Cont: Transwomen are not women - part XI

[Robin]

The general usage of what?

Oh for crying out loud

 

[Craig4]

Again, arguments from incredulity aren't even arguments. You doubt it? Go do some looking. It's not even rare.

The lesbians who feel pressured to have sex and relationships with trans women
Some women have penises. If you won’t sleep with them you’re transphobic
Are Your Sexual Preferences Transphobic?
Yes, It’s Wrong to Tell Trans People You Don’t Want to Sleep With Them Because of Their Genitals
Transgender People Claim Gays Are ‘Transphobic’ For Declining Sex With Them

Just some starters for you. Just because you find it irrational and nutty doesn't mean it's not happening. Your incredulity doesn't make it not real.

Wow, so I'll admit I haven't given this much thought and had never considered that the above links were a thing. The throughline here seems to be that there's an expectation that people don't have a right to make up their own minds about who they are attracted to. There's nothing fill in the blank-phobic about not being sexually interested in another person. No one has a right to anyone else's attraction.

 

[Paul2]

When I am making a point about the general usage of the word, my point is not negated by people saying that they are not using the word that way in this context.

Your point (if I am correctly imagining exactly what point you are referring to) is negated by the usefulness of the alternative usages that others are suggesting in clarifying distinctions (man woman male female sex gender) that are crucial to being able to communicate about the topic.

 

[d4m10n]

If Rowling's comments referred only to specialised usage of the term then it wouldn't make sense.

I'm pretty confident Rowling isn't using either "male" or "female" to imply the normativity of gendered roles, i.e. "Males should man up and be more masculine." I'm highly confident no one here in this thread is doing that. The question remains, why do you insist on bringing up this particular usage if no one else was using the language in this particular way?

When I say you are "male," I'm saying something about your genotype and phenotype, not about your social role. Is that clear enough?

 

[Emily's Cat]

And I have already covered "male" and "female" in general usage referring to categories which are assumed to entail obligations, giving examples.

Look, you can use words however the heck you want to, feel free.

But do not expect that everyone else change their usage to fit your preferences, and don't think that you're going to browbeat anyone into "losing" an argument because of your own particular twist on what a word means.

You can either continue to yell at a blank wall... or you can adopt the usage that we have within this thread and be part of the discussion. The choice is yours.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Posting an irrelevant cartoon and arbitrarily declaring victory to avoid making the slightest attempt to even understand what I am saying.

Not very helpful.

What you're saying only makes sense to you, while also being a complete mischaracterization of what others are saying.

I've tried to communicate effectively. At this point, you're the one hollering gibberish, and there's nothing I can do about that.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I understand what you're saying, you're just wrong. You're insisting that everyone uses "sex" to mean something other than we are all telling you we mean by it. That's bad communication skills, and it's your fault, not mine or anyone else's.

Exactly.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I’ve often wondered what life will be like in 10 years or so if we have a generation of young adults who don’t know up from down re: natal sex and can’t confidently discern a man (adult human male) from a woman (adult human female) in most day-to-day situations, something most of us take for granted. We still have time; maybe a lot of this will have been resolved by then. But there are some hopelessly confused young people out there at the moment and Stonewall, Mermaids et al seem determined to keep them that way.

I don’t think this has been posted here yet — admin at Wellesley College, a women’s college, is going to have to figure out how they define “women” for admissions purposes: https://archive.ph/xXZyT

<big deep breath>

At this rate, we're going to have to rename it to Wellesley Female Human College.

"Excuse me a moment, I need to visit the Female Human Toilet" SMDH

 

[Emily's Cat]

I've always thought that alone was absolute proof that the people who say bollocks like that are both stupid and hiding their feelings.

What could be more sissy than being the only boy in a room full of scantily-clad, beautiful girls with amazing bodies?

Plus, let's be honest - male ballet dancers have FANTASTIC butts.

 

[Emily's Cat]

The language may be new, but the usage of terms like "male" and "female" to refer to social categories built on top of biological sex and assumed to have obligations to present and behave in certain ways is very, very old.

You have this entirely and completely backwards. Historically, the terms "man" and "woman" were used to refer to sex, and the social ******** was just assumed to be directly attached to sex. There was NEVER a distinction made for the variance between physical reality and social expectation. The entire concept of separating those expectations from the physical aspects of reproductive sex is new, and dates only from about the 70s.

 

[Emily's Cat]

More offensive is the implication that being a johnson-haver automatically mandates that I should be lumped into a social category with all the other johnson-havers.

Social categories are ********.

Regardless of how you "feel" about it, you ARE in the same category as every other penis haver on the planet - the biological category of males. And that includes apes, crocodiles, and capybaras.

 

[d4m10n]

At this rate, we're going to have to rename it to Wellesley Female Human College.

I'm afraid the policy contemplated is actually a bit weirder than this, and might better be summed up as the Wellesley College for Everyone Other Than Those Who Openly Admit to Being Cisgender Men.

Which, BTW, is fine with me. I don't mind private associations picking their own inclusion criteria, however easily gamed.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Your failure to recognise, despite all the evidence, that the general usage does not refer to simply biological sex or to even acknowledge the argument I am.making makes it impossible to discuss it with you..

Think for a moment. If I wanted to know what gender I was, how would I go about it?

This is really getting silly.

If you want to know what gender you are, look inside your magical soul and decide what social roles and presentations you like best, and give yourself a magical gender label and be done with it.

If you want to know what sex you are, look at your genitals

Edited by jimbob: 

rule 9nviolation removed

 

[Emily's Cat]

Again, were discussing the general sense the terms are used in everyday life.

No. Just no.

YOU are trying to FORCE this discussion to be about what YOU think the general use of words are based on YOUR own very peculiar interpretation.

That is not the discussion of this thread.

In fact, I'm going to say that it is irrelevant and an intentional attempt to derail the thread. Kindly stop derailing the thread, and stick with the actual topic.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Wow, so I'll admit I haven't given this much thought and had never considered that the above links were a thing. The throughline here seems to be that there's an expectation that people don't have a right to make up their own minds about who they are attracted to. There's nothing fill in the blank-phobic about not being sexually interested in another person. No one has a right to anyone else's attraction.

Very early on, I was way, way more supportive and accommodating than I am now. There have been several elements that have brought me to a much more gender critical perspective. Among them was a long conversation with my lesbian cousin about the experiences that they and their female friends were having in the realm of dating, and how intimidating it was to keep finding themselves being harassed and vilified for not being "open" to having sex with a "woman with a penis". Some of the experiences they related were eye-opening, and represented a level of sexual harassment that I thought we as a society had grown past. It was unconscionable, in my view.

 

[Ziggurat]

I thought our purpose here was to establish what the general everyday usage was. If Rowling's comments referred only to specialised usage of the term then it wouldn't make sense.

Yes, actually it would. That's what I told you before, and which you seem to have just ignored, perhaps out of disbelief. There really is a push to deny biological reality from some of the trans activists, to claim that a male becomes female, and not simply in a "social expectation" sense but an actual biological sense, when they identify as such. Yes, it's crazy. But it's also actually there. And that is very much what Rowling was pushing back against.

The irony here is that you're appealing to context to insist that words like "sex" mean more than just biology, but you're actually ignoring the context of the debates in which these words have been spoken, a context in which some people don't just want to attach social expectations to words like "sex", but actually want to strip the words of any real biological meaning so that social expectations are the only thing they mean.

 

[Robin]

I think this beautifully illustrates my point about language, layers and associations.

This clumsy neologism "cervix-haver" taken at face value is simply a word made up of the component words "cervix" and "have" referring to people who have cervixes, the target audience for literature relating to the cervix.

Yet apparently it also has meanings relating to dehumanisation and degradation although it is impossible to point to which part of the word conveys these meanings.

And yet anyone in future who thinks to use this word in some medical literature will hopefully know that it conveys these meanings and not use it.

No-one can argue that its "literal" meaning prevents it from having these new meanings.

Because it has taken on these new meanings by usage.

 

[TragicMonkey]

Yes. And very intentionally so. I'm sure you think you've got some grand "gotcha" going on, but you don't.

You are allowed to be "incredibly incensed" by phrasing that "robs you of your core humanity" (quote again below, for reference) but you permit yourself to do the exact same thing to others.

As a female of the human species, I am incredibly incensed by being referred to as "a person who menstruates" or as a "cervix haver". It robs me of my core humanity, it relegates me to nothing more than a set of bodily functions. It is incredibly offensive.

As a male of the human species, I call that hypocrisy. Not that you consider me human, apparently, as I am a "penis-haver" and by your own formula referring to people by their organs "robs them of their core humanity" and "relegates them to nothing more than a set of bodily functions".

 

[Robin]

Yes, actually it would. That's what I told you before, and which you seem to have just ignored, perhaps out of disbelief. There really is a push to deny biological reality from some of the trans activists, to claim that a male becomes female, and not simply in a "social expectation" sense but an actual biological sense, when they identify as such. Yes, it's crazy. But it's also actually there. And that is very much what Rowling was pushing back against.

Again you are appealing to the same straw man over and over and over again. No matter how many times I point out that it is a straw man.

Trans people do not claim that they can alter their genetic make up

Did you read that? Can you stop pretending they do?

Therefore trans people are making the claim using the everyday sense of the word the referent of which is a social role built on underlying biological sex.

So the claim becomes that the binding of this social role to the underlying biological sex is not absolute.

That is the Bailey.

 

[Robin]

Also, regarding "cervix-haver", let me quote you something that gets thrown in the face of trans men and trans women all the time:

It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more... than a whine. 'I find that offensive.' It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. 'I am offended by that.' Well, so ******* what."

Is he right?