(October 7, 2021 at 8:39 pm)Irreligious Atheist Wrote: Dave Chappelle doesn't know the difference between gender and sex. He seems to think they are the same thing. He's far from an expert on this subject and on these terms, but he's certainly not a "radical" feminist in the first place, so he can't be a TERF without first being a radical feminist. In fact, he said he just found out what feminist means, so clearly this isn't an area he's been studying for years or anything. Can people be offended by him calling himself TERF? Sure. He said far worse things in the stand-up special though. Said he enjoyed being raped by a priest. Compared his body fighting coronavirus to black people on the street attacking Asians, basically equating Chinese people with the virus. It's supposed to be offensive, but I don't think Dave actually understands what a TERF really is, and he clearly said he respects trans enough to call them what they want to be called, and he said he's not saying they're not women, but he thinks gender is fact. I believe he means sex AKA chromosomes and body parts are fact, but I'll call you a woman if you want to be called one, which you can call an undereducated opinion, but he's not intentionally being hateful at all to trans people imo.
But yeah, one of the first responses in this thread was about Dave Chappelle thinking trans people were some kind of non human monsters, and this is the kind of nonsense you will hear from many trans activists. "You won't even acknowledge that I'm a human being" and "your speech is violence so you need to be silenced". It's nonsense.
That's not what I said. I said he's taking on a label for himself that has harmful, damaging consequences for real people, popularizing it and validating those who would use it for excluding trans people and invalidating our identities. He may be uneducated, I don't know. Benefit of the doubt and I haven't once said that I thought he himself was targeting trans people or being malicious. But he should be called out for shooting from the hip and giving platform to hateful ideas.
The funny thing is, it's not a joke. There are those people out there who will feel like it's okay now to say they're TERFs and to act on that, because ole Dave "said what we're all thinking; someone finally fucking said it." In this cultural climate, validating this mindset, whether Chapelle understands gender or the term TERF or not, it's not a joke to people who don't conform to the gender binary who are still getting victimized in the U.S. in 2021, and it's not a joke to the radicals who feel like they have a voice and a license now because a mainstream celebrity decides he wants us to laugh about these problems.
