woke.

[Chest Rockwell]

23 minutes ago, SuperBacon said:

I know you don't "do Twitter" but interested to see whether you have looked at her Twitter account and still don't see the presence of malicious intent.

I haven't done because I know I can't see replies and that without an account, so I figured I wouldn't be able to get a proper sense of the conversation.

[Devon Malcolm]

8 minutes ago, Chest Rockwell said:

I haven't done because I know I can't see replies and that without an account, so I figured I wouldn't be able to get a proper sense of the conversation.

Are you looking for a specific conversation about the Holocaust or are you talking about her stance in general?

[Chest Rockwell]

Well yeah I was trying to find out about the Holocaust thing specifically as that sounded pretty extreme.

And then what I found was a journalist publicly apologising for calling her a Holocaust denier and some sites saying it was all a load of bollocks and others saying she was the new Hitler but I couldn't really get a clear picture.

I'm not going to lie and say I put loads of work in, nor am I asking you guys to spoonfeed me..  But it was more the point that if it's that unclear, people with be unlikely to be motivated to change their behaviours and I can't really blame them.

[SuperBacon]

48 minutes ago, Chest Rockwell said:

I haven't done because I know I can't see replies and that without an account, so I figured I wouldn't be able to get a proper sense of the conversation.

Gotcha. Well, unfortunately seeing as all of this comes from her use of Twitter and the hatred she spews on it, this is one conversation you won't be finding out about will it.

[Devon Malcolm]

15 minutes ago, Chest Rockwell said:

I'm not going to lie and say I put loads of work in, nor am I asking you guys to spoonfeed me..  But it was more the point that if it's that unclear, people with be unlikely to be motivated to change their behaviours and I can't really blame them.

It's not really unclear, though. She tweeted a denial that trans people were targeted by the Nazis during the Holocaust. 

 

[Loki]

12 hours ago, BomberPat said:

This is an interesting one, because I've seen a few things pop up recently about Tomb Raider, with the developers giving really reasoned explanations about why they made the main character a woman, and how important that was to them. Back in the '90s, I distinctly remember one of them saying to Official Playstation Magazine that they did it because they "didn't fancy looking at a bloke's arse for the whole game".

It reminds of a time during the Gamergate shitstorm, when someone on the shit side of things tried to argue that actually there's loads of feminist games, but their definition of "feminist" boiled down to "has a woman in it", so half of their list was stuff like Dead or Alive that's entirely built on over-sexualising every single female character for the male gaze. As much as a lot of this stuff is built on simple old-fashioned misogyny, the complete lack of media literacy among a sizable percentage of the population has to shoulder some of the blame too.

 

It's not got that much better in the intervening years, I can tell you.  Even in the last few years I have had heated conversations with co-workers about the implicit sexism of people's work, and had to advocate for a more inclusive approach.  

A lot of games companies are 70-90% male staffed, and so a lot of the time it's just a blindness to inbuilt biases.  Like for example making the "default" skin of a female character a tiny bikini where the male default is t-shirt and shorts.  Or having no female enemies to fight in a game.  Or making a bunch of haunted weapons, and they're all haunted by male ghosts.  That sort of thing.  It's never malicious and deliberate, it's just a lack of wider thought.

When you're the only woman in a meeting of 15 artists, you have to be very, very self-confident to speak out about this, so often it just passes unremarked.  And the number of women in senior development positions is still far too low, so senior management meetings are often all male.   

It's hard to redress the balance, especially in larger companies.  I've quietly managed to hire more female juniors into my departments over the years but some companies don't like the idea of positive discrimination so you can't do it overtly.  Also there are so few women candidates.  So I've worked with a university to set up bursaries for female students to encourage more girls to do videogame degrees, but obviously that's only going to produce a few more candidates a year.  You do what you can.

On the flip side, I've heard from more than one female game developer that Lara Croft inspired them to get into games.  Yes, she was 50% polygon norks, but she did represent a genuine female voice and protagonist which was unusual at the time (Janus in Metroid is silent and in a power suit).   Having playable, voiced female characters is fairly well established now across game franchises, and that in the long term will encourage more girls to play games, and then consider it as a career.

TL:DR games dev is still a sausage fest.  Still, at least people don't download hardcore porn onto their work computers any more, that was a thing when I joined the business.

 

Edited April 16 by Loki

[Keith Houchen]

42 minutes ago, Chest Rockwell said:

Well yeah I was trying to find out about the Holocaust thing specifically as that sounded pretty extreme.

And then what I found was a journalist publicly apologising for calling her a Holocaust denier and some sites saying it was all a load of bollocks and others saying she was the new Hitler but I couldn't really get a clear picture.

I'm not going to lie and say I put loads of work in, nor am I asking you guys to spoonfeed me..  But it was more the point that if it's that unclear, people with be unlikely to be motivated to change their behaviours and I can't really blame them.

It revolves around two specific tweets. The first was in reply to someone who said “The Nazis burned books on trans healthcare and research. Why are you so desperate to uphold their ideology around gender”. Rowling replied “I just…how? How did you type this out and press send without thinking I might have to check my source for this as it might be a fever dream”. 
 

So this could be taken as Rowling saying that the Hirschfeld and Gohrbrandt studies and research weren’t destroyed by Nazis (they were, and they photographed themselves doing so) and it’s a fever dream to say they were, or that it’s a fever dream to say Rowling is desperate to uphold the Nazis ideology on gender, which means she wants to exterminate all people not conforming to the Nazis view on gender. 
 

The second tweet was in regards to a reply to the above. Someone said that trans people were the first people targeted by the Nazis (they weren’t, the disabled were) and telling her about it wasn’t a fever dream. She replied with something about the bible had a bit about puberty blockers but Leviticus made them take it out”

The holocaust denial bit is because a German court ruled that denying any book burning is an act of holocaust denial. I’m sure that Rowlings many lawyers would argue the case that she meant the fever dream referred to her wanting to exterminate gay and trans people, hence the retraction. The court also ruled there isn’t the evidence to say trans people were targeted because they were trans. The trans people executed in the holocaust were  executed because they were homosexual, Jewish, disabled, and/or prostitutes. 

[Chest Rockwell]

56 minutes ago, Devon Malcolm said:

It's not really unclear, though. She tweeted a denial that trans people were targeted by the Nazis during the Holocaust. 

 

I think I might be getting confused because you were talking about anti-Semitism, and it seems the two are in this case completely unrelated?

My understanding of 'Holocaust' and 'Holocaust denial' has always been that those terms refer specifically to the systematic genocide of Jews in Nazi Germany, and not any other social groups targeted by the third reich. That doesn't seem to be how those terms are being used here.

I don't think it's helpful to use ambiguous language to imply she has been expressing anti-Semitic views.

[Keith Houchen]

4 minutes ago, Chest Rockwell said:

My understanding of 'Holocaust' and 'Holocaust denial' has always been that those terms refer specifically to the systematic genocide of Jews in Nazi Germany

I think the holocaust refers to any and all groups murdered by the Nazis, Shoah is the term specific for the mass murder and slaughter of Jews. 
 

 

[Chest Rockwell]

Ah, I see. If that's well-understood then it's unlikely that anyone else is making the same incorrect inference that I have done.

[Devon Malcolm]

9 minutes ago, Chest Rockwell said:

I think I might be getting confused because you were talking about anti-Semitism, and it seems the two are in this case completely unrelated?

My understanding of 'Holocaust' and 'Holocaust denial' has always been that those terms refer specifically to the systematic genocide of Jews in Nazi Germany, and not any other social groups targeted by the third reich. That doesn't seem to be how those terms are being used here.

I don't think it's helpful to use ambiguous language to imply she has been expressing anti-Semitic views.

On this occasion I wasn't talking specifically about her casual anti-semitism, I was talking about her transphobia. The Holocaust is recognised as an umbrella term for a number of groups targeted and murdered by the Nazis.

https://theconversation.com/historians-are-learning-more-about-how-the-nazis-targeted-trans-people-205622

By denying that they were targeted during the Holocaust, Rowling is engaging in Holocaust denial.

https://www.themarysue.com/j-k-rowling-appears-to-sic-lawyers-on-queer-critic/

[Tamura]

5 hours ago, Keith Houchen said:

She replied with something about the bible had a bit about puberty blockers but Leviticus made them take it out

That has to be one of the most insane things I've read in a long time, I even had to fact check what she actually said to make sure she wasn't being misquoted. But it turns out to be substantially correct, since she said;
 

Quote

I heard there was a bit in Revelation about puberty blockers but Leviticus made them take it out

The idea that the Levi censored the book of Relevation tends to fall down flat on its face when you consider what's actually left in the various books of the bible (and yes, I'm aware there isn't a single universally accepted version of it, but bear with me here). Over to Richard Dawkins;
 

Quote

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

But hey, let's leave all that in and make sure we only take out the part about puberty blockers ok? The Book of Leviticus itself is one of the most insane parts of the bible, featuring heavily in the Heretic's Guide to the Bible. Some more liberal-minded people might consider the death penalty for cursing one's mother or father (Leviticus 20:9), sleeping with your neighbour's wife (Leviticus 20:10), or cursing the name of the lord (Leviticus 24:16) to be just a teeny bit excessive, it's no surprise thart I don't remember the Book of Leviticus ever being mentioned during religious eduction at school. But of course the bible isn't meant to be taken literally, say adherents. Of course which particular bits that applies to can be generally taken to mean anything which makes Christianity look ridiculous. 

I'll never understand people like Rowling. Undeniably a creative person. fabulously rich with the freedom to do whatever she wants with her time, and she spends most of it arguing online about transgender people. Utterly baffling.

[BomberPat]

11 hours ago, Loki said:

On the flip side, I've heard from more than one female game developer that Lara Croft inspired them to get into games.  Yes, she was 50% polygon norks, but she did represent a genuine female voice and protagonist which was unusual at the time (Janus in Metroid is silent and in a power suit).

This is something I've had to kind of teach myself to consider in other areas too - I used to be really critical of Chyna being used as an example of female empowerment in wrestling, because I don't think that was ever the intent; Chyna being strong and fighting men was never meant to say "women can be as good as men", it was a freak-show act to say "this woman can wrestle women", because she was the exception to the rule. But then I speak to lots of women in wrestling who were inspired by Chyna, and whatever my thoughts on her and how she was booked, it's only right that I take a step back and let the women who did see her as empowering and inspirational step up.

 

10 hours ago, Chest Rockwell said:

I think I might be getting confused because you were talking about anti-Semitism, and it seems the two are in this case completely unrelated?

My understanding of 'Holocaust' and 'Holocaust denial' has always been that those terms refer specifically to the systematic genocide of Jews in Nazi Germany, and not any other social groups targeted by the third reich. That doesn't seem to be how those terms are being used here.

I don't think it's helpful to use ambiguous language to imply she has been expressing anti-Semitic views.

There is legal precedence in German courts that the law covers denying any aspect of the Holocaust, not only the genocide of Jews - the specific letter of the law refers to the denying of Nazi crimes, rather than the Holocaust, which has the effect if not the intent of skirting around the linguistic debate over whether the "Holocaust" should refer solely to the genocide of Jews or to all victims. As an aside, a lot of people who write about this stuff prefer "Holocaust revisionism" as a term to "Holocaust denial", to better illustrate that it's a broader category of hate speech and extremism than just those who outright pretend the Holocaust never occurred at all.

In that light, I don't think the intention of accusing Rowling of Holocaust denial is to imply antisemitism, but to show the circles that she now runs in and the fellow travelers who share her views. In denying that the Nazis targeted trans people, there is recent legal precedence for that to be considered an act of denial - the case Houchen mentioned is, I believe, currently awaiting appeal, so it's not a done deal, and there's a lot of scholarly writing about the targeting of trans people by the Nazis, and will be lots more in years to come.

 

On Houchen's point about the Nazis not targeting people because they were trans, I think that's largely an issue with projecting our current understanding of sex/gender roles and identity on to the past - I think I have said on here before that I think there are LGBTQ+ activists who can overstate the significance of the Hirschfield Institute by effectively treating it as a queer Library of Alexandria, this repository of lost knowledge destroyed by history's greatest monsters, and that without that destruction and the loss of their research we'd be living in far more enlightened times, and I understand why it can be helpful to believe that as a call to arms, but of course it's all more complicated than that. 

The issue with saying that trans people killed by the Nazis were actually killed for other reasons neglects that, until relatively very recently, there really wasn't much distinction between categories like "gay" and "transgender" or "gender-fluid"; the idea of a defined identity of a "gay man" is really a late 20th century invention. For a long time, to be gay as we would now understand it was argued as a "third sex", and a person assigned male at birth who identified as female would, in many cases, have been treated as falling under that broad umbrella. For the Nazis, the labels of trans woman, gay man, and pederast may as well have been interchangeable, but that was largely true in this country for decades as well.

It's a mistake to look back at even the recent past and ascribe identities to people who never chose them personally - one of my favourite artists is Claude Cahun, and there's been debate over whether she should be referred to by male pronouns given that she went by a male name for most of her life, and much of her art and photography played in a space that prefigures a lot of more recent art exploring questions of gender; I fall down on the side of the argument that says she never, as far as we can tell, referred to herself as anything other than she/her even while using the name/identity of "Claude", so it would be unjust to project our current ideas of what her gender role might be on to her as anything more than speculation.

So determining to what extent trans people were targeted for their trans-ness rather than being seen as a subset of gay people is a messy and often speculative process. But we know that Weimar Germany had laws against public crossdressing, for which it was possible to obtain exemption permits if it could be proved that the holder of said permit was living their life as the gender they presented as. These permits were revoked by the Nazis. There was a limited and rudimentary understanding of trans identity, work by Hirschfield and others to establish an idea of trans rights, and there were trans magazines, societies, and clubs, all of which were targeted by the Nazis.

A trans woman who has sex with men, sent to an extermination camp because the Nazis saw her only as a cross-dressing homosexual man, should not be seen distinctly as either solely a gay victim of the Holocaust or solely a trans victim of the Holocaust. To do the former is to shy away from the motivations of the Nazis and the understanding of sex/gender roles that was most prominent at the time, but to do the latter is to see her only in the same terms that the Nazi regime saw her in, which is an injustice in itself.

[deathrey]

24 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

The issue with saying that trans people killed by the Nazis were actually killed for other reasons neglects that, until relatively very recently, there really wasn't much distinction between categories like "gay" and "transgender" or "gender-fluid"; the idea of a defined identity of a "gay man" is really a late 20th century invention. For a long time, to be gay as we would now understand it was argued as a "third sex", and a person assigned male at birth who identified as female would, in many cases, have been treated as falling under that broad umbrella. 

Fantastic and well written post as always @BomberPat, I always learn so much from your posts on this subject. I know this was not the point of your post as you are speaking specifically about Nazi's treatment of Trans people but I do think it was worth mentioning that this is a very western view of Trans people and for many Eastern countries Trans people were recognised in their own right for many centuries - in India this was only undone by the British Raaj.

[BomberPat]

Thank you!

I've done a lot of research into revisionism over the years - a friend of mine used to delight in introducing me to people by saying, "this is Pat, he's been getting really into Holocaust denial lately" - so I try to add anything that can add a bit of nuance to an argument that risks just taking a very serious allegation and using it as an insult rather than understanding what it means. 

On trans identities, I owe a lot of the direction of my argument here to the Bad Gays podcast, which often reiterates that point about recognising that when we talk about gender and sex identities we are talking about them in a narrow historical and cultural context, and that it's not necessarily useful to project that on to others; the flipside is that it would be equally foolish to think that we've got it all exactly right here and now!