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> On Dec 19, 2018, at 6:20 PM, Philip Ferguson via Marxism > <marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > > MM wrote: > "But all of the evidence offered by Whitmore et al ? as unfortunate and > even objectionable as some the reported behaviour may be ? is still > essentially anecdotal. . ." > > Are you serious??? > > The attacks on gender-critical feminists are all over the internet, all in > the words of the new trans people doing it. > > It is massively documented. > > It's a long time since I've seen denial like this. > > In 2018 it's bizarre that people can exhibit violent misogyny on this scale > and someone dismiss what the misogynists themselves are saying on twitter, > facebook, websites etc etc. "Anecdeotal"? Wow! > > The Daphna Whitmore article simply scraped the surface of this campaign of > hate. > https://rdln.wordpress.com/2018/12/17/the-intolerance-of-transactivists/ Phil’s invocation of “misogyny” here is just opportunistic, as Tim Nelson has explained elsewhere. None of the abuse documented by Whitmore et al at the sources provided is aimed at women as such, but entirely at women who espouse a specific ideological position (and one that attempts to hide its own ideological basis, by implying that it is simply based on how things are in some supra-historical “natural” realm of “biological men” and “biological women.” That’s the kind of move someone like Dawkins or Pinker would make; it has no place on the left. Second, “anecdotal” doesn’t mean “rare” — although the collection of evidence you’ve provided so far is indeed vanishingly small in the scheme of things: a tiny fraction of the instances of actual physical violence perpetrated against women daily by cis-men, for instance. But questions of rarity aside, the evidence in question is anecdotal insofar as it consists almost entirely (as far as I can tell) of instances and / or reports of individual cases of abuse, rather than statistical studies of broad trends. I don’t have any doubt that the sort of abuse on social media that you describe has increased dramatically in the past decade, because basically all forms of online abuse have increased dramatically in the past decade, and I doubt many researchers would find that particular form of online abuse to require a dedicated focus. That doesn’t mean the threats aren't disgusting; they are. But there is simply no comparison between such threats and the documented physical attacks against people identifying as trans-women at significant scale: brutal rapes and murders. If there is evidence of such verbal threats translating into physical violence, it would be good to see it, and that would indeed be alarming and would demand urgent attention. But even a collection of really vile tweets doesn’t seem like the right point of focus when gender-non-conforming people are being brutally murdered in very significant numbers — and of course when voices ostensibly on the left seem to want us to ignore that violence and focus instead on verbal abuse that seems to find little if any expression in actual physical violence. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
