May 3, 2017

"This Is What a Modern-Day Witch Hunt Looks Like."

By Jesse Singal (in New York Magazine). This is a remarkably detailed analysis of an attack on Rebecca Tuvel, a philosopher who published "In Defense of Transracialism" in the feminist-philosophy journal Hypatia. Excerpt from Singal's article:
There has simply been an explosive amount of misinformation circulating online about what is and isn’t in Tuvel’s article, which few of her most vociferous critics appear to have even skimmed, based on their inability to accurately describe its contents. Because the right has seized on Rachel Dolezal as a target of gleeful ridicule, and as a means of making opportunistic arguments against the reality of the trans identity, a bunch of academics who really should know better are attributing to Tuvel arguments she never made, simply because she connected those two subjects in an academic article.
Read the whole thing. It makes me want to read all these other things Jesse Singal has written. Like, "Here’s (More) Evidence Testosterone Makes Men Dumber."
As you can see [from the new study in Psychological Science], testosterone made the respondents significantly more likely to pick the answer that “felt” right but that wasn’t in fact correct. It didn’t seem to have an effect on their ability to solve arithmetic problems, which don’t have an answer that “feels” right and therefore don’t lend themselves to gut-impulse guessing.
Here's a Breitbart article about Jesse Singal: "Meet Precious Flower Jesse Singal: He Thinks You Are a ‘Hateful Idiot.’" It's really insanely intra-Breitbart:
[I]n response to Breitbart Tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos Tweeting out the article about Singal’s piece, Singal began to lose it. “Holy shit Breitbart responded to my beard blog post!!!!!!!!!!! These are some sensitive snowflakes,” Singal wrote....
That goes on and on about Singal going on and on.  Here's Singal's beard blog post (from 2015): "7 Breitbart Commenters Who Think Paul Ryan Might Be a Radical Muslim Because He Grew a Beard."

33 comments:

Big Mike said...

@Althouse, I don't know about testosterone, but I suspect reading Jesse Singal will make you dumber.

traditionalguy said...

Trans is now a term in high favor. I for one want to be called a trans commenter. You can't touch that. Think of it as triangulation strategy. I am now a victim , maybe.

Ignorance is Bliss said...

This Is What a Modern-Day Witch Hunt Looks Like.

This is what me not-caring looks like.

This sort of witch hunt is aimed at conservatives every day. Maybe after Jesse Singal writes critically about all of those witch hunts, I'll find the motivation to care about this one left-on-left witch hunt.

Richard said...

There is a whole lot of transsane in the feminist community.

Titus said...

I love reading all his stuff. Plus he is a Boston native and a Woody Woo-graduate of Princeton School of Public Policy!

Fernandinande said...

"Here’s (More) Evidence Testosterone Makes Men Dumber."

Here's (More) Evidence Men are Smarter Than Women

As you can see [from the new study in Yale Law], being female made the respondents significantly more likely to pick the answer that “felt” right but that wasn’t in fact correct.

Paper: "Men scored significantly higher than women on the CRT, as shown in Table 6."

Lyssa said...

What a fascinating, and baffling, article. I think that it could be tied back to yesterday's post about experts conclusively stating consensus rather than performing their expertise. The thought processes going on in these sorts of disputes is mind-boggling. I wonder where this will leave Ms. Tuvel's career?

Ignorance is Bliss said...

We accept the following premises about trans people and the rights and dignity to which they are entitled:...

Trans people are entitled to the same rights and dignity to which everyone else is entitled.

I don't know what premises about trans people she lists, but I'd be willing to bet that I don't accept them. ( At least not all of them. )

Anonymous said...

Just noticing the "modern-day witch hunts", eh? Not a very alert and observant fellow, is he?

wildswan said...

Easy-Think
If you attack a lefty, it's a witch hunt. If you attack a conservative, it's resistance to fascism.

Men have always tried to exclude women by pretending that thinking can be hard or challenging. They pretend it's a thing that a person does or does not do - like using a pipe wrench on your car's pipes - and that women often do not do it. But transrationalism shows us that this is just f---ed-up dead white male privilege misogyny trying to be a policeman who prevents the intersection of all goodness. Just say "Poop" like Elizabeth Warren - suddenly, right in their face. That shows them.

The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...

"This sort of witch hunt is aimed at conservatives every day."

Indeed. The Left can put ice-picks in each other all day long and it would never be anything but cause for celebration. The absurdity of the reasons is just a marker of the progress of their disintegration.

Bay Area Guy said...

So one grown man decides to act like woman and one particular white woman decides that she is a black woman, and this is supposed to have some deeper meaning?

Mike said...

"Maybe after Jesse Singal writes critically about all of those witch hunts, I'll find the motivation to care about this one left-on-left witch hunt."

He has.

traditionalguy said...

Everybody knows that you handle witches by the water dunking test. The water accepts the innocent one who drowns, and the water rejects the witches who will not drown.They will however burn at the stake.

Matt Sablan said...

The important take away from this thread is that Titus's new dog, if indeed that is his dog, is adorable.

exiledonmainstreet, green-eyed devil said...

If testosterone makes men dumber, what's Jesse Singal's excuse?

I personally have been hoping Rachael D. starts a trend. I think it would be great to see lots of white SJWs suddenly proclaiming their blackness, taking advantage of affirmative action programs, and competing with those who were merely born black for jobs with the NAACP and other AA organizations. And then loudly complaining about discrimination against transracial people if they don't get hired.

Likewise, I just can't wait until trannies ace all the women's sporting competitions and the born female athletes find that if they complain about the trannies having an unfair advantage, those born with vaginas will be told to "check their privilege."

And thus identity politics will collapse under the weight of its own absurdity and stupidity.

John henry said...

I think the whole thing is hilarious for being so ridiculous. Sort of like the Kilkenny cats.

Race is much more fluid than gender. What race is someone with one black, one Chinese, one native American and one white grandparents? We are all mixed race to some greater or lesser extent. There is no test for what race one is. DNA? perhaps, somewhat, but even that is not definitive.

OTOH, male/female seems pretty clear cut. You have a penis, testicles and so forth, you are male. You have a vagina, uterous and so on you are female.

Yet somehow sex is fluid and a penis person like Bruce Jenner can become a "woman" just by his own say-so is accepted as fact.

I think there is a Hell of a lot more to supporte Rachel Dolezol's claim to be black than Jenner's claim to be a woman. That is, Damn little in her case compared to none whatsoever in his.

John Henry

John henry said...

I don't think Ann has done so in the past but a post about TERFs would not be out of order on the blog.

TERF = Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists

Some feminists think that they have the right to their own little clubhouse with no boys allowed. (TERFs) Only "women born women" are allowed in Other radical feminists think they are transphobic.

I don't follow it but every once in a while run across an article about it that makes me giggle.

Here's an example from Anti-TERFs. TERFs are no less ridiculous

http://transadvocate.com/terf-what-it-means-and-where-it-came-from_n_13066.htm

Keep it up girls. You amuse me.

John Henry

David Docetad said...

The Hypatia kerfuffle is fascinating to watch.

The defenders of the original offending professor and her article are going to be in a tough spot.

Of course if one can self-identify gender, then one can self-identify race. In fact, it makes total sense to self-identify race, while gender-self identity is a sign of mental illness. And racial self-identity does not affect a properly ordered society (i.e., one not based on race).

The problem is that the promoters of gender self-identification have made it clear that racial self-identification is actually reasonable, and the implications to the race industry are profound - deadly really.

There is not enough popcorn to make it to the end of this movie.

Yancey Ward said...

The Left, if one cares to remember, is that which drove Doleazal out of her job, not the Right, and it didn't take ridicule from the Right to make the Left do this to her.

The question you have to ask is why the Left attacked her that way? I think the answer is almost blindingly obvious, but I haven't seen a single honest answer to that question from anyone on the Left. A commenter above alluded to the real reason acknowledging that he hoped there would be literally droves of Doleazals in the future, a position I also would wish for just for my amusement alone.

Yancey Ward said...

David Docetad wrote:

"The problem is that the promoters of gender self-identification have made it clear that racial self-identification is actually reasonable, and the implications to the race industry are profound - deadly really.

There is not enough popcorn to make it to the end of this movie.
"

This a hundred times.

Pianoman said...

The stories about male-athletes-participating-as-women have started to bubble up to the surface. Shouldn't take long before the trans movement and the Olympics butt heads.

Didn't the IOC lose it's shit over females taking massive doses of male hormones in order to gain nationalistic advantage? How is this different?

David Docetad said...

It should be noted that the original outrage to the Hypatia article was focused on gender, and not on race. At first I thought this was surprising. But the gender self-identity industry is not worried that the racial self-identity industry will be upended by accepting racial self-identity. No, the real problem the for gender industry is that accepting racial self-identity makes gender self-identity obviously idiotic and insane.

A lot of the academic philosophers who have defended the publishing of the original article, if not the article itself, have tried to make the point that the proper response is more argument, not censorship. But this misses the point. It is so obvious that people can and should be allowed to racially self-identify, and that
gender self-identification is absurd, that no argument may be allowed. The gender industry has a lot to lose here. Can you imaging spending your whole life writing academic articles that everyone will now realize are insane? They will not take this lightly, thus the vicious response.

Furthermore, since gender self-identification follows directly from same-sex marriage, SSM is also called into question.

Racial self-identity cannot be allowed to even be discussed.

Fernandinande said...

'I consider myself trans-species': Fantasy fan transforms himself into an ELF with £25,000 of plastic surgery including full body hair removal, skin bleaching and eye colouring

n.n said...

No one believes in witches. This is the post-enlightenment baby hunt.

Roger Sweeny said...

So it's not women who are irrational and at the mercy of their hormones. It's men.

Richard Dolan said...

"Read the whole thing."

I did, and accepting the premises of the article, Singal shows beyond much doubt that a vicious pile-on has been happening, all without any serious effort by the academics who are pushing it and should know better to find out whether what they were asserting was even slightly accurate (assuming they cared to know better, which they clearly didn't).

It reminded me of the twitter storm by other feminist academics that engulfed Prof Tim Hunt, a British Nobel winner, for a joke that went badly during a talk on women in science in 2015. Same with a former Harvard president who had the ill grace to raise a question that can't be raised in academic company.

Amazing how nasty, vicious and back-biting those academics can be. Fortunately, they're off in their own little world, devouring each other.

Hlavery said...

Of course, the original "Hypatia" was a Roman-era woman, a noted mathematician/scholar, who was torn into bloody gobbets by a politically-motivated mob. Ah, the irony....

Titus said...

he is not new matthew. He just turned 16. He is blind and deaf and I have had him since he was 8 weeks. I was a young man when he arrived...sigh.

Rick said...

4. It fails to seek out and sufficiently engage with scholarly work by those who are most vulnerable to the intersection of racial and gender oppressions (women of color) in its discussion of “transracialism”.

Philosophy by Women of Color is cultural appropriation. Those goddamn racists are everywhere.

exiledonmainstreet, green-eyed devil said...

He is still a cute dog, Titus.

My Golden Retriever is now 13 and is starting to have hip problems.

SukieTawdry said...

If people want to self-identify as something they're clearly not, they should feel free to do so. But why should society be expected to make accommodation for their illusions?

How does the estrogen brigade generally answer the bat/ball question? Seems to me anyone who thinks about the question for more than a few seconds will realize the answer can't be ten cents. Figuring out the right answer might take a little longer.

Gahrie said...

If people want to self-identify as something they're clearly not, they should feel free to do so.

I'm going to cut my legs off below my knees and call myself Napoleon.

But why should society be expected to make accommodation for their illusions?

Because I'm the freaking emperor of France you peasant!