Transfiguration

dankblog! 2023-02-11, 0903 EST, at the danktower

WHEREIN Your Humble Wikist foolishly tosses his Hat into the Culture Wars, knowing his Words Unlikely to bring Anyone into his Philosophical Camp, but quite Capable of creating new Enemies, while not particularly Caring about convincing anyone In Any Case.

the release of Harry Potter Legacy has thrown a particularly loud contingent of the internet populace into a tizzy. the product of a Burbank monstrosity known for insolent rabbits and immense intellectual properties and a Utah video game developer named after a blue peppermint schnappes from the 90s has become proxy in a great mudsling regarding blonde british billionaire and solidly mid YA author jk rowling.

now as far as i'm concerned, ms. rowling's greatest crime was pairing the inimitable, drop-dead-sexy Hermione Granger with the gormless simpleton Ron Weasley and his empty cobweb-covered shitsmeared skull, a surrender to utter mediocrity that left both me and Viktor Krum flabbergasted. Poor guy was doing Wronski Feints and listening to some Bulgarian Deftones knockoff for days, and i can't blame him. but back in 2020, jkr wrote what i thought to be a fairly compelling essay, certainly the best thing she'd penned since Voldemort croaked out "Kill the spare." a loud population decried it as thoughtcrime, and began deluging her with the rape and death threats women of all persuasions can look forward to when they open their mouths on the internet. understandably, this did not fill jkr's heart with love, and she's been no fan of transgender extremists since. if they're going to call you a TERF and Nazi and threaten to rape you for well-reasoned if debatable views, what does one after all have to lose?

as a computer scientist, i work in a culture liberally salted with spergy behavior, and a correlation between gender dysphoria and aspergers is, as far as i'm aware, established (as much as sociology or psychology can ever be considered "established"). either way, m2f transgenders are very well represented in my industry. indeed, in my subfield of low-level and high-performance computing, there are regularly more m2fs than born fs in a given room. and i love 'em. the transgendered people i've known are, across the board, kind, reasonable, intelligent folks who have to deal with a persuasion, a mental obligation, that has my sympathy. i get it, to a degree--i've never felt particularly human at all. y'all confuse and terrify me a good chunk of the time, all of you. the transgendered deserve all the same civil rights other citizens enjoy, and to think otherwise is deranged neophobia. if i had children, i'd have no problem with them being educated by transgender teachers, who ought be able to adopt their own children. go in whatever bathroom you want; if you look like you don't belong there, people are likely to look at you strangely, but tell 'em to fuck themselves if they try to police your stalls. live your life presenting as whatever you'd like. if my neural net recognizes you as belonging to the class of "women", i'll treat you like a woman, and if it does otherwise, i'll do otherwise. anything else would be disingenuous on my part; expecting anything else is foolish on your part. either way, it's not my place to play bathroom cop, and the thought of telling someone when and where to piss has never crossed my mind.

never having been a girl nor played a girlsport, my opinions there are of limited interest. i can say that watching Lia Thomas dismantle NCAA records made me wonder why, exactly, we're bothering with girls' sports at all if someone who'd recently competed as a man was going to come in and clean everyone's clocks. getting rid of ladysports seems a bad move, but so does rendering them ridiculous. i'm glad i'm not responsible for solving this issue, which seems to have no good solutions.

with that said, few things make me roll my eyes harder than the oft-bleated apothegm "transfoo are foo". this is semantic abuse at best, and at worst (and more likely) an Orwellian bit of sloganeering doublethink. in many environments, rejecting this semeiotic rape is grounds for removal of posts or even accounts. when i was employed at Google, it was compelled speech, a horror associated with the worst religions, authoritarians, and despots. indeed, suggesting that "transfoo are foo only when all shades of nuance and context are eliminated from speech, that's why one has the prefix and the other doesn't" is probably prima facie evidence of an unsafe space, and a member of any modern university faculty would do well to think twice before advancing such a dangerous proposition, thanks to the same academic subversions of language that brought us "silence is violence" and that chestnut "only white people can be racist". this is redefinition and obscurantism to the point of calumny, and i won't be a part of it.

if you think this makes me "transphobic", your definitions are bad, and you ought feel bad. if you think this means i "want to kill transgender people", as jkr has been accused of pretty much unceasingly, you're not just factually incorrect but pretty stupid to boot.

if anything frightens me about the transgendered--if there is any way in which i consider myself transphobic--it is the way in which their movement seems to embrace and indeed demand these kinds of linguistic chicaneries, one of the most odious habits of the Left since Vyshinksky's heyday at Shakhty. it is this i find loathsome and frightening; it is this that i think worth opposing, and necessary to fight. let tolerance be our watchword; let our minds and hearts remain our own even as we allow those with whom we disagree--even the most dogmatic among them--to speak their own hearts and minds.

i can't help but note that drug use can send me to prison for decades, while there's no legal penalty for even the most outlandish genderfuckery. so cool it, maybe? and may all enjoy their video games and gender presentations in peace.

previously: "dare obasanjo" 2022-12-05