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Discussion: Transwomen are not women (Part 7)

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Olmstead said:
Eh, it will be fine. Logically and scientifically consistent views eventually end up on the right side of history.
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She'll be fine regardless. She's independently wealthy and her heirs will be set for life for multiple generations. I suppose her reputation can always get worse and she might suffer some minor social consequences, but this anti-trans stance is really little more than a hobby for someone who is essentially retired.
 
The Atheist said:
Beautiful.

Handwave away rape and death threats and go back to "TERFs are more evil".

You have become a parody of yourself.
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Some trans people are not very nice, some even engage in criminal action like death/rape threats. This is true of all people.

Since when do we decide who gets civil rights based on the actions of a lunatic fringe? Somewhere out there some gay person sent a death threat, some black person sent a rape threat, some woman mailed a pipe bomb. How is this relevant to whether or not entire classes of people deserve civil rights?
 
Matthew Best said:
What was the reason for standing outside her house doing whatever it was that they did? (I'm afraid I don't know what they posted because all three of their Twitter accounts have vanished for some reason.)
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Rowling has used her fame to platform her anti-trans views, and some critics see an opportunity to protest her as a way to use that same fame to advocate pro-trans views.

Don't be willfully obtuse. It would probably be better if society generally didn't care about the social takes of celebrities, but that's not the world we live in.

If Rowling wants to use her outsized influence to advocate a certain policy position, we should not be surprised if her detractors criticize her personally in an attempt to likewise use that fame in the public discourse. Standing outside her mansion is not a threat or doxxing, it's run-of-the-mill criticism. The TERFs have paper thin skin, but trying to conflate holding a protest sign with an implied threat of violence is especially pathetic.
 
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SuburbanTurkey said:
Some trans people are not very nice, some even engage in criminal action like death/rape threats. This is true of all people.

Since when do we decide who gets civil rights based on the actions of a lunatic fringe? Somewhere out there some gay person sent a death threat, some black person sent a rape threat, some woman mailed a pipe bomb. How is this relevant to whether or not entire classes of people deserve civil rights?
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Indeed.

And there were of course plenty of well-documented terrorist-style incidents carried out by black civil rights activists, and female suffragettes, and other unfairly-oppressed groups. So, go figure......

FWIW, I think it was highly irresponsible and provocative (at a minimum) for those trans-activists to have published photographs of them standing outside Rowling's private residence. I was interested though in Rowling's response - a defiant exhortation that it wasn't going to shut her up, and that nobody should be "telling women" what to do/think/etc.

And that got me to thinking: Rowling obviously believes that transwomen aren't women. But she must also therefore think that transmen are not men. In other words, she believes that transmen are women. So I wonder how she feels about a transman (ie a woman, in her eyes) "telling women" about the validity of transgender identity and the need for transgender rights?
 
LondonJohn said:
And that got me to thinking: Rowling obviously believes that transwomen aren't women. But she must also therefore think that transmen are not men. In other words, she believes that transmen are women. So I wonder how she feels about a transman (ie a woman, in her eyes) "telling women" about the validity of transgender identity and the need for transgender rights?
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TERF's generally believe transmen are deluded women who have internalized misogyny to the extent that they willingly mutilate themselves. They are sympathetic to them as fellow women, but discredit their experiences as delusional self-harm.
 
d4m10n said:
Not you, her.
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Considering all her concern trolling about keeping "women's" spaces trans-exclusive, it's safe to assume she opposes any form of policy that grants trans people official gender recognition, with all the rights that entails.
 
There was a distinct lack of calls to "Rape Whitey" in the black struggle as I remember though - such threats only seem to come from Incels and Trans Rights Activists and funnily enough both groups want to get into womens knickers
 
stanfr said:
My point was, that even though that is the simplistic answer, life/nature aint that simple--see:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the-idea-of-2-sexes-is-overly-simplistic1/

You are free to disagree with this, but it is not a unique position.
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I will be happy to disagree with that (the following is from a biologist):

sex might as well be a binary, because the overwhelming majority of people conform to the definitions of either male or female, which involve differential gamete production (sperm vs. eggs), and only slightly fewer fail to conform to a binary of other primary sexual characteristics (appearance of genitalia) or secondary sexual characteristics that appear at puberty (breasts, pubic hair, etc.).

To be a bit more precise, biological sex in humans is bimodal: if you do a frequency plot with “sex” on the X axis and “frequency of individuals conforming to that sex” on the Y axis, you get a huge peak at “male”, another huge peak at “female”, and then a few tiny blips in between that conform to hermaphrodites or intersexes.

There’s a reason why sex is a binary: evolution produces two distinct sexes who mate with each other to produce offspring. Exactly why there is sex rather than all of us budding off clones or reproducing in other asexual ways is an unsolved problem, but once there is sexual reproduction, you can construct a reasonable theory about why there should be two of them, and that they should be distinct. (A few species have “mating types” that encompass more “sexes”, but these are virtually nonexistent in vertebrates.)
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Source
 
stanfr said:
Fair enough I just found this thread today so I don't know the history. I was just going on your comment as it read to me.
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At the risk of being a pain in the neck and explaining something that really doesn't need an explanation.



Some of us have been around the block on this thread so many times that we just sort of skip some points and make some assumptions and such.


In discussing intersex issues, you might see some rather snippy responses that you think aren't warranted. It goes to the role played by intersex issues within the context of the thread. We all know that intersex issues are important and sometimes difficult, but they have almost no actual role in any controversial topics discussed here. They are often simply a red herring or diversionary tactic.

We all understand that intersex people exist, but that person who is fully functionally male who wants to use the same locker room as the girls' swim team is not intersex. That kid who holds the all time recod for the 200 meter run in Connecticutt is not intersex. Laurel Hubbard isn't intersex.

Likewise, they haven't surgically transitioned, and they may or may not have taken any hormones. They are fully functional males capable of impregnating females using the tried and true methods made available through evolution. The truly controversial areas for this thread involve males who simply declare that they are women, and expect to be treated as such, even without any medically related transition.

So by all means discuss intersex issues. They are certainly related to the topic of this thread, but recognize that they are kind of peripheral. They aren't central to the controversy. Some answers you get might be because people think you are using a tactic that they have seen before, which is to hide behind intersex or surgically transitioned individuals in order to avoid talking about the actual controversial situations that people feel strongly about.
 
Paul2 said:
I will be happy to disagree with that (the following is from a biologist):

Source
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I liked this from one of the comments in the blog post:

Not biological essentialism: a Chinese person is a person from China.

Biological essentialism: Chinese people are inherently good at math.

Uber biological essentialism: People who are good at math are Chinese.

***

Not biological essentialism: A woman is an adult human female.

Biological essentialism: A woman is an inherently feminine minded person.

Uber biological essentialism: A feminine minded person is a woman.
 
Paul2 said:
I will be happy to disagree with that (the following is from a biologist):

Source
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I'm not sure about the 'sex is bimodal' though. Bimodal implies that sex is on a continuous distribution with two frequency peaks. It is usually presented as a variant of 'sex is a spectrum'.

If sex is continuously distributed, what is the scale on the horizontal axis? Perhaps there is some meaning of 'bimodal' other than a statistical one.
 
Elaedith said:
I'm not sure about the 'sex is bimodal' though. Bimodal implies that sex is on a continuous distribution with two frequency peaks. It is usually presented as a variant of 'sex is a spectrum'.

If sex is continuously distributed, what is the scale on the horizontal axis? Perhaps there is some meaning of 'bimodal' other than a statistical one.
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Yep- it's an obligate binary - there are only two roles and both are required for proper development in mammals.

There was a while in September where I was pointing this out and posting links to a definition every few days
 
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stanfr said:
My point was, that even though that is the simplistic answer, life/nature aint that simple--see:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the-idea-of-2-sexes-is-overly-simplistic1/

You are free to disagree with this, but it is not a unique position.
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I would say it is virtually an unheard-of position in peer-reviewed papers published by biologists. This is an ideologically-motivated piece by a journalist. It has already been debunked in this thread. There is no new science behind it - the examples discussed have been known about for decades but they do not pose any threat to our understanding of the ontology of sex. It is existing knowledge re-packaged to lead to an ideologically-preferred conclusion (that being male or female should be self-identified).

There is a good critique in this article under the 'categories' section.
 
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