Adventures in Gender Activism at FFRF

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

@Mercer

Possible? Maybe.

Likely to work in practice? Unlikely with such a difficult issue.

It seems to me part of the difficulty is that too much ground has been ceded to extremists on both sides the issue. And no I don’t think the gender extremists are remotely as dangerous or numerous as the fundamentalist bigots that genuinely want to ruin other people’s lives.

I just think they too (the gender extremists) need to be called out, and I think the otherwise entirely reasonable concern for the potential for harm against trans people inadvertently serves to give too much space for the gender extremists. The opinions of which are then used and exploited, deliberately, by the fundamentalist bigots who highlight them (the statements of the worst of the gender extremists) as if they are typical left wing positions. And that this actually seems to be working (it appears to affect public opinion), because (among other things) a lot of much more reasonable (but otherwise pro-trans) people are afraid of speaking up on the topic out of fear of being called transphobes and considered bigots themselves if they don’t cede on literally every single trans-related issue. It’s a viscious cycle.

Perhaps Jerry Coyne just isn’t very good at being the more reasonable voice on these matter. I actually don’t go hunting for every trans-controversy news item that crops up, preferring to mostly stay away from the topic to be honest, out of… I dare say it, self-censorship. I heard about the recent boxer controversy but never looked into it. I don’t care about bathrooms, pronouns, clothing, names, drag-queens, pride flags, etc. etc. At all.

@Mercer

1. Coyne should never have used those lousy UK prison statistics.
2. No one should have called Coyne a bigot for doing #1.
3. FFRF should not have taken anything down.
4. One’s personal experience is not necessarily applicable to those of a large number of other people.
5. Gender is not binary.
6. Sex is not binary either, just much closer to being binary than gender.
7. One’s right to fair competition in sports is not as important as one’s basic right to life.

1. I have no idea, haven’t looked into it at all.
2. Strongly inclined towards agreeing, though I’m mindful I don’t know the details about those prison statistics and what Coyne might or might not have known about them.
3. Agreed.
4. Agreed.
5. Depends on what you mean by gender of course, but yeah generally agreed.
6. Unsure. I don’t know enough about what the possible exceptions could be to say that I strongly disagree (in other words I’m leaning towards sex being binary), as from what little I have read I’m inclined to consider any deviations from the gametic sex definitions as developmental disorders (or something like that), rather than true/third sexes of their own.
7. Agreed.