Trans women are not women (Part 8)

[Emily's Cat]

You need to improve your reading comprehension. I explained in my post that the app used facial recognition to verify sex, as well as actual human beings vetting the applicants. It is as clear as it possibly can be that the app is for biological, female women only (there is no other kind of woman, but let's be tautologically clear about this). That is exactly what the trans activists are challenging in the human rights court. They do not believe that biological, female women should have any space or category at all that is closed to them.

There's another mess going on at the moment, related to this. There is a charity that supports women who have suffered pregnancy loss due to domestic abuse and/or forced abortion by a controlling partner. The woman who heads this is currently under enormous pressure because she won't "open the service" to transwomen. I'm not making this up. If she insists that only women will be helped by her charity she is an evil transphobe and they will get her closed down.

My feeling about all this is that we're looking at a mass psychosis coming near to its natural end-point. A bunch of over-confident, aggressive men have over-reached themselves, and the essential nudity of rhe emperor is becoming clearer to more people by the day. They thought it they could get men accepted in women's prisons they would win, because they thought that was the ultimate invasion. However it turns out that most people don't care so much about prisons as they do about sport - or many it's just that the prison rapes aren't being shown live on TV but the girls and women being beaten by men are.
It's not going to go away overnight, but the first signs of the tide turning are already showing.

I think it's the highlighted more than anything. A surprising number of people are completely unaware that bepenised males are being placed in female prisons... because the vast majority of people don't know anyone in prison, let alone a female in prison, and the media will not report on it. News agencies can take a "progressive" stance and consider anything critical of trans stuff to be "phobic"... but they can't stop showing sports. Too many people care about sports, too many people watch. And if they stopped showing those sports, people would complain.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I thought this link might be relevant to the wider thread:

https://www.girlschase.com/article/social-life/mouse-utopia-are-we-living-human-version

It's the famous rat utopia experiment. I post this as a counter to Rolfe feeling that the current fixation with trans-activism is something akin to the satanic panic.

To anybody who doesn't know it, back in the 60s, scientists tried to create a "rat utopia" to study what happened to rat populations under "ideal" circumstances. A lot of odd things happened. One of the things that stood out was low status male rats becoming effeminate, obsessively grooming....

Interesting choice of sources. I'm... unconvinced that I should accept any conclusion about females coming from a cite dedicated to pick-up training for incels.

 

[sarge]

Ive split posts that were discussing relative happiness of women after the advent of feminism to a new thread here http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=357908. There remains more off-topic posts than can’t be easily split to new threads without impacting the continuity of this thread. Please try to stay on-topic going forward.

Posted By: sarge

 

[p0lka]

Considering that all recorded history, as well as all anthropological information going back to the stone age indicates that males and females at minimum covered their genitals, even in hot climates, is rather strongly suggestive.

Yeah we wear clothes. The point of contention was whether it was instinctive modesty that drove it, or basic utility, for example cover up the sensitive bits cos it hurts when you don't.

By trying to redefine what "female" means in the first place, and trying to cast it as a "cluster" of a whole bunch of different characteristics, including karyotype, phenotype, and hormones. Then they pretend that since some of those things aren't "strictly binary", then sex isn't strictly binary either... and therefore, if a male person has enough estrogen in their system, and has grown some boobs, they're "female" by their postmodern solipsist definition.

It's straight up wrong, completely wrong... but that's the approach.

That sounds like people trying to deny reality and attempting to make their own.
In my opinion male and female are biological testable descriptions, we don't have the tech to change them at the moment. male and female can't change.

 

[Distracted1]

By trying to redefine what "female" means in the first place, and trying to cast it as a "cluster" of a whole bunch of different characteristics, including karyotype, phenotype, and hormones. Then they pretend that since some of those things aren't "strictly binary", then sex isn't strictly binary either... and therefore, if a male person has enough estrogen in their system, and has grown some boobs, they're "female" by their postmodern solipsist definition.

It's straight up wrong, completely wrong... but that's the approach.

Yet you seem to be fine going along with the redefinition of "woman" as a term. Choosing, instead to use "female" when you mean "woman".
I advise against that.

 

[Distracted1]

I'm not very interested in precise physical definitions. I kind of feel that if somebody claims to need a definition to know what a woman is they have lost contact with reality past the point where they can be reasoned with. If we have to have one, the ova definition seems fundamental. To me though, that's because it's a physical definition that gives you the right answer to the question of "who is a woman" rather than because it is the essence of woman.

Physical definitions are tricky. Tigers have four legs, but if one is born with three, it's just a deformed tiger, not something else. A woman without a vagina is a woman without a vagina. In the movie Freaks there is a guy called, I think, Johnny Ekk. He was a human torso. Nothing from the waist down. I don't need to know what was in his pants, if there was anything, to know he was a man.

I didn't learn the category "woman" from a dictionary. I learned it from having a mother and father, seeing they were different and forming categories around that. Same as people have done since before the invention of language. I think accepting that a discussion about definitions is necessary is like having a conversation with HAL predicated on him being sane. He isn't. The conversation is pointless. All you are doing is giving power to these people by pretending there is a question there to debate. A man isn't a woman and can't become a woman.

Man and woman aren't rationally derived categories.Debating definitions forces us to pretend that they are.

The only reason this debate about definitions is happening is because something is insane at the heart of enlightenment rationalism. It's like how you slowly realize something isn't right about HAL in 2001. This is the ideology that thought the 10 hour day and 10 day week were good ideas.


Please do.

WRT the highlighted, that seems to indicate that you define "woman" based upon a performance of a role- much like TRA might. If a person passes a kind of "womanhood Turing test" they are a Woman-following that logic.
The materialistic definition is much more sound.

 

[Rolfe]

I think what he means is that a woman is something (someone) we all know when we see her, because we learned what a woman is in early infancy. We don't need a textbook on physics to be able to catch a ball, or to know that if we drop one it will fall down.

Trying to redefine something as fundamental and as basic as the word for the female sex of our own species, against this early learning, is frankly insane. But that's transactivism for you.

 

[shuttlt]

I think what he means is that a woman is something (someone) we all know when we see her, because we learned what a woman is in early infancy. We don't need a textbook on physics to be able to catch a ball, or to know that if we drop one it will fall down.

Trying to redefine something as fundamental and as basic as the word for the female sex of our own species, against this early learning, is frankly insane. But that's transactivism for you.

Exactly. I don't define it because it doesn't need a definition.

 

[Rolfe]

Well, it shouldn't. But we've all seen it. Is there a formal name for this debating fallacy, where you announce that a word everyone has been entirely clear about for hundreds of years is suddenly going to be used in with a different definition, one which rather conveniently suits the position of the arguer?

 

[Distracted1]

I think what he means is that a woman is something (someone) we all know when we see her, because we learned what a woman is in early infancy. We don't need a textbook on physics to be able to catch a ball, or to know that if we drop one it will fall down.

Trying to redefine something as fundamental and as basic as the word for the female sex of our own species, against this early learning, is frankly insane. But that's transactivism for you.

"I know it when I see it" is fine in many cases- yet breaks down when challenged. The biological definition ("materialistic" definition, in Shuttits' vernacular) is therefore more reliable.
If I define "woman" as anyone who convinces me they are a woman through observation- I am likely to put some men into women's prisons.

 

[Rolfe]

Any other definition is circular. A definition of x as "anything you want to call x" or "anything that calls itself x" is useless for any practical purpose.

I've heard some daft definitions along the lines of "a woman is kind and nurturing" and so on, which tend to be met by a bunch of women declaring that they personally are dyed-in-the-wool selfish bitches, does that mean they're not women. But it's committing the fallacy of confusing describing with defining. Maybe it's a drawback that English has only one verb for "to be". In Gaelic (and I bleieve in Spanish" you know which is which because you use different verbs.

 

[shuttlt]

Well, it shouldn't. But we've all seen it. Is there a formal name for this debating fallacy, where you announce that a word everyone has been entirely clear about for hundreds of years is suddenly going to be used in with a different definition, one which rather conveniently suits the position of the arguer?

Pretending a word everybody knows the meaning of is deeply confusing seems to me like playing the hatchling... I don't know a word for the rest. Maybe it's a type of motte and bailey?

 

[shuttlt]

"I know it when I see it" is fine in many cases- yet breaks down when challenged. The biological definition ("materialistic" definition, in Shuttits' vernacular) is therefore more reliable.
If I define "woman" as anyone who convinces me they are a woman through observation- I am likely to put some men into women's prisons.

And yet that didn't seem to be an issue for hundreds of years. There are obviously cases of people being tricked into misgendering somebody... there was a famous Edinburgh doctor who turned out to have been female the whole time. Once the discovery was made though, nobody was confused about whether she was really a woman or a man.

 

[Distracted1]

And yet that didn't seem to be an issue for hundreds of years. There are obviously cases of people being tricked into misgendering somebody... there was a famous Edinburgh doctor who turned out to have been female the whole time. Once the discovery was made though, nobody was confused about whether she was really a woman or a man.

What was the discovery?
Was it a failure to perform "manhood" convincingly? or was it the discovery that she was "materialistically" female?

 

[shuttlt]

Any other definition is circular. A definition of x as "anything you want to call x" or "anything that calls itself x" is useless for any practical purpose.

I've heard some daft definitions along the lines of "a woman is kind and nurturing" and so on, which tend to be met by a bunch of women declaring that they personally are dyed-in-the-wool selfish bitches, does that mean they're not women. But it's committing the fallacy of confusing describing with defining. Maybe it's a drawback that English has only one verb for "to be". In Gaelic (and I bleieve in Spanish" you know which is which because you use different verbs.

To be honest, I suspect the meaning of man and woman is hardwired deep in our brains, all wrapped up in social meanings we learn from having a mother and a father who also had it hardwired deep in their brains. Obviously that doesn't stop anybody from turning their back on it and pretending they don't have the slightest way to tell whether the large, muscular, bepenised individual is a man or a woman.

 

[Rolfe]

What was the discovery?
Was it a failure to perform "manhood" convincingly? or was it the discovery that she was "materialistically" female?

She died. She had left instructions in her will that she was to be buried in the clothes she died in, but of course some interfering busybody had to ignore that and all was revealed.

 

[Distracted1]

To be honest, I suspect the meaning of man and woman is hardwired deep in our brains, all wrapped up in social meanings we learn from having a mother and a father who also had it hardwired deep in their brains. Obviously that doesn't stop anybody from turning their back on it and pretending they don't have the slightest way to tell whether the large, muscular, bepenised individual is a man or a woman.

Putting aside for a moment the issue of gendering large , muscled, "bepenised" individuals.
How does one gender small, nurturing, feminine individuals who have had their genitalia altered to resemble that of women?
Surely, it is not based upon their performance of "womanhood"? There must be more than that, no?

 

[Distracted1]

She died. She had left instructions in her will that she was to be buried in the clothes she died in, but of course some interfering busybody had to ignore that and all was revealed.

That would indicate that everyone who "knew a man when they saw one" were wrong- and that the materialistic determinant was the critical one.

 

[Rolfe]

To be honest, I suspect the meaning of man and woman is hardwired deep in our brains, all wrapped up in social meanings we learn from having a mother and a father who also had it hardwired deep in their brains. Obviously that doesn't stop anybody from turning their back on it and pretending they don't have the slightest way to tell whether the large, muscular, bepenised individual is a man or a woman.

And the instruction to ignore that hardwiring, how hard can it be, just "be kind", is deeply problematic. "The party asked us to disbelieve the evidence of our eyes and ears."

Interestingly, in linguistics, it turns out that the gendered (or occasionally not gendered) third person singular is the most hard-wired thing there is. If you learned that a certain object was feminine in your native language, you'll probably go to your grave using the feminine third person singular for it.

One aspect of that I heard about was a Finnish woman who moved to England in her late teens. She became completely fluent in English, married an Englishman, and had two or three children. And yet she could never remember to refer to her son as "he" and her daughter as "she", because the third person singluar is not gendered in Finnish.

 

[Rolfe]

That would indicate that everyone who "knew a man when they saw one" were wrong- and that the materialistic determinant was the critical one.

It's always possible to deceive people. It doesn't change reality.

Of course they're trying to trans her now. But nobody knows what she herself thought about it all, or whether she would have recognised the very concept of "gender identity". As far as can be ascertained she was a woman who passionately did not want to be confined to the life the society of her time enforced on women, and wanted to be a doctor. So she dressed up as a man, changed her name (from Miranda, I believe) to James, and enrolled in medical school.

People did remark on her small stature and high voice at the time, but she was quite belligerent about it all and they backed off. People see what they expect to see. I suspect the thought was, is he a eunuch or something, not, is this a woman?

And yet, unless I'm remembering the wrong case, at post-mortem it was discovered that she had given birth to a child.