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Comment by howinteresting | Hacker News Reader

The specific policy and political recommendations of the people on the gender critical subreddit are very transphobic, and not even in a nuanced way.

Fuck the meta level. I'm only interested in engaging with specifics.

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> The specific policy and political recommendations of the people on the gender critical subreddit are very transphobic

There's plenty of actual transphobia occurring, out there in the real world - as in, real hateful violence and oppression being done to people who identify as trans or even just behave in non-gender-typical ways. So you're quite factually wrong about this.

Gender-critical feminists do not even register on the radar.

Structural transphobia such as the medical gatekeeping GCs want to preserve, and incidents of violence, are both actual transphobia. Focusing on the latter and ignoring the former is also transphobic.

I might disagree with you on one point - Gender critical feminists, whose detractors have kindly labeled "TERFs," threaten the philosophical underpinnings of the trans movement in a way that trans hate does not.

You have no idea what you’re talking about. “Gender critical” people (they are not feminists) regularly harass trans people, including kids, to the point of suicide. They lobby for discriminatory legislation that makes life-saving medical care difficult or impossible to access for trans people. They are instrumental in spreading bewilderingly unscientific anti-trans propaganda with the deliberate effect of harming and demonizing trans people, with the predictable effect of inspiring more hate crimes. They organize in order to harass and abuse trans people out of employment and housing. They just straight up lie. And if you were to peruse that subreddit, you’d also see them regularly joke about lying to AFAB trans people in order to exploit them for sex because those were the “hot butches” in a way that was incredibly hateful and, honestly, pretty rapey.

These people are abusers and bigots. They’re no different than any other hate group, except that they often use the language of victimhood to cloak their primary mode of social aggression. (This is the mode of aggression that it is most acceptable for AFAB people to express, so they get really, really good at it. It has a lot in common with the dynamics of emotional abuse, and, for lack of a better term, mean girling (which is, especially after adolescence, a particularly effective form of abuse)).

So you have no idea what you’re talking about, but based on your other comments in this thread — you genuinely seem to think homosexuality is a modern invention? And that it came out of some sort of predatory behavior? — it seems this is a willful ignorance that accommodates the hate and disgust you already feel for certain minorities.

Homosexuality and heterosexuality are modern inventions, yes - they first show up in the discourse of 19th c. psychology. And no, rape culture was never the province of "certain minorities", in fact it was quite widespread among those we would now (retrospectively!) identify as heterosexual. The primacy of sexual consent and of romantic, egalitarian relationships are very modern developments.

The words themselves are modern inventions, reflecting the western medicalization of the concepts, which in turn reflected bigotry — declaring something an “illness” is a great way to get people on board with eradicating it. But gay people and gay relationships existed in pretty much every society for which we have records, long before the British decided to coin a new word. (And in fact, so did trans people.)

A rose by any other name smells just as sweet, etc.

Your ignorance on this is truly stunning.

> reflected bigotry — declaring something an “illness” is a great way to get people on board with eradicating it

It's quite true that homosexuality used to be viewed like that. And yet, strange as it might seem, even that was a significant step forward from earlier perceptions of MSM which essentially were reminiscent of the Graeco-Roman model. Obviously these perceptions were also colored by bigotry, but we can see parallel changes in the discourse among male gays themselves.

Again, you have no idea what you’re talking about. You keep referencing talking points from ahistorical views of two societies as though they represent the entire world. I suppose to you, they do? You might be better served by reading about the world at large. Off the top of my head, Japan provides an interesting case study in views of homosexuality (and bisexuality) pre- and post- western influence.

Seriously? The older term for homosexuality in Japan literally translates as "the way of nqbyrfprag oblf" (I ROT13'd the last two words as they're IMHO likely to trigger trauma, offense, or both trauma and offense.) Some "case study" indeed! (Needless to say, the modern, Western-informed outlook now common in Japan could not be more different - but that supports my earlier point.)

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