silencing tactics

Standing Up For Leelah

[Content Note: discusses harassment, family rejection of transgender teens, suicide, trans* erasure, and silencing tactics commonly used to stifle discussion of these matters ].

I find more and more recs for articles written by Arthur Chu in my feeds lately. This post prompted by reactions to the Tumblr’d suicide note left by transgender teen Leelah Alcorn is a particularly strong piece: Cover-ups, Concern Trolls and Suicide. Chu questions why some people want others to stop sharing Leelah’s words.

Debate vs Inquiry and “Reasonable Debate” as a silencing tactic

Debate is not inquiry. Argument is not skepticism. Fetishizing debate makes us less knowledgeable as a culture and even as a movement, not more.

<okay, sure, we’ve been having these debates for decades now. But let’s dredge it up again. Let’s treat the basic bodily autonomy of people with uteruses** as a subject that’s up for discussion, a subject that reasonable people can disagree about. And let’s be calm and reasonable about it.

The attempts to shut women down continue

Two women who have been the subject of floods of contemptuous and dismissive abuse as part of their public life write about their experiences and point out that their experience is the cultural norm, not any outlier experience.

Today in Tangential Learning: the smell of chloroform

As part of following PZ Myer’s account of a campaign against him on campus from the editor(s) of a right-wing student newspaper, I have learnt what chloroform smells like, and it smells like something present in every office and classroom and most private homes.

Then I searched online for a bit more information about chloroform…

Methinks ’tis time to update a ‘net classic

The world needs a social justice version of John Baez’ classic simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics AKA The Crackpot Index, to rate our never-ending “feedback” from troglodytes of assorted stripes who are convinced that not only are we Doin It Rong but that we deserve to be threatened into silence for daring to have an opinion in the first place.