I was depressed to see Ros Kaveney tweeting this:
I've sometimes been accused of being a psychopath and a liar for accusing GCs and their fascist allies of promoting genocide of trans people. The Lemkin Institute agrees with me.https://t.co/kBkf8U9rzM
— Roz Kaveney (@RozKaveney) December 21, 2022
“I’ve sometimes been accused of being a psychopath and a liar for accusing GCs and their fascist allies of promoting genocide of trans people. The Lemkin Institute agrees with me.”
I briefly met Roz Kaveney many years ago, at a speech she gave. She dealt very patiently and graciously with the curiosity of her mostly student audience about her having had a sex change, at a time when it was much more rare to meet openly transgender people than it is now. I do not think she is a psychopath or a liar. I just think she has succumbed to the terrible effects of being in a social media reverberation chamber. I had heard of the Lemkin Institute, too, named after the scholar of genocide Raphael Lemkin, most of whose family were murdered in the Holocaust. The world is not yet safe from such horrors, as shown by the Institute’s pages on historical, ongoing and threatened genocides in places such as Armenia, Somaliland and Ukraine. It should get back to the day job, which urgently needs doing. The Lemkin Institute’s “Statement on the Genocidal Nature of the Gender Critical Movement’s Ideology and Practice” is absurd.
It really is beyond parody.
One of the essential falsities of the argument:
No one seeks to eradicate transgendered people. What people do seek – what most US proposed laws seek to accomplish – is to remove minor children from the marketing and from the permanent medically-induced changes that are occurring far too frequently.
Do whatever you wish to yourself. Leave the kids out of it.
Meanwhile, over at Spiked:
“When did it become a crime to say ‘men can’t be lesbians’? A Norwegian filmmaker could face three years in jail for telling the truth about biological sex.”
If a man wants to LARP as a woman, I don’t care. If a woman wants to LARP as a man, fine by me. But I cannot be compelled to play along with their delusions or act like they are something they aren’t. Leave the kids alone, stay out of the opposite restroom or locker room, and stop pretending that one’s sexual fetish demands to be not only tolerated but celebrated.
I disagree, these people are dangerous, gaslighting lunatics
Stephen R, I disagree about public lavatories. A transwoman dressed as a woman using a men’s public lavatory is in severe danger of assault. Fortunately there is a simple solution with a proven record of success. If I may quote myself:
Between groups of people who are not bad but among whom there are differences of opinion, try negotiation. It doesn’t have to be a million separate negotiations for every individual village hall or public lavatory, or for every women’s sporting competition or Brownie pack; there are such things as organisations and organisational policies. Not that there is anything wrong with having a great many separate local deals. This is called “subsidarity”.
Many fear that this radical strategy would give free rein to the worst instincts of the people. I don’t get it. To get into the habit of settling disputes by meeting the other party and peacefully trying to reach a compromise sounds a great deal more likely to give free rein to the best instincts of the people. Humans are nicer when not being threatened.
And there are cases where “transwomen” have gone into female restrooms and locker rooms and assaulted actual girls and women, never mind the discomfort of actual females having to share a space with a non-female or having a man who claims to be a woman exposing himself to little girls changing into swimsuits down at the YMCA. I’d rather err on the side of caution and stop enabling sexual assaults or validating the mental illness of transsexuals, political correctness be damned.
Negotiation can only occur between people who will reasonably respond to their counterparty’s requests. I just don’t see the room for that in the current environment (which is undoubtedly fogged because of the visibility and volume of the bearded hulks screaming “respect me!” to the scared young girls in the videos I’ve seen lately.)
I don’t know the overall esteem in which Ms. Posie Parker is held here or elsewhere, but this Triggernomitry video I found educational:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pdpc2r4cBxQ&t=27s
I’ll hasten to add that I’ve known several transgendered people and have liked them all, but they have not resembled the more out-there trans activists that make it into national view.
Folk who are unable to give a coherent account of the semantic content of “woman” can hardly be expected to do any better with “genocide.”
Remember that this nonsense is from the same source (albeit a generation or two removed) as Lysenkoism.
That was tripe masquerading as science, this is tripe masquerading as the Road to the Next Holocaust.
It’s bullshit with a candy wrapping of hyperbole, nothing more, but by enabling this nonsense (presumably in a pursuit for more funding or recognition), The Lemkin Institute brings themselves into disrepute and provides succour to the Holocaust denial community.
Lee beat me to it. It was of course the very first thought that Natalie’s article raised in a pedant like me.
The temptation is to say something about how removing meaning from one word drives them to remove it from others – but while that would in time apply it does not apply here, because I think Ros was not driven to ignore the meaning of genocide but ran eagerly to do so.
“Control language, and you control thought; control thought and you control action; control action and you control the world.”
-Peter Kreeft
The sad thing is no one in the media will call them out for saying “a man is not a woman” is akin to filling ditches with bodies or stuffing corpses in ovens by the thousands. One would think representatives from peoples who have been subjected to genocide would say “wait a minute, there is no concentrated effort to eliminate you and others like you based on ethnic or religious lines.” No one cares what trannies do to themselves so long as they don’t cross a few lines.
I get that languages evolve over time and definitions change, but words do mean things and we can’t simply change them to meet the whims of a handful of loud and obnoxious mentally ill people and their allies on Twitter to the point that they have no real definition (see also: racist, sexist).
Natalie, this post brought back memories. I dimly recall your describing that talk to me and our discussing it.
As regards whether there has been any change in Roz Kaveney’s political morals between then and now, my natural take is nearer:
I hypothesis that, like Erdogan and democracy, free speech was just a bus to Ros – one to get off when something as attractive as Wokeness NewSpeak Centre hove in sight.
This is not exactly to say that, long ago in that lecture, the lecturer was consciously lying while speaking. I suggest neither Ros nor you then foresaw a time when getting you arrested for dissenting would be in Ros’ power. You, who were there decades back, can comment better than I, who only heard an after-action report, whether it is really a surprising change or an only-too-predictable one that Ros’ commitment to the ideology over the decades now requires applying such tired ‘Nazi’ labels to you and to any who dares to remain ‘critical’ (another word whose various meanings are, I suspect, being filleted) in their thinking.
And some people say they do not understand when I say the “modern social system” of the West is not a “social system” (“modern” or otherwise) – it is a weapon to destroy the West.
Of course, if one tries to explain that this is not a “social system”, it is not a “culture”, it is just a glass of poison that the West must stop drinking, or DIE, then one is dismissed as a “tool of Putin” or whatever. Yes the dictatorships in Russia and China do not want this agenda (“Diversity, Inclusion and Equity” or whatever one wants to call it) in their own countries, because they do not wish to destroy their own countries (if they do destroy their own countries it will be unintentionally – not deliberately as the United States and some other Western are being deliberately destroyed).
It is much the same if one points out that Western governments are spending the West to destruction. By the way – even if the 100 Billion Dollars was not being spent on the Ukraine, the United States would go de facto bankrupt anyway, as the “Entitlements” (and so on) are totally out of control.
The Biden Administration, or rather the people who control the senile puppet, are fully in support of the “Woke” (Frankfurt School Marxist) agenda – because they wish to destroy the West. Indeed “Death to the West” is the unofficial motto of the education system and just about every other institution – public and private.
The British government says it is against the agenda – but does nothing to stop it.
There is nothing more to say. Other than to point out the obvious – that the new, totalitarian, society of international “governance”, that the international establishment (government and corporate) wish to replace what is left of liberty, will-not-work – not even for the elite.
It is going to be a total mess.
Niall : It was of course the very first thought that Natalie’s article raised in a pedant like me.
I may be mildly pedantic from time to time, but I don’t think it has yet risen to clinical levels.
The point in this case is that the refusal to offer any coherent account of “woman”, which is consistent from one sentence to the next, is not an incidental curiosity or annoyance in the “trans wars” – it is the very heart of the matter.
It’s not about some new meaning of “woman” that is offered as an alternative to the traditional one. There is no new meaning on offer. It’s not a semantic battle.
It’s a real world version of O’Brien and his finger test. The many many people who accept that a “trans woman” is a “woman” have not analysed the facts of the matter and concluded that this is so as a matter of fact. They simply accept the Party line, because it is the Party line. They have successfully learned not to think. That is the whole point of this business.
“Anti-trans” folk are not wicked because they disagree on what is or is not a woman, or because they might hurt someone’s feelings, but because they have not yet accepted that thinking for themselves is criminal.
Lee Moore (December 23, 2022 at 2:52 am) +1.
In one of his essays, Vaclav Havel noted how communist ideology, over and above its intended and foreseen aggressions, also acquired enemies it did not intend; how, for example, young Czechs who just wanted new musical styles – the kind of ‘I’m-a-rebel’ conformists whose UK equivalents of that time the commies could propagandise – found themselves ‘enemies of the state’, driven to attempt evading it through no politics of their own. Similarly, you won’t need to be a pedant, let alone a clinical one, to be caught up in the great pedanticide which this pretence of ‘genocide’ is to excuse.
FWIW, the tweet’s misuse of ‘genocide’, even in its own terms, genuinely was the very first thought that went through my mind on seeing it. I thought that, since transing is either fictive (cosmetic, but leaving the old sexual capacity in place) or else neutering (save in the incredibly rare case of its being applied to an “‘–All You Zombies–‘”-style prior state), the word ‘genocide’ is not applicable even in the tweeter’s own sense – or rather, is being gutted of meaning in the very act of being used to justify demonising anyone who objects to gutting words of meaning.
it’s no different that using “fascist” or “Nazi” or “racist” or “bigot” or any number of other words to describe anyone a person on the Left disagrees with.
Steven R – I love it when they use the word “Fascist” as they, the Democrats, have been pushing Fascism since 1933 – the National Industrial Recovery Act and the National Recovery Administration (the Blue Eagle thugs) were taken from Mussolini’s Fascism. And the Biden Administration (and the RINOs as well as the Democrats) push “private-public partnership”, the Corporate State, every day – as do the World Economic Forum and the rest of the international establishment. “Stakeholder Capitalism” is Fascism.
They are Fascists – even as the scream “Fascist!” ate other people.
It is almost as funny as the Economist magazine, which always pushing bigger government (as part of its Corporate State agenda) describing itself a “limited government” publication – which it did, yet again, in its Christmas edition.
Merry Christmas.
Ho! Ho! Ho!.
The term ‘genocide’ does not of course apply either to the trans-industry’s cancellation of the detrans (h/t instapundit). But it does seem less of an echo chamber mistake and more of an intentional misrepresentation for Ros to claim even some metaphoric equivalent when to be in that echo chamber is to be very aware of its dedication to denying and cancel-culturing detransitioners.
(BTW, the article I link also references an interesting paper that is a rare but welcome example of woke-taught bigotry slowly giving way to at least an attempt at actual research.)
The “genocide” of the transsexual will eventually happen, once everyone has the opportunity to engineer their genomes and closely monitor fetal development. As well as maintain observation over their kids, 24/7 until they reach majority. By the time that happens, all likely causative factors for “gender dysphoria” will have been corrected, and there won’t be any more weirdos being born or made.
The world will likely be a much more boring place, without the madness/creativity brought by these sorts, but it will be more peaceful and quiet.
Makes you wonder, it does: What, if anything, will we have lost, once everyone is boring and stodgily “normal”, without sexual dysfunction and deviancy, having had that corrected at conception and in the womb?
Or, will people deliberately make more of these dysfunctional types? Hard to say, really… I suspect that we’ll likely wind up licensing some deviants to have around for the entertainment value, but they’ll have the same sort of social status as actors and other prostituting performers had back in the old days; they’ll be unacceptable in polite company. Which then begs the question: Why create them in the first place?
I think the people whinging about genocide of their “kind” are really stating an essential truth: They know, instinctively, that they are damaged goods, that nobody would want to be them or tolerate their presence if they had a choice in the matter. And, this drives much of their angst with society in general, explaining why they perpetually want to tear it down for the normies. They absolutely cannot tolerate a situation where they are faced with the reality of their situation, that they are actually as dysfunctional as they imagine the rest of us think they are. It’s very much a case of the guilty fleeing where no man pursues; they project upon the normies that which they wish would be done to them, and which they’d do to the normal, if they could.
As I’ve often pointed out, here: The point of the exercise isn’t “being gay” or “being transsexual”, it is, instead, the sheer transgression involved. Put most of these types into a society where the values they espouse now were celebrated and considered the “norm”, and they’d be violently in opposition, taking up the values and positions that they claim to loathe in our society here-and-now.
The real “genocide of the LGBTWTFBBQ” is going to take place, once we figure out how to effectively treat their madness. Once those correctives are in place, then we’ll see so very few of them that we’ll likely have to artificially create a few, just for the creative fillip they possess along with their madness.