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.

Again:

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.

Another:

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.]

Finally:

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.

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