I was going to make this a comment on PZ’s blog but here it is:
There is a shit load of stuff going on here – and a lot of it has been caused by a very crafty narrative built by trans antagonistic feminists who consistently treat trans feminists like some sort of exotic pet and hold onto this dualistic idea that sex and gender are infinitely separable. Because the existence of trans people upsets this STRONGLY held belief by some radical feminists that gender itself is a fantasy and source of oppression – to them – respecting “gender identity” is respecting women’s oppression. READ shit that CCP or Sarah Ditum have written on the subject – that is what’s going on here. They will say they support trans women with one side of their mouth and then go on rants about how being called “cis” is offensive – not because they embrace a trans identity or question the trans/cis dichotomy but because they assert that *identifying with the gender “woman” is identifying with rape, subordination, forced gestation, etc* – they proclaim their *SEX* as “woman” but not their gender and forward a simplistic class analysis that emphasizes oppression based on reproductive class and define “woman” as sharing that class struggle.
ANYHOW – when the fact that these feminists are extremely trans antagonistic is brought up to Ophelia she gets very defensive – and I GET THAT. I don’t play the game of people policing my follows or associations or any such shit either – but she does what she is doing now. She addresses the fact that she doesn’t appreciate how people approach her with these subjects – but then COMPLETELY IGNORES the substance of what people are trying to tell her.
There is a pervasive and highly articulated persecution narrative that’s been deployed against trans activists. So the well is poisoned COMPLETELY when attempting to discuss these issues. CCP and Sarah Ditum are FUCKING RAGING TRANSPHOBES – and every time they have discussed issues related to trans women specifically they have SAID ABSOLUTELY HORRIFIC SHIT that appeals to a certain feminist paradigm so the awfulness is obscured by advancing those talking points that resonate with that audience. AND CRITICISM of them from the trans community is answered with *sometimes blatantly fabricated* accusations of harassment by “male entitled” trans women activists who are supposedly acting like fascists for pointing out that these feminists are ATTACKING THEM in some of the most VILE fucking ways possible – because it’s drenched in sugary sweet easy-to-digest feminist tropes.
OKAY.
So – I feel for Ophelia because I suspect she didn’t realize that the gender crit forum that she became a part of was an open group that is publicly view-able. I suspect she thought she could go there and they would help her think through a reasoned, informed response in candid ways. I appreciate that there is a “thinking out loud” aspect of all of this.
And just fyi: when I said that people I know monitor the group – I mean we check it every once in a while. And no – that’s not in the guise of “The Block Bot” – “The Block Bot” is a twitter application that manages a shared blocking list. “The Block Bot” is not monitoring or otherwise checking Facebook groups or any other sorts of activities such as that, k? Alright then. I just mentioned that the group is checked occasionally so Ophelia didn’t feel like people were being stalkery to notice her posts there about James.
The group was started by Elizabeth Hungerford. This is somewhere in the realm of a forum about feminism being started by Paul Elam. That information is probably useful to anyone who thinks that this is a good place to get information – cause IT IS NOT.
Look through the posts and it is FULL of TERF talking points – links to “pretendbians” (a site run by Cathy Brennan) for example. On one post Hungerford points to an article and judges an individual’s “appropriation” of the term ‘woman’ offensive. Another member says that transSEXuals are okay because they can be “gender critical” but transgender people cannot. Etc so forth. I know activists who have joined the page, but most of them eventually get frustrated and leave – notably an activist who academically studies the neurology of sex and gender was often shouted down with pseudo-science.
And yeah – Hungerford used a Swedish study to positively state that *transition does not reduce the instances of suicide* based on a study that compared suicide rates of trans people who had transitioned and THE GENERAL FUCKING POPULATION. My friend went on the page and desperately explained that TRANSITION CARE SAVES LIVES by pointed out how Hungerford was misrepresenting the study and posting other studies and information that made this *exceptionally clear*. The group members essentially ignored her and went on like her post did not exist – as if they had LEARNED that transition care was useless in preventing the deaths of trans people.
That crap isn’t just toxic – it’s DEADLY BULLSHIT – in a similar fashion that anti-vaxx shit is DEADLY BULLSHIT.
But the well is poisoned. ME POINTING THIS OUT = I’m the fucking gestapo.
Jason pointing out that Ophelia faved one of Barbs posts = STALKER.
And however much I empathize with feeling embattled. However much I can only imagine feeling embattled *by people I thought had my back*. I am not the gestapo or “loathsome”. Jason is not a stalker. James didn’t deserve to be trashed on her blog either.
I get it though – however much people might be in “wtf” mode right now. I absolutely agree cooling it is likely the best way to go. I may have not used the best judgment in being blunt in her comments – but it is frustrating to hit a brick wall.
And yeah – I think the worst thing that could happen right now is if someone mounts a “kick her out” campaign. Not only is that mean-spirited – but it would be a FUCKING FIELD DAY for the crew painting trans activists as a cabal of McCathyesque bastards IN THE SAME WAY that anti-feminist freeze-peachers latched onto Thunderf00t leaving FtB.
SINMANTYX 
Yes, that seems to hit most of the problems I’ve seen. More and more of a pattern being noticed, and questioned, and the response is only of the ‘how dare you question me?!’ variety.
But it’s in the context of that very toxic, battle-scarred territory where real people are getting badly hurt. Which there doesn’t seem to be recognition of.
As well as the treating all criticism and complaint as some sort of witch hunt that can’t possibly be genuine or reasonable.
I’m trying not to wade too much into this, it has caused me some significant stress and pain. All I know is that trans women are dying, and relatively privileged women are treating their lives and experiences as an intellectual exercise AT BEST. And whether or not OB is actively transphobic or merely sympathetic/friendly towards TERFs, she’s been a real jerk about the whole thing.
Also for the record, you don’t have to be stalking her to see her interactions on social media. Social media reports your interactions to everyone in your circle. I never meant to see that she follows a bunch of abusive assholes on Twitter. When you click on an account to block them, Twitter shows you the followers you share. As I was blocking TERFs, I saw Benson’s name pop up over and over again. I didn’t stalk her in a desperate attempt to find a reason to block her.
This is a long time in coming & I can’t believe it’s taken this long. Too many alleged “allies” have been given passes for things they’d otherwise have been called out for early on. This has gone on for years in our community & suddenly everyone is acting like they’re just now noticing these problematic behaviors. I’m just glad that I’m not the only one not burying my head in the sand on this one again. Thanks for saying it much better than I could, Melby.
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Yikes, clicked the pingback. Ophelia is de-escalating the conflict by sharing peoples private facebook posts and attacking Joe again.
I was going to ask you to make very sure you were correct – but I can see the “friends only” icon right there. I know people are struggling with the ethics of sharing non-public information. This is not a good trend.
She got called out on it immediately and deleted it.
Phew, that’s good. Would have been better to not post something that was obviously private. Not fun for the person in question as they’ll be paranoid about who is stalking their private TL and passing messages on to OB.
In other news Zinnia has posted a great bunch of tweets de-constructing exactly where OB and her defenders are going wrong. Will that have a post of it’s own? No, much better to pick on some comments from cis allies that are easily dismissed and prop up the “witch hunt” narrative. Or just point at me and say, look there, oolon! Troll! Poisoner!!! Ignore what I have to say, deal with the criticism from trans ppl FFS.
Right – and yeah – that sort of put the fork in my resolve to avoid attacking her personal character. She said she didn’t notice, but the whole thing stinks.
I see that: https://twitter.com/ZJemptv/status/625360815500173317
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I apologise for not really adding anything, or actively detracting with such a useless ramble, but I hope a comment saying I deeply appreciate this summary is okay.
The rest is partly for catharsis since I value a lot of Ophelia’s writing and efforts so I’m sorry if deletion of this is deemed best due to my bad writing and self-indulgence.
Anyway, I stopped reading Ophelia’s blog and commenting there (under a different name) over a year ago because I worried this explosion was coming.
I would guess that seems like I’m praising myself for being oh such a smart person or some such silliness but I’d hope I don’t say it for that, I’d hope I’m saying it to make this point: I didn’t interact with anyone about my concerns or see any statements about it by others. I just independently and silently noted things that made me feel concerned over time until I felt best changing my behaviour to exclude things. Until this incident, I had no idea anyone else felt uneasy for that long or longer and nothing about Ophelia had been in my mind for all, or at least almost all, of that time.
I’d hope that I know such pattern recognition and gut-feelings are hardly very scientific or proof of anything but I tend to defer to those feelings when it comes to cis people so I don’t leave myself open to unexpected awfulness, as I’d guess so many others in so many contexts that I can’t imagine do.
Maybe a tad like Joe, I didn’t go out of my way to ‘stalk’ her or dissect her life and history. In my case, I just passively accumulated stuff in the mental background while tottling around doing other things.
Despite how detailed I’d guess the consideration of it looks written down, it amounted to no more than a few seconds here or there in the lower levels of chatter of my head as I read or scanned over things.
On social media, I just noticed that whenever I went to block truly horrific people, the types of people that refer to trans women as perverted men (or had the political sense to hide the bitter taste with the sugar of euphemisms, hand-wringing, and an elevated register most of the time, like Boodleoops, Glosswitch, Ditum, Milinovich, etc) or worse, Ophelia would often be following or friendly with them. This wasn’t just true of large accounts with many followers due to the profession of the person but quite small ones too. Equally, their content would be shared but it commonly wasn’t a viral comment about current affairs, a poignant insight, or a good article that they’d written on another area of their expertise. The shared content would be small comments and interactions that had received little or no attention, so suggested a higher level of intimacy that seemed to make awareness of the behaviour of those people more likely.
After finding a few, I wasn’t worried and hoped for the best since this kind of thing happens, expecting omniscience seems silly since a lot of these people are amazingly knowledgeable in other areas or are good at hiding their attitudes to trans stuff as they clearly seem to feel it could be toxic to them if not presented to a large audience in a carefully managed way. Goodness knows people have had to tell me I had a few people in spaces like Facebook or Twitter that had an abusive past I had no idea about, after all.
The small part of me that wasn’t just focused on blocking horrible people I’d encountered as fast as possible shrugged and hoped she hadn’t seen their behaviour or had some other understandable reason that mattered to her in her space or simply didn’t care enough social media stuff.
Over time, it turned into more and more though. The interaction with them popped up increasingly until it worried me because it meant I felt there was almost no chance at all that she simply didn’t see the awfulness they wrote themselves or the outright dangerously hateful comments those people shared from others, or repackaged to be more palatable, on a regular basis. I could only imagine she overlooked it for some reason, thought it was within the realm of reasonable discussion so didn’t see as absolutely abhorrent, etc. For me, the only reasons that could indicate good things on her part were also extremely unlikely to be true.
And I’m afraid, while I will only ever harm people by putting them in situation where they’re asked to cut off from others in extreme situations and will defer to just changing my behaviour around them instead, I do ‘police’ in the sense that if you can regularly warmly engage with people that further a narrative that portrays trans women as sexual predators, appropriators, dogmatic reinforces of gender roles peddlers of ‘brain sex,’ silencers of defenceless middle-class women with platforms, etc without challenging them, without it being obvious you’re doing it to ‘know the enemy,’ or having to remove them because of how such regular exposure enflames your belief in respect for basic dignity then I’m going to judge you. I’m going to change my own behaviour and I’m probably going to share that with people I know have similar attitudes and needs to my own where mutual trust in fairness is a thing.
I understand others don’t do this or abhor it but I feel I can’t remain charitable about your motives forever because it means risking exposure to harm in the future, however huge or tiny that harm might be.
I’d guess a lot of people consider that guilt by association but I’ve always viewed that as applying when a causal link is remote or non-existent. For me, it doesn’t mean ‘guilt by who you choose to associate with and give any of your resources to even after you know how awful they are.’ I apologise if I’ve misunderstood it but I think there’s quite a plausible causal link with Ophelia.
For me, that link is only confirmed by the comments made by Ophelia in that horrible Facebook group. I could understand people being taken in by ‘Gender Critical’ at first because it seems such a cuddly and vague name but if you don’t look at a quick overview of the content and see that group for what it is, and see ‘gender critical’ for what it is, then you are a bigot. I’d say it’s a tad similar to joining a group titled something like ‘Struggling With Sexuality’ only to find content that vilifies anyone that isn’t straight and promotes reparative therapy with the occasional article about the plight of people facing discrimination due to sexuality thrown in (of course, including the implication it’s all their fault for existing somehow or never ever the fault of people in the group). If you don’t realise the dynamic instantly then it says a lot about you.
Sorry for all of that if it remains and anyone reads this far. I’ll go back to tottling around lurking and hope things become more positive in the future. It’s just I detached from a writer I valued and am sad to see worst fears confirmed, including the hypocritical ‘witch-hunt’ silliness so hope this adds even a tiny fraction to countering the absurd idea it’s a particular group of people orchestrating something.
Thanks for sharing that.
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