"If we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed and tolerance with them." -Karl Popper
I only stumbled on your post late (found after reading a comment of yours on the med school story on Bari Weiss's Substack), but wanted to say that you made a lot of good points. I can sense your frustration with the double standards on speech -- I feel it, too.
The gender issues were in my periphery until, like you, I was curious about the J. K. Rowling controversy. Reading what she wrote in her essay that went into her thoughts in greater depth than her Tweets, and comparing it to the accusations of bigotry, and the threats of violence... it was a moment of awakening for me. The response, in quantity and quality, was disproportionate to what she actually said (and I doubt most of her critics actually did that, because it would be exposing themselves to "literal violence").
Every individual voice that counters this illiberal movement is valuable. Glad to have found your writing.
"What shocked me the most, perhaps because I am a woman and the mother of a female adolescent, is that according to the study, almost eleven thousand female adolescent respondents said they had attempted suicide (17.6% or 10,763). That huge number tells us that young girls in the U.S. are suffering a mental health crisis, "
The crisis among teenage girls has been corroborated by psychologist Jonathan Haidt's research. Yet, except for a few mainstream journalists like Hadley Freeman, we barely hear about this.
I also was on Twitter in 2020 during the attack on JK Rowling. I've read through everything she's ever commented about women and single sex spaces. Nothing she has ever said is transphobic. For anyone who had been concerned about violence against women, and the creation of women's rape crisis centers, the attack against JK Rowling can only be viewed as yet another orchestrated attack on women.
But I am not surprised. There have been other orchestrated attacks on women in the press such as the refusal in Canada, for more than 25 years, to discuss anywhere in the press that the killing of 14 women engineering students was a misogynistic attack on women and part of a larger societal misogyny:
Filmmaker Francine Pelletier reflects on the Montreal Massacre 25 years later
I only stumbled on your post late (found after reading a comment of yours on the med school story on Bari Weiss's Substack), but wanted to say that you made a lot of good points. I can sense your frustration with the double standards on speech -- I feel it, too.
The gender issues were in my periphery until, like you, I was curious about the J. K. Rowling controversy. Reading what she wrote in her essay that went into her thoughts in greater depth than her Tweets, and comparing it to the accusations of bigotry, and the threats of violence... it was a moment of awakening for me. The response, in quantity and quality, was disproportionate to what she actually said (and I doubt most of her critics actually did that, because it would be exposing themselves to "literal violence").
Every individual voice that counters this illiberal movement is valuable. Glad to have found your writing.
"What shocked me the most, perhaps because I am a woman and the mother of a female adolescent, is that according to the study, almost eleven thousand female adolescent respondents said they had attempted suicide (17.6% or 10,763). That huge number tells us that young girls in the U.S. are suffering a mental health crisis, "
The crisis among teenage girls has been corroborated by psychologist Jonathan Haidt's research. Yet, except for a few mainstream journalists like Hadley Freeman, we barely hear about this.
I also was on Twitter in 2020 during the attack on JK Rowling. I've read through everything she's ever commented about women and single sex spaces. Nothing she has ever said is transphobic. For anyone who had been concerned about violence against women, and the creation of women's rape crisis centers, the attack against JK Rowling can only be viewed as yet another orchestrated attack on women.
But I am not surprised. There have been other orchestrated attacks on women in the press such as the refusal in Canada, for more than 25 years, to discuss anywhere in the press that the killing of 14 women engineering students was a misogynistic attack on women and part of a larger societal misogyny:
Filmmaker Francine Pelletier reflects on the Montreal Massacre 25 years later
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLMZ-avnNxg
Thanks for this article. Not easy to out yourself as a ‘transphobe’ (i.e. rational human being) when you know that you’re going to get hate for it.