It’s less about giving money to the woman herself and more about how HP and JK Rowling are used as memetic weapons. Every release of a new property has seen a rush of transphobic actors invading trans spaces for years. Invoking the name of the author and showing solidarity in a lot of contexts is a not subtle way of showing support to the veiws expressed by the Terf ideology during a time when being trans is becoming criminalized in more places. The news isn’t generally covering it well but Texas is passing laws where it is a criminal offense to misrepresent your birth sex at work or in public government spaces.

“Oh but it’s just money” isn’t so much the problem. It’s the cover this entire conversation about ethical consumption or the lack thereof in daily life is providing to people throwing up open flags of anti-trans bigotry in public and using that as a tool to band together to attack the community and send open messages that trans people are not welcome in ways that the average cis person will dismiss as just “they like kid wizards”.

It isn’t for “no real effect”. Harry Potter is a merchandise empire and it’s important to see how that empire is being utilized. Open fan support of Harry Potter is often used as a direct open signal of anti-trans support and Terf ideology. Here in Vancouver where we have a larger than average population of trans and non-binary folk and more open accommodation to the community a billboard was put up saying “I❤️ JK Rowling” downtown because it’s a more nebulous dogwhistle that wouldn’t immediately ping Canada’s hate speech laws so that the whole “Freedom of Speech” ploy could be envoked.

Whenever a new HP franchise item comes out there’s a wave of people who flood online and sometimes in person trans spaces who use the barest veneer of support of the franchise as a means to say some truely awful things about trans people. Some don’t even bother mentioning the franchise they just participate in the storming because they have the opportunity. Those spaces are often filled with vulnerable people seeking support and solidarity and these rushes can leave isolated trans people without community for weeks.

Here in Van someone wearing HP merch in any queer space is throwing up a flag that says “I am potentially an unsafe person.”

Article of the billboard.

http://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5722244

You don’t have to give up your books. All we ask is that people do not white knight the author or the publication and merchandising empire which keeps making her influence into an active memetic weapon.

It’s not Canada or Denmark which will suffer the most from-it, but US themselves

I get what you are saying but at the same time as a Canadian that comes across as more American-centric myopia.

We are a small country in terms of people with only nominally more people than the state of California spread out over a landmass 1.6% larger than the US. Our energy infrastructure doesn’t fully connect through our own country and due to American strong arming a lot of our manufacturing industry is not super robust. It’s the Goose next to the Eagle. We’re tough enough to defend ourselves and make it hurt to attack us but we aren’t getting anything out of this fight. For us it’s a fight for our lives not a fight we can profit off of. Whatever wounds we take in this fight will soften us up for the regular problems we fight. The forest fires that have become exponentially worse through climate change that have erased entire cities off our map. The healthcare crisis of a mass of retiring boomers needing more care in a system that has constantly under fire from Americanizing rhetoric that has caused disinvestment from an ethically better system. The protectionist rhetoric that comes with conflict which will erode the systems of government and create legal precedent for more autocratic means of operation that will need to be later undone. The pausing of reconciliation efforts with indigenous nations. This conflict, even as it is now, will cause real trackable losses of life and livelihood some of which will not come back.

Our existence and future as a sovereign nation is threatened but nope “The US will be the real victims of this”? Bloody fucking tonedeaf mate.

Are you talking about the NATO shortfall? Because the Canadian government has a number of places where it is scrambling to find budget for a lot of things. Consider

• An expanded commitment to rehoming and financially supporting refugees from Ukraine. Processing and approving 962,612 submissions starting from 2022

• Reconciliation efforts with notoriously under served indigenous nations to improve dismal conditions of services support, locate and providing funding to document the Residential school genocide and providing better support to survivors.

• Reinvestment in one of the most challenging Public health care landscapes in the world due to the sheer landmass the government is constitutionally on the hook to cover.

• A history making sized population of people now reaching retirement age and requiring more drastic critical health interventions and social supports than ever before.

Static commitments like NATO spending are a bit like rent. If you are financially struggling through other financially challenging problems the landlord cannot often be convinced to give you a temporary forgiveness for extenuating circumstances. All of the above things are challenges that are either in service to international peace against the encroachment of Russia, the thing NATO was created to do, or they represent inflexible commitments the government has to serve the needs of it’s people as written into it’s own laws… But a NATO landlord has a contract with a number and the number doesn’t change no matter what.

Yup, already had the “flee or stand and die” convo with my partner a few weeks ago. I am firmly willing to risk death to defend the progress we’ve made as a Province and Nation. We aren’t perfect and are early in the process but we’re trying to recon with our history of colonial genocide and embrace a truer multiculturalism which the US refuses to even acknowledge. We have made commitments to the health and well-being of all citizens, not just the productive bodies which fuel the markets. It’s incomplete but aspirational and walking it back would be a disgrace.

The American democracy is an outdated shambles that has fallen into ruin and I will not be bound by it by choice. There is no freedom or opportunity the USA can offer us. Only more oppression on rights we already have enshrined.

Wow, your name is pretty accurate huh?

Wow, lucky you.

While I won’t argue that the media is causing a number of problems thinking it’s a storm in a teacup is your privilege showing. Even though I live in one of the most trans accepting places on the planet I have had the unique experience of having to sneak past protesters who are trying to remove people like me from public life, using slurs over megaphones and openly marching hundreds strong in the streets… And again this is rated one of if not the most trans friendly place in the world. There is no safer place to go.

It’s a lot harder to see it as a storm in a teacup when the world is dramatically becoming a smaller place for us personally because laws keep passing that people do not understand or do not care how they actually impact us. The media doesn’t report a lot of us who are murdered even when it’s a hate crime. This year in the US there was 41-ish such hate motivated crimes which is near double 2023’s total… But we can’t be sure of the actual number because a lot of the time the transness of the victim and the nature of the motive is obscured by the media reporting. Some of the media shenanigans only gets caught only by loved ones as media frequently uses vagueness and dead names that friends and community members don’t recognize because that person hasn’t gone by that name for decades.

Your opinion comes from the fact you don’t personally have a horse in the race so whether you engage with it or not is a choice. The safe places are radically shrinking. The next government projected to win federally here is known to be openly hostile to trans people and I know that at least one of my friends will die directly as a result from them removing the supports currently in place. So enjoy the storm you aren’t living friend but realize saying it doesn’t exist is really crass to those who cannot find shelter.

This feels like it was not an intended reply to my post as it seems to be dealing with entirely different subject matter , are you sure you are replying to the correct person?

If your point is that intentionality of harm is required for law to be enacted then that isn’t particularly true either. Things like manslaughter charges exist because intention isn’t always nessisary when determining criminal fault for harm. Negligence, lack of adherence to pre existing law or willful ignorance are still criminal factors… And they have their own individual criminal burdens of proof that must be met to stick a conviction in court.

It is simply a nature of law that intent is always considered and proof of it is nessisary to bring forth particular types of charges that are weighted more heavily based on proof of premeditated knowledge or intent. Lack of intent does not always mean no damages are criminaly found to be your fault that must be answered for. Law makes allowances in many cases for the potential of the purest of pure accidents.

However since the UK has hate speech law, libel law and laws against provoking violence or harassment and damages are now measurable the person in the original article can be proven to have violated a law and damages happened as a result meaning that she cannot claim pure accident. Knowingly or not she broke a pre-existing law and people and property was damaged as a result.

Just like a charge of vehicular manslaughter only really sticks if you were speeding or broke a traffic law. If you are truely blameless and followed all law it is ruled " actions leading to accidental death" which is not a punishable crime. Speeding in a school zone is usually a pretty mild punishment if one is caught doing it and no one gets hurt usually it is a pretty mild fine… But if someone dies as a result of your speeding you go to jail. Same premise here just different laws.

Agreed, but you also said :

I’m okay with this phrase except for the word “intent”. If we give someone the power to try to assess our intent, it can easily go the way of totalitarian states where they say you have a bad intent any time you criticize the government.

And I am pointing that the power to assess intent is actually a norm in the justice system. Too many people on here are very quick to catastrophize things that are actually very culturally normal and stable in systems of law. Your point is not the same one I was making, hence why I referenced your likely intended point in my post.

We have always lived with exceptions to freedom of speech. Libel, slander and obscenity law as examples. The sanctity of medical records is another.

The UK also technically does not and never has had any freedom of speech enshrined in law and the government has always been able to squash print and media publications that post things deemed a danger to security.

Russia on the other hand holds a constitutional freedom of speech and the press… But will also send you to prison for publishing “LGBTQIA propaganda”

Americans treat this misplaced concept of freedom of speech as this full access pass as a universal good that is the only thing holding us all back from totalitarian regimes. In reality however speech has both never been totally free even in America as plenty of exceptions have always existed and having those protections is way more optional in other democratic nations then they would believe. It also does not protect from abuse on it’s own.

Remember that any and all tenants of free speech aren’t nessisarily a universal good. If there are measurable harms being done to people your nation is allowed to carve out an exception. It’s on you to critically evaluate the individual exception for potential issues but not specifically on the basis of a dogmatic adherence to an idea of free speech. Totally free speech itself could actually be harmful to a society and in fact has already proven to be hence libel/slander laws.

But all criminal law already has a concept of Mens rea (guilty mind) baked in. The reasonable proving of intentions is nessisary for the severity of the sentencing in almost all cases under review and has been at least as long as anyone here has been alive. It isn’t the sole factor of creating a criminal charge because - as you stated you also need to prove harms but saying people are not punished for intent and treating that as only the tool of strictly authoritarian government is factually untrue.

I feel like so much of it comes from really not doing the work to understand. It doesn’t help that With trans issues people get flat out lied to and because there’s nobody on hand to say reality check stuff like : "What the fuck do you mean ‘The uptick of trans men is causing a wave of hysterectomies in a mass sterilization plot’ … one of the largest reason for temporary detransition is for pregnancies. Also STOP TALKING ABOUT PEOPLE LIKE BREEDING STOCK. " You get a rolling problem where the disinformation is layers deep and they only trust the sources who are financially rewarded for saying the bullshit- because they believe so hard that everything is a conspiracy and have this backwards perception that if only a tiny handful of people in a field are saying something that contradicts a varitable mountain of concensus then that thing is automatically somehow more believable…

I feel like having someone in your family who opens your eyes to the realities because of the immediate demonstratable contradictions of observed reality makes sense. These people caught in transphobialand have by and large been duped. They were ignorant and a bunch of people took advantage of that for financial and political gain. While I can see how not being immediately empathetic isn’t great I dunno if I am as mad when observing from the angle of these people just being kind of dumb enough to be played.

I think it’s a lot more black and white being trans than people realize and I have my own pet theories about what gender euphoria /dysphoria is that I observe as being two independent factors.

Half of the problem I think in reaching people is that the vast majority of cis people don’t have an observed internal gender preference. We are trying to build empathy with something we as trans people assume they have too - but maybe only a small minority of cis people experience it. I don’t think we actually understand cis people, we just assume a bunch of things about them using trans people as a false opposite.

Thing is… If I am correct, the assumed massive earth shaking regret of what would happen if a cis person went through gender reassignment… Is they might just adapt and be fine.

I have pointed out to people before that trans women athletes in practice tend to not outperform all women in the sport. The data we have puts them as no more competitive as women with naturally high testosterone and depending on sport can actually be at a disadvantage…

But there’s another underlying assumption. You assume your athlete went through masculinizing puberty first and then a female puberty second. If you skip that first step then you don’t see major differences of frame, weight distribution or muscle mass.

Where this stings is that laws are forcing people to go through that first puberty regardless of the wishes of the paitent, the patients families, the paitents doctors and the concensus of the medical associations of those doctors… And then the government sits back and demonizes those people based on their physicality as a logistical social problem for the rest of their lives and ostracizes them based on this logic.

Athletes squew young. If you allowed through trans athletes who went through the transition process young enough or looked at sport with trans populations and statistically assessed whether any excessive advantage was afforded and allow in those instances where none was found you could solve for any statistical stand out issues within a decade…

But no, we are having this inane conversation because it suits some government parties to make people feel that trans people are a threat or a problem that must be stopped and that there is zero reasonable inclusion policies.

It isn’t that there’s tons of trans athletes… It’s that even at fairly low levels of sport there are currently more options available to people with disabilities to participate then there are of people of intersex and trans backgrounds. In a lot of cases tracking performances of trans athletes they aren’t dominating. There’s stories of transfem athletes who regularly sit around getting 15th place but after coming in first one time the entire sporting becomes hostile to trans people.

In civil rights discussions there’s a concept of rights of participation. The concept being that being barred from social, political or recreational spheres creates outsized harms on the ability to make the advantageous connections others are given free access to and creates classes of segregation.

There’s also a catch 22 situation. If someone opts to go through a trans puberty instead of a natal one there is no meaningful difference to speak of between the physicality of trans athletes and cis ones. If forced to stay inside their original sex segregated sport not only are trans people being being told in no uncertain terms that society does not accept their new status regardless of parity, they essentially become isolated inside the sporting body. Either you have someone whose body is feminine placed in a sport with only cis males to be compared to or you have a masculine body placed inside a group with all cis women and both will be framed out of being taken at all seriously inside the entire body of that sport. A lot of trans people can’t participate in sport not because they aim to be picked for any of the social leg ups excellence in sport provides… But for any of the regular benefits of just participating.

It creates a fair sting to have a government force your choice of initial puberty that neither you or your doctors and parents thought was a good idea… and then sit back and watch the rest of society constantly punish and isolate you for going through that puberty by then treating you as a logistical social problem for the rest of your life.

Segregated sports based on a demographic like that isn’t as trans affirming as you would think… My gut reaction as a trans person is about the same aversion I imagine a person of color would experience if a white person tried to put forward a “People of Color sport league”.

Ditching us all into a new category like we’re quarantined in sport away from other athletes because we’re implicitly not cis… Isn’t something I would appreciate.

You are halfway there. Those examples you gave define constructs but a lot of these things are not what philosophy uses to define social constructs. Scientific taxonomy constructs and linguistic constructs are things but they are fairly useless in discussion surrounding social constructs because while different cultures might draw the line differently around what exactly constitutes a “chair” vs say a “stool” or some such that’s more of just a linguistic boundry. Its basically always a thing you sit on.

Philosophy uses a bunch of different ideas labeled as different forms of construct to break down the idea of how different types of categorization or subjection happen… but when they start talking about “social” constructs they are specifically talking about categories of human interactions with something that have incredibly variable different potential contexts based on culture. It also requires things which are included or excluded from those category for not entirely practical reasons. Philosophy uses this to talk about how social categories are subjective creating or allieving tension between different cultural groups.

Food is actually a good example. There are a lot of things culturally considered food and non food items despite those items all having nutritional value and being safe to consume. In our increasingly cosmopolitan world a lot of expansion has happened to increase the size of the category. Like raw fish was not considered a food item by a lot of people when and where I was growing up. Now sashimi is everywhere and no one bats an eye. Digging for another example mice are technically edible but even raised and slaughtered cleanly very few would consider them valid as food. Whether what I put on your plate is deemed an disgusting insult or a delicious delicacy is really in the eye of the beholder and has caused a number of historical diplomatic and cultural issues around other cultures veiwing each other as inferior.

Just because something is a construct does not automatically make it a social construct.

Food is a social construct. For a social construct to exist you have to have a social category with shifting goalposts based on different context and cultural factors that are not rigidly defined. Like “Fat” - what is considered fat for a person is based on context. A supermodel is fat for being 5’9 and 145lbs but we would call a constructiom labourer skinny as fuck at those same dimensions. Each culture constructs it’s own version of what defines “fat” which is different and distinct from something than the medical guidelines for obesity or an expectation of reasonable health. “Fat” is in the eye of the beholder and represents overlapping cultural circles with varying degrees of consideration of what is excluded from the category.

The scientific concept of nutritional substance is not how we always define “food”. Culturally people contest what is considered food vs non food items based on cultural factors. Like eating mice for instance does have nutritional value but there are a lot of people who would contest them as being a valid food item even if they were raised in clean conditions due to cultural adversions. “That isn’t food.” has been uttered in all sincerity by people encountering strange delicacies that their culture has taboos against eating beliving it dangerous, unpleasant or just categorically not something intended to be eaten. Thus “food” would be in part a sociologically constructed category.

Canadian here, we don’t do that either. Primaries is one of the many additional structural barriers to representive voting being adopted in the US and a step away from having more than two parties in their system. It also increases the campaign costs for candidates and exacerbates the issues with first past the post voting meaning running people becomes an exclusive exercise for the wealthy or people with wealthy patrons who make handshake agreements.

As I understand it, Instead of having parties internally figure out who they are running on the docket as party head like sane people they open it up to basically a second first past the post election of internal candidates. You register as a member of those parties when you register to vote to participate (or not) in the election before the actual election. Personally to one outside that system that just seems like an additional bundle of problems to deal with by doubling down an already outdated voting system that creates further issues of populism but some Americans are very fond of archaic systems. You know something something founders of our nation blah blah can’t change anything our fathers who art in 6ft of dirt didn’t personally come up with blah.

Forgive my glibness. Being a neighbour is hard sometimes.

As a Socialist that subscribes more to the historical strain of Saint Simone and Robert Owen that broke out and away early from Marxism to become the Chartist movement and the history of American non-Marxist socialism … I am often tired of how one note Tankies are. They seem obsessed with a sort of internal purity which denies a rich history of socialism other than Marx and Engles. Once one of them goes off about Stalinism or Maoism I basically just disengage because at that point they are basically so enamored with the aesthetics of communism that they aren’t going to be listening to anything. They want to be devout to the ideology while whitewashing the bloodstains of past failures. I understand a collectivist mindset is more or less what Marx aims to cultivate in his work but it seems often at the cost of tolerance of any level of apostasy.

The flattening of a mass of political thought into cardboard cuttouts to snipe at and sneering at the range of Socialism hybrids with No True Scotsman flavour condescension as political ideologies simply not complete worldviews in their own right has got me rather depressed in dealing with the average Communist on here. People in general often just seem to want to find something simple and easy to hate.