Transwomen are not women - X (XY?)

[Emily's Cat]

A few of us terfs were talking about this in a café in Galashiels last weekend and as far as we could see there was nothing to prevent any of us from simply applying to become men without changing anything about our appearance or behaviour. A couple of the bolder ones said they would do it, and that it would be fun if lots and lots of women did.

If you can't stop the runaway horses, might as well hop on and least enjoy the ride.

I also think that if more and more females do this, it will really start hitting home. It's like that 11th circuit court case here in the US recently, where the ruling came down that single-sex changing rooms should be recognized, and that the transgender identified female plaintiff did NOT have a right to use the male locker room, and that their gender identity did nor override existing Title VII and Title IX provisions on the basis of sex.

There's a good chance that if the plaintiff had been a transgender identified male, the ruling would have gone differently... but now the precedent is set. Now males are being inconvenienced and made uncomfortable. So now, someone will take notice.

IIRC, there was a similar thing in the UK with some natural springs a while back - the female section was obligated to allow transgender identified males in... but when the females began to identify as "men", the males very quickly responded with "Nope, we're not doing that".

 

[Rolfe]

IIRC, there was a similar thing in the UK with some natural springs a while back - the female section was obligated to allow transgender identified males in... but when the females began to identify as "men", the males very quickly responded with "Nope, we're not doing that".

Nah, that protest didn't work.

It was the swimming ponds on Hampstead Heath. There is a men's pond, a women's pond and a mixed pond. The trans started invading the women's pond, and as far as I know they're still doing it. The council have done the usual spineless "inclusion" announcement and given in. So women who value a single-sex swimming space, including Jewish and Moslem women, are no longer swimming.

A group of women called "Man Friday" did try the protest you describe, but the problem was they were only upsetting a bunch of men who weren't causing women any problem and who were a mixture of bewildered and supportive. Someone called the cops and the women were ejected. Somethng like that.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Although it's hard to work out exactly what goes on in his head, I believe LJ is pretending that people are claiming 'gender (not sex) is binary and immutable - all people are cisgender' and this is therefore equivalent to saying 'sexuality is binary and immutable - all people are heterosexual'.

Of course nobody as far as I'm aware has said anything remotely resembling the first statement, which is completely incompatible with a gender-critical position.

It's another bizarre concoction of LJ's misrepresentation and circular logic.

To be fair (to be faaaiiiirrrr)* a large portion of the perspectives assigned by LJ aren't representative of any views held by people in this thread anyway.


*I've been watching a lot of Letterkenny lately. "To be fair" is now a permanent part of my entire family's lexicon. Sorry in advance. I'll sort myself out, pitter patter.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Yeah, but she's a terrible writer. So that is not a valid comparison.

Eh, their writing was hit or miss. I really enjoyed almost all of the Darkover novels. I liked The Mists of Avalon, but the subsequent Avalon books were horrid. Most of their other books were lukewarm at best. But I did really like Darkover. Some of it is likely nostalgia, they were some sci fi I read while fairly young (maybe between 10 and 12). Same thing is true of A Wrinkle in Time too - I absolutely LOVED that book, and its sequel, as a kid. As an adult, the first book still reads well, but everything after that just got weird and a bit slow.

 

[Emily's Cat]

You're missing my point.

You probably don't have any books on your shelf by authors you despise and want canceled, but their books are such an important part of your life that you'd rather rebind the books to erase the author's name than take their books off your shelf.

Because that would be crazy.



The point is that there seems to be people that cannot separate the artist from the art, and also cannot bear to give up the art. So they go to these lengths to try to erase the artist from the art. A more sane person would not be so invested in the idea of Harry Potter that they can't just throw out the books when they part ways with the author.

Good point.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I've got all of Jacqueline Lichtenberg's books which are something of a guilty pleasure. She was cancelled way back in the 1980s, ostensibly because some people thought that the books depicted homosexual relationships. (How come Marion Zimmer Bradley got away with what she did, at much the same time, when she actually meant it and Lichtenberg didn't?) Actually though her crime seems to have been being conceited and obnoxious at a convention. Someone with a fair bit of influence in fandom then wrote a hatchet job on her in a widely-read fanzine, slamming the books for being disgusting. When I mentioned that I liked her books a friend gave me a horrified look and said how could you read such filth - turns out he hadn't read a word of it himself. I also came across people criticising the plot-line of one series of novels, when the flaw they were using to rubbish the books was actually part of the development of the story and led to some dramatic developments in a later volume.

This was particularly annoying because the cancelling led to her publisher dropping her and the third book of a trilogy which I particularly liked not being written at all.

So it's been going for some time, and it doesn't even need the internet. What startled me even back then was the use of a (false) accusation that the books depicted male homosexuality as the reason for the cancelling. I mean, even in the 1980s? In science fiction circles?

And then again I mentioned Richard Wagner, who was notoriously a racist. I think in that case, well first he's dead, but mainly, if your art is absolutely world-shakingly tremendous, lots of people suddenly decide they can separate the art from the artist after all.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the crime Lichtenberg committed was being conceited and obnoxious while being female. That's never been a particular barrier to the other half of the species.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Nah, that protest didn't work.

It was the swimming ponds on Hampstead Heath. There is a men's pond, a women's pond and a mixed pond. The trans started invading the women's pond, and as far as I know they're still doing it. The council have done the usual spineless "inclusion" announcement and given in. So women who value a single-sex swimming space, including Jewish and Moslem women, are no longer swimming.

A group of women called "Man Friday" did try the protest you describe, but the problem was they were only upsetting a bunch of men who weren't causing women any problem and who were a mixture of bewildered and supportive. Someone called the cops and the women were ejected. Somethng like that.

Well that's not nearly as effective as I had misremember it to be!

See people - our brains lie to us all the time. ALL. THE. TIME.

 

[Stout]

It's pretty clear what would happen.

There would be less participation by women.

That's the plan isn't it?

(Bringing back the urinary leash, and preventing women from having sports/activities that they can participate in?)

Quite possibly however if there was a mandatory 50/50 stand to pee/sit to pee ratio with things like free tuition offered to the group that under applied it would give a real read on just where society stands in general on the whole issue of access.

Would trans people even apply? It would mean their gender is no longer relevant so things like access to the ladies room would no longer mean anything as the "ladies room" would no longer exist and going to the bathroom would be the same as using the gender neutral bathrooms all the transes don't seem to want.

But surely there's enough women believing that trans women are women to make this work.

 

[Rolfe]

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the crime Lichtenberg committed was being conceited and obnoxious while being female. That's never been a particular barrier to the other half of the species.

I'm still baffled as to why Lichtenberg got cancelled with extreme prejudice on the ostensible ground that the human relationships presented in her Sime/Gen novels were a proxy description of male homosexuality, and yet at the same time, roughly, Zimmer Bradley was writing that dragon stuff where any time the dragons had sex their riders did too, and nearly all the dragon-riders were men. And she meant it, whereas what Lichtenberg was writing about was an entirely imagined new type of physical relationship between human beings that specifically wasn't sexual in the majority of cases.

I never met Lichtenberg but I did meet her co-author Jean Lorrah at a convention and she was a perfectly nice lady (although a much less good writer in my opinion). She was quite baffled about what had happened. Now I have met Harlan Ellison and frankly conceited and obnoxious really doesn't begin to describe the half of it so on the whole I reckon you've put your finger on it.

 

[TheGoldcountry]

I'm still baffled as to why Lichtenberg got cancelled with extreme prejudice on the ostensible ground that the human relationships presented in her Sime/Gen novels were a proxy description of male homosexuality, and yet at the same time, roughly, Zimmer Bradley was writing that dragon stuff where any time the dragons had sex their riders did too, and nearly all the dragon-riders were men. And she meant it, whereas what Lichtenberg was writing about was an entirely imagined new type of physical relationship between human beings that specifically wasn't sexual in the majority of cases.

Are you thinking of Anne McCaffrey?

 

[Stout]

Now that we've had our daily fill of Bylan Mulvaney it's time for a little Days of Boyhood.

This is satire...right?

 

[Rolfe]

Are you thinking of Anne McCaffrey?

Yes, of course, I must have had a bit of a brain-storm because we were talking about Zimmer Bradley earlier.

What I said still stands though. McCaffrey was getting away with involving her male characters in homosexual sex at a time when Lichtenberg was being cancelled because of an interpretation of her story, not an interpretation she subscribed to, that an act she had invented which wasn't sex, was actually a proxy for sex.

And when I said Zimmer Bradley was terrible, that's who I was talking about. OK maybe The Mists of Avalon wasn't that bad, but some of the rest of it! Night's Daughter is one I have particular reason to hate.

 

[Rolfe]

Now that we've had our daily fill of Bylan Mulvaney it's time for a little Days of Boyhood.

This is satire...right?

How to tell, these days?

(Yes, it's hilarious.)

 

[Nessie]

https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/scots-sex-offender-who-abducted-29012078

" A sex offender who abducted and raped his care worker is demanding to be known as a woman named Claire as he prepares for freedom.
Officers at HMP Edinburgh were stunned when Albert Caballero, 50, bald and reputed to have “a crazed look in his eyes”, demanded lipstick and eye make-up and gave himself the new name. Having served half his sentence, Caballero is eligible to apply to the Parole Board for Scotland to be released back into the community.
Insiders at Edinburgh’s Saughton Prison say Caballero only recently changed his name to Claire and is telling fellow cons he will be transferred to a women’s prison before release."

 

[Elaedith]

The more this conflict continues, and the more I hear the vehement insistence of males that transgender identified males are actually "women"... the more convinced I become that what is really at play is males enforcing gender roles on other males. They aren't insisting that females need to be inclusive because they actually care about those transgender identified males. They are insisting that females are obligated to be inclusive so that they can get away with excluding males who aren't "masculine" enough from their male spaces.

I sometimes wonder about that too.

If you look at the 'third genders' in traditional cultures that gender ideologues often harp on about, a lot of them turn out to be ways to exclude males who were gay and/or gender nonconforming from the category 'man'. More rarely, to let some women escape extremely oppressive gender roles if they agreed they were not women (e.g. the 'sworn virgins'). What happened in these cultures is now apparently supposed to be a model of progressivism.

 

[Rolfe]

Your midnight check-in on the petition reports 72,958 signatures, so 363 new signatures today. Back on track after yesterday's slight dip.

The new magic number is 303.8.

 

[Nick Terry]

Your midnight check-in on the petition reports 72,958 signatures, so 363 new signatures today. Back on track after yesterday's slight dip.

The new magic number is 303.8.

Meanwhile, 'Decapitate TERFs' is trending on Twitter (4712 tweets) following widespread disgust at a banner displayed at today's pro-GRR rally in Scotland.

 

[Rolfe]

Oh, I've been following that. It's getting interesting. The very people who are quick with the faux outrage when someone whose opinions they don't like is praised by a newspaper they don't like are hotly denying what was there before their eyes.

There were several offensive placards. There are pictures of them being made in a room in a nearby pub the previous evening. There were multiple SNP elected representatives there. And not one of them saw any of the placards and alerted their colleagues? Pull the other one. I don't think I could have missed these the week before I had my cataract surgery! They've been told time and time again they're associating with violent, toxic people, and they just ignore it.

 

[zorro99]

https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/scots-sex-offender-who-abducted-29012078

" A sex offender who abducted and raped his care worker is demanding to be known as a woman named Claire as he prepares for freedom.
Officers at HMP Edinburgh were stunned when Albert Caballero, 50, bald and reputed to have “a crazed look in his eyes”, demanded lipstick and eye make-up and gave himself the new name. Having served half his sentence, Caballero is eligible to apply to the Parole Board for Scotland to be released back into the community.
Insiders at Edinburgh’s Saughton Prison say Caballero only recently changed his name to Claire and is telling fellow cons he will be transferred to a women’s prison before release."

Absolutely outrageous.

 

[Rolfe]

That's the second one in a week.