| Leadified said: I am not quite sure if I understand the connection of the politicization of permitted speech and a Barnes and Nobles book display... Barnes and Nobles is a private corporation and it is in their right to choose want they want to and not want to display. Demanding the opposite would be a violation of their freedom of speech. Besides, they still sell Rowling's books, so I am not sure what the problem is. On the other hand, conservatives have stated their intention to burn library books because it contains speech they do not like. Is that not a more serious and existential issue? There's been numerous cases of butch lesbians being harassed by men and gender critical activists because of the campaign by both to reinforce traditional gender norms which causes real world harm to women everywhere. The reason I point this out is because your arguments about free speech and security, while not invalid by any means, can easily be flipped the other way around to make the same point from the other perspective... |
I agree, but only to a point. Namely, I don't buy into the corporate personhood argument. For-profit business corporations have no legitimate claim to human status as far as I'm concerned and therefore no valid claim to human rights. Authors on the other hand...
Seriously, you know exactly what I'm getting at. Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, etc. etc. etc. are all private companies, sure, but they collectively form and control today's public square. If this idea is okayed and that one is not by all them in uniform in response to angry mobs demanding as much, that has a similar practical effect to legal censorship. You know this. I know this. Let us not disingenuously pretend it is otherwise. Maybe it's my scary socialist instincts to think of the means of communication as public utilities that should operate in the interests of the public as a whole and as such facilitate the widest possible range of conversation, and not as things that should be owned and run privately and funded by advertising for the purposes of separating the public from their money, but point is.
And look look, I can cite threats by gender identity believers to burn books they don't like as well! 
Progressives are, in reality, not particularly more mature that way than the people they criticize. The difference is that most of the business community takes up their position on matters like this and we both know it, which is why you're now utilizing the banal corporate personhood argument here that ten years ago leftists were roundly, and rightly in my opinion, condemning. Corporate personhood is the same argument Chick Fil-A used to use to defend their ostensible right not to hire any gay people (as a for-profit business company can have a religion that merits constitutional recognition, you see), the argument that Hobby Lobby has used to deny their female workers access to health care plans covering birth control despite the fact that the Affordable Care Act obliged them to (once again, having a company religion makes them above the law, it turns out), and so on and so on.
I guess my instinct to view the free speech cause as a "right wing" cause and argument today has to do with the fact that it's simply not one you see progressives attempting to make anymore save for in a defensive context like you are here in this one, whereas conservatives, by contrast, lament "cancel culture" all the time. Does that actually mean that rightists are consistent in their support for the free speech of artists and individuals, including ones they don't agree with? Nope! Not even close. But it does mean that opinions progressives consider right wing are more likely to actually be censored, officially discouraged, etc. today. And we both know that.
Now as to this especially ridiculous insinuation that maybe I hate lesbians and want the butch ones harassed out of the women's room...*sighs* come on now. I am a lesbian and by now everyone here knows that, as are many gender critical women. Indeed I'd go as far as to say that lesbians are disproportionately represented as a share of the gender critical community, including our fair share of the butch ones. Please don't insult my intelligence that way. I know butch women are often harassed out of the women's room and that's wrong. It's been that way my whole life. I've seen it. It's wrong. But it's not the issue here. My objection is to men declaring all public spaces theirs, affording girls and women no place of privacy or refuge. Concerning unisex facilities, the facts remain that, as discussed at great length in the article I cited earlier, "90% of cases of sexual assaults, voyeurism, and harassment take place in unisex facilities". Therefore, I contend that rendering all facilities unisex is objectively harmful to girls and women, as in more harmful than the alternative.
I'll also add in response to your claim that gender critical feminism is about "reinforc[ing] traditional gender norms" that you clearly don't understand what the movement is about very well. The prevailing view among gender critical feminists is that gender (unlike biological sex) is fiction; that it is a fundamentally conservative concept that exists to reinforce patriarchal sex roles and which, as such, can have no positive appropriation by the left. If the goal of masculinism is to compel everyone to behave according to crude stereotypes about their sex so that men command and women obey, transgenderism has as its goal that instead gender-nonconforming people should change their public identity to match the sex they supposedly behave like. GC feminists view those as two sides of the same coin, not as some kind of rupture with patriarchal norms. In reality, the gender-nonconforming woman should be accepted as such. She should not feel social pressure to change her legal identity because she isn't a stereotype or absurdly told she is not a lesbian because she isn't interested in penile penetration.
Last edited by Jaicee - on 02 December 2021
