Recently I came across the new SOTT Focus Article here: http://www.sott.net/article/279645-Mummy-why-is-Daddy-wearing-a-dress-Daddy-why-does-Mummy-have-a-moustache#comment104751
Since it dealt with a lot of issues I felt particularly vested in, I decided to comment about it. Since I felt some of my emotional buttons were pressed a bit upon an initial reading, I decided to take the disclaimer to heart and read as carefully as possible to be as unbiased as possible in judgement. So I did this. I read the article several times over, very carefully, often with several hours in between readings. I slept on it. The strange result of this was that, instead of reducing the problems I saw with the article (which probably arose from emotional bias), I actually began to see more problems with it, and as a consequence grew more frustrated. Because of that I think that the general issues I had with it were not entirely subjective in nature, but may have been objective (at least in part) and therefore perhaps valuable for others to hear about. Perhaps reading it over and over again got rid of some critical correction I was engaging in? Who knows. I’ll let the network decide.
Anyway, to start off I want to thank Pierre for his excellent exposure of the predatory hypersexualization of children at progressively younger and younger ages. I also liked the parts toward the end that discussed our society’s increasingly permissive attitude toward buying and selling embryos, irresponsible abortions, etc., and how sad it is that successful monogamous marriages are declining.
On the flip side, I found a lot of parts of the article to be quite ignorant and damaging to gay and particularly trans people. Since people can get different ideas about what it means to be damaging or helpful to gay, trans, or other oppressed minorities, I wanted to lay that out first so readers know what exactly I mean by damaging.
I appreciate that right at the start SOTT comes out in support (at least superficially) of marriage, sexual freedom, and employment equality for gay people, and saying that the article (at least superficially) is not meant to be an attack on gays. But is that enough to dismiss something as not being harmful? Social justice and civil rights activists have dealt with a lot of people and groups who superficially support things, but in attitudes and deeds still end up harming or marginalizing oppressed minorities in ways. The term used to describe these interests are Bad Allies, which is in a way their term for cointelpro (official or otherwise).
They typically look at 4 things when determining if someone is helping or harming oppressed minorities.
1. Privilege. Do they fully acknowledge their privileges in not having to deal with oppression, and do they acknowledge to extent to which the minority has and continues to struggle with ostracism, poverty, violence, and employment discrimination (laws on paper be damned)? Or, do they trivialize and dismiss these difficulties and claim things weren't or aren't as bad as the oppressed group make it out to be?
2. Listening. Do they attend to and listen to struggling people about their needs and how they can best be supported? Or does the member from the majority condescendingly make decisions about which voices in the minority are representative of the needs of the minority while ignoring others?
3. Empowering participation. Is the person actually helping minority members to speak to a wider audience and gain acceptance, or do they position themselves as mediators to speak on their behalf while cutting actual minority members out of the picture and out of the dialogue that is ABOUT THEM?
4. Feedback. When an ally misspeaks in a private or public setting (due to lack of knowledge and understanding) and is reprimanded by a minority member, do they attentively listen to their concerns about how their comments affect others, and does this change their behavior? Or, attached to the idea of their being a good person helping others, conclude the concerns are unfounded, and characterize the criticism as hysteria/hypersensitivity, or otherwise diminish the objectivity or experiences of the person they hurt?
There’s a lot of overlap between the 4 points, but the essence of the message is this: in order to actually support gays, there needs to be a level of empathy and respect for them, the troubles they’ve faced collectively, and the work they’ve done to overcome it, and an attempt to receptively ask them how they can assist in their emancipation. I feel this empathy and respect, despite SOTT’s sincerest efforts, is absent in ways from the article, for reasons I hope to explain as clearly as possible below.
She looks like a woman with a beard—it’s a really simply description. A friend of mine has a 90 year old grandmother, and she had no problems getting Conchita. A part of me wonders if Pierre simply projects here, and when he says Conchita is far from his grandma’s frame of reference what he actually means is that she is far from HIS.
Here Pierre idealizes the “simplicity” of heterosexuality and cissexuality. Simple is an artificially vague term, the sort that is used in NLP courses to induce agreement and rapport in readers. An uncritical mind upon reading this immediately thinks that this “simplicity” was good. What is so good about “simple?” Things were “simple” back then because those who did not fit the predominant culture’s norms were ostracized, pathologized, and subjected to violence, corrective rape, and chemical castration. Gays and trans people have always been written out of history and erased. If Pierre is attempting to awaken and warn gays of pathologicals in their movement, the worst way to do this would be to idealize and laude periods when they were persecuted. That’s simple external considering.
Pierre is right that the oppression of gay and trans people has been around for millennia, but when he says there’s no reason for such things to change, he is implicitly validating and assenting to the marginalization and suffering they have undergone. He says one thing explicitly, and another thing implicitly.
Pierre may argue that he was actually referring to a different set of things which didn’t have a reason to change (like there being little-to-no divorce), but to me that simply highlights the fact that in that previous paragraph he didn’t consider gay or trans people at all when he wrote it. He may have paid lip service to gay people at least, but he didn’t fundamentally empathize with them or understand their condition in those times.
Why doesn’t Pierre mention sexual liberation among the list of legitimate movements? In these times homosexuality was still outlawed and considered a psychiatric illness. Isn’t the freedom to love someone a legitimate freedom to pursue? In excluding it from the list of “good movements,” Pierre relegates it to the pursuit of solely pathological interests. This may not have been his conscious intention, but that is what comes across.
Very true, all that can be said on the origin of homosexuality can be said about the origin of transsexuality. The education and advocacy of trans people, where it is mentioned at all, is met with nothing but derision. Why?
What justified approach was this? Not much context is offered here. Again, this is extremely vague language, onto which people can project whatever they wish. Can you be more specific?
This is fallacious. The purpose of the gay rights movement is to fully integrate them into mainstream society with a combination of legal and social advocacy. Racism didn’t end overnight with the passing of the Civil Rights Act; why would anyone expect the same to happen to homophobia? There are still many places, even in the so-called tolerant countries, where homosexuality is frowned upon and marginalized, if not violently addressed.
Pierre says he’s not anti-gay. Why does he trivialize the fact that many still struggle every day long after he alleges their advocates have lost their raison d’étre? How does that help them at all?
This has nothing to do with savouring a sense of otherness and everything to do with making gays personable and more cognitively accessible. More common and prominent depictions of them in life increases empathy towards them, and so help further legal and social integration.
An aside about the word pride. It was always about equality, and still is. But it has always been about pride as well. For gays to be open about who they are with family, coworkers, and society, they had to face incredible shaming from traditional institutions. These are people who have been told their whole lives they are destined for Hell, that they should be punished or possibly killed for their ability to love someone the same as them. They have been narcissistically wounded on a social scale that is very hard for straight people to comprehend if they are not subjected to similar discrimination. Pride is about gays undoing centuries of inculcated negative programming and brainwashing about themselves. It’s about rejecting things people who don’t understand them say about them, about looking inwards and finding their inner self-worth, about looking beneath all the shaming and near-universal condemnation and finding someone who deserves to be happy and deserves to belong in a loving community and society that celebrates all they have to contribute individually and collectively. That, at least, is what it has meant to me, and how it has helped me.
Based on what facts or evidence? The hyperlink has nothing to do with the rest of the paragraph.
As for thinking there’s reversal, it is quite typical of privileged majorities to think of the liberation of others as a zero-sum game in which boons to the marginalized come at the expense of the majority, causing them to develop a reactionary victim complex. This is seen quite commonly in the men’s rights movement, straight pride, or the ku klux klan. Straight people feeling anachronistic or plain is more of this zero sum thinking. Homosexuality becoming acceptable or celebrated does not in any way diminish straight people.
http://exploreable.wordpress.com/2011/05/25/white-people-face-the-worst-racism/
This may be counterintuitive, but orientation is certainly not a private matter. This highlights one of the ways in which Pierre does not recognize the privileges that being straight affords him.
When you mention to the grocer amid many other customers you’re bringing your girlfriend over for dinner tonight, that is being public about your sexual orientation. When a guy proposes to his fiancé at a football or hockey game and gives her a big wet one for the cameras, that is also a public declaration of their sexuality. Gays are subjected to this everywhere. When gays try to do the same, they get accused by homophobics of being activists or proselytes in quite a hurry for “shoving their sexual orientation in their faces.” Everyone’s is, but it’s invisible to most people unless it’s something that sets of aversive affects in their system 1. Asking for two sets of rules, one for straights and one for gays, is bigotry, plain and simple, and so is asking sexual orientation to be private. It is nothing less than a relegation of gays back to living in the closet. In shame. Like they have been for millennia ever since wicked people decided that they were less deserving of empathy and respect.
Who’s arguing for special status? All that’s asked for is equal rights.
The study linked is a non-sequiter. The fact that the marriages are less successful in no way whether or not gays want to be married. I am gay myself, as are about 70% of my friends. Believe me, they want marriage and kids just as much as straight people do. There are a number which do not want marriage or children, true, but there are many straight people who don’t either.
When a straight person comes up to me and proceeds to explain to me what the views of the community I belong to are, and his ideas turn out to be quite orthogonal to my own experiences (and that of, well, everyone else I know), I feel compelled to ask how this person comes up with his information, and how he decides who gets to represent and speak on my behalf about what my actual social and advocacy interests are.
When “allies” to the gay movement do this, they risk coming across as heavily paternalistic or ignorant, which was my experience with Pierre in the context of his saying most gay people do not want to marry (they just collectively devote millions of dollars and volunteer hours to advocate for it.)
It is contradictory to say that gays do not want to be interfered with, but do not want marriage (which entails visitation rights in hospitals and funerals, ability to share insurance coverage, tax benefits, immigration permission, guardianship of next of kin, among other things). All of these boons marriage offer are de facto protection from interference!
Here’s a 10 minute video that shows what happens when that protection is denied:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR9gyloyOjM
To claim pursuit of legalizing same-sex marriage is fundamentally about allowing psychopathic males to marry and molest children is ignorant, and trivializes and ignores the needs and grievances of the gays who advocate for it – see the above comment.
Even if there are some incidents of it being opportunistically exploited, claiming that marriage equality is being promoted for those very nefarious reasons lends itself to the association that same-sex marriage is fundamentally harmful to children. Allowing French people to adopt children can also be opportunistically exploited, because some French people certainly are pedophilic psychopaths. Does that mean it's reasonable to talk about how laws permitting marriage and adoption by the French have a nefarious purpose behind them? If you (assuming you're French) were to read such an article, would you not feel condescended to and humiliated, the way they imply that somehow there's a cost to pay in tortured and murdered children for enforcing your rights as a human being (right to marry in this case)?
The popular myth that gays are higher on the socioeconomic ladder is actually quite false, and by extension so is the claim that gays have more adoption rights than straights. The ironic tone with which the notion that gays have more rights than straights is mentioned, once again, betrays the view of discrimination as a zero-sum game.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/03/the-myth-of-gay-affluence/284570/
Here there is the suggested equivocation of encouraging entropic pleasure for the self in children with tolerating and accepting and having empathy for those who prefer to dress differently or play with different toys. I have trouble comprehending the confusion of ideas that would provoke such a conflation.
Where is this condemnation of transsexuality coming from? Nothing that can be said about homosexuals that cannot be said about transsexuals, as I’ve said before. They are part of a normal distribution of traits as well, as equally natural as homosexuals.
Pierre, if you haven’t read the wiki entry about causes of transsexuality, I highly encourage it. The Lust chapter in Panksepps’ Archaeology of Mind also speaks about a number of causes for transsexuality that you may also find educational.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_transsexualism
Pierre, I don’t understand why you add the cartoon to the list of negative consequences of gender theory. It’s a positive depiction of a same-sex affection... one could be forgiven for thinking this is something you have beef with subconsciously.
I checked out the nursery mentioned, and unless my French is mistaken it seems that those who run the nursery do NOT force children to play with the toys of the opposite gender. It is more the case they try not to impose a specific gendered toy on them as much as possible. I get that English may not be the author’s (or possibly even the editor’s) first language, but that’s not a trivial distinction.
Source: http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2012/09/07/01016-20120907ARTFIG00665-a-saint-ouen-on-lutte-contre-le-sexisme-des-la-creche.php
So what? If it increases acceptance of men who prefer to wear dresses, why not? It’s not forcing them or harming them or damaging them in any way. This is another example of casual transphobia on Pierre’s part, which he does nothing at all to justify. There really is something about cissexuality (having men purely masculine and women purely feminine) which seems to appeal a lot to Pierre.
Honestly, where does Pierre get the idea that advocating gay rights has nothing to do with freedom or equality? That is an extraordinary claim to make that I haven’t seen any convincing support for it so far.
I would agree with what was said about the dangers of exposing children to sexuality too early. However, allowing the adoption of different gendered toys or dress, as well as legitimizing crushes and hand-holding with members of your own sex, do not qualify as encouraging pedophilia. They do not qualify because they are not harmful activities as long as they are not forced to express their gender or orientation in certain ways. It’s long been the case (back in the simple old days Pierre lauded) that those children who did not conform to cis-heteronormative behaviors were heavily traumatized and narcissistically wounded by parents, peers, and other adult authority figures. Perhaps he needs a reminder about that?
This is making a naturalistic fallacy. They are both variations which may arise (I mean, if someone can wake up from a head injury with xenoglossy, what CAN’T you acquire from a bump on the head?) What makes one neutral and the other pathological is the fruits they bear in their interpersonal relationships as a result of this. Gay and trans people are fully capable of having virtuous love relationships with those they desire. Pedophiles are not. Nor are psychopaths in general, but that’s an aside.
This is actually a widening recognition of the fact that some women are naturally less feminine than others (ditto for men), and making space where it is safe to express and live how they feel called to. Again, it’s not hurting anyone. Why is this deemed problematic to Pierre?
I don’t think gays and lesbians are alone in failing to live up to more positive and admirable qualities. It’s endemic to the mainstream culture itself. It’s unrealistic to expect them to consciously behave differently from others, as they are all just human.
Furthermore, when Pierre says they attempt to mimic, he is in effect claiming those behaviors are outside of them, or artificial somewhat. What if the natural influences that would predispose people to more belligerence are biologically more marked in lesbians (perhaps through some change in vasopressin function, or whatever?) Pierre claims being gay isn’t a choice; how much of this also applies to things he automatically assumes to be foreign to them (such as traits more common to the opposite sex)?
I think here Pierre confuses sex with gender. They’re not the same. Sex is what is given to us biologically, and gender is what the culture and socialization does with what is given to us as conditioning. I think here Pierre projects his own subjective ideals about how men and women ought to be onto others (highly cis-normative and transphobic), without having any regard as to what their actual identity and emotional needs are. See the above comment.
I shouldn’t have to point out that the word “creature” is incredibly dehumanizing, and again, shows a severe lack of empathy on Pierre’s part. I would have never expected an editor of SOTT to use that word in the context of anything other than a murderous psychopath.
Disturbed? Really, Pierre, it’s a word like that that makes me wonder if your condemnation of androgyny has more to do with their appearance going into an “uncanny valley” in which your system 1 doesn’t know how to classify the person into its culturally-constructed binary categories. This percolates up to system 2, which then generates a pretext to justify your feeling of unease around not immediately knowing the sex of the individual. You may well be used to knowing at first glance, but you should probably think twice about whether you think you are automatically entitled to that information. Something to think about.
Here Pierre seems to insinuate that allowing people freedom of expression shouldn’t come at the expense of the cognitive accessibility biases of others. I disagree. For what it’s worth, race back in those good old days was very simple as well. There were whites and non-whites.
This is perhaps one of the most damning sections of the article. If Pierre was interested in simply demonstrating the importance of the love of the family unit, he could have simply used the first paragraph. But instead, he added information about homosexuals having a negative PK effect. Here he implies that gays are inherently entropic, and not capable of influencing the cosmos in a positive way macrocosmically. (This may or may not be true, but it’s mad to suggest that gays not have a problem this, especially after Pierre says he supports gays).
If Pierre’s aim with this article was to warn sexual minorities of psychopathic hijackings of their social justice movement, this piece of information has no relevance at all. That this was considered relevant to begin with suggests that the problem isn’t with the way some parts of the civil rights movement are being handled, but rather that the civil rights movement itself, and its legitimization of gay people and relationships, is inherently entropic because “there may be large amounts of male pedophiles marrying to adopt and molest children, and anyway same-sex long-term relationships aren’t very successful, and don’t even benefit the cosmos macrocosmically the way straight love does.”
Again here I feel compelled to bring up that many, many gay and trans people still struggle every single day with ostracism, poverty, violence, and employment discrimination. When you say that ending all of this oppression and helping to become accepted and integrated into society – to feel more human – is not in their interests, and is merely a pretext for psychopaths to abuse others, you come across as highly disrespectful to them. The attitude is disrespectful because it shows no empathy or understanding or sensitivity toward the difficulties they face. It also shows no respect for the tremendous uphill battle they have waged and are starting to win (at least for gays). Even if Pierre makes the excuse of claiming to support gay rights, all that is said since then suggests something quite different. If you took a closer look at the lines of force in what's actually written, I think you would realize that the article, in fact, is still very damaging to their cause and interests as an oppressed group.
In talking about the history of sexuality and relationship, the article pays lip service to the struggles of gays in one section, and then trivializes and minimalizes them in another. In claiming to think they know what gays want (which turns out to be opposed to the views of a lot of gays who happen to be gay and know lots of gay people and be active members of the gay community), the article in effect misrepresents their wants, needs, and aspirations. All of this is a direct result of a lack of empathy, understanding, and respect for gay and trans people. This is not the type of support or advocacy gays or trans people want or need. It is in fact quite harmful because of how it poisons the way in which gays and trans are spoken of and perceived.
Here you conflate heterosexuality with cissexuality. The experiments, as far as the article describes, don’t even survey people about their gender: whether they were cis or trans. But Pierre goes ahead and makes the assumption that gays and trans, both equally different from the Platonic Solid that is “Bob & Jane,” probably both exert negative PK influence. Earlier on in the gender theory section you conflate trans-sexuality with attempts to sexualize children. It doesn’t take much imagination for someone to connect the dots in this writing and see the implication that gays are part of the problem as well (which Pierre implies by citing a story about two male fish in love as also problematic for children – it isn’t.)
So. Gays have a negative/entropic influence on the cosmos. Just like psychopaths. No risk of someone coming away with the conclusion that gays are evil there! *rolleyes*
If SOTT is starting to change its mind on homosexuality and whether it’s a force for good or evil in the world, why doesn’t it just come out and say it? This is the most disingenuous and two-faced piece of writing I’ve ever read coming out of this organization. I honestly expected better.
I suppose you will know the virtue of this article by its fruits though. It will be spread by right wing interests who condemn homosexuality as a matter of principle (as much as Pierre condemns transsexuals), and further aid them in their ignorant and bigoted activities and wiseacring. I think the editing team has harmed a lot of homosexuals and transsexuals with this writing, as well as themselves and the reputation of SOTT itself with this article.
The article even ends with a painting of Sodom and Gomorrah. In the traditional evangelical interpretations, both were destroyed because there was too much sodomy there. And yet the SOTT editors go to lengths to try and explain the article isn’t attacking gays. The SOTT editors are either lying to their readers or themselves on this one. Or both.
Anyway, these are my thoughts. I am very interested in hearing all of yours. As always, a mirror is more than welcome.
Since it dealt with a lot of issues I felt particularly vested in, I decided to comment about it. Since I felt some of my emotional buttons were pressed a bit upon an initial reading, I decided to take the disclaimer to heart and read as carefully as possible to be as unbiased as possible in judgement. So I did this. I read the article several times over, very carefully, often with several hours in between readings. I slept on it. The strange result of this was that, instead of reducing the problems I saw with the article (which probably arose from emotional bias), I actually began to see more problems with it, and as a consequence grew more frustrated. Because of that I think that the general issues I had with it were not entirely subjective in nature, but may have been objective (at least in part) and therefore perhaps valuable for others to hear about. Perhaps reading it over and over again got rid of some critical correction I was engaging in? Who knows. I’ll let the network decide.
Anyway, to start off I want to thank Pierre for his excellent exposure of the predatory hypersexualization of children at progressively younger and younger ages. I also liked the parts toward the end that discussed our society’s increasingly permissive attitude toward buying and selling embryos, irresponsible abortions, etc., and how sad it is that successful monogamous marriages are declining.
On the flip side, I found a lot of parts of the article to be quite ignorant and damaging to gay and particularly trans people. Since people can get different ideas about what it means to be damaging or helpful to gay, trans, or other oppressed minorities, I wanted to lay that out first so readers know what exactly I mean by damaging.
I appreciate that right at the start SOTT comes out in support (at least superficially) of marriage, sexual freedom, and employment equality for gay people, and saying that the article (at least superficially) is not meant to be an attack on gays. But is that enough to dismiss something as not being harmful? Social justice and civil rights activists have dealt with a lot of people and groups who superficially support things, but in attitudes and deeds still end up harming or marginalizing oppressed minorities in ways. The term used to describe these interests are Bad Allies, which is in a way their term for cointelpro (official or otherwise).
They typically look at 4 things when determining if someone is helping or harming oppressed minorities.
1. Privilege. Do they fully acknowledge their privileges in not having to deal with oppression, and do they acknowledge to extent to which the minority has and continues to struggle with ostracism, poverty, violence, and employment discrimination (laws on paper be damned)? Or, do they trivialize and dismiss these difficulties and claim things weren't or aren't as bad as the oppressed group make it out to be?
2. Listening. Do they attend to and listen to struggling people about their needs and how they can best be supported? Or does the member from the majority condescendingly make decisions about which voices in the minority are representative of the needs of the minority while ignoring others?
3. Empowering participation. Is the person actually helping minority members to speak to a wider audience and gain acceptance, or do they position themselves as mediators to speak on their behalf while cutting actual minority members out of the picture and out of the dialogue that is ABOUT THEM?
4. Feedback. When an ally misspeaks in a private or public setting (due to lack of knowledge and understanding) and is reprimanded by a minority member, do they attentively listen to their concerns about how their comments affect others, and does this change their behavior? Or, attached to the idea of their being a good person helping others, conclude the concerns are unfounded, and characterize the criticism as hysteria/hypersensitivity, or otherwise diminish the objectivity or experiences of the person they hurt?
There’s a lot of overlap between the 4 points, but the essence of the message is this: in order to actually support gays, there needs to be a level of empathy and respect for them, the troubles they’ve faced collectively, and the work they’ve done to overcome it, and an attempt to receptively ask them how they can assist in their emancipation. I feel this empathy and respect, despite SOTT’s sincerest efforts, is absent in ways from the article, for reasons I hope to explain as clearly as possible below.
She looks like a woman with a beard—it’s a really simply description. A friend of mine has a 90 year old grandmother, and she had no problems getting Conchita. A part of me wonders if Pierre simply projects here, and when he says Conchita is far from his grandma’s frame of reference what he actually means is that she is far from HIS.
Here Pierre idealizes the “simplicity” of heterosexuality and cissexuality. Simple is an artificially vague term, the sort that is used in NLP courses to induce agreement and rapport in readers. An uncritical mind upon reading this immediately thinks that this “simplicity” was good. What is so good about “simple?” Things were “simple” back then because those who did not fit the predominant culture’s norms were ostracized, pathologized, and subjected to violence, corrective rape, and chemical castration. Gays and trans people have always been written out of history and erased. If Pierre is attempting to awaken and warn gays of pathologicals in their movement, the worst way to do this would be to idealize and laude periods when they were persecuted. That’s simple external considering.
Pierre is right that the oppression of gay and trans people has been around for millennia, but when he says there’s no reason for such things to change, he is implicitly validating and assenting to the marginalization and suffering they have undergone. He says one thing explicitly, and another thing implicitly.
Pierre may argue that he was actually referring to a different set of things which didn’t have a reason to change (like there being little-to-no divorce), but to me that simply highlights the fact that in that previous paragraph he didn’t consider gay or trans people at all when he wrote it. He may have paid lip service to gay people at least, but he didn’t fundamentally empathize with them or understand their condition in those times.
Why doesn’t Pierre mention sexual liberation among the list of legitimate movements? In these times homosexuality was still outlawed and considered a psychiatric illness. Isn’t the freedom to love someone a legitimate freedom to pursue? In excluding it from the list of “good movements,” Pierre relegates it to the pursuit of solely pathological interests. This may not have been his conscious intention, but that is what comes across.
Very true, all that can be said on the origin of homosexuality can be said about the origin of transsexuality. The education and advocacy of trans people, where it is mentioned at all, is met with nothing but derision. Why?
What justified approach was this? Not much context is offered here. Again, this is extremely vague language, onto which people can project whatever they wish. Can you be more specific?
This is fallacious. The purpose of the gay rights movement is to fully integrate them into mainstream society with a combination of legal and social advocacy. Racism didn’t end overnight with the passing of the Civil Rights Act; why would anyone expect the same to happen to homophobia? There are still many places, even in the so-called tolerant countries, where homosexuality is frowned upon and marginalized, if not violently addressed.
Pierre says he’s not anti-gay. Why does he trivialize the fact that many still struggle every day long after he alleges their advocates have lost their raison d’étre? How does that help them at all?
This has nothing to do with savouring a sense of otherness and everything to do with making gays personable and more cognitively accessible. More common and prominent depictions of them in life increases empathy towards them, and so help further legal and social integration.
An aside about the word pride. It was always about equality, and still is. But it has always been about pride as well. For gays to be open about who they are with family, coworkers, and society, they had to face incredible shaming from traditional institutions. These are people who have been told their whole lives they are destined for Hell, that they should be punished or possibly killed for their ability to love someone the same as them. They have been narcissistically wounded on a social scale that is very hard for straight people to comprehend if they are not subjected to similar discrimination. Pride is about gays undoing centuries of inculcated negative programming and brainwashing about themselves. It’s about rejecting things people who don’t understand them say about them, about looking inwards and finding their inner self-worth, about looking beneath all the shaming and near-universal condemnation and finding someone who deserves to be happy and deserves to belong in a loving community and society that celebrates all they have to contribute individually and collectively. That, at least, is what it has meant to me, and how it has helped me.
Based on what facts or evidence? The hyperlink has nothing to do with the rest of the paragraph.
As for thinking there’s reversal, it is quite typical of privileged majorities to think of the liberation of others as a zero-sum game in which boons to the marginalized come at the expense of the majority, causing them to develop a reactionary victim complex. This is seen quite commonly in the men’s rights movement, straight pride, or the ku klux klan. Straight people feeling anachronistic or plain is more of this zero sum thinking. Homosexuality becoming acceptable or celebrated does not in any way diminish straight people.
http://exploreable.wordpress.com/2011/05/25/white-people-face-the-worst-racism/
This may be counterintuitive, but orientation is certainly not a private matter. This highlights one of the ways in which Pierre does not recognize the privileges that being straight affords him.
When you mention to the grocer amid many other customers you’re bringing your girlfriend over for dinner tonight, that is being public about your sexual orientation. When a guy proposes to his fiancé at a football or hockey game and gives her a big wet one for the cameras, that is also a public declaration of their sexuality. Gays are subjected to this everywhere. When gays try to do the same, they get accused by homophobics of being activists or proselytes in quite a hurry for “shoving their sexual orientation in their faces.” Everyone’s is, but it’s invisible to most people unless it’s something that sets of aversive affects in their system 1. Asking for two sets of rules, one for straights and one for gays, is bigotry, plain and simple, and so is asking sexual orientation to be private. It is nothing less than a relegation of gays back to living in the closet. In shame. Like they have been for millennia ever since wicked people decided that they were less deserving of empathy and respect.
Who’s arguing for special status? All that’s asked for is equal rights.
The study linked is a non-sequiter. The fact that the marriages are less successful in no way whether or not gays want to be married. I am gay myself, as are about 70% of my friends. Believe me, they want marriage and kids just as much as straight people do. There are a number which do not want marriage or children, true, but there are many straight people who don’t either.
When a straight person comes up to me and proceeds to explain to me what the views of the community I belong to are, and his ideas turn out to be quite orthogonal to my own experiences (and that of, well, everyone else I know), I feel compelled to ask how this person comes up with his information, and how he decides who gets to represent and speak on my behalf about what my actual social and advocacy interests are.
When “allies” to the gay movement do this, they risk coming across as heavily paternalistic or ignorant, which was my experience with Pierre in the context of his saying most gay people do not want to marry (they just collectively devote millions of dollars and volunteer hours to advocate for it.)
It is contradictory to say that gays do not want to be interfered with, but do not want marriage (which entails visitation rights in hospitals and funerals, ability to share insurance coverage, tax benefits, immigration permission, guardianship of next of kin, among other things). All of these boons marriage offer are de facto protection from interference!
Here’s a 10 minute video that shows what happens when that protection is denied:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR9gyloyOjM
To claim pursuit of legalizing same-sex marriage is fundamentally about allowing psychopathic males to marry and molest children is ignorant, and trivializes and ignores the needs and grievances of the gays who advocate for it – see the above comment.
Even if there are some incidents of it being opportunistically exploited, claiming that marriage equality is being promoted for those very nefarious reasons lends itself to the association that same-sex marriage is fundamentally harmful to children. Allowing French people to adopt children can also be opportunistically exploited, because some French people certainly are pedophilic psychopaths. Does that mean it's reasonable to talk about how laws permitting marriage and adoption by the French have a nefarious purpose behind them? If you (assuming you're French) were to read such an article, would you not feel condescended to and humiliated, the way they imply that somehow there's a cost to pay in tortured and murdered children for enforcing your rights as a human being (right to marry in this case)?
The popular myth that gays are higher on the socioeconomic ladder is actually quite false, and by extension so is the claim that gays have more adoption rights than straights. The ironic tone with which the notion that gays have more rights than straights is mentioned, once again, betrays the view of discrimination as a zero-sum game.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/03/the-myth-of-gay-affluence/284570/
Here there is the suggested equivocation of encouraging entropic pleasure for the self in children with tolerating and accepting and having empathy for those who prefer to dress differently or play with different toys. I have trouble comprehending the confusion of ideas that would provoke such a conflation.
Where is this condemnation of transsexuality coming from? Nothing that can be said about homosexuals that cannot be said about transsexuals, as I’ve said before. They are part of a normal distribution of traits as well, as equally natural as homosexuals.
Pierre, if you haven’t read the wiki entry about causes of transsexuality, I highly encourage it. The Lust chapter in Panksepps’ Archaeology of Mind also speaks about a number of causes for transsexuality that you may also find educational.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_transsexualism
Pierre, I don’t understand why you add the cartoon to the list of negative consequences of gender theory. It’s a positive depiction of a same-sex affection... one could be forgiven for thinking this is something you have beef with subconsciously.
I checked out the nursery mentioned, and unless my French is mistaken it seems that those who run the nursery do NOT force children to play with the toys of the opposite gender. It is more the case they try not to impose a specific gendered toy on them as much as possible. I get that English may not be the author’s (or possibly even the editor’s) first language, but that’s not a trivial distinction.
Source: http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2012/09/07/01016-20120907ARTFIG00665-a-saint-ouen-on-lutte-contre-le-sexisme-des-la-creche.php
So what? If it increases acceptance of men who prefer to wear dresses, why not? It’s not forcing them or harming them or damaging them in any way. This is another example of casual transphobia on Pierre’s part, which he does nothing at all to justify. There really is something about cissexuality (having men purely masculine and women purely feminine) which seems to appeal a lot to Pierre.
Honestly, where does Pierre get the idea that advocating gay rights has nothing to do with freedom or equality? That is an extraordinary claim to make that I haven’t seen any convincing support for it so far.
I would agree with what was said about the dangers of exposing children to sexuality too early. However, allowing the adoption of different gendered toys or dress, as well as legitimizing crushes and hand-holding with members of your own sex, do not qualify as encouraging pedophilia. They do not qualify because they are not harmful activities as long as they are not forced to express their gender or orientation in certain ways. It’s long been the case (back in the simple old days Pierre lauded) that those children who did not conform to cis-heteronormative behaviors were heavily traumatized and narcissistically wounded by parents, peers, and other adult authority figures. Perhaps he needs a reminder about that?
This is making a naturalistic fallacy. They are both variations which may arise (I mean, if someone can wake up from a head injury with xenoglossy, what CAN’T you acquire from a bump on the head?) What makes one neutral and the other pathological is the fruits they bear in their interpersonal relationships as a result of this. Gay and trans people are fully capable of having virtuous love relationships with those they desire. Pedophiles are not. Nor are psychopaths in general, but that’s an aside.
This is actually a widening recognition of the fact that some women are naturally less feminine than others (ditto for men), and making space where it is safe to express and live how they feel called to. Again, it’s not hurting anyone. Why is this deemed problematic to Pierre?
I don’t think gays and lesbians are alone in failing to live up to more positive and admirable qualities. It’s endemic to the mainstream culture itself. It’s unrealistic to expect them to consciously behave differently from others, as they are all just human.
Furthermore, when Pierre says they attempt to mimic, he is in effect claiming those behaviors are outside of them, or artificial somewhat. What if the natural influences that would predispose people to more belligerence are biologically more marked in lesbians (perhaps through some change in vasopressin function, or whatever?) Pierre claims being gay isn’t a choice; how much of this also applies to things he automatically assumes to be foreign to them (such as traits more common to the opposite sex)?
I think here Pierre confuses sex with gender. They’re not the same. Sex is what is given to us biologically, and gender is what the culture and socialization does with what is given to us as conditioning. I think here Pierre projects his own subjective ideals about how men and women ought to be onto others (highly cis-normative and transphobic), without having any regard as to what their actual identity and emotional needs are. See the above comment.
I shouldn’t have to point out that the word “creature” is incredibly dehumanizing, and again, shows a severe lack of empathy on Pierre’s part. I would have never expected an editor of SOTT to use that word in the context of anything other than a murderous psychopath.
Disturbed? Really, Pierre, it’s a word like that that makes me wonder if your condemnation of androgyny has more to do with their appearance going into an “uncanny valley” in which your system 1 doesn’t know how to classify the person into its culturally-constructed binary categories. This percolates up to system 2, which then generates a pretext to justify your feeling of unease around not immediately knowing the sex of the individual. You may well be used to knowing at first glance, but you should probably think twice about whether you think you are automatically entitled to that information. Something to think about.
Here Pierre seems to insinuate that allowing people freedom of expression shouldn’t come at the expense of the cognitive accessibility biases of others. I disagree. For what it’s worth, race back in those good old days was very simple as well. There were whites and non-whites.
This is perhaps one of the most damning sections of the article. If Pierre was interested in simply demonstrating the importance of the love of the family unit, he could have simply used the first paragraph. But instead, he added information about homosexuals having a negative PK effect. Here he implies that gays are inherently entropic, and not capable of influencing the cosmos in a positive way macrocosmically. (This may or may not be true, but it’s mad to suggest that gays not have a problem this, especially after Pierre says he supports gays).
If Pierre’s aim with this article was to warn sexual minorities of psychopathic hijackings of their social justice movement, this piece of information has no relevance at all. That this was considered relevant to begin with suggests that the problem isn’t with the way some parts of the civil rights movement are being handled, but rather that the civil rights movement itself, and its legitimization of gay people and relationships, is inherently entropic because “there may be large amounts of male pedophiles marrying to adopt and molest children, and anyway same-sex long-term relationships aren’t very successful, and don’t even benefit the cosmos macrocosmically the way straight love does.”
Again here I feel compelled to bring up that many, many gay and trans people still struggle every single day with ostracism, poverty, violence, and employment discrimination. When you say that ending all of this oppression and helping to become accepted and integrated into society – to feel more human – is not in their interests, and is merely a pretext for psychopaths to abuse others, you come across as highly disrespectful to them. The attitude is disrespectful because it shows no empathy or understanding or sensitivity toward the difficulties they face. It also shows no respect for the tremendous uphill battle they have waged and are starting to win (at least for gays). Even if Pierre makes the excuse of claiming to support gay rights, all that is said since then suggests something quite different. If you took a closer look at the lines of force in what's actually written, I think you would realize that the article, in fact, is still very damaging to their cause and interests as an oppressed group.
In talking about the history of sexuality and relationship, the article pays lip service to the struggles of gays in one section, and then trivializes and minimalizes them in another. In claiming to think they know what gays want (which turns out to be opposed to the views of a lot of gays who happen to be gay and know lots of gay people and be active members of the gay community), the article in effect misrepresents their wants, needs, and aspirations. All of this is a direct result of a lack of empathy, understanding, and respect for gay and trans people. This is not the type of support or advocacy gays or trans people want or need. It is in fact quite harmful because of how it poisons the way in which gays and trans are spoken of and perceived.
Here you conflate heterosexuality with cissexuality. The experiments, as far as the article describes, don’t even survey people about their gender: whether they were cis or trans. But Pierre goes ahead and makes the assumption that gays and trans, both equally different from the Platonic Solid that is “Bob & Jane,” probably both exert negative PK influence. Earlier on in the gender theory section you conflate trans-sexuality with attempts to sexualize children. It doesn’t take much imagination for someone to connect the dots in this writing and see the implication that gays are part of the problem as well (which Pierre implies by citing a story about two male fish in love as also problematic for children – it isn’t.)
So. Gays have a negative/entropic influence on the cosmos. Just like psychopaths. No risk of someone coming away with the conclusion that gays are evil there! *rolleyes*
If SOTT is starting to change its mind on homosexuality and whether it’s a force for good or evil in the world, why doesn’t it just come out and say it? This is the most disingenuous and two-faced piece of writing I’ve ever read coming out of this organization. I honestly expected better.
I suppose you will know the virtue of this article by its fruits though. It will be spread by right wing interests who condemn homosexuality as a matter of principle (as much as Pierre condemns transsexuals), and further aid them in their ignorant and bigoted activities and wiseacring. I think the editing team has harmed a lot of homosexuals and transsexuals with this writing, as well as themselves and the reputation of SOTT itself with this article.
The article even ends with a painting of Sodom and Gomorrah. In the traditional evangelical interpretations, both were destroyed because there was too much sodomy there. And yet the SOTT editors go to lengths to try and explain the article isn’t attacking gays. The SOTT editors are either lying to their readers or themselves on this one. Or both.
Anyway, these are my thoughts. I am very interested in hearing all of yours. As always, a mirror is more than welcome.
https://www.ipce.info/ipceweb/Library/dutch_movement_text.htm
