Magic with words
Morgane Oger provides, if nothing else, an in-depth illustration of how The New Language Rules function to help him (and others like him) blur the picture so thoroughly that most people give up trying to see it clearly.
Here:
It is explicitly prohibited in Canada for any women’s service to discriminate against more-vulnerable women while favouring less-vulnerable women.
There are no exceptions, have not been since our charter was adopted in 1983.
That sounds sensible on its face, but the trouble is that he means “it is explicitly prohibited in Canada for any women’s service to discriminate against men who say they are women while favoring women.” He is claiming that men who say they are women are, as a class or category, more vulnerable than women. How? How are men who say they are women more vulnerable than women? Not physically, certainly, because even if they do the full hormone thing they still have the male skeleton, musculature, lung capacity, and so on. Men don’t magically make themselves not just as vulnerable as women but more vulnerable than women by the power of thought. So how are men who say they are women more vulnerable than women? Given that they remain physically stronger, how can they be more vulnerable?
They can’t. It’s just the typical hyperbolic bullshit, and it’s a lie, but Oger gets away with it because of the verbal magic that is at the heart of the whole thing. Change names and pronouns and bam you’ve won most of the battle. Change names and pronouns and you condition people to think men are women and thus potentially more vulnerable than women, because they get to add their trans status to their bogus female status and get two, where women get only one.
VRR successfully protected its right to choose its own members. They did not defend any right to deny service to a woman because she is transgender. THAT has been illegal for decades in Canada.
But they didn’t “defend any right to deny service to a woman because she is transgender.” The right in question is to deny service to men, no matter what they claim about their “gender.” They don’t deny the right because the man is transgender, they deny it because he is a man.
TERFs are not “women who’ve created single-sex spaces for victims of male violence to recover free from the presence of males” They are trans-exclusionary radical feminists, a philosophy that VRR adhers to and enforces.
No. Feminist women who don’t accept the claim that men can become women by saying so can be women who have created single-sex spaces for victims of male violence to recover free from the presence of males. Whether that’s “trans-exclusionary” or not isn’t really relevant, because feminist women get to be focused on feminist issues rather than trans issues.
And:
The fact is that VRR is discriminating against one group of women on prohibited grounds. They have no defense for this other than “those women are not women”. Whereas that works for membership in an organization, it is illegal in a service.
No. The fact is that VRR is declining to serve men because their mission is to serve women. They don’t need a “defense” for it, and their reason for it is that those men are not women. If it’s illegal for women’s organizations to decline to include men then there’s something badly wrong with Canada and it should fix it. [Updating to add: it’s not; see Naif’s comment @ 3.]
Anyone can make a tall-locally-born-women-of-childbearing-age-who-had-kids club with its own space.
Nobody can tell a woman she is not a woman.
But the issue isn’t telling a woman she is not a woman, it’s telling a man he is not a woman. Anybody can do that. Women can do that.
Oger is an entitled male bully who spends all his time bullying women for wanting to get away from him and men like him.
When I was a general surgeon (eons ago it seems), I had been highly trained in surgery for diseases of the breast as part of my residency. I was an early advocate of less invasive surgery for breast cancer and was the first I know of who worked with a team of physicians to council women about their options. When I saw a woman with breast cancer in my office I coordinated the visit with oncology, radiation therapy and plastic surgery in one visit so the individuals I saw could make the best choice for their needs. When surgery was part of the therapy, I worked with a highly skilled plastic surgeon on all my cases who would help design the incision sites (without compromising the cancer surgery) and we would perform immediate reconstruction surgery at the same time in most cases (so the women never woke up without a breast). Lastly, all my patients were referred to a female surgeon I respected and worked with for a second opinion. The purpose of this was twofold- one to make sure all questions and doubts were addressed and 2 – allow for the possibility that my patient might prefer a woman surgeon (we informed them that this option was completely understandable and that no one would be offended). Sometimes they did – sometimes not.
Here’s the thing – I was completely qualified to handle the clinical needs of any of these patients. But as I tried to instill in our residents – it’s not about us – it’s about what they (the patient) need. Sometimes what they needed was something I could never be – a women who could exactly empathize with them and who provided them with a bit more comfort in a horrible time in their lives. And guess what, that’s what they got. Care, comfort, and security – the things we tried to provide to all our patients.
I bring this up because this should be the only perspective on the issue of advocacy services – what do these women need. They’re not looking to part of any would-be counselor’s agenda or be part of any social movement. They have trauma and pain and helping them find care, comfort and security is all that matters. Anyone who can’t adjust to that shouldn’t be a counselor because empathy is pretty much a must have in that role.
Oh, and look; Oger does a “Compar (sic) and contrast with Dover Rape Crisis” without mentioning the almost universal pushback it’s getting for advertising for “self-identified” women volunteers. Maybe he can help Dover get out of its “mess?”
Re-If it’s illegal for women’s organizations to decline to include men then there’s something badly wrong with Canada and it should fix it.
There is no such issue, Nixon v. VRRS was decided in favour of VRRS. Oger thinks it should not have been, preferring to stick to the Human Rights Tribunal finding that was overturned on appeal to the Supreme Court of BC. Nixon appealed to the BC Court of Appeal, lost (unanimously), and then tried to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. The SCC declined to hear the appeal.
tldr: Oger is full of shit.
[…] a comment by Pliny the in Between on Magic with […]
This is exactly why I won’t stop bleating on about how most trans-identifying males are otherwise garden-variety heterosexual men who exhibit typical male-pattern behaviour in every regard apart from their choice of dress and presentation (from their Trump-voting-ness to their entitlement-having-ness to their woman-hating- and woman-assaulting-ness). I think the average person genuinely believes that males who choose to wear feminine clothes must therefore actually have female-like traits and be more “like” most women than other men, because why on earth would a macho-man want to put on a dress and makeup, amirite?!
(And, if i’m being perfectly honest with myself, if most transwomen were in fact effeminate homosexual males whose behaviour was always at the extreme tail end of the distribution curve of male behaviour — so extremely “feminine” that they genuinely do tend to behave more like women than men — I’d be less appalled at what’s going on right now. Though i’d still be incensed about a shit ton, like (but by no means limited to) the obvious dangers of self-ID, the madness of allowing men in women’s sports, and just the overall dissolving of language, meaning and common sense that inevitably occurs wherever the acid of trans ideology seeps in.)
It’s my hope that by demonstrating to people that males who identify as trans really are still male in every relevant, non-superficial sense (OMG do people really think dress-wearing is an indicator that a male is less likely to commit assault against a woman??!!) — that is to say, that transwomen are still male in every behavioural sense, they’ll start to see things as they really are. If people saw Morgane Oger not as a vulnerable trans “woman” but as a rich straight white male married father with kids who just happens to have a variant form of heterosexuality which causes him to self-identify as a woman, that, I hope, would make a huge difference in the way he’s perceived by most people.
Artymorty, people are terribly shallow often though. I’ve seen just enough of those makeover shows to note that many people genuinely do not look beyond clothes, makeup and hairstyle.
#theregoesmylimitedstreetcred.
Rob, as an example, I don’t like to play into that superficial “what women should wear in [x] setting”, but yesterday, when I was being observed by my boss for my evaluation, I took careful stock of the fact that I am a woman, and attempted to dress in a way that would not (1) make me look flighty; (2) make me look frumpy; or (3) make me look radical.
We all do these things, because we know how others will perceive us.
Are they? Its impossible to know at this point. We have a group of belligerent trans-misogynists, and a vast body of ‘woke’ useful idiots grovelling to them. At this point, is there even a way to know how representative they are? Karen White and Jessica Yaniv don’t have to be ‘most.’ ANY is too many, especially if no one will admit they exist.
There are no “explicit prohibitions” in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (aka Constitution Act, 1982, Part 1). That is neither its purpose nor its function.
It’s clear from the multiple inane claims made, that Oger has never read it . . .
https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/Const/Const_index.html