[RD] JK Rowling and Explicit Transphobia

If minorities are people then protect their rights.

 

Apparently those rights only matter when they intersect with the majority

serious question @TheMeInTeam inteam , do you even think there should be laws preventing discrimination or the intentional firing of minorites in the work place

 

I deduct he does not. After all, minorities are people, and whoever heard of discrimination. Can you prove people are discriminated against?

 

Nevermind the fact that transitioning is partially also based on being allowed to legally change your gender and is unique to the trans and non binary community, following his logic such a thing shouldn't even exist because it impacts upon a minority of people.

Yet another way his viewpoint functionally harms, marginalizes and invalidates us.

 

Nobody said trans people should be an exception. This all came out of you claiming your preference for the rights themselves, and not "arbitrary" subgroups, being a neutral act. Not to repeat myself, but it seems it bears repeating.

Saying "I don't concern myself with the worker protections of trans people" is not the same as saying "I don't have time for a stranger's problems". They're not equivalent (except in the case where someone is conflating a person's rights and a person's presumably-personal problems), and yet you attempted to make them so. You attempted to draw an equivalence between a group, and the notion of a stranger. Which is immaterial given your latest claim about support for rights, because it doesn't matter, according to your logic, if they are a stranger or not. The rights come first.

This is all a bit circular, you see. Nevermind your repeated, unexpected label of "arbitrary" in a thread discussing a named, recognised LGBTQ minority that everyone at least understands the word for, which likely isn't helping your case. If you spoke less in generics, people might understand better what you're getting at. Reading into what you're saying raises the common problem with the Internet - guessing at peoples' meanings often comes with mistakes, confusion, or even accusations of fallacy or the like. It's better not to, in any case. This makes it tedious at times, sure, but better to be safe than sorry, especially in threads like this.

The core point is simple. There are laws. They already exist. Marginalised minorities under these laws are demonstrably suffering more for complicated, intersectional reasons that directly involve said laws (and abuses of or loopholes written into said laws). You mention reform, but you cannot reform a law involving all people to help right marginalised wrongs without specifically identifying the loopholes that allow for the exploitation of said marginalised minorities. At some point in this sequence, you have to care about the specifics of said minority.

You can claim that you support equal rights for all people, or however you want to word it. You cannot at the same time, however, claim to be unconcerned with specific minorities, because you cannot begin to understand what is required to make the law equal for all without understanding individual specifics regarding discrimination. Or, perhaps you could, if you simply didn't post on the topic, but you choose to involve yourself in threads like these, which means there is something of a minimum of understanding required.

 

Law is so often so very biased, so openly discriminating or so openly used to discriminate. Socially or institutionally. The continued discrimination that certain kinds if people have faced precisely because they belong to one such group go far beyond the law, in letter and in power.

These are attitudes sown and cultivated in the hearts and minds of entire societies, out of their own prejudices, customs, and learned behaviours. Though undoubtedly such attitudes and behaviours do evolve and change with time, they exist for a long time after they lose their respectability. Indeed, for quite long after they are still protected, institutionally and socially, by the structures that spread and reproduced them in the first place. This is the reason that special protections are not only justified but necessary for such groups.

It is worth noting that these groups are indeed arbitrarily selected, but not for protection. They were arbitrarily selected for persecution. That is why they merit protection.

 

The "every group should be treated exactly the same legally" argument fails because it presupposes that socially and historically there haven't been and aren't any disparaties or mistreatment.

If someone genuinely believes that disabled people only deserve rights that intersect with the majority of non disabled people then they're fundamentally calling for discrimination because both are not on an equal playing field.

 

Blunt but might be an honest answer.

 

Is it a neutral act?

 

Yes.

 

All that is necessary for evil to prevail is that good men do nothing.

 

Someone telling you that they don't care is the precise opposite of neutral.

Neutral would be if they stated they didn't even have an opinion

 

In a sense, neutrality is the default state, if we are talking about emotions instead of having an opinion.
For everyone can have an opinion - often it is unavoidable as well - but not everyone will actually have a strong sentiment about something.
Which isn't always about lack of empathy either. An example:
(although I hate how now the thread has become personal, but at least in my case I will mention something about another person)
One of my few good IRL friends had their father die last year, after a very extended period of horrors. They are a real friend and I care about them. But it would be impossible to actually feel something close to what they felt. It was just by proxy, and personalized to myself. Even if you like the other person, even if they are quite close, it isn't often possible to be emotionally invested.

 

The thread was already personal for transpeople by the way.

 

Since I clarified that this wasn't my stance already I don't see the issue.

Yes. Along with other forms of non-work related discrimination.

Loopholes in laws protecting transpeople are loopholes in generally applicable laws. The correct solution, even to protect transpeople, is to fix the general law.

Yes I can.

Quoted is a false assertion even at face value.

While questioning understanding rather than arguments made is yet more weak ad hominem (more of which I skipped because it's worth nobody's time), it's worth quoting this to point out that there actually is no knowledge prerequisite for posting in this thread, other than the English language and forum rules.

So make laws that make discrimination illegal. Though these tend to already exist.

We can make persecution of people illegal without knowing which group is being targeted, and that law will protect transpeople by necessity so long as its upheld. If it isn't upheld, you have a different problem that still needs fixing.

It doesn't presuppose those things because they're irrelevant to writing fair law in the present.

Calling for non-equal treatment before the law is actively championing discrimination.

And so we argue against laws that intentionally discriminate.

That's not true either. It can be taken personally if one chooses, but it's an open discussion forum thread with predefined rules. Nothing about discussing JKR's conduct or transrights fits the category of "personal", except ironically for one person (JKR). JKR is literally the only person for whom this thread is "personal", and it is unlikely any of its participants is actually JKR.

 

You're so detached from the issue and reality that it's unreal, why wouldn't transphobia be a personal issue to a trans person?

This isn't a "debate" for us, this is real life and it's becoming increasingly clear to me that you don't seem to respect that fact or even understand it.

 

Friendly. Likes you, willing to help.

Neutral. Indifferent. Might help might not.

Hostile. Actively seeks to harm or hinder you.

 

Where did you clarify that this wasn't your stance? You haven't retracted the claim of neutrality nor have you spoken any further on the attempted equivalence.

Which laws are you referring to? What happens when administrations roll back protections specifically for groups that you are defining as arbitrary? Furthermore, this undermines your claim that they are arbitrary, because they are both nationally and internationally-recognised as a specific minority, as determined by a leading Western government singling them out as a target. There's nothing arbitrary about that.

There's technically nothing stopping you, no. It just means your argument contradicts itself as a consequence.

Why is it false? Are you willing to explain the flaw with the argument? If you do not concern yourself with a specific minority, how can you be expected to understand the problems that minority faces? How can you understand what needs improving or reforming under current law? Is there a definition of "not concerning yourself with minorities" I am unaware of? "arbitrary subgroups" being your label for named and recognised minorities, and your label alone.

Calling things you don't like ad hominem is not an argument, and even if you wanted to spend another post explaining how it is allegedly a valid ad hominem, using it as pretext to not engage with the greater point being made is the fallacy fallacy. I was trying to explain to you that knowledge is required for discussion to be constructive. You cannot be forced to have this knowledge, naturally, but in posting within the rules, some knowledge is at least required (my aim was never backseat moderation. I was being a bit vague with my language as to directly avoid that, as per Lemon's later post. I want to see this discussion kept going). Otherwise the discussion by its very nature becomes less informed, and thus less constructive.

Your understanding relates to the arguments you are making. Your arguments are poor because they do not reflect an accurate understanding of trans people (nevermind other minorities) in the United States or even other modern first-world nations (like the UK). You claim that a discussion of transphobia is allegedly only personal to JK Rowling, which is worrying because it demonstrates you see no significance in a thread debating a specific group of peoples' rights, in a thread where people of that group exist.

To put it another way, you repeatedly call fallacy whenever you think something is directed at you personally, but you cannot understand that discussing a subject which is part of at least one poster's actual lived experience is not also personal. This is a failing in any argument you put forward on the subject.

None of this is neutral, to go back to the start - to go back to an actual argument. Every opinion here has weight. The decision to support trans rights is binary, because you either support them, or you don't. There's nuance after that fact, for sure. But the initial support / do not support is a binary. There is no neutral stance in that. If someone doesn't care about trans rights, or doesn't concern themselves with trans rights (regardless of how you go about it, or prefer to word it), they do not support trans rights.

If you support rights for all people and include trans people in that statement, as you have said, then congratulations. Your opinion is not neutral. It is, at least by what you've said, in favour of trans rights (and also, notably, opposed to Rowling's own stance on the subject). Anything else is just tedious semantics. If we all agree here that trans rights deserve our support, then the best way forward would be to reply to my second paragraph (and ignore as much of the rest as you prefer), and talk in real terms of the work needing to be done.

 

I know that this is getting awfully close to arguments we’ve gone over before but transpeople aren’t an arbitrary subgroup. They are not arbitrary because 1) they are currently and historically have been the targets of a very powerful ideology that has many very powerful people in its number and 2) transpeople require access to things that cispeople would be unlikely to use (e.g ability to legally change their gender with minimal legal BS) in order for their fundamental rights to be preserved.

To use another example, everyone should have the right to be able to access public buildings. However, if all government buildings in a country were only accessible by stairs in a given country then people who could not walk up stairs (generally the elderly and the disabled) then that would discriminate against them. Laws should be written to ensure all public buildings have ramps so people who can’t use stairs access them and in many countries such as this. These laws are designed with certain (not arbitrary) subgroups of the population in mind (the elderly and the disabled).

Legally changing one’s gender will be only ever relevant to trans people and intersex people. In most countries the process for changing one’s gender is extremely and unnecessarily difficult. In many countries it requires months of getting approval from various doctors and psychologists and then having to live as one’s preferred gender for a matter of years (all while having to face the embarrassment and danger that one would experience from having ID that does not match the gender that one is presenting as). Some countries require people to have to have surgery that they may not otherwise want to have in order legally change their gender. And countries that don’t have same sex marriage they require people to get divorced before they can transition, even if both people in the relationship would rather stay married. Some countries (including the UK where this debate was squashed thanks to the effort of people like JKR) there are proposals to move to a system where people can change their gender if they can legally prove that they fully understand the implications of doing so (by being of sound mind and making a sworn declaration to a judge). Solving these issues will require legislation written that address issues unique to the trans community.

Sometimes to protect everyone’s rights, legislation needs to be crafted to specifically protect significant (not arbitrary) subsets of people who have a higher likelihood of having their rights infringed.