Trans women are not women (Part 8)

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shuttlt said:
I would say two things here. Your paragraph beginning "Historically" seems obvious and true to me.

The paragraph after it seems entirely subjective to me. Is that really what the past was, I can certainly see that perspective.... but there are others. I don't see though how you can ditch the idea of a functioning society unless the preferred society is also functional. Maybe trans-women are treated as second class women, but is a society that treats them simply as women functional?
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This is a strange take. Societies CAN function by treating female humans as property and not as independent entities. A good chunk of the middle east and africa do that now.

The question really ends up being whether or not you can convince enough of the citizens of a society to relinquish the existing rights of females to be able to pull that off. Because that would be what it takes - either convince enough males AND females that females should NOT have rights... or have the necessary might to force that change on unwilling citizens and be willing to shed blood over it.
 
Emily's Cat said:
In actual practice, even if I have a principled objection to that, I find it pragmatically acceptable. If a male person has undergone so much surgery and hormonal intervention - and has removed their genitals - then they win. I can work with the very, very few edge cases when they occur. That's entirely different from kowtowing to self declaration.
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This sounds almost like a tribal right of passage into manhood / womanhood etc...
 
Emily has pretty much said what I was going to say. The reason we know it when we see it is that sexing others of our own species without seeing their genitals is something we are very very good at, to a high degree of accuracy.

It may be that occasionally we make a mistake, or we're the targets of deliberate deception. That's life. Just now and again (as with Miranda Barry) we get it wrong and realise our mistake when fuller and better information becomes available. That simply means we made a mistake, or we were deceived. It doesn't mean the man magically becomes a woman, or vice versa. What about someone who managed to deceive some people but not others? What about someone I encounter only casually, and make a mistake about, but whose close acquaintances are in no doubt about at all? What sex are these people?

The fact that we can correctly tell the sex of most people simply by looking at their faces, and most of the rest by hearing their voices, means that "I know it when I see it" really is a useful metric,
 
Rolfe said:
And the performance of femininity and masculinity are irrelevant to the material reality of being a woman or a man. I'm sitting here in completely gender-neutral clothes and nobody (except the cat) is observing me. I am still a woman. I'd still be a woman if I put on a DJ and a black bow tie and took a girl to a dance, and I'd still be a woman if I put on a boiler-suit and started to do a full service on my tractor.
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If you are female and you decided you wanted to live as a man then I see no issue with that. You would still be female though.

edit: male and female is objective reality, woman and man is a different kettle of fish.
 
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p0lka said:
If you are female and you decided you wanted to live as a man then I see no issue with that. You would still be female though.

edit: male and female is objective reality, woman and man is a different kettle of fish.
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I understand what you are saying, and I guarantee that Rolfe does as well.

We disagree and actively REJECT your forced redefinition of the terms "woman" and "man".

You can keep repeating the same sentiment over and over, and it will not help you any. This is not a case of misunderstanding, this is a case of a fundamental disagreement with respect to the core concepts involved.

Look - you can paraphrase and rephrase and make analogies up the wazoo... but when you're trying to convince me (and those who share my views) that 2+2=5... It's not going to help your argument. I'm looking at two rocks in my left hand and two rocks in my right hand, and I put them together and count them and I come up with four rocks every single time. You insisting that five now means something different than it used to mean isn't going to change my observation of reality.
 
p0lka said:
If you are female and you decided you wanted to live as a man then I see no issue with that. You would still be female though.

edit: male and female is objective reality, woman and man is a different kettle of fish.
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Male and female is objective reality. Man and woman are the words for the male and female categories of the human species, respectively. You will find language a lot easier to deal with if you remember that. Circular definitions are a no-no.

ETA: What Emily said. There are words for the people who are male whom you want to include within the category of "woman". Stick with these words, they're fairly clear and can be readily clarified if necessary. We do not need a word for "women plus some men who play dress-up and LARP their masculine idea of what a woman is". If you want to refer to that category, there is your starter for ten as to how to do that.
 
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Emily's Cat said:
I'm looking at two rocks in my left hand and two rocks in my right hand, and I put them together and count them and I come up with four rocks every single time. You insisting that five now means something different than it used to mean isn't going to change my observation of reality.
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That's not a great analogy. I can show that 2+2=5 under certain circumstances. Maybe 2+2=6 would be better, because I can't do that one.
 
Funny old life. A long time ago when I joined the forum I used my late cat's name and mugshot and never referred to my sex. I wanted to debate without preconceptions. I remember once in the middle of a homoeopathy debate someone suddenly said "Rolfe, are you a woman?" and I didn't answer. I've been "misgendered" on the forum more often than I can count, and it certainly didn't bother me.

Now I have "Adult human female" as my custom title.

I was always a woman though.
 
Emily's Cat said:
I'd dub it the Humpty-Dumpty Fallacy.
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Perhaps a bit unfair to old Humpty.

“I don't know what you mean by 'glory,'" Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't---till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'"
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He did at least have the grace to translate from Humptyspeak into Alice's vernacular, rather than suggest that his bizarre usage was as much the vernacular as hers. Or, worse, that his usage was the vernacular and hers not.
 
The state of British conservatism. Yet another issue that all the parties agree on.
 
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Well, he is an interesting character with quite a lot of, er, stuff in his past that doesn't particularly reflect well on him.

Of course, if anybody points this out they can be accused of transphobia! Problem solved!
 
Matthew Best said:
Well, he is an interesting character with quite a lot of, er, stuff in his past that doesn't particularly reflect well on him.

Of course, if anybody points this out they can be accused of transphobia! Problem solved!
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That is a transphobic observation. Do better!
 
Matthew Best said:
Well, he is an interesting character with quite a lot of, er, stuff in his past that doesn't particularly reflect well on him.

Of course, if anybody points this out they can be accused of transphobia! Problem solved!
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Maybe, but I was more suggesting that media is going to make a field day out of the specific issue of his transition. I suspect there is going to be a lot of nasty commentary specifically on this personal issue that won't have much to do with any politics or previous scandals.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
Maybe, but I was more suggesting that media is going to make a field day out of the specific issue of his transition. I suspect there is going to be a lot of nasty commentary specifically on this personal issue that won't have much to do with any politics or previous scandals.
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Mmmmm. I think this is rather more awkward for them to do that with than if a Tory MP had been caught with a rent boy 30 years ago.
 
Says it all really.

[imgw=600]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FPGnhNeWQAAJ6hY?format=jpg&name=large[/imgw]
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
Maybe, but I was more suggesting that media is going to make a field day out of the specific issue of his transition. I suspect there is going to be a lot of nasty commentary specifically on this personal issue that won't have much to do with any politics or previous scandals.
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If there's one thing I've learned from this thread, it's that being trans is necessarily not a personal issue. Being gay is a personal issue. Being black is a personal issue, in a sense that being trans very much is not.
 
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