Don't toe the line and echo approved orthodoxy? You're the enemy! This is extreme tribal behavior.
As a result, there is a chilling effect and a lot liberals no longer feel welcome on the left[1][2]. Certainly don't feel welcome to speak or think openly. This is incredibly regressive, damaging to liberalism and enlightenment values. Seriously, not being able to challenge your own side and engage in dialectic will send us back to the dark ages.
1. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-left-is-now-the-right
2. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-left-is-now-the-right/comm...
I don't agree with JK Rowling's take on these issues. But I actually think she likely has made at least some effort to do this. Some of her open letters certainly mention her knowing trans people and sympathising with their experiences.
Although in general I think the gender debate is a prime example of neither side listening to the other. There is a group of people who aren't listening to trans people when they say that they have gender feelings which are important to them. But equally trans people aren't listening to other people when they say that their physical bodies are important to them.
"the left" isn't a discrete thinkspace. There is a political spectrum, which isn't linear. The individuals mentioned are still relatively leftist, regardless of whoever is critical or engaging in other disparaging acts. Implying there is 1 left-wing or 1 right-wing is tribal behavior.
It is really the same process as having any ingrained belief challenged, it is going to make that person uncomfortable because something they took on faith is being challenged. That doesn't mean it's not something that should happen.
what i don't care about is how many genders an English department can create. I don't discriminate, but I also don't want to expend any energy understanding or empathizing .
I feel like they are.
Specifically, if you believe that "feeling like" a gender makes you that gender, then it seems to me that logically you have to believe one of the following:
(1) That having the physiology associated with a given gender is not sufficient to count as a gender.
This invalidates the identity of people like me who don't experience the "gender feeling" that trans people (and some cis people) talk about, and therefore base their identity as a man/woman on their physicality.
OR
(2) That gender categories are "open" where for example either feeling like a man OR having "male" physiology makes you a man.
But that seems to make the whole concept of gender pointless because people with penises don't share anything in common with people who feel like men (that they don't also share with people who feel like women and people with vaginas) unless they happen to be people who fall into both categories. It also makes it impossible for someone express that they have one of those things but not the other because there is only one label "man/woman" to describe two distinct phenomena.
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If you have a suggestion for how someone like me who has male physiology but doesn't have a "feeling of being a man" (or any other gender) can represent themselves in a system where there is only a single gender identifier and making sub-distinctions is frowned upon (because "trans (wo)men are (wo)men") then I'm all ears.
Shaming is often more about making the shamer feel good than a rational calculation of persuasive power.
This is called nonbinary, agender, or genderqueer. This is a fairly established situation. You may come across someone who uses nonstandard pronouns such as "they/them" or "zyr/zem" or something like that. There's even an LGBTQ flag for being nonbinary. (Q stands for queer/questioning as well). If you are assigned male at birth but don't identify as male or any other gender then you may be nonbinary or agender. If you're interested in learning more I recommend reaching out to a local LGBTQ community organization to be more educated about gender identity and to figure out if you might yourself be LGBTQ!
(Additionally on technicality, trans means "anything that isn't identifiying as one's assigned gender at birth". Being nonbinary is a subset of being trans. Society is most familiar with binary trans identity, which is when someone is assigned F/M at birth but identifies as M/F, however this is not the entire set of trans identity. You are free to be assigned M at birth but identify with no gender, and still be trans.)
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> If you're interested in learning more I recommend reaching out to a local LGBTQ community organisation to be more educated about gender identity and to figure out if you might yourself be LGBTQ!
I'm pretty familiar with the LGBTQ community in general, and I have spent a great deal of time over the last year or so reading up about and thinking about gender identity. My view is that the mainstream view in the LGBTQ community where one's gender identity (which label they use - man/woman/non-binary/etc) is assumed to correspond to "a feeling of gender" is quite naive. This is certainly true for some people, but there are also other reasons why people choose to use those labels including having certain physiologies or simply the fact that you were assigned the label and never bothered to change it. It seems to me that these other kinds of gender identity are equally valid and one way or another ought to find representation in whatever system of gender we settle one, but that a "gender feelings" focussed conception of gender doesn't provide this representation.
(one such system would be a system eschews having a single gender label at all and requires that we are more specific about which aspects of sex/gender we are talking about in situations where we need to make gendered distinctions)
You can identify as a masc nonbinary or AMAB nonbinary. These are distinctions that are pretty common to use in the LGBTQ community which is why I suggest not just reading up and thinking but actually going to a community and participating within it. Your local group may even be able to introduce you to other AMAB NB people that you can compare and contrast experiences with.
Maybe avoid characterizing your would-be allies in terms of dumb right-wing tropes like "how many genders an English department can create" while you're at it.
Maybe people aren't forcing each other at gunpoint, but it's pretty close.
Furthermore, unless there's more context I've skimmed over (I assume you're referring to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24636899), it's not clear that Coinbase will suffer any negative consequences from this whatsoever aside from being shunned by activists, which I presume is a consequence they're okay with since they published a blog post explicitly alienating that group. The only folks being forced I see are the employees being told to pipe down or ship out.
(also, while it may not be substantive to this discussion, the belief that neutrality, especially explicit neutrality, is tacit endorsement of the status quo is neither extreme nor unreasonable)
This is a direct example of what you are denying, that people are somehow not being forced to participate in these politics. They are, and increasingly so, with very few companies taking such an active stance to combat it.
And yes, neutrality is specifically the absence of any single position. It cannot be an endorsement of anything, be definition. Redefining terms to be whatever is politically convenient to create strawman positions and drama is another tactic used by those who want to force politics into every situation.
Source? I have no idea what this is referring to.
Effective neutrality due to lack of will or resources is one thing. But a declaration of neutrality is a message to other actors that you will not intervene in their affairs. It is a rejection of the cultural norm that extremism (outside the company) should be tempered. Sounds pretty political to me, but maybe you and I are working with different definitions of politics.