it, if you watch the latest special closely, he says explicitly that his problem is with trans activists using the sympathy out there for them to hurt the careers of black performers. In particular he mentions DaBaby and Kevin Hart. I believe Chappelle's last words in the latest special are something along the lines of "Please stop punching down on my community." In other words, he thinks trans activists are unfairly attacking black people.
That sounds right. Just take out the word “unfairly”. I don’t he cares whether anything that Hart or da baby said warranted a response.
There aren't any trans people around my life that I know of (and I'm sure they would tell me!) so it's all a non-issue for me.
Stand up comedy is really not appealing to me. It's always been hostile to one group or another and these days I just don't think any of them are amusing enough for me to spend time listening. Everyone laughs a the F bomb regardless.
Live and let live.
“Comedy isn’t funny”
I bet you’re great fun at parties
Just want to point out that women don't identify as TERFs. Here's a good explanation. https://debuk.wordpress.com/2016/11/06/what-makes-a-word-a-slur/
"Their attacks on working scientists who happen to produce inconvenient results are legendary."
Kevin, are you talking about Lisa Littman??? If not, then who? Enquiring minds want to know.
I imagine he's referring to the stories in Dreger's book, mentioned a couple of times in earlier comments.
It's probably both. The activists got Littman fired because she published a paper that was almost certainly correct in its conclusion and which even many people who work in transmedicine have confirmed the thesis of.
As a trans woman, I can explain why we seem to “treat even light criticism as if you’re trying to team up with people who are trying to murder them.” It’s because that is literally true! I totally understand why that statement seems like hyperbole, but sadly it isn’t. The channels by which criticism leads to murder operate in two ways:
First, consider the fact that many men were raised to believe the following: if you meet a woman, hit it off with her, start to have sex, and only then discover that the woman in question is trans, you would be, not merely allowed, but *obligated*, to react with violent anger, up to and including murder. The reason this is said to be justified is that the trans woman was “really” a man, and was therefore attempting to “trick” the man into having gay sex. And so if the man does *not* react violently, they are implying that they are in fact gay, and would be cast out of their straight male community. Until *very* recently, a man in that case would be legally entitled to cite the trans woman’s “deception” in their legal defense, and even now, in many jurisdictions, police and prosecutors would be sympathetic to such a claim even if it’s no longer allowed in court. So when someone claims, as Dave Chappelle, JK Rowling, etc. like to do, that trans women are “really” men trying to force cis people to believe their lies, they are endorsing a claim that literally and directly leads to the violent murder of trans people.
The second way that anti-trans rhetoric leads to murder is more subtle, but unlike the first, it is actually becoming more common rather than less. Consider the bill passed recently in Arkansas denying trans-affirming medical care to minors. Now I’m sure you’ve seen the statements that such medical care leads to greatly decreased risk of suicide in trans people, but I think you may not have stopped to really let the implications of that sink in: the Arkansas legislature (overriding the governor’s veto!) have knowingly passed legislation THAT WILL KILL TRANS CHILDREN. And they have done this because of a belief that trans children don’t actually exist, a belief which Dave Chapelle is encouraging them to maintain. Moreover, it seems reasonable to assume that some percentage of those legislators would support similar legislation applying to all trans people, not just minors. I can state with complete confidence that, if I was denied hormone treatment, I would die. This may seem odd or inexplicable if you are cis, but please believe me (and the statistics) when I say it’s true. So I go through life knowing that there are, at minimum, a few million people in this country who, if given the chance, would support passing legislation that would lead to my death. And while Dave Chappelle may not be one of those people, he is absolutely encouraging the belief that I am a delusional liar, which is the same justification that would be used to pass the law that killed me.
So, sorry for being dramatic! But “mild” criticism stops feeling so mild when it’s being used to justify my death. I guess I’m just going to keep being hysterical