Something about Darwin
posted by Winston Smith at
8:45 PM
Sunday, December 23, 2007
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13 Comments:
I think it's not so much about being nice to her (who gives half a fuck about that, after all?) as it is about not using 'transsexual' as a term of insult.
---Myca
What Myca said.
With a caveat: unless you have knowledge that Coulter is, in fact, a tranny who makes a living by slagging off (among others) gays and transpeople to a Republican/Christian audience, then don't mock her for her physical appearance.
Lord knows she offers plenty of legitimate targets.
I think we're going a little too PC here. I'd agree that one shouldn't make fun of someone else's appearance, but WS gave his reason. He's right. If someone's going to make fun of people in vicious, hateful ways, it should probably be pointed out to that person when he or she is obviously subject to the same sort of attacks.
Or hell, to laugh at her. Come on, people, she's terrible. We should all feel bad for her, being so deluded and angry all the time. However, sometimes it helps one deal with another person's horrendous nature if one is permitted to laugh about how ridiculously bad it is.
Still, however, you can't just call someone a "fag". Why? That insinuates that being gay is something one wants to avoid. So, if WS were calling her a transsexual because he thought transsexuals were terrible people that ought to be stoned to death, that'd be bad. However, the usage of the word "tranny" doesn't appear to have been intended to be an insult because being transsexual is bad, but rather because being a woman who looks like she used to be a man is not a desirable appearance to have.
It's not in any way derogatory towards transsexuals. In fact, transsexuals wouldn't want to look like transsexuals either - they just want to be the opposite sex! Looking like a transsexual isn't really something anyone wants.
Given all of that, I don't think WS did anything inappropriate here. He justified the fact that he was making fun of her appearance by noting that she does vicious things all the time. I think that justification stands. He then pointed out that Ann Coulter looks like a man. It's true, she kinda does. He used the word "transsexual" not because he was making fun of her for being one, but for looking like one, which is something no one, not even real transsexuals want.
So he's probably safe here.
But I'd like to push this conversation in another direction if I might:
I do think about the whole transsexual thing every once in a while. I'm 100% sure that gay people shouldn't be chastised, because there's zero harm in being gay and if you're a man who likes men, who cares!? It makes no sense to me that anyone would make fun of these people. In fact, having a gay population within a larger heterosexual population has been theorized to be an evolutionary advantage by biologists in that it removes these animals from breeding competition (and thus, away from the potential for injury or pregnancy) while keeping them around for protection for the rest of the herd.
Every once in a while, though, I really wonder about whether transsexuals should be accepted or not. I mean, being gay requires doing nothing but dating the same sex. Being transsexual requires pushing the line of what should be accepted as a part of life versus what one can change a little too far for my comfort.
I doubt whether or not it's good to promote people undergoing ridiculously painful and horrendous, really, bodily mauling in order to do no more than obtain an appearance. It's not that one can become a woman, but only that one can look kind of like one.
Should we promote that? I don't think so, personally. Maybe one day when we have a the Genderomatic machine where you step in and *poof*, you're the other gender, with no cost of mauling your body, that'd be great! But as it is now, it's not really a sex change. That's a misleading term. It's simply mutilating yourself until you look like you want to look. You don't get to actually be a woman.
If you ask me, supporting people who care so much about how others perceive them that they're willing to mutilate themselves in order to get that appearance is not what I want to do.
Chuang Tzu wrote "He who has mastered the true nature of life does not labor over what life cannot do", and I agree wholeheartedly. You cannot change your sex. You can, however, go so crazy with obsession over it, however, that you are willing to destroy your body and waste thousands upon thousands of dollars trying to get a very poor facsimile of what you want.
So, I don't think it's very clear that we should all love the idea of supporting transsexuals because that's simply who they are. We should really try more to emphasize what Chuang Tzu said, if you ask me.
Don't pursue that which can't be caught. I would never do it, and I balk at encouraging others of doing it. As I said, maybe one day when we have the Genderomatic (and I worry about a day when we have that much control, but perhaps that's for another post), but I don't think it should necessarily be supported now.
Not that any of that is a reason that making fun of transsexuals should be permitted (that will always be bad), but food for thought.
He's right. If someone's going to make fun of people in vicious, hateful ways, it should probably be pointed out to that person when he or she is obviously subject to the same sort of attacks.
An interesting view of ethics, since it seems to endorse revenge. She hit me first!
No it doesn't.
Further, it wouldn't make it interesting if it did - plenty of views of ethics endorse revenge. What do you think capital punishment is?
Themystic - unbelievable. You just made Tom Van Dyke look good. Step by step:
Further, it wouldn't make it interesting if it did - plenty of views of ethics endorse revenge. What do you think capital punishment is?
I think a lot of the social contract guys distinguished revenge from punishment. I seem to remember Rawls doing this, even, as early as the 1950s (before Theory of Justice, maybe).
But this is just a little nitpick compared to all the other shit. What the hell are you trying to say here? Some questions:
a) Is this opinion on transsexuality based on knowing any transsexuals? I am not discounting your opinion based on this, but you should understand that people who have spent lots of time around / are friends with / are transsexuals will almost down the line tell you that you're full of shit, even if they are not wacko post-structuralists.
b) Why do you think that transsexuality is about appearance and, apparently, only appearance? To avoid being rude I would say this is 'simplistic'.
c) I don't really see much of a difference between calling someone a 'fag' and calling someone an 'adams-apple-having tranny'. In WS' blog post from awhile back about what a horse's ass Mike Du Toit was, I think he pointed out that making fun of people for something they are is not nice. It isn't nice to make fun of a gay dude for being gay, and it's not nice to make fun of a transsexual because he/she has trouble fitting herself into a rigid little biological box.
There are lots of points you can make about fucked up body issues in the transgendered and transsexual communities, and a lot of them are valid, but you should REALLY try to have an understanding of transsexuality before you do so because otherwise you kind of look like a real jerk.
Thank you for the gratuitous insult, Colin. Coming from someone who blogs paranoid racist filth like blaming the Jews for the inner-city drug trade, all I can say is I'm honored.
But you're quite right about your c), about there not being "much of a difference between calling someone a 'fag' and calling someone an 'adams-apple-having tranny'."
Also correct about Rawls, etc. Why should a contract be kept if there's no punishment for breaking it? No point in having a contract in the first place, then.
As for transsexuality itself and surgical solutions to the syndrome, Mystic is within his rights to question the prevailing wisdom, which is only decades old after all. Neither did I find Mystic's consideration of the issue from a Taoist perspective unkind or intolerant.
Saying that Coulter looks like a transsexual is no more necessarily insulting to transsexuals than saying that she looks like a man is insulting to men.
(Hmmm...though come to think of it...)
Though the PC biz is a joke, one needn't buy into it in order to recognize the obvious fact that one shouldn't make fun of people for things they can't help. I does seem interesting that I wouldn't have called her, say, "Faggy Spice." That could be either because I think that 'fag' is a term of abuse while 'tranny' isn't, or because I take derision directed toward transsexuals as being less serious than derision directed toward homosexuals.
Actually, I've never heard the word 'tranny' used as a term of abuse. Not that it's a word I run across that much, to tell you the truth...
I've only every heard it used as a kind of jokey term, by people who didn't seem to have any problem with transsexuals at all. Now, if some of YOU guys have a problem with transsexuals, that's your problem, not mine.
Associating Coulter with transsexuals is no more inherently degrading to the latter than is associating her with, say, liberals. The dig is a dig because its target would find it irksome.
I think there are responses here, but I don't actually think that the issue is interesting enough to pursue any further.
But, anyway, anybody who wants a purely PC blog is probably in the wrong place...
Damn, Colin. For all of that insulting, you certainly didn't make many points.
Your a) You seem to suggest that I'm full of shit without giving any reason. I'm perfectly able to be educated on the issue. I don't really know what you took issue with in my post - you didn't specify, so I can't really respond. Sorry.
Your b) My reason for thinking it was about appearance was, as I explained, that undergoing a "sex change" operation does nothing but grant you an appearance. You don't actually become the opposite sex. Therefore, transsexualism can be nothing but a change in appearance. I'm not trying to be crude here, but if you get a sex change operation, you can't really have a period, you can't get pregnant, and any organs that you "acquire", do not have any functionality - they are only for appearance. That's just how it is in the current arena of sex changing.
Your c) WS responded to that so I won't be redundant here.
Anyway, if you're going to insult me, at least let me know why. I wasn't trying to be ridiculous here, and yes, it is a touchy topic (obviously for you), so we can just drop it if it'd be better for you, but I'm open to hearing your opinion here.
My main point was that, given the definition of a transsexual as someone who undergoes surgery in order to obtain the necessary physical appearance of the opposite sex with which he or she identifies, it appears to me that this sort of behavior is entirely aimed at obtaining the appearance of being the opposite sex without regard to the fact that one cannot become the opposite sex.
To me, it is very similar to plastic surgery in which someone with an inferiority complex gets fake muscles implanted into his chest (yes this is done, you can Google it). Sure, now he looks somewhat like he's stronger, but he's not. There is no functionality, only appearance.
A sex change operation is the same thing.
What would you say about someone who decided that he or she is "transspecies"? What if he or she wanted to be a bird and so (s)he got surgery to make him (her) look like a bird. Of course, (s)he is unable to fly and can't do anything birds do, but now (s)he kinda sorta looks like a bird.
This doesn't seem to me like something that one should support. Of course this doesn't mean that we should be in any way hostile towards these people, just that it might be going too far to say that it's "only a lifestyle choice" or something. I think it appears to be more problematic than that.
But please, I'm totally open to being wrong on this, so if you have good reasons for me, I'm absolutely willing to hear them.
And thanks, Tom.
Huge 'ahahaha' at TVD taking that joke conspiracy theory blog seriously. I was going to sell you a bridge but black UN helicopters won't let me.
Mystic, I don't mean to come off as touchy about trans kind of stuff; what I was trying to get across was that it's an extremely complicated thing and, at least for the people who have surgery or hormone treatments done, it's about much more than just physical appearance. It can be about sexual pleasure, it can be psychological, it can just be a matter of feeling comfortable in your own skin. Furthermore, I think you're downplaying how much people react to physical appearances; this discussion did start with 'Anne Coulter has an adam's apple' after all.
I think your objection here might be to reiterate the stuff from Tzu, which I would think is a little outdated now that we have phenomena such as biopolitics, surgery, technology, Western medicine, etc.
Regarding your point about transspecies; I think that's more of an anthropological question than anything and I don't know enough about these to know how to REALLY answer it to anyone's satisfaction. I kind of think that it comes from a much different place than transsexuality, but this is mostly based on reading about the furry community and watching a thing on extreme body modification where a guy got his tongue split so he'd look more like a lizard or something. Anyway, I don't really think that's relevant because questioning species membership seems a lot more extreme than just questioning sex.
The ONLY point I was making by utilizing the quote from Chuang Tzu was that I think it's more important to encourage the acceptance of that which one cannot change over the pursuit of that which cannot be caught. Regardless of how old Chuang Tzu is, or whatever, I think it's a valid point - it wasn't supposed to indicate that I think Taoists know everything or everyone should follow every word Chuang Tzu said. I wouldn't have even mentioned his name if I hadn't wanted to give credit where it's due.
The transspecies thing was supposed to be an analogy for transsexualism. I don't know why it's an anthropological question - it's just supposed to be another example of where someone wants to change something that can't be changed.
You say it could be about sexual pleasure, but there are loads of problems with that that I'm not going to go into. Further, if the extreme trauma of a sex change operation is undergone for the sole purpose of sexual gratification, I'm going to have to say that that seems a bit unhealthy to me.
You say it could be a psychological thing, but I don't really know what you mean by that. If you mean it's psychological in that the person desires to feel like the opposite sex, then my initial objection that the person is, in fact, still not the opposite sex, but rather just has the appearance of the opposite sex, still stands.
You say it could be about "feeling comfortable in your own skin", but again, if that's just because you now look somewhat like the opposite sex, that sounds like a false sense of comfort to me.
In the end, I'm not suggesting that we prohibit transsexualism, or make fun of transsexuals, just that we might want to rethink its encouragement - perhaps encouraging better solutions in place of it, like not being so attached to one's body that one cannot live one's life without it being the exact way one desires it to be.
Being a bird would be cool as hell, but it's impossible. Being a woman might be great! But, again, for me it is impossible. Time spent chasing down these impossibilities seems to me to be something that should not be encouraged. Instead, we might want to just acknowledge the fact that some things cannot be changed and that one's time is most likely better spent learning to accept that fact than having sex change operations.
That's it. That's all I was saying. Of course, I could be wrong. That's just how it seems to me at the moment. I've had plenty of my life wasted mulling over things I can't change, and I know how hard it can be to accept them, but it has proven to be a very worthwhile endeavor.
Well, Colin, you certainly had me going. See, there's someone called "lovable liberal" who comments here, and they've written that the right wing will take violence to the streets if they don't get their way. So you fit right in.
So you understand my confusion, that, and that that joke blog isn't actually funny. Your insult of me was equally not worth the effort to type it.
For accuracy's sake---which nobody cares about---Ann Coulter didn't call any homosexuals fags, just Al Gore and John Edwards, for their earth-tonish metrosexuality. So congratulations, WS, you're no worse than she is, altho comparing the form and content of your writing to hers, I don't quite perceive why you might think you're the slightest bit better.
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