A clear and powerful statement of the liberal creed. one we forget at our peril. Mill’s argument is not that people always act wisely, but that no one else is wise enough to rule them by force. The line between harm and offense, danger and discomfort, is the battleground of modern politics. But the principle holds.. if we abandon the idea that sovereignty begins with the individual, we open the gates to every manner of soft tyranny dressed as care.
Thank you for being so consistently insightful, logical, brave and levelheaded (too often in the face of rank stupidity, hubris and nastiness). In the trash heap of current public discourse, you’re an absolute gem!
Thanks Helen, I am so sorry you have to endure such awful abuse. Separately, but possibly with some connection somewhere, I recently unsubscribed to a gender critical substack I had been following as they automatically assumed that just because I don't want to see womens' sex based rights eroded, I must also be vehemently against assisted dying....as I said to them on my way out, most fortunately for me I hope never to be exposed to a rapist in a female prison, personally I am not threatened if a man in a dress comes into the loo when I am there, however at 60, I am more likely than not to want the ability to end my life at a time of my own choosing and with dignity when terminally ill, than to have the good luck to just die in my sleep, so thanked them for their service and suffering in basically winning the gender argument, but please don't assume that just because I support that battle means I automatically want to constrain other types of right.....they did seem a bit surprised but fortunately it wasn't on twitter and I didn't have to hang around to argue. Take care and have a great day, you are a rare and precious voice of reason
The psychological grounds for the authoritarian position you
Describe interest me. One hypothesis—people who hold that position are reacting to what they see as the implied demand from the man in a dress that he be treated as and thought of as a woman.
Other possibilities—pure religious-traditionalist moralism, rigid category adherence. The other is the counterreaction to societal bullying, the pendulum swing phenomenon that you describe.
Sorry you’ve been subjected to vitriol. People must be lumping you in with the TRAs which is totally unfair. I do however understand sensitivity to any implication that women and girls should ignore their disgust signals, which exist for an important self-preservation function. But how they react to them must be within liberal civilized norms, so long as liberal society is maintaining boundaries that adequately protect them, which right now, it isn’t. Hence the overreaction makes sense.
Yes, liberal society is not maintaining boundaries and I think this is the cause of the "swing" you describe. Ten years ago I would have been mildly supportive of a barman presenting as a woman serving me a drink. I would have been thinking "well done you for expressing yourself". David Bowie in a dress was an icon. But recently I find I project onto the obvious transwoman a belief that they will feel free to follow me into the ladies, they will aggressively assert their right to do so even if I say "no", and have me declared transphobic and barred from the club as well. So I am primed to be hostile, without knowing anything about them. If society re-establishes sex based boundaries, this problem goes away.
Disgust alone is not an argument and certainly not a justification for cruelty. Disgust persists as an emotion because it signals potential harm. And men in dresses are likely to be fetishists whose behavior can often bring with it harmful consequences to society as a whole and in particular to women, children and lesbians. So because we cannot separate the voyeurs, exhibitionists and potential/likely perpetrators of assault from the non-predatory fetishists, society has an interest in saying no to public practice of this fetish—not because of the emotion alone but because of what it signals.
I am 100% with you that a liberal society needs to accept gender nonconformity as a right and a naturally occurring phenomenon that needs
accommodating—but how? With courtesy, acceptance, and clear boundaries that do not encroach on the safety and dignity of other groups. Basically, what JKR said.
We are in danger of screwing up gay and other naturally non-conforming kids and adults if we don’t, which would be a totally bad thing. And we risk pushing them into the arms of the fender butchers.
“This might provide some reason for being wary of such an individual, but it is still not ethical to abuse somebody for being statistically somewhat more likely to do something. It should also be clear that bullying someone into changing their clothes cannot possibly change what is going on in their minds and that making a sex offender wear trousers is not going to stop him from being a sex offender. “
Not talking about abusing anyone. TGs however histrionically insist that refusal to accept and validate is tantamount to abuse.
Well, I am. That's what the piece is about. If you simply don't want to accept and affirm the concept of gender identity and will leave otherwise leave people alone, I support this completely. That is the right thing to do instead of abusing people or trying to impose sex-based dress codes.
I don’t think you do respond to it if your argument is we have to wait until someone has offended to keep them out. The fact is autogynephiles are statistically more likely to engage in the other fetishes of exposure and voyeurism. Mill’s quote is relevant here: That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.
No we can’t and shouldn’t legislate dress and personal expression, but we can legislate to keep men out of women’s spaces (if society goes back to being able to define what a man and woman are) and stop giving in to the demand to validate fetishists and confused, disturbed people generally as members of the opposite sex. That would be sufficient, in addition to also stopping the crazy celebration of this fetish as “stunning and brave” would do something to discourage public offending.
It is arguing against abusing men for wearing dresses, not against supporting keeping men out of women's spaces which I argue should be the focus and will actually prevent harm.
"Those who wish to enact sex-specific dress codes for men, at least, and penalise those who do not conform with legal consequences or by designating them all fetishistic sex-offenders and abusing them in public are undeniably authoritarian. They are not gender critical. They believe that gender is essential and one’s sex dictates the right way to perform masculinity or femininity. A failure to comply indicates degeneracy and deviance and all right-thinking people must be disgusted by it. Consequently, they declare a moral duty to police this out of visibility. They raise the spectre of danger and invoke the safety of women to do this. This enables them to accuse anybody who does not want sex-specific dress codes of not caring about women, including women. This cannot protect women. Calling someone an autogynephile and abusing him will not stop him from being one if he is and fantasies held in somebody’s head do not harm anyone. Even if this is related to higher levels of sexual offending, making a sex offender wear trousers will not stop him from being a sex offender. What we do have strong evidence of is that trans women have similar levels of sexual offending to men who identify as men and that, in the prison system, it is significantly higher. This gives solid grounds to protect women’s spaces, not to control men’s clothing."
"When people diverge from these vitally important goals and begin referencing their feelings of disgust and dehumanising trans-identified people as ‘troons’ and expressing visceral hatred and hurling abuse at individuals due to their clothing or the beliefs, politics or sexual fantasies they imagine them to have, they not only behave in abhorrent ways to fellow human beings, they also undermine the strong ethical basis of the gender critical movement and the fight to protect women’s spaces and children’s bodies."
This essay reminded me of the Canadian man who cross-dressed while teaching his woodworking class of mainly teenaged boys. This male teacher wore a long blonde wig, lippy, a mini-skirt and a pink top stretched over a pair of enormous fake breasts with erect nipples visible under the top. The fake breasts were so very large that they could only have been purchased from the fetish section of a sex shop. I felt disgust when I saw pictures of this man dressed in this way being watched by his students. I also felt anger on behalf of the students and contempt for the School Board that declared it would not police the “bodies” of its teaching staff, meaning that it affirmed this man’s fake breasts as a woman’s breasts, rather than as a man’s costume. But what should the School Board have done about this man’s open display of a sexual fetish to minors in a professional context. Should the Board have disciplined/dismissed the teacher, forbidden the teacher to cross dress, established a mandatory dress code for teachers?
I have a very clear and painful memory of walking into the first class of a compulsory course in my MSc programme proudly wearing a brand new ‘pant suit’ that I thought made me look quite attractive. The Professor disagreed and said: “It’s bad enough that I have to teach girls, but I won’t have one wearing pants in my class. Go away and comeback when you are properly dressed.” I appealed to the Head of Department and wore ‘pants’ to every subsequent class in that Course. So, I’m not a fan of dress codes, but I believe that Canadian teacher should have been prevented from exposing his students to his fetishised cosplay. I just don’t know how this could be done without unintended authoritarian consequences for other teachers, such a lesbian teacher who chose to wear a suit and a bow tie to work. Liberalism ain’t easy!
Yeah, reality is messy and often things have to be taken on a case-by-case basis. This makes some people, who want clear-cut blanket answers stressed. In the case of the teacher you mention, whom I have seen, this would require the updating of policies in a way that did not bring about *sex-based* dress codes. It would be inappropriate for a female teacher to wear enormous prosthetic breasts too so something along the lines of only allowing proportionate prostheses and body modifications that were those of an average human body might be needed. Like the dress code for nurses in the UK which specified only hair dye that was of a natural colour so it ruled out nurses with bright blue hair but did not stop anybody concealing their greys or having highlights. This would protect butch lesbians from dressing with a masculine aesthetic but if any wanted to “pack” in a way that produced more than a typical male “bulge” this would not be allowed either.
Sometimes people say this is a lot of work to accommodate weirdos and want to stamp down hard and enforce conformity in ways that cause a lot of collateral damage to people harming no-one. We are a very messy species and have a lot of weirdos but we are also resourceful and adaptable. I once saw a sign prohibiting the placing of penises in a petrol(gas) pump and wondered what the story was behind that and whether it required the fire service to extricate said penis.
Personally I think it's a mistake treat the harm principle as the beginning and end of moral reasoning. It's a reasonably good starting point for things like criminal punishment but can never provide a full answer when we're deciding on norms of conduct for particular social contexts/professions (and Mill certainly never suggested that it should) - that Canadian teacher wearing fetish gear to work is a good example.
It's possible to conceptualise 'harm' in order to cover cases like this but personally I don't see how this kind of strategy can be kept within sensible bounds. I think it's less convoluted and more honest to say that how much sexuality a person can reasonably display at work/in public places is always going to be culturally determined (and disgust responses have a role to play here, amongst other things) and the lines we draw will always have some degree of arbitrariness to them.
Yes, I agree. We need harm as a reason to ethically justify using force against someone to prevent them from doing something, but that frees people up to try to influence cultural norms and also have their own moral communities and their own personal code.
On a cultural level, I’d like to see more liberalism certainly, but also more focus on tolerance, dignity, community, manners and less belief in gods.
Liberals are my voluntary community so I am accountable to them if I ever argue for anything illiberal while I respect the rights of others to do that.
On a personal level, my ethics are mostly about loyalty and honesty and compassion. I would not, for example, decide that, in my relationships, I can do whatever I want provided it does no material harm to anyone else nor denies them the same freedoms. My daughter expects me to put her needs first, my husband to consider his on a level with my own and my friends and other family have a right to expect that I will be loyal and honest and keep their confidences and care about their interests.
When it comes to rules that are arbitrary, we need to argue from principles rather than disgust if anybody wants to change anything. I cannot provide a harm-based argument for why people should not be naked or have sex in public but as there is a consensus on this and it doesn’t hugely constrain anybody’s freedom, I don’t feel the need to consider it. If social conservatives of any kind grew in number and those calling themselves gender critical wanted to set up sex-based dress codes or Muslims wanted to establish modesty codes, particularly for women, I’d have to argue against that on the grounds of freedom.
Maybe I am too simplistic, but for me the main point of whatever rule you choose, the rule of ruling should be if the rule is Kantian (universal) and then class/race/gender neutral.
If women can have tight pants showing the camel thing when teaching to minors (that for average men means the urge to immediately run to the bathroom to extinguish is biological needs... really women don't know that???) but that implies that men professors can go teaching with fake missile tits bombs. And equally, students can go to classroom in thongs, no matter gender or others specifications.
That means: same rule for everybody.
Or, otherwise, everybody in schools with minors should forced to dress exactly the same: a boring blue unisex long coat covering from ankles to the neck. Everybody: from the board director to the cleaning stuff. Including pets and parrots, as in Victorian and Mao's times.
Very well written and argued. This is a simple line in the sand for gender-critical feminists arguing for biological sex to be the reason we exclude all males, good or bad, from female spaces. Good males can be males in dresses, males who take female hormones, men with major feminising surgery. Our argument is where biological sex matters, they stay out of female spaces (and sports). That they are not in fact women. But disgust because they are expressing themselves as feminine? I'm not going to be joining in with that.
I noticed a while ago that feminists like me who have long enjoyed the company of effeminate gay men - and who like drag as an art that is a homage to and satire of femininity - are most unlikely to be offended or disgusted by a male transvestite or transsexual. My political rage and disgust at the ideology that genderists (the vast majority of them straight men and women) have been forcing on all of us is of course a different thing.
The one aspect of the TQ+ community that does alarm and disgust is the public display of fetish in order to be aroused by the humiliation of others, and the sexualisation of children by men using the umbrella of gender non-conformity to hide their paedophilia in plain sight. But that can be addressed as a distinct problem, with our allies being the gay men and transsexual men who are equally appalled at this abusive and predatory behaviour.
I think what we have learned is that, in modern times, the standard moral inclination of most people to be accepting of people behaving outside the guidelines of normal, has led to the people outside the guidelines of normal to next demand to be considered special... and some of them to punch down normies in perpetual resentment and retribution for any history of any feeling they had for not being accepted or valued... or otherwise being meant to just feel less happy for being non-normal.
So now more people are questioning the value proposition for being accepting of non-normal.
We materially achieved gender equity, racial equity and for the most part people didn't care too much about men and women with a cross-dressing fashion fetish with or without a related cross-gender sexual fetish. And now what do we all get in return for that progress? Woke bullshit ripping the fabric of society to shreds.
To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to some one else. The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
Wise words from Mill. It’s too bad that individual sovereignty was not granted to Alan Turing and countless gay British men….
If you, Helen, try to stay on the center of liberal democratic ethics, everybody who is sadly fed with extremism culture see you on his/her opposite side. The dark side effect of mediatic polarization.
This is why it is on topic, this article about disgust: the more we learn to tolerate what disgust us but can't honestly consider against other's rights, the more we learn to be really liberals.
Hurt me strong, reading the unacceptable and baseless offenses you received: I feel shamed for people wrote them. I hope you take their rants with enough irony about the comic hyperboles and with socio-anthropological curiosity about the oddity of weighing rational discourses based on FFMI index of the source. And all of this goes to question myself... when I feel disgust somthing and wrongly confuse this feeling as a justification to consider that thing universally wrong only because it disgust me...
Liberal tolerance is defended exactly when I (we) tolerate what I (we) dislike personally.
How can we define (liberal and democratic) tolerance otherwise?
No emotion by itself is a moral argument. And yet, often it's disgust/purity axis people tend to have the deepest problem with not care/harm. If the social sphere can not police itself or is not allowed to by 'smart' well 'reasoned' Portland people, then it becomes the basis for moral arguments and indeed moral conviction, if democracy is incapable of asserting itself, than ultimately that's all you have left.
You have a way of measuring pollution and holding corporations accountable but refuse any similar mechanisms and imagine society as a market in need of regulation in the same way, with illness of the mental variety permeating the entire structure.
A clear and powerful statement of the liberal creed. one we forget at our peril. Mill’s argument is not that people always act wisely, but that no one else is wise enough to rule them by force. The line between harm and offense, danger and discomfort, is the battleground of modern politics. But the principle holds.. if we abandon the idea that sovereignty begins with the individual, we open the gates to every manner of soft tyranny dressed as care.
Thank you for being so consistently insightful, logical, brave and levelheaded (too often in the face of rank stupidity, hubris and nastiness). In the trash heap of current public discourse, you’re an absolute gem!
Well, now I have a warm, fuzzy glow and it’s all your fault.
The glow is all yours — well-earned! — and I hope it helps insulate you somewhat from the ridiculous barbs thrown your way.
Thanks Helen, I am so sorry you have to endure such awful abuse. Separately, but possibly with some connection somewhere, I recently unsubscribed to a gender critical substack I had been following as they automatically assumed that just because I don't want to see womens' sex based rights eroded, I must also be vehemently against assisted dying....as I said to them on my way out, most fortunately for me I hope never to be exposed to a rapist in a female prison, personally I am not threatened if a man in a dress comes into the loo when I am there, however at 60, I am more likely than not to want the ability to end my life at a time of my own choosing and with dignity when terminally ill, than to have the good luck to just die in my sleep, so thanked them for their service and suffering in basically winning the gender argument, but please don't assume that just because I support that battle means I automatically want to constrain other types of right.....they did seem a bit surprised but fortunately it wasn't on twitter and I didn't have to hang around to argue. Take care and have a great day, you are a rare and precious voice of reason
The psychological grounds for the authoritarian position you
Describe interest me. One hypothesis—people who hold that position are reacting to what they see as the implied demand from the man in a dress that he be treated as and thought of as a woman.
Other possibilities—pure religious-traditionalist moralism, rigid category adherence. The other is the counterreaction to societal bullying, the pendulum swing phenomenon that you describe.
Sorry you’ve been subjected to vitriol. People must be lumping you in with the TRAs which is totally unfair. I do however understand sensitivity to any implication that women and girls should ignore their disgust signals, which exist for an important self-preservation function. But how they react to them must be within liberal civilized norms, so long as liberal society is maintaining boundaries that adequately protect them, which right now, it isn’t. Hence the overreaction makes sense.
Yes, liberal society is not maintaining boundaries and I think this is the cause of the "swing" you describe. Ten years ago I would have been mildly supportive of a barman presenting as a woman serving me a drink. I would have been thinking "well done you for expressing yourself". David Bowie in a dress was an icon. But recently I find I project onto the obvious transwoman a belief that they will feel free to follow me into the ladies, they will aggressively assert their right to do so even if I say "no", and have me declared transphobic and barred from the club as well. So I am primed to be hostile, without knowing anything about them. If society re-establishes sex based boundaries, this problem goes away.
Oh Helen!
When will the abusive, regressive insanity stop?!?
Thanks for your unwavering clarity and strength.
Please take good care of yourself! We need (I need) your sanity more than ever.
Lotsa of love, tea and biscuits 🙏🏽❤️🫖
Disgust alone is not an argument and certainly not a justification for cruelty. Disgust persists as an emotion because it signals potential harm. And men in dresses are likely to be fetishists whose behavior can often bring with it harmful consequences to society as a whole and in particular to women, children and lesbians. So because we cannot separate the voyeurs, exhibitionists and potential/likely perpetrators of assault from the non-predatory fetishists, society has an interest in saying no to public practice of this fetish—not because of the emotion alone but because of what it signals.
Please read piece where I have responded to this argument specifically.
I am 100% with you that a liberal society needs to accept gender nonconformity as a right and a naturally occurring phenomenon that needs
accommodating—but how? With courtesy, acceptance, and clear boundaries that do not encroach on the safety and dignity of other groups. Basically, what JKR said.
We are on the same page.
We are in danger of screwing up gay and other naturally non-conforming kids and adults if we don’t, which would be a totally bad thing. And we risk pushing them into the arms of the fender butchers.
“This might provide some reason for being wary of such an individual, but it is still not ethical to abuse somebody for being statistically somewhat more likely to do something. It should also be clear that bullying someone into changing their clothes cannot possibly change what is going on in their minds and that making a sex offender wear trousers is not going to stop him from being a sex offender. “
Not talking about abusing anyone. TGs however histrionically insist that refusal to accept and validate is tantamount to abuse.
Well, I am. That's what the piece is about. If you simply don't want to accept and affirm the concept of gender identity and will leave otherwise leave people alone, I support this completely. That is the right thing to do instead of abusing people or trying to impose sex-based dress codes.
I am very clear about this in the piece.
I don’t think you do respond to it if your argument is we have to wait until someone has offended to keep them out. The fact is autogynephiles are statistically more likely to engage in the other fetishes of exposure and voyeurism. Mill’s quote is relevant here: That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.
No we can’t and shouldn’t legislate dress and personal expression, but we can legislate to keep men out of women’s spaces (if society goes back to being able to define what a man and woman are) and stop giving in to the demand to validate fetishists and confused, disturbed people generally as members of the opposite sex. That would be sufficient, in addition to also stopping the crazy celebration of this fetish as “stunning and brave” would do something to discourage public offending.
It isn't. Please read the piece, Cassandra.
It is arguing against abusing men for wearing dresses, not against supporting keeping men out of women's spaces which I argue should be the focus and will actually prevent harm.
"Those who wish to enact sex-specific dress codes for men, at least, and penalise those who do not conform with legal consequences or by designating them all fetishistic sex-offenders and abusing them in public are undeniably authoritarian. They are not gender critical. They believe that gender is essential and one’s sex dictates the right way to perform masculinity or femininity. A failure to comply indicates degeneracy and deviance and all right-thinking people must be disgusted by it. Consequently, they declare a moral duty to police this out of visibility. They raise the spectre of danger and invoke the safety of women to do this. This enables them to accuse anybody who does not want sex-specific dress codes of not caring about women, including women. This cannot protect women. Calling someone an autogynephile and abusing him will not stop him from being one if he is and fantasies held in somebody’s head do not harm anyone. Even if this is related to higher levels of sexual offending, making a sex offender wear trousers will not stop him from being a sex offender. What we do have strong evidence of is that trans women have similar levels of sexual offending to men who identify as men and that, in the prison system, it is significantly higher. This gives solid grounds to protect women’s spaces, not to control men’s clothing."
"When people diverge from these vitally important goals and begin referencing their feelings of disgust and dehumanising trans-identified people as ‘troons’ and expressing visceral hatred and hurling abuse at individuals due to their clothing or the beliefs, politics or sexual fantasies they imagine them to have, they not only behave in abhorrent ways to fellow human beings, they also undermine the strong ethical basis of the gender critical movement and the fight to protect women’s spaces and children’s bodies."
Yes, without a doubt. Must not lose sight of what’s essential about being “gender critical” in all dimensions.
💯
This essay reminded me of the Canadian man who cross-dressed while teaching his woodworking class of mainly teenaged boys. This male teacher wore a long blonde wig, lippy, a mini-skirt and a pink top stretched over a pair of enormous fake breasts with erect nipples visible under the top. The fake breasts were so very large that they could only have been purchased from the fetish section of a sex shop. I felt disgust when I saw pictures of this man dressed in this way being watched by his students. I also felt anger on behalf of the students and contempt for the School Board that declared it would not police the “bodies” of its teaching staff, meaning that it affirmed this man’s fake breasts as a woman’s breasts, rather than as a man’s costume. But what should the School Board have done about this man’s open display of a sexual fetish to minors in a professional context. Should the Board have disciplined/dismissed the teacher, forbidden the teacher to cross dress, established a mandatory dress code for teachers?
I have a very clear and painful memory of walking into the first class of a compulsory course in my MSc programme proudly wearing a brand new ‘pant suit’ that I thought made me look quite attractive. The Professor disagreed and said: “It’s bad enough that I have to teach girls, but I won’t have one wearing pants in my class. Go away and comeback when you are properly dressed.” I appealed to the Head of Department and wore ‘pants’ to every subsequent class in that Course. So, I’m not a fan of dress codes, but I believe that Canadian teacher should have been prevented from exposing his students to his fetishised cosplay. I just don’t know how this could be done without unintended authoritarian consequences for other teachers, such a lesbian teacher who chose to wear a suit and a bow tie to work. Liberalism ain’t easy!
Yeah, reality is messy and often things have to be taken on a case-by-case basis. This makes some people, who want clear-cut blanket answers stressed. In the case of the teacher you mention, whom I have seen, this would require the updating of policies in a way that did not bring about *sex-based* dress codes. It would be inappropriate for a female teacher to wear enormous prosthetic breasts too so something along the lines of only allowing proportionate prostheses and body modifications that were those of an average human body might be needed. Like the dress code for nurses in the UK which specified only hair dye that was of a natural colour so it ruled out nurses with bright blue hair but did not stop anybody concealing their greys or having highlights. This would protect butch lesbians from dressing with a masculine aesthetic but if any wanted to “pack” in a way that produced more than a typical male “bulge” this would not be allowed either.
Sometimes people say this is a lot of work to accommodate weirdos and want to stamp down hard and enforce conformity in ways that cause a lot of collateral damage to people harming no-one. We are a very messy species and have a lot of weirdos but we are also resourceful and adaptable. I once saw a sign prohibiting the placing of penises in a petrol(gas) pump and wondered what the story was behind that and whether it required the fire service to extricate said penis.
Personally I think it's a mistake treat the harm principle as the beginning and end of moral reasoning. It's a reasonably good starting point for things like criminal punishment but can never provide a full answer when we're deciding on norms of conduct for particular social contexts/professions (and Mill certainly never suggested that it should) - that Canadian teacher wearing fetish gear to work is a good example.
It's possible to conceptualise 'harm' in order to cover cases like this but personally I don't see how this kind of strategy can be kept within sensible bounds. I think it's less convoluted and more honest to say that how much sexuality a person can reasonably display at work/in public places is always going to be culturally determined (and disgust responses have a role to play here, amongst other things) and the lines we draw will always have some degree of arbitrariness to them.
Yes, I agree. We need harm as a reason to ethically justify using force against someone to prevent them from doing something, but that frees people up to try to influence cultural norms and also have their own moral communities and their own personal code.
On a cultural level, I’d like to see more liberalism certainly, but also more focus on tolerance, dignity, community, manners and less belief in gods.
Liberals are my voluntary community so I am accountable to them if I ever argue for anything illiberal while I respect the rights of others to do that.
On a personal level, my ethics are mostly about loyalty and honesty and compassion. I would not, for example, decide that, in my relationships, I can do whatever I want provided it does no material harm to anyone else nor denies them the same freedoms. My daughter expects me to put her needs first, my husband to consider his on a level with my own and my friends and other family have a right to expect that I will be loyal and honest and keep their confidences and care about their interests.
When it comes to rules that are arbitrary, we need to argue from principles rather than disgust if anybody wants to change anything. I cannot provide a harm-based argument for why people should not be naked or have sex in public but as there is a consensus on this and it doesn’t hugely constrain anybody’s freedom, I don’t feel the need to consider it. If social conservatives of any kind grew in number and those calling themselves gender critical wanted to set up sex-based dress codes or Muslims wanted to establish modesty codes, particularly for women, I’d have to argue against that on the grounds of freedom.
Maybe I am too simplistic, but for me the main point of whatever rule you choose, the rule of ruling should be if the rule is Kantian (universal) and then class/race/gender neutral.
If women can have tight pants showing the camel thing when teaching to minors (that for average men means the urge to immediately run to the bathroom to extinguish is biological needs... really women don't know that???) but that implies that men professors can go teaching with fake missile tits bombs. And equally, students can go to classroom in thongs, no matter gender or others specifications.
That means: same rule for everybody.
Or, otherwise, everybody in schools with minors should forced to dress exactly the same: a boring blue unisex long coat covering from ankles to the neck. Everybody: from the board director to the cleaning stuff. Including pets and parrots, as in Victorian and Mao's times.
Fine for me both.
Very well written and argued. This is a simple line in the sand for gender-critical feminists arguing for biological sex to be the reason we exclude all males, good or bad, from female spaces. Good males can be males in dresses, males who take female hormones, men with major feminising surgery. Our argument is where biological sex matters, they stay out of female spaces (and sports). That they are not in fact women. But disgust because they are expressing themselves as feminine? I'm not going to be joining in with that.
I noticed a while ago that feminists like me who have long enjoyed the company of effeminate gay men - and who like drag as an art that is a homage to and satire of femininity - are most unlikely to be offended or disgusted by a male transvestite or transsexual. My political rage and disgust at the ideology that genderists (the vast majority of them straight men and women) have been forcing on all of us is of course a different thing.
The one aspect of the TQ+ community that does alarm and disgust is the public display of fetish in order to be aroused by the humiliation of others, and the sexualisation of children by men using the umbrella of gender non-conformity to hide their paedophilia in plain sight. But that can be addressed as a distinct problem, with our allies being the gay men and transsexual men who are equally appalled at this abusive and predatory behaviour.
I think what we have learned is that, in modern times, the standard moral inclination of most people to be accepting of people behaving outside the guidelines of normal, has led to the people outside the guidelines of normal to next demand to be considered special... and some of them to punch down normies in perpetual resentment and retribution for any history of any feeling they had for not being accepted or valued... or otherwise being meant to just feel less happy for being non-normal.
So now more people are questioning the value proposition for being accepting of non-normal.
We materially achieved gender equity, racial equity and for the most part people didn't care too much about men and women with a cross-dressing fashion fetish with or without a related cross-gender sexual fetish. And now what do we all get in return for that progress? Woke bullshit ripping the fabric of society to shreds.
So maybe the Islamists have it right?
To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to some one else. The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
Wise words from Mill. It’s too bad that individual sovereignty was not granted to Alan Turing and countless gay British men….
Yes.
If you, Helen, try to stay on the center of liberal democratic ethics, everybody who is sadly fed with extremism culture see you on his/her opposite side. The dark side effect of mediatic polarization.
This is why it is on topic, this article about disgust: the more we learn to tolerate what disgust us but can't honestly consider against other's rights, the more we learn to be really liberals.
Hurt me strong, reading the unacceptable and baseless offenses you received: I feel shamed for people wrote them. I hope you take their rants with enough irony about the comic hyperboles and with socio-anthropological curiosity about the oddity of weighing rational discourses based on FFMI index of the source. And all of this goes to question myself... when I feel disgust somthing and wrongly confuse this feeling as a justification to consider that thing universally wrong only because it disgust me...
Liberal tolerance is defended exactly when I (we) tolerate what I (we) dislike personally.
How can we define (liberal and democratic) tolerance otherwise?
Looks like a representation of Allah or that prophet Mohammed. Both are synonymous with a death cult and evil.
No emotion by itself is a moral argument. And yet, often it's disgust/purity axis people tend to have the deepest problem with not care/harm. If the social sphere can not police itself or is not allowed to by 'smart' well 'reasoned' Portland people, then it becomes the basis for moral arguments and indeed moral conviction, if democracy is incapable of asserting itself, than ultimately that's all you have left.
You have a way of measuring pollution and holding corporations accountable but refuse any similar mechanisms and imagine society as a market in need of regulation in the same way, with illness of the mental variety permeating the entire structure.