While this project (like Nina's quilt project) is interesting, and she has previously made some beautiful art, including Sita Sings the Blues, and Mimi and Eunice, Nina has spent a significant amount of time and energy in the last five years actively working to harm the lives of trans people.
She has done this through using her substantial social media following to publish and post anti-trans articles, promote anti-trans writers, mock trans symbols (such as the trans flag), as well as actively mock the trans experience through posts about genitalia, pronouns, and other issues.
I used to be a colleague of hers and also considered myself a friend of Nina's, but while she actively works to harm the lives of trans people, I feel people must know this side. I sincerely hope that Nina will understand the magnitude and severity of the pain she's caused people and will change her attitude and denounce her previous statements and activity.
In the meantime, I would hope that those who wish to support her or her work express to her that they would like to see her turn away from this path and towards one of acceptance and compassion.
ugh that's really depressing. I really liked the generated art, but it feels tainted now knowing the artist hates my existence. I'm glad to know this though, thanks.
Hate is such a strong word and most likely not the best description here.
We all have beliefs about reality and these beliefs generate a lot of emotions. We also interact with our beliefs as if they are the reality and seldom question them. This is true for both more conservative or traditionalist beliefs and for ultra-progressive beliefs.
When the beliefs about reality clash, as they inevitably do, people sometimes find it hard to take a more inclusive perspective and try to find our shared humanity. Unfortunately, most of the time they activate the old ingroup-outgroup distinction, Us vs Them and the Them must be destroyed.
Just because someone don't share ALL of your beliefs does not mean that they hate you.
I wonder how many of the people defending or downsizing Nina Paley's position have seen the offending content - irrespective of how you feel about trans issues, representing trans women as such offensive caricatures (as violent club-wielding male genetalia) seems like sufficient grounds to label someone as hating trans-people.
Imagine if someone had drawn similarly offensive caricatures of black people or any other minority? Would you hesitate to claim that they were racist and hated the targeted minority?
I admire Nina Paley for her advocacy of free culture (both public domain artwork and free software), but it is somewhat saddening to her take such a hateful stance.
> I wonder how many of the people defending or downsizing Nina Paley's position have seen the offending content
Exactly. Nina likes to pretend that she is simply "exploring the issue critically" or that pronouns are "a debate" rather than about the rights of individuals to live their lives. She'll bring up bizzare "talking points" like (and this is a direct quote) "They're trying to kill gay men by turning them into women".
I worked with Nina at QuestionCopyright.org, the organization that she was (perhaps still is?) Artist in Residence of.
I also moved cities in part to be closer to Nina and other QCO folks. (This didn't work out as they moved away from NYC just as I moved there).
I've had many conversations with her, as well as not only following her social media, but also curating one of the channels where her work was shown for a while.
I spoke with her on the phone about these issues specifically, and how posts showing the "Snowflake Flag" and parody songs like "If it has a penis, it's a man" were actively hurting people.
> Imagine if someone had drawn similarly offensive caricatures of black people or any other minority? Would you hesitate to claim that they were racist and hated the targeted minority?
Yes and! If a friend called you up on the phone (as I did with Nina) and said "Let me explain to you how the things you're drawing are not only offensive, but actively harmful" and they kept doing it despite that, I think it would be reasonable to conclude that the artist was placing their own freedom of expression above the well being of the minority.
Moreover, if the artist only targeted one group over and over, then one would be reasonable to conclude that this was a specific, targeted effort to harm that minority.
> I admire Nina Paley for her advocacy of free culture (both public domain artwork and free software), but it is somewhat saddening to her take such a hateful stance.
> They're trying to kill gay men by turning them into women
I'm not sure how this is hard to understand. Trans-activists themselves have been emphatically raising awareness about gender dysphoria being a critical risk factor for suicide. You think healthy gay or bi males who increasingly get told by trans-activists that their non-heteronormative gender presentation means "they're not really a man" and should surgically transition to female are not going to experience dysphoria after transitioning?
There is not a single "trans activist" who wants to deliberately induce dysphoria in people. Many of us know what dysphoria feels like: why would we want to make other people suffer for no reason?
Trans activism is about giving people the ability to self-determine their gender presentation, their personal identity and their sexual characteristics. It's about liberating us (all of us, cis and trans alike) from oppressive notions of sex essentialism and medical gatekeeping. Fundamentally it's about shifting the source of truth to one's personal experience rather than societal messaging of any sort, i.e the exact opposite of what you describe.
Again, for the record: we have no interest in telling anyone with a non-normative gender presentation that they're likely trans. We want to get rid of the idea of telling people what they are in the first place. We want to replace it with the idea that people themselves are the best judges of what they are.
If anything, they'd maybe be told that they're non-binary? and most non-binary people do not medically transition in any way..
but I know a number of very femme cis gay men, I've never told them they were any kind of trans, and they're quite happy. I think this is a conspiracy theory.
One of the ways you can tell Paley's position is not worth deeper intellectual consideration is the number of outright contradictions in it.
"If it has a penis it's a man" but trans women who have had bottom surgery are also still men. Biology defines gender but also womanhood is in crisis because "our connection to ancient goddess worship is completely broken" and trans activism is "a continuation of the erasure of the Goddess." Transition is a form of colonization but also the Age of Reason produced the only coherent conception of gender. Trans activists are forcing queer cis men to get bottom surgery, but the problem with trans women is that they don't get enough surgery like they did in the good old days. The writing is to sexual freedom and gender studies what a Gish Gallop is to evolution.
I don't know Nina Paley's stance on this beyond your paraphrase, but your first statement (at least) is not a logical contradiction. It is equivalent to (for all) x, penis(x) -> male(x); (there exists) x (such that) !penis(x) -> male(x).
I think this sums up the problem with today discussion about this issue in general. First, the whole debate has been reduced to one side only, i.e. people who identify as women. Second, trans activists can not understand that there is a huge number of women who are not comfortable with the fact that anyone can say they identify as a woman and do things like observe them naked.
It's very hard to argue because it's clear both sides have good arguments: you can't debate someone's feelings. One side has a feeling of being vulnerable for abuse, and the other side feels rejected and misunderstood. It's no wonder that the whole discussion gets out of hand and name calling starts, like "they want to eliminate my existence" where the opposite is often true: the people who feel courageous enough to express their opinion on this dangerous point are the ones who deeply care for others and feel they need to speak out on behalf of those who are too afraid. You can be the most popular writer in the world but it's enough you speak up on this issue and you will be dragged through the mud.
> Second, trans activists can not understand that there is a huge number of women who are not comfortable with the fact that anyone can say they identify as a woman and do things like observe them naked.
How is this argument different from, say, "There are a huge number of men who aren't comfortable with homosexuals seeing their nakedness in public restrooms and changing rooms, and if they won't take medical treatment to get rid of their unnatural attractions, they need to be separated from society"?
Like the whole thing hackers are supposed to be good at is recognizing patterns and coming up with abstractions. How is this not just another instance of the same class of mistreatment Alan Turing suffered?
> How is this argument different from, say, "There are a huge number of men who aren't comfortable with homosexuals seeing their nakedness in public restrooms and changing rooms, and if they won't take medical treatment to get rid of their unnatural attractions, they need to be separated from society"?
The difference is that I said the equivalent of the first part of the sentence, whereas the part "and if they won't take medical treatment to get rid of their unnatural attractions, they need to be separated from society" has been added by you, and this is happening regularly in these discussions because people feel the main argument is too weak so they try to add made up things.
If we really want to solve this problem instead of creating confusion, we should really concentrate on the finding out some solutions rather than mischaracterizing the other side. Because, as far as possible solutions go, I haven't heard of many.
That's why I said these are two different cases of the same pattern, not the exact same thing. You're right that they are not the same thing.
But we found a working solution to the previous problem: gay people get to be gay, and people who worry about gay people checking them out in bathrooms and in changing rooms have to deal with it. It's not a balanced solution, in the sense that it didn't make the two sides of that debate equally unhappy, but from all accounts, it seems to work just fine.
The same solution seems like it should apply to the present problem, too. That's why I think these two cases, even though they are different cases, have similarities.
But the "problem" you describe was never a problem, hence it required no solution. You don't have your orientation written all over you, so gay and straight people use the same public spaces and there is absolutely no problem. There was no debate about it because it was not needed.
I remember I was in a public restroom in a mall once and a strange man approached me while I was peeing, he was literally looking at my penis. I was very surprised, but didn't feel really threatened, just a bit uncomfortable. But I can imagine being a woman in a similar situation and it doesn't feel like right. The core of the problem is that the victims of vast majority of sexual assaults are women, and for some of them this problem is very real.
> Second, trans activists can not understand that there is a huge number of women who are not comfortable with the fact that anyone can say they identify as a woman and do things like observe them naked.
Yes, they can.
Trans activists will respond to this with something like “public restrooms, lockerrooms, etc., should not assume that everyone is a cisgender heterosexual and that sexual violence occurs only in the direction if normal attraction, and should provide sufficient privacy and safety for the fact that genser identity, attraction, and sexual violence targets are not determined by sex assigned at birth.”
I would hazard a guess that there are few groups of people who are more aware of, and have spent more energy on considering comprehensive rather than shallow solutions for, this issue than trans activists.
Well, in theory, many things should work. The concerns of women re voiced because, in practice, if these don't work, the consequences can be severe.
And yes, sexual violence dominates in one direction (male -> female/male), that's why we have female-only gyms and other public places, like passenger cars in trains in Asia and other parts of the world. Yes, in theory trains should be safe but in practice sometimes/often they are not, depending on where you live and so on. Saying people who identify as women can enjoy can enter all these safe spaces at will basically destroys all these protections built specifically for women over decades.
> The modern Trans Rights movement (not to be confused with actual trans people) is a men's sexual rights movement dominated and richly funded by white men. Its main victims are black women, for that is who mostly populate the single-sex spaces - such as prisons and domestic violence shelters - transactivists insist should be accessible to men.
Well, what transactivists insist these should be accessible to trans women because they are women. But Nina here essentially argues trans women simply do not exist, they are men as they were assigned at birth. This is the moral panic over men suddenly claiming they are women to gain access to women they can predate on. Never mind that never happens.
And the claim of rich white men somehow fueling this, as if rich white men needed to do something as absurd as falsely claiming to be trans to find women they can r*pe, often underage.
>actively working to harm the lives of trans people.
That is some exaggeration, unless you have some video of Nina chasing trans people with a machete or similar. I would say she has some dissatisfaction about how transactivism is carried out nowadays and how gender-identity has become a religion.
Advocating for changes in public policy, or opposing changes to currently oppressive public policy, is a zillion times worse than chasing someone with a machete.
You think expressing dissent is akin to mental abuse? I think people have every right to express their opinions or dissaproval regardless of how many twitter followers they have.
You can disagree and dissent all you want, but there's a bit of style involved. Gov't discussing legislation you don't like, feel free to shout from the rooftops. Telling someone to their face they are doing something you disagree with is another thing entirely. Holding rallies to let people know you believe they are deviants/perversions of nature/etc serves no purpose other than intimidation.
> actively working to harm the lives of trans people.
Many self-described trans-activists are indeed "actively working to harm the lives of trans people" by seeking irreversible hormonal and surgical transition for young kids and teenagers who are increasingly being encouraged to express "confusion" and "dysphoria" about their gender roles, no matter what their actual feelings on the matter might be. So she's at the very least not alone in that!
38 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 79.8 ms ] threadNina Paley did "Sita Sings the Blues" [1], "Sader-Masochism" [2] and "Mimi and Eunice" [3].
MysticSymbolic has a GoFundMe to help support it [4].
[0] https://github.com/mysticsymbolic/mysticsymbolic.github.io
[1] https://www.sitasingstheblues.com/
[2] https://www.sitasingstheblues.com/
[3] https://mimiandeunice.com/
[4] https://www.gofundme.com/f/mysticsymbolic-development
https://sedermasochism.com/
https://archive.org/details/sedermasochism/
A predecessor of this is This Land Is Mine https://vimeo.com/50531435
She is also a fantastic comics author https://ninapaley.com/NinasAdventuresArchives/NinasAdventure... my favorites are the two color ones featuring Og ...
I hope the Twitter mob doesn't notice this[0], otherwise she'll go through the same stuff as J.K. Rowling.
https://mimiandeunice.com/2018/11/14/not-all-trans/
She has done this through using her substantial social media following to publish and post anti-trans articles, promote anti-trans writers, mock trans symbols (such as the trans flag), as well as actively mock the trans experience through posts about genitalia, pronouns, and other issues.
I used to be a colleague of hers and also considered myself a friend of Nina's, but while she actively works to harm the lives of trans people, I feel people must know this side. I sincerely hope that Nina will understand the magnitude and severity of the pain she's caused people and will change her attitude and denounce her previous statements and activity.
In the meantime, I would hope that those who wish to support her or her work express to her that they would like to see her turn away from this path and towards one of acceptance and compassion.
We all have beliefs about reality and these beliefs generate a lot of emotions. We also interact with our beliefs as if they are the reality and seldom question them. This is true for both more conservative or traditionalist beliefs and for ultra-progressive beliefs.
When the beliefs about reality clash, as they inevitably do, people sometimes find it hard to take a more inclusive perspective and try to find our shared humanity. Unfortunately, most of the time they activate the old ingroup-outgroup distinction, Us vs Them and the Them must be destroyed.
Just because someone don't share ALL of your beliefs does not mean that they hate you.
Those "Jendra Identitty" things look like they're coming pretty close.
Imagine if someone had drawn similarly offensive caricatures of black people or any other minority? Would you hesitate to claim that they were racist and hated the targeted minority?
I admire Nina Paley for her advocacy of free culture (both public domain artwork and free software), but it is somewhat saddening to her take such a hateful stance.
Exactly. Nina likes to pretend that she is simply "exploring the issue critically" or that pronouns are "a debate" rather than about the rights of individuals to live their lives. She'll bring up bizzare "talking points" like (and this is a direct quote) "They're trying to kill gay men by turning them into women".
I worked with Nina at QuestionCopyright.org, the organization that she was (perhaps still is?) Artist in Residence of.
I also moved cities in part to be closer to Nina and other QCO folks. (This didn't work out as they moved away from NYC just as I moved there).
I've had many conversations with her, as well as not only following her social media, but also curating one of the channels where her work was shown for a while.
I spoke with her on the phone about these issues specifically, and how posts showing the "Snowflake Flag" and parody songs like "If it has a penis, it's a man" were actively hurting people.
> Imagine if someone had drawn similarly offensive caricatures of black people or any other minority? Would you hesitate to claim that they were racist and hated the targeted minority?
Yes and! If a friend called you up on the phone (as I did with Nina) and said "Let me explain to you how the things you're drawing are not only offensive, but actively harmful" and they kept doing it despite that, I think it would be reasonable to conclude that the artist was placing their own freedom of expression above the well being of the minority.
Moreover, if the artist only targeted one group over and over, then one would be reasonable to conclude that this was a specific, targeted effort to harm that minority.
> I admire Nina Paley for her advocacy of free culture (both public domain artwork and free software), but it is somewhat saddening to her take such a hateful stance.
I couldn't have expressed it better myself.
I'm not sure how this is hard to understand. Trans-activists themselves have been emphatically raising awareness about gender dysphoria being a critical risk factor for suicide. You think healthy gay or bi males who increasingly get told by trans-activists that their non-heteronormative gender presentation means "they're not really a man" and should surgically transition to female are not going to experience dysphoria after transitioning?
Trans activism is about giving people the ability to self-determine their gender presentation, their personal identity and their sexual characteristics. It's about liberating us (all of us, cis and trans alike) from oppressive notions of sex essentialism and medical gatekeeping. Fundamentally it's about shifting the source of truth to one's personal experience rather than societal messaging of any sort, i.e the exact opposite of what you describe.
Again, for the record: we have no interest in telling anyone with a non-normative gender presentation that they're likely trans. We want to get rid of the idea of telling people what they are in the first place. We want to replace it with the idea that people themselves are the best judges of what they are.
Has this actually happened, or is it the same kind of thing as those child sex rings in pizzeria basements?
but I know a number of very femme cis gay men, I've never told them they were any kind of trans, and they're quite happy. I think this is a conspiracy theory.
"If it has a penis it's a man" but trans women who have had bottom surgery are also still men. Biology defines gender but also womanhood is in crisis because "our connection to ancient goddess worship is completely broken" and trans activism is "a continuation of the erasure of the Goddess." Transition is a form of colonization but also the Age of Reason produced the only coherent conception of gender. Trans activists are forcing queer cis men to get bottom surgery, but the problem with trans women is that they don't get enough surgery like they did in the good old days. The writing is to sexual freedom and gender studies what a Gish Gallop is to evolution.
I don't know Nina Paley's stance on this beyond your paraphrase, but your first statement (at least) is not a logical contradiction. It is equivalent to (for all) x, penis(x) -> male(x); (there exists) x (such that) !penis(x) -> male(x).
I didn't examine the other statements.
If there's anything to be learned from critical race theory it's that structures matter much more than interpersonal relationships.
Does she harm the lives of actual trans people? Or is she rather criticizing a toxic development of the Trans Rights movement itself?
It's very hard to argue because it's clear both sides have good arguments: you can't debate someone's feelings. One side has a feeling of being vulnerable for abuse, and the other side feels rejected and misunderstood. It's no wonder that the whole discussion gets out of hand and name calling starts, like "they want to eliminate my existence" where the opposite is often true: the people who feel courageous enough to express their opinion on this dangerous point are the ones who deeply care for others and feel they need to speak out on behalf of those who are too afraid. You can be the most popular writer in the world but it's enough you speak up on this issue and you will be dragged through the mud.
How is this argument different from, say, "There are a huge number of men who aren't comfortable with homosexuals seeing their nakedness in public restrooms and changing rooms, and if they won't take medical treatment to get rid of their unnatural attractions, they need to be separated from society"?
Like the whole thing hackers are supposed to be good at is recognizing patterns and coming up with abstractions. How is this not just another instance of the same class of mistreatment Alan Turing suffered?
The difference is that I said the equivalent of the first part of the sentence, whereas the part "and if they won't take medical treatment to get rid of their unnatural attractions, they need to be separated from society" has been added by you, and this is happening regularly in these discussions because people feel the main argument is too weak so they try to add made up things.
If we really want to solve this problem instead of creating confusion, we should really concentrate on the finding out some solutions rather than mischaracterizing the other side. Because, as far as possible solutions go, I haven't heard of many.
But we found a working solution to the previous problem: gay people get to be gay, and people who worry about gay people checking them out in bathrooms and in changing rooms have to deal with it. It's not a balanced solution, in the sense that it didn't make the two sides of that debate equally unhappy, but from all accounts, it seems to work just fine.
The same solution seems like it should apply to the present problem, too. That's why I think these two cases, even though they are different cases, have similarities.
I remember I was in a public restroom in a mall once and a strange man approached me while I was peeing, he was literally looking at my penis. I was very surprised, but didn't feel really threatened, just a bit uncomfortable. But I can imagine being a woman in a similar situation and it doesn't feel like right. The core of the problem is that the victims of vast majority of sexual assaults are women, and for some of them this problem is very real.
Yes, they can.
Trans activists will respond to this with something like “public restrooms, lockerrooms, etc., should not assume that everyone is a cisgender heterosexual and that sexual violence occurs only in the direction if normal attraction, and should provide sufficient privacy and safety for the fact that genser identity, attraction, and sexual violence targets are not determined by sex assigned at birth.”
I would hazard a guess that there are few groups of people who are more aware of, and have spent more energy on considering comprehensive rather than shallow solutions for, this issue than trans activists.
Well, in theory, many things should work. The concerns of women re voiced because, in practice, if these don't work, the consequences can be severe.
And yes, sexual violence dominates in one direction (male -> female/male), that's why we have female-only gyms and other public places, like passenger cars in trains in Asia and other parts of the world. Yes, in theory trains should be safe but in practice sometimes/often they are not, depending on where you live and so on. Saying people who identify as women can enjoy can enter all these safe spaces at will basically destroys all these protections built specifically for women over decades.
https://mimiandeunice.com/2018/11/07/the-jenndra-identitty-c...
https://blog.ninapaley.com/2018/02/07/gender_colonialism/
> You have the right to identify as anything you like, but that doesn't give you the right to make everyone else identify you the same way.
And a four tweet thread at https://twitter.com/ninapaley/status/1086633666208509952 let me copy the first two:
> The modern Trans Rights movement (not to be confused with actual trans people) is a men's sexual rights movement dominated and richly funded by white men. Its main victims are black women, for that is who mostly populate the single-sex spaces - such as prisons and domestic violence shelters - transactivists insist should be accessible to men.
Well, what transactivists insist these should be accessible to trans women because they are women. But Nina here essentially argues trans women simply do not exist, they are men as they were assigned at birth. This is the moral panic over men suddenly claiming they are women to gain access to women they can predate on. Never mind that never happens.
And the claim of rich white men somehow fueling this, as if rich white men needed to do something as absurd as falsely claiming to be trans to find women they can r*pe, often underage.
That is some exaggeration, unless you have some video of Nina chasing trans people with a machete or similar. I would say she has some dissatisfaction about how transactivism is carried out nowadays and how gender-identity has become a religion.
Many self-described trans-activists are indeed "actively working to harm the lives of trans people" by seeking irreversible hormonal and surgical transition for young kids and teenagers who are increasingly being encouraged to express "confusion" and "dysphoria" about their gender roles, no matter what their actual feelings on the matter might be. So she's at the very least not alone in that!