No, it’s a debate over whether transgender women can compete in women’s sports leagues.
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Nice one. Also Edward Snowden.
is transgender women different from men who self identify as women?
I share this question as well. I am not going to be cowed by the slippery slope argument and not do anything about people doing and saying heinous things.
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I had to stop reading that first article because BARF but is she really crying over being canceled by a book club?
Yes.
I think this take misses the point. No one signed that letter because they thought it was going to decrease the amount that they get yelled at online. (If they did, oops!) The people who signed the letter are, by construction, people who have enough power and security that they can piss people off without having their lives ruined, although the fact that a handful of signers have decided they needed to recant suggests that there may have been some miscalculations. If you have power, you don’t need free speech to get a hearing for your ideas or protection from consequences if you make a mistake. That’s what the power is for! What I suspect most of the authors are concerned about is that people with less power are getting a clear message that they need to keep their heads down about more and more things if they want to keep their lives intact. By definition, those people are not going to sign an open letter defying online mobs.
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How? Honestly asking.
I remember when the SNL writer got fired for saying that Baron Trump would be the first home schooled shooter.
One of them is real.
James Gunn yo. But later uncancelled
To answer your direct question: when people use the term transgender woman, they are talking about a person who you would consider “a man who identifies as a woman”. The blowback you’re getting is because the language you use implies that their “true” gender is male, and that they’ve simply adopted the (presumably false) label of woman.
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Who is in this brigade?
I’d also recommend Lindsey Ellis (though she focuses more on literature and the media than Contra) they are both excellent youtube follows
I could quote-mine, but I fear that I’d be derailing my own point. Even if no such ‘brigade’ existed here on UnStuck, it certainly exists where it actually matters, so to speak, among those with significant ‘platforms’:
But elsewhere in the geographically diverse, horizontally organized Black Lives Matter movement, a third subset is pursuing change ineffectively and objectionably. Rather than trying to persuade, they’re aiming to target skeptics, adversaries and even weak allies with shaming, verbal attacks, and attempts to silence them.
This will hurt their cause and do much harm besides.
Black Lives Matter and the Means of Persuasion - The Atlantic
As I mentioned above, there is no “hive mind” on “the left”. No amount of these “Harper’s Letters” are going to dissuade this “third subset” from doing what these anti-“cancel culture” folks don’t want to have done. Unlike random posters on random interwebs forums, the fool who wrote this essay is paid to think this shit through… and so really should be aware of this simple fact.
He’s asking for something he (should) know will never actually happen. This raises the obvious Q: Why? What actual purpose is supposed to be served by all this navel-gazing, whining, and concern trolling?
Because of the Internet most people can find a platform to share their thoughts and ideas, no matter how rancid.
There is no effective way to squelch a person, in the US, in 2020 shirt of imprisonment or murder. People are not being denied the ability to speak. They are being denied the “right” to have others he forced to propagate their speech.
Before the modern internet it was possible to essentially silence someone because the means of propagation were controlled by a few people. That is not the case and everyone needs to move their views on free speech into the 21st century.
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Some types of talk have been squelched though. Like the meat people shut Oprah up. Scientologists do a pretty good job of shutting people up. So, imprisonment, murder or civil suits.
While his views on sports participation seem reasonable, his concern trolling about bans based on intentionally mis-gendering people on social media isn’t. Since he does both of these things and you’re right, people aren’t responding with arguments, you can’t jump to “They’re saying he’s a bigot because of his reasonable view on participation in sports.”
Mormons, too.
In the future, will there be more effective ways to silence people on the internet? Imagine a world where you have more advanced AI or better algorithms than what places like Youtube and Facebook currently use to police their sites. Imagine these things could filter as well as or better than having dedicated human staff reading and watching everything on the internet.
Should our view of free speech on the internet be expressed in such a way that we could easily apply it to that scenario? Or do we base the limits of how we can constrict online expression based on what we want the world to look like and move the goalposts to accommodate changes in technology?