Your point will only be valid if the women speaking of dick function are the same women who say men shouldn’t opine on abortion. If the woman is someone who thinks everybody can have an opinion on everything regardless of their biology or identity, it doesn’t work. https://twitter.com/jameslovevani1/status/1358266200871100416

We see this weird mentality a lot. “Some people at some point with the same skin colour or genitalia as you have said or done something about X. This makes it hypocritical for you to say or do something which would be inconsistent with that.”

Eg, many white people have historically been disparaging of black people’s hair and some still are. Therefore white people who have never felt or been disparaging about it & actually like & wish to wear some of the styles inspired of it are insensitive hypocrites.

This is the problem when we categorise groups by identity rather than by values. When it comes to abortion rights, I am not best understood as belonging to the group called “women” but to the group called “pro-choice.” In my country more men than women are in that group.

When it comes to issues of racism, I am not best understood as belonging to the group “white people” but to the group “liberal opponents of evaluating people’s worth by their race - aka racism.” There are a lot of non-white people in this group.

Standpoint epistemology isn’t real. People don’t think a certain way because of their skin colour, sex or sexuality. Some aspects of our experiences can be related to our skin colour, sex or sexuality & not experienced by people with different ones but more are not.

One of the worst mantras of current anti-racism expressed by white adherents is “I will never understand.” How low in empathy or unable to recognise people with different skin colours as fellow humans do you have to be not to be able to understand how damaging racism must feel?

You may not have experienced something but you should be able to intuitively understand how it makes other people feel.The fact that we humans devour stories in the form of novels & movies is testament to our ability & desire to empathise with people having experiences we haven’t

Of course, human theory of mind & empathy is limited but this means we should try harder to empathise with people who’ve had or consistently have horrible experiences related to their identity. Current antiracism actively discourages this & that’s one of my biggest issues with it

I have a relative of my father’s generation who has spent her life actively opposing racism as a writer. I’d describe her as primarily an old school leftie who focuses mostly on class but has liberal tendencies with a splash of wokeism in there. She’s very politically engaged.

Actually, I’m not going to continue with that story because of the risk of anyone trying to cancel her. Let’s just say she told me her focus on racism as a political writer was inspired by a teenage incident in which she’d been flirting with a black boy.

They’d been throwing teasing insults at each other in the way teenagers do when they’re flirting but then she used one that was racially tinged & saw him flinch. She was only 14 but she recognised that that one had caused him genuine hurt. This was 1960s London. Racism was rife.

She said the memory of that flinch underlies everything she’s done since to oppose racism. That was a teenage human recognising that she had caused emotional pain to another teenage human & being inspired by it to dedicate herself to opposing racism for the next 50 years.

So let’s not go down the “I will never understand” route, but instead go down the “I can & should try to understand my fellow humans even if they differ from me in some way because we all suffer emotional pain & can convey this to each other & be receptive to it” route.

Addendum: I saw my mother yesterday. She said one of her aunts had pictures of “Black Sambo” that she saw once. This character and his family didn’t look human. She remembers being very uncomfortable with it as a little girl in the 1940s before ever meeting a black person.

The reason she felt so uncomfortable was because she had been badly burned in a fire as a baby & was marked out & bullied & called “scar face” by other kids. She found this very painful & imagined that a black person would feel the same way if they saw those pictures.

I’m currently reading “Trans-gressive” by Rachel Anne Williams & while I disagree with most of it, I liked that she said that people who are affected by some kind of prejudice are likely to be empathetic & feel kinship with people affected by other kinds.

This is actually quite problematic in CSJ terms which prefers to focus on privileges people have in order to divide them. So they might say to Williams “Yes, you’re trans but you’re not black so you still have white privilege & can’t understand the experience of racism.”

I’d go a step further than Williams and say that you don’t actually have to have any kind of marginalised identity to empathise. Few straight, white men have gone through their lives never feeling excluded, bullied, demeaned, marked inferior in any situation ever.

This will provoke the ire of CSJ people who will say I’m relating the feelings of a privileged white boy who was a bit socially awkward & didn’t get invited to many parties to the experiences of people whose ancestors were recently enslaved, brutalised & lynched. No, I’m not.

I’m saying all humans have the same psychological needs and emotional pains & thus come equipped with the ability to empathise & imagine how we’d feel in someone else’s shoes. This is a good thing. Let’s maximise this with humanism rather than diminish it with identity politics.

And now I am going offline to be with my family.