Sounds great, but expensive. Perhaps there’s an org of some sort out there that would help with legal costs…
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You’re encouraging your friends to sue?
Perhaps Facebook is actually staffed by Northern Ireland protestants. That would explain a lot.
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Sometimes even nukes have to be launched.
And lawyers are like them in many aspects, from cost to fallout to calls for a ban.
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But, he also thinks they’ll lose. Lawyers are not cheap.
If he discloses this in the course of the advice, it is fair, though. I can see the merit of that approach, though the cost limits it only to those with money to spare on such a “toy activity” or with friends-lawyers willing to chip in their time. Or so.
Can’t they file suit themselves? I don’t use attorneys.
And yet, I see teenagers on there all the time with names like “MariaTheRealSwag CopKilla” or something equally ridiculous. Every single one I’ve reported has gotten the message from Facebook that the name does not appear to violate their policies.
You could be on to something there. Based on the fact that posts inciting people to murder are “within FB’s community Guidelines” it makes a lot of sense.
Well, it’s Facebook, if they don’t discriminate on one thing, they still discriminate on so many others, and they still don’t respect privacy.
For example, they require people to recognize people by their faces to close accounts, and not everyone can recognize people by their faces.
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Great, thanks for being part of the problem.
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Trans actually has nothing to do with Drag really. Drag is very specifically a type of performance. It has no bearing on sexuality or gender identity. There are straight men that perform as drag queens. There are straight, cis-gendered women who perform as drag queens. Drag is also different from transvestism. Wherein some one dresses in the clothing if the opposite gender, but without identifying (or transitioning) to that gender. It loosely just means any dressing in the clothing of the opposite gender, but its most often used these days to refer to the practice as a sexual fetish (which is most common among straight men). You could be a trans transvestite. Say, someone born a man but transitioned, and identifying, as female who goes on to sometimes dress as a man for a sexual thrill.
Which is why drag queens would be a problem here. The drag queen persona is explicitly a stage name and stage persona. Its effectively fictional, and thereby not a “real name”. But its their trade name of sorts, and its the name and face that needs to be promoted via and present on social media. On top of that drag names tend to be obviously not regular, normal, names by any other convention. Dan Savage used to perform under the name Helvetica Bold, and Pandora Boxx is a friend of a friend (I’ve met the guy who portrays Pandora he’s really, really nice). The names used are almost always deliberately goofy puns or jokes; or utilize purposely obscure, humorous sounding real names or otherwise improbable combinations of names to form an obvious gag. All of which is going to run afoul of real names policies of this type. So it impedes their ability (and to certain extent right) to promote, and engage in their chosen form of performance art. Combine that with drag’s origins in and connections to the LGBT community and you’ve kind of got a recipe for a dodgy ethical situation. But not one that’s cleanly, or even for the most part, falls under inclusion or identity politics.
But anyway Drag Queens aren’t a subset of Trans people. Most drag queens (most drag performers of any sort) are cis-gendered, gay, men. Though there isn’t anything specific to Drag that ties it to gay, cis-gendered, men exclusively.
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You can go down to the courthouse and pay $20 or whatever to file an intent to sue*. It’s basically a legal document that says you’re reserving the right to file a suit at a later time. You’re not obligated to sue after filing.
Usually, these are used to extend the statute of limitations: Say you have two years from the date of an accident to file a suit. At 22 months, you’re still needing medical care, and don’t know how much to ask for until they know what the real damage is- So you file the form that says you’re still reserving the right to sue at a later time because the situation is ongoing.
Alternately, they serve as a legal document on file that says you want to sue someone, and it will show up in a public records search. It puts pressure on the other party by convincing them that you’re serious.
And that’s exactly what I’m telling people. If a record search shows 20,000 people planning to sue over it and claiming racial, gender, and religious discrimination, it makes it LOOK MUCH MORE LIKELY to cost the company a lot of money. This is something that can lead to the stockholders showing up at a meeting and asking “we’re facing HOW MANY lawsuits from this?!? SHUT IT DOWN before it COSTS us.”
Facebook doesn’t CARE what name you use, they just want to make money. If the policy makes more than it costs, it stays. If it risks more than it makes, it goes away.
*IANAL: The official term, filing fee, and procedure vary by state. Still, it’s a matter of: Go to the courthouse, fill out a form, and pay the fee. A lawyer would charge you $100 to have an aide go do the same thing.
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I’m sorry, but who the fuck do they think they are?
I’d ask that question if I walked into a convenience store and they asked to look down the front of my pants. It has precisely fuck-all to do with whether they run the website, and everything to do with criticizing it. It’s still a fucking valid question. AKA, “Where do they get off being so damn nosy?”
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Lawyers are ethically bound to tell you when the effort is futile, expensive, or ultimately not worth the money you’re about sink into it. Some people go ahead anyway. Sometimes people have the money and it really is just the principle of the thing. But the assumption that lawyers are happy to take the money of naive clients for merit-less cases is more closely related to the lawyer-joke than the reality of the standard practice of law.
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Didn’t say anything about the ethics of lawyers.
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True. I misinterpreted your remark, sorry. I’ll let mine stand as a mere aside, then.
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But you don’t get to decide that. At the very most you get to say that you personally are a drag king/queen who does/doesn’t identify as transgender. Other people can make their own minds up about themselves, but not each other.
The reason for this is although you may see one group as different from another, the thug who shouts abuse and puts someone in hospital for not dressing ‘correctly’ doesn’t care if you are a drag queen or a transvestite or have a diagnosis of gender dysphoria.
Transgender was supposed to be an umbrella term for all people who challenged gender norms should they choose to identify as such. If someone wants an exclusive term then they can go and find another that isn’t already being used.
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Observing that A is not a subset of B doesn’t mean the sets are exclusive to each other. The fact that there are people who are members of A without being members of B demonstrates the truth of the statement. “Getting to decide” has nothing to do with it, it’s not a value judgement.
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But what I am trying to say is that group A was always meant to be a subset of group B (if they chose to be) until Group C came along and decided they shouldn’t be. Group C shouldn’t be able to do that.
In this case a group of people has been attempting to redefine transgender as people who desire surgery, despite the intentions of the people who first defined it in the 1980s. If they want a group which doesn’t include drag kings/queens, then they can go and create their own group and their own terms for themselves, and stop stealing inclusionary terms and hijacking movements!
Please note that there are lots of people who are post-GRS who do not identify as transgender, because their body now matches their gender identity. Does this mean that anyone who is seeking or has had surgery isn’t transgender?
This seems to be heading towards No True Scotsman.
