Joss Whedon: A Bigot For Thinking That Women Do Not Have Testicles
posted by Winston Smith at
7:39 PM
Sunday, February 09, 2014
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4 Comments:
His biological social constructs are literally raping the rights of the LGBT community.
I'm inclined to leave Whedon to his fate, since (a) he's let himself become an authority figure on sex/gender matters in pop-lefty circles and should know the rules of his own game, and (b) the explanation for the Reavers in "Serenity" was complete bullshit. (They were a lot scarier when they were those into whom the abyss stared back, rather than people fed angry drugs.) Down the hatch for you, Joss. But, for this to be an example of someone being persecuted for the crime of merely affirming true propositions, which presupposes that is all he was doing.
On the thread below, you were going to explain how the in vitro fatherhood case is not analogous to transexuality cases. May as well move the question up here. How are they disanalogous?
Right, so it now seems to me that my revirgination example is actually better than your in-vitro father example, after all, and that the ivf example actually won't do the trick.
Or, perhaps it's better to look at a crucial claim in your response:
"...all that's being demanded of you is to understand the concept by which the person understands himself and to use some words that are important to him to mean that concept."
At least in conjunction with that claim, I don't think we can use the 'father' example. The thing about the father example is that 'father' is uncontroversially ambiguous (or close to it) as between its (probably more central) biological meaning and the other meaning (nurturing male parent or some such).
"He's not really my father," said of someone who is your biological father, meaning that he was not a nurturing male parent, is not really deviating from the concept--it's just emphasizing the secondary meaning of 'father.'
But, in the imagined case in which someone says "I was never a boy," there's no aspect of the concept that is being used there. So the father example ends up prejudicing the case/being disanalogous.
Saying "hey, there's an ambiguity and I'm asking you to take the concept/term in one way rather than another" is one thing...still a not-entirely-clear case to me...but just fabricating a new concept/meaning is...more of a problem. Especially when the old word is being used... (It's a particular problem to use a word that suggests a meaning you want, but doesn't actually mean it, and to use it in a way that illicitly maintains the old associations...)
So, I suppose I'm saying: in the end I must dispute your claim above. What's being asked is more than what you say.
The person might perhaps reasonably request that I emphasize one meaning of an ambiguous term...or he might introduce a new term for a new concept...but in asking me to use an old term in a way that deviates markedly from the concept associated with that term, he is asking me to either say something false ore incorrectly categorize something/someone.
In the case I'm actually thinking of (and I'll post the link soon), a person is claming to have never been a boy when she uncontroversially was, and has said so herself. (I'm not even convinced that this use of the feminine pronoun is correct, but I'm willing to overlook niceties here.)
It's false to say that someone who was born a boy was not born a boy, and it's incorrect to categorize a baby male human as not a boy...so we're either being asked to assert/believe falsehoods or something tantamount to it...
Sorry...no sleep last night, that's a poorly-written, poorly-organized blob...
Incidentally, I couldn't agree more about the Reavers. Goddang it, why do people have to take cool quasi-supernatural accounts and screw them up with lame naturalistic explanations? It's midi-chlorians all over again... Spinning the dead rising from their graves into a virus...that's just a cool and natural-seeming variation on a theme. But the reavers thing was a huge damn error.
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