Fuzzy auras, penumbras and emanations

From How to be a stickler in the fuzzy aura by Ann Althouse.  She is critiquing an article, Listening to ‘The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling’ is exhausting work/A podcast promised clarity from Harry Potter author on how she feels about trans issues. But it falls to the audience to fact-check her" by Monica Hesse in the Washington Post.  

Althouse is pointing out the logical inconsistency in Hesse's writing.  Well, and actually just how bad the writing is.  

I am more struck by two slightly different points.  Hesse writes:

Journalism is a business for sticklers. Reporters are discouraged from calling anyone transphobic, or homophobic, or racist, because doing so requires knowing what’s in their hearts when the only thing we can know with certainty is what comes out of their mouths. So what I can say is that what comes out of her mouth, or goes onto her Twitter account, has a fuzzy aura of harmful rhetoric. 

Rowling might indeed believe she has transgender friends. But taken as a whole, her body of communication on the issue, such as the things she chooses to retweet and the provocative language she uses while doing so — cumulatively, it sucks. Her communications have implicitly conflated being trans with being a predator.... The communications have implied that many trans men are confused, and that some trans women are actually just dangerous men in drag.... 

Rowling’s tweets are exhausting. They are exhausting because they require constant vigilance, because they are not screaming out obvious bigotry, a la 'I hate trans people.' Rather, they are whispering a curated plausible deniability, the kind that purports to be just asking reasonable questions with simple answers....

The first point is that Hesse is essentially trying to mind read.  Apparently there is nothing in Rowling's writing which Hesse can point to that articulates the objectionable views Hesse believes Rowling holds.  So Hesse is having to work hard to interpret the innocuous words to find a hidden, unstated, meaning.

This echoes the experience of Scottish journalist E.J. Rosetta.  From Rosetta's article, JK Rowling transphobic? How I went from spreading this false narrative to seeing right through it – EJ Rosetta.  

I had been tasked with writing a clickbait article entitled “20 transphobic JK Rowling quotes we’re done with”, which I had enthusiastically accepted. However, while collecting my list of quotes, it felt like they must be wearing an invisibility cloak. I couldn’t find a single one!

For example, in July, Rowling tweeted a thread detailing her concerns about the medicalisation of trans children. It was branded “transphobic” because it asked the-question-that-must-not-be-asked about the reality of medical care, still in its infancy, being applied to children. On second look, I saw that Rowling simply concurs with professionals that lifelong medicalisation and loss of fertility is not in the best interests of children. That is actually care for trans people, not condemnation of them.

She was saying “there are downsides that I feel should be discussed” not “I hate trans people”. She had taken the time to research the matter, understood what could be holding back progression for trans healthcare and raised awareness for its betterment. That, I would say, is pro-trans, not anti-trans.

It dawned on me: JK wasn’t transphobic, she was standing up for women’s rights in a real and meaningful way. I was surprised anew as I found that, when I approached her words in an unbiased way, I agreed with every point she made.

The second point builds from the mind reading of the first.  Author's who are trying to find meaning where it clearly does not exist.  "Fuzzy aura of harmful rhetoric" sounds a little like . . . penumbras and emanations.

Supreme Court Justice Douglas was trying to find the basis for a constitutional right to an abortion in the US Constitution.  There very clearly was no explicit right to abortion so he went with penumbras and emanations rather that with the fuzzy aura of a right.

From Wikipedia:

In United States constitutional law, the penumbra includes a group of rights derived, by implication, from other rights explicitly protected in the Bill of Rights. These rights have been identified through a process of "reasoning-by-interpolation", where specific principles are recognized from "general idea[s]" that are explicitly expressed in other constitutional provisions. Although researchers have traced the origin of the term to the nineteenth century, the term first gained significant popular attention in 1965, when Justice William O. Douglas's majority opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut identified a right to privacy in the penumbra of the constitution.

[snip]

Although the meaning of the term has varied over time, scholars now generally agree that the term refers to a group of rights that are not explicitly stated in the constitution, but can be inferred from other enumerated rights. The definition of the term was originally derived from its primary scientific meaning, which is "a space of partial illumination (as in an eclipse) between the perfect shadow on all sides and the full light". By analogy, rights that exist in the constitution's penumbra can be found in the "shadows" of other portions of the constitution. Additionally, the process of identifying rights in constitutional penumbras is known as penumbral reasoning. Brannon P. Denning and Glenn H. Reynolds have described this interpretive framework as the process of "drawing logical inferences by looking at relevant parts of the Constitution as a whole and their relationship to one another." Glenn H. Reynolds has also characterized penumbral reasoning as a process of "reasoning-by-interpolation" where judges identify the full scope and extent of constitutional rights.

[snip]

J. Christopher Rideout and Burr Henly note that the term achieved prominence after Justice Douglas' majority opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut held that a right to privacy existed in the penumbra of the constitution. In Griswold, the Supreme Court ultimately held that a Connecticut law that criminalized the use of contraception was unconstitutional. Writing for a majority of the Court, Justice Douglas held that the Connecticut law violated a fundamental right to privacy. After reviewing a line of cases in which the Supreme Court identified rights not explicitly enumerated in the constitution, Justice Douglas declared that "[t]he foregoing cases suggest that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance". Justice Douglas argued that the Court could infer a right to privacy by looking at "zones of privacy" protected by First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments:

Various guarantees create zones of privacy. The right of association contained in the penumbra of the First Amendment is one, as we have seen. The Third Amendment in its prohibition against the quartering of soldiers "in any house" in time of peace without the consent of the owner is another facet of that privacy. The Fourth Amendment explicitly affirms the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." The Fifth Amendment in its Self-Incrimination Clause enables the citizen to create a zone of privacy which government may not force him to surrender to his detriment. The Ninth Amendment provides: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

Fuzzy auras, penumbras and emanations - all ways to find a meaning in words which isn't actually there.