You are choosing the most uncharitable reading which is not what he meant. How do I know that? Because, despite his meatheaddy appearances, he has consistently shown himself to not be transphobic, I watch his show. What he wanted to say is that her sex was biologically of male and that's why she has in this specific case unduly enormous advantage, to a degree that she is depriving others of fair chance at competing.
Transphobia is a property of actions, not an immutable property of people. Rogan may not hold transphobic beliefs. That does not stop a particular action from being harmful.
This isn't a judgement on his person. I don't want to shoot him into space. I want people to recognize that this specific sentence is harmful and we can be better than that. We can have conversations around transgender people in sports without using the same exact same phrasing as people who want to kick them out of their homes and call them freaks.
Whether or not trans athletes should be allowed to compete in the same classes as their cis counterparts in MMA is a conversation we can have, but it is beside the point. Trans women are women. If someone makes plainly transphobic comments, and then refuses to apologize for them (or even doubles down), I'm not going to go and listen to hundreds of hours of their content to attempt to gain a more nuanced understanding of their attitude towards the trans community. I'm just going to think of that person as a transphobe.
Respectfully, I understand you have good intent trying to stand up for a marginalized group, but you're being very ignorant. You can't just helicopter in, show no interest in understanding the situation, then cherry-pick something to spew off some unwarranted opinions about before helicoptering out again. While that singular sentence is absolutely insensitive, the context absolutely matters if you're going to judge the character of the person who said it.
And I appreciate that you are not trying to impute ill intent on me, although you may be underestimating my proximity to the transgender community personally. From my reading of the longer-form quotes – those that I have based my opinion on, I really don't think the context helps Rogan out all that much.
"Look, [Fox is] huge! She's not just huge, she's got a fucking man's face. I mean, you can wear all the lipstick you want. You want to be a woman and you want to take female hormones, you want to get a boob job, that's all fine. I support your life to live, your right to live as a woman. Fight guys, yes. She has to fight guys. First of all, she's not really a she. She's a transgender, post-op person. The operation doesn't shave down your bone density. It doesn't change. You look at a man's hands and you look at a women's hands and they're built different. They're just thicker, they're stronger, your wrists are thicker, your elbows are thicker, your joints are thicker. Just the mechanical function of punching, a man can do it much harder than a woman can, period."
"If you want to be a woman in the bedroom and you know you want to play house and all of that other shit and you feel like you have, your body is really a woman's body trapped inside a man's frame and so you got a operation, that's all good in the hood. But you can't fight chicks. Get the fuck out of here. You're out of your mind. You need to fight men, you know? Period. You need to fight men your size because you're a man. You're a man without a dick. I'm not trying to discriminate against women in any way, shape, or form and I'm a big supporter of women's fighting. I loved watching that Ronda Rousey/Liz Carmouche fight. But those are actual women. Those are actual women. And as strong as Ronda Rousey looks, she's still looks to me like a pretty girl. She's a beautiful girl who happens to be strong. She's a girl! [Fallon Fox] is not a girl, OK? This is a [transgender] woman. It's a totally different specification."
I'm not talking about a single sentence here. Despite whatever permissive or lassiez-faire attitudes he might hold, there is a constant drumbeat of "they're not really women." "Benign" transphobia is still transphobia, even if it's preferable to more aggressive forms. It's possible to be sober about physical differences that might exist between trans women and cis women without denying the former "full" womanhood. I'm not even necessarily disagreeing with the main point he's making, but I still find these comments to be transphobic, and I don't need to be a fan of his to hold an informed opinion here.
I premise that your is a perfectly valid interpretation, he said the things your criticize him for saying.
I would disagree with calling this transphobic... On the topic of the statement "trans women are women" for example wikipedia notoriously offer an interesting position
Trans woman: A trans woman is a woman who was assigned male at birth.
Woman: A woman is a female human being.
This is not necessarily contradictory, but it as the effect that the statements "Trans women are women" and "Trans women are females" are linked together.
My assumption (which I believe you agree with, if you disagree with the next statement I would be interested in hearing your opinion on it) is that many people that (strongly) agree with "trans women are women" do not necessarily fully embrace "trans women are female"
I am not arguing for or against any of those statements (I am trying not to inject my opinions (if any) on them in this comment), but to me this says that the linguistic concept of woman is not intrinsically obvious in this phase of an evolving language.
In my opinion what Rogan says here is that in term of fighting he believe the only contextual concept of gender is similar to duck-typing: If you punch like a man, then you are a man.
Agree or disagree with that I believe it is (still) important to be able to express that concept without being transphobic, as in my opinion that would impede our ability to talk about the complex multidimesional bimodal distribution that is human sexuality.
What I am trying as hard as I am able to is to steel-man Rogan's position without straw-manning yours.
A short summary of what I am trying to say is that I believe that Rogan's position is not transphobic; maybe he is toxic, maybe he is poisoning the conversation with inflammatory language, maybe he is on the wrong side of history. And maybe he deserves being called transphobic for what he said; I am not trying to defend Joe Rogan the person, I am trying to find a small reasonable kernel of his position where I believe we can agree.
I am not entirely sure what you mean, what I am trying to say is that if someone believe he was transphobic, then it would be enriching of the conversation if they took care not to use the fact that he is making that distinction as an argument for that statement.
Specifically I think it is in the interest of the side challenging the status quo to keep their arguments as precise as possible.
Otherwise conversations become extremely difficult and layered, like a relationship fight that stem from a resentment decades old. There are so many branches and so many directions that even if the core problem might be easy it requires a monumental effort just to get close to it.
Intrinsically examples of where I think this happened would be flamebait topics :)
> what I am trying to say is that if someone believe he was transphobic, then it would be enriching of the conversation if they took care not to use the fact that he is making that distinction as an argument for that statement
Yes, I think I'm definitely not understanding you correctly. It seems like you're objectively stating that conversation would be of higher quality if people would construct arguments more like you do. But what if people do want to use that argument for their statement that they find JR transphobic?
"Don't use this argument; it's wrong and devalues the conversation" reads very strange to me when discussing something as fuzzy as "does this person exhibit transphobic behaviour?"
This is close to what I am saying. If people want to use that argument they are free to do so, I intend to keep butting and try to steel man the opposing position without strawmanning their argument.
Also I need to confess that, no, I do not actually want people to argue like I do, I argue this way because otherwise I would make terrible, inconsistent, and vague arguments. Many other people are better than me and they do not need a whole paragraph where they preemptively state their intentions.
Overall I believe that there is great value in trying to find a common ground we can agree on and base the discussion. In my perception arguments in forums like this one should be the complete opposite of a debate. If I believe A is true and you believe B is true and they are mutually exclusive, I believe that the "proper" way to argue my position by exposing the basis of my opinion so that you can both understand why I believe A and explain me your interpretation of those positions.
Now I am devolving into rambling, but I think that shaping conversations as debate is indeed damaging. As an example if I am convinced of A by some internal reasoning and you prove not A to me then only half the job is done. We (or I) need to also resolve the conflict between my internal reasoning and what you are saying. Or at the very least take note of the fact that there is an internal conflict to be resolved.
There is no foundation in anything for this opinion, but I believe that the lack of this second step in the popular sciences made the scientific community elitist and was fertilizer for things like antivaxxers.
>Whether or not trans athletes should be allowed to compete in the same classes as their cis counterparts in MMA is a conversation we can have
Thats the conversation he was having. You don't have to listen to hours of content, just take it from people here telling you that that was the context of the discussion. Or don't and simply don't comment on the matter. You are not obliged to have an opinion on everything.
