The scary women
The what?
https://twitter.com/ztsamudzi/status/1052662266988883968
The actual MATERIAL violence that we as cis women pose to trans women? What the fuck is Zoé Samudzi talking about? Since when do women commit violence against people with male bodies? Her all-caps on MATERIAL make clear she doesn’t mean rhetorical or psychological violence but the real, physical, punch-kick variety. Women are not violent toward trans women. It’s some kind of wokeness or more radical than thou-ness that generates these ludicrous counter-factual panics, but that’s so radical it’s reactionary…as is so often the case when people start “standing with” their trans sisters.
https://twitter.com/ztsamudzi/status/1052663652891803648
Yes these terrible frightening women who say that women are women and men are not women – how very arrogant and playing-god-like.
Crazy. I still like PZ’s science writing, as well as a few others (Mano, Affinity, Stderr), but they sure as shit lost it over the “Great TERF Pogrom”.
I am quite happy to accept more than one definition of what a woman is and “woman” is one category, “trans woman” is another one. But I think it’s the presence of “trans” that sometimes makes it exclusionary from what is, quite rightly, the domain of women, eg in reproductive health care. A trans woman is not going to need the help of an obstetrician, for example.
I am as annoyed as you about the continuous attempts to erase women as part of the vocabulary, let alone their wiping out from societies power.
Material violence makes me think of something like vandalism for example a women’s library Vancouver.
Or punching 60 year old women when you have a younger, larger, male-muscled body.
There was a time where I thought this violence trans women were worried about was the violence they might experience at the hands of men, as punishment for not toeing the gender line. So, you know, the same violence women are at risk of… well, always. It seemed like a reasonable thing to be afraid of – after all, it comes from the same place. It’s just a matter of the individual misogynist’s opinion whether men who act like women are more or less contemptible than actual women. Let the poor sods use whichever bathroom they want, I thought. They’ve got enough on their plates.
But this shit? I can’t work it out. Claiming that women are a danger to trans women and simultaneously demanding unrestricted access to women’s spaces is just bizarre. Do they imagine themselves as pioneers, fighting their way unapologetically into spaces unfairly dominated by women since forever? I just… can’t.
It’s getting pretty tiresome to see yet another rant against the gender critical position by someone that plainly conflates sex and gender. If sex is immutable or not, or any A or Not A for that matter, this has no bearing on gender because gender is a different thing.
“these cis women who feel entitled to play god and dictate who gets to be a woman”
If trans women are women, no ‘cis’ woman could possibly change that fact, even if they were to try dictating who gets to be a woman. Why accuse them of acting like entitled dictators or gods whhen you could just point out that they are factually incorrect (if that’s what the tweeter thinks)?
On the other hand, if transwomen aren’t women, it isn’t because ‘cis women’ say they aren’t.
I don’t think the tweeter understands material reality. Or even social reality. There’s just no need to panic about some women disagreeing with you. You don’t actually need to exaggurate the physical threat they pose, or accuse them of playing god (whatever that means). The tweeter could calmly explain what they believe some women are mistaken about.
The material violence will be all the apochryphal tales floating around in the trans- blogosphere of transwomen being assaulted in public restrooms. The tales are never by the supposed victims, just a general ‘whatabout the transwomen who…’, without specifics.
I’m not. I might be if “woman” were a wholly non-political descriptive word, like teapot or daffodil, but it’s not. Women are a historically systematically oppressed and subordinated category of people, and I’m not quite happy to let people from the other category, the one that does the oppressing and subordinating, usurp the word while pushing us roughly aside. Rich people don’t get to redefine the category “poor people” so that they can be part of it; white people don’t get to redefine the category “people of color” so that they can be part of it; bosses don’t get to redefine the category “workers” so that they can be part of it; and so on. It’s a power move, it’s a cheat, it’s a lie, and I’m not at all happy to accept it.
#1
Even his posts that attempt to validate trans ideology by mis-representing and outright distorting science?
Given that most of the women ZS labels ‘cis’ are unlikely to so consider themselves, I’d like to know how ZS decides who is a ‘cis woman’, without ‘reducing people to their genitalia’.
Yes, that. That’s a constant self-contradiction and I for one forget to point it out often enough. MUST DO BETTER.
That’s easy. Definition of cis woman – “Any woman who does not agree with whatever today’s prevailing trans ideology is, as defined by those trans-activists who use the word TERF in ordinary conversation about women who do not agree with them”
That’s cis. You see, nothing to do with genitalia at all…after all, Tiggerthewing is a TERF to these folks…