Some “ally”
That’s disgusting.
Navratilova’s recent comments are transphobic, based on a false data, and perpetuate dangerous myths that lead to the ongoing targeting of trans people. She has been removed from our Advisory Board and as an Athlete Ally Ambassador, effective immediately. https://t.co/A1taa40ihv
— Athlete Ally (@AthleteAlly) February 19, 2019
Athlete Ally unequivocally stands on the side of trans athletes and their right to access and compete in sport free from discrimination. Martina Navratilova’s recent comments on trans athletes are transphobic, based on a false understanding of science and data, and perpetuate dangerous myths that lead to the ongoing targeting of trans people through discriminatory laws, hateful stereotypes and disproportionate violence. As an organization dedicated to addressing root causes of homophobia and transphobia in and through sport, we will only affiliate with those committed to the same goal, and not those who further misinformation or discrimination in any way. Given this, Navratilova has been removed from our Advisory Board and as an Athlete Ally Ambassador, effective immediately.
Within her op-ed in the Sunday Times, Navratilova referred to trans women as men who “decide to be female,” and that to allow them to compete with women is “cheating and unfair.” First of all, trans women are women, period. They did not decide their gender identity any more than someone decides to be gay, or to have blue eyes. There is no evidence at all that the average trans woman is any bigger, stronger, or faster than the average cisgender woman, but there is evidence that often when athletes lower testosterone through hormone replacement therapy, performance goes down.
Italics mine. Seriously?
Trans women athletes aren’t looking to take over women’s sport. They are women, and want to compete in the sport they love, just as any other athlete would. In fact, they’re largely underrepresented. Trans athletes have been allowed to openly compete in the Olympics since 2003, and yet no transgender athlete has ever gone to the Olympics. Professional trans women athletes are extremely rare.
Public figures like Martina Navratilova have an incredible platform provided to them, and when they speak, the world listens. When we launched our Ambassador program in 2011 and invited Martina to join us, we saw her as a trailblazer for LGBTQ people in sports—someone who, like us, believed in the power of sport to advance equality, dismantle stereotypes, and build a more inclusive society.
Martina’s latest statements stand in stark contrast to that vision, and to our core beliefs and values as an organization. We live in a world where 1 in 4 trans people are assaulted simply for being trans, and bills across the United States are seeking to dehumanize trans people and prevent them from accessing the rights they deserve. The trans community is under attack, and we firmly stand opposed to any and all people who perpetuate attacks against them—regardless of who they are or their accolades. To spread misinformation is to create a ripple effect of bias and discrimination that restricts trans people from living their lives fully, and endangers their health, safety and livelihood.
Navratilova isn’t “perpetuating attacks” against trans people. Not accepting people’s counter-factual claims about themselves is not attacking them.
This is not the first time we have approached Martina on this topic. In late December, she made deeply troubling comments across her social media channels about the ability for trans athletes to compete in sport. We reached out directly offering to be a resource as she sought further education, and we never heard back.
Italics mine. No, not about the ability of trans athletes to compete in sport, the fairness of trans women to compete against women in sport.
We believe that growth is possible, and we extend once again to Martina the invitation to learn from this experience, to study the data on trans athletes in sport, and to examine how statements like hers further stigma and discrimination.
The LGBTQ community is not a monolith. We must always leave space to learn from one another, and to grow. If we fail to do so, we are not only failing our goal to advance LGBTQ equality as a whole, but failing to live up to the core of our potential as human beings who believe all of us deserve a place in sports and in this world.
Italics mine. The LGBTQ community is not a monolith but everyone in it has to believe and repeat exactly what we tell them to, on pain of instant removal and public defamation. That kind of not a monolith.
So what percentage of transwomen have actually had one? I’m not saying that all women have periods, of course, but in any random group of women between the age of 16-50, the majority either do or will have menstruated. What percentage of transwomen have experienced even one menstrual cycle?
Arrogant assumption that only one side needs to learn aside, I think Navratilova has learnt more than enough, which is why she has taken her particular stance.
Which means, we will insist that you learn from us, but we will not listen to, or learn from you. No, because you are a transphobe.
And I don’t think Martina is the one who is failing to understand the science or the data.
I understand that people will disagree about important issues. I understand that our different perspectives, temperaments, and experiences will color our opinions.
But could this person actually believe this? Is there now no difference between male-type bodies and female-type bodies that we are “permitted” to recognize?
Are we supposed to say that a transwoman’s body is the same in every respect to a woman’s body?
The LGBTQ community is not a monolith.
Very few so called communities are monoliths. Maybe communities like Scientology and Jehovah’s Witnesses are, but they are the exceptions.
I am sure that the needs and wants of the G are different to those of the L and different again to the T. You know, I reckon there are even differences among the G the L, the T, The Q and so on.
A few weeks back there was a pile on at PZ’s blog in a post headed “An Old Friend has …”, but rather than broaching the subject with the old friend PZ let slip the dogs of war. I attempted to defend his old friend and found myself subject to some vitriolic abuse and have been banned from contributing by another “Freethoughts blogger.
After that, I decided I’d be out and proud to be a TERF!
Trans women are many things, they are as varied as any group, they deserve all the rights of a civil society. But they are not women. The clue is right there in the word trans.
The language and tone of that statement are pretty horrible, as well as the content. Things like:
Well, I rather think she earned that platform, it was hardly given to her. Who on Earth do they think “provided” it?
and
Like she’s a naughty schoolgirl.
And those final two paragraphs – Jesus.
They could have denounced Navratilova’s perfectly reasonable comments without being insulting and just plain nasty to her, personally. That would probably have worked out better for them anyway. Do they want to be seen as infants throwing their toys out of the pram? Because that’s what it reads like to me.
Oh, and another thing:
Well, nobody has said that, have they? That’s surely a deliberate distraction. What individual trans women athletes want is irrelevant, the point being that trans women athletes will take over women’s sports just by competing if things continue as they are.
It’s a strawman, as is the argument that there are hardly any trans women athletes anyway. That seems unlikely to satisfy the women that have to compete against those rare trans athletes.
It reminds me of the argument that’s trotted out here in the UK every time someone proposes banning or unbanning fox hunting. The first sentence always says something about how foxes are such a nuisance and cause so much damage and have to be controlled. Then when people say ok but literally hounding them to death and ripping them apart with dogs for fun doesn’t seem like the most humane or effective method of population control they reply “Oh, well we hardly ever catch any foxes anyway.”
@Roj:
Yeah, that post and its pilings-on were the final nail in the coffin for me and the point where I stopped reading Pharyngula.
A peeve and a thought. First the peeve:
Even if that were true, professional sports isn’t dealing with the average, it’s dealing with the tails. And the tails for trans women are definitely further to the right.
Now the thought: Caitlyn Jenner, who (we are told) has always been a woman, won a gold medal against a field of men in perhaps the most grueling Olympic sport. Surely trans activists should be celebrating that feat as an example of how trans women can compete at the highest levels of traditionally men’s sports, rather than trying to compete in women’s sports.
@Maroon:
Yes. And it’s individual women athletes having to compete against the (supposedly) non-average gigantic trans women. Careers in sport – particularly team sport – can already be made or lost by arbitrary statistical spikes, so how is it going to go for women when they have to compete either against or *with* people who are significantly bigger and stronger? Their best won’t look so good and the women with the good fortune not to share or compete with a team with such a great hulking brute will score better in comparison.
And then there’s sponsorship. I expect some companies will be falling over themselves to give money to trans athletes because it shows how totally woke they are. I certainly don’t blame the athletes for that, but it seems like another lever to push women out of womens sport.
Pharyngula has been a lost cause for a long, long time. I stopped reading the posts over the Tuval affair, but my attention had been attenuating for quite some time before then. The comments are, without fail, filled with vicious and angry people with seemingly nothing better to do than try and ruin each other’s day, or, when a fresh face appears that doesn’t have the years of context of the collective and dares to disagree with it in any respect, to utterly alienate that person and turn them into The Enemy against whom the commentariate can, for the briefest of moments, unite in single purpose.
“Freethought” indeed.
Yeah. I know. But I followed PZ since way back into Panda’s Thumb days and I’ve admired him more recently for not-sucky things like reporting on Shermer, the Dictionary Atheist post and so on. It was difficult to let go completely, perhaps I’m getting conservative in my old age or something. I still think PZ’s heart is in the right place, but I have no fucking idea at all where his head is.
Not being into or following sports I don’t quite know how or why it should work but it seems to me that, just as there are weight categories as in boxing and various levels of professional categories for team sports, how is the obvious answer not a trans category for whatever the sport happens to be in which the relevant, significant qualities are adjusted for?
Of course I also don’t get how something that is categorized with a modifier is the same thing as that which doesn’t have the modifier and why that is controversial.
Modifiers can do a lot of things. Some refer to a subset of the category (a black woman is a woman), some place the thing outside of the category (a prairie dog is not a dog), and some indicate that the thing modified lacks certain prototypical characteristics of the category (an adaptive mother is a mother in the legal, social, and emotional sense, but not in the biological sense)*.
So the question is: what kind of modifier is trans? Most trans activists would claim it’s the first kind; at least some who get labeled TERF would claim it’s the second. I lean toward the third.
*I don’t claim that this is an exhaustive taxonomy of modifiers. I could bore you for several pages on how modifiers work, but I’m trying not to sacrifice too many electrons.
I should say for the third type of modifier “lacks certain prototypical characteristics of, but still belongs to, the category.”
Re #12 “how is the obvious answer not a trans category”
It appears of primary importance to trans activists that trans women be fully accepted as women, that they use women’s restrooms and locker rooms, that they be housed in spaces designated for women, that they be eligible for any sort of prize or position reserved for women. The sports issue provides examples, but also consider school bathrooms, where separate space for trans students is deemed unacceptable, and trans students are suing for access to the restrooms associated with their “identity” rather than sex. Separate sports divisions would meet the same resistance.
I get that about the modifiers but in all cases they are limiting for some identifying feature. So while a black woman is a woman, she can’t be a white woman. And more to the point with respect to the social question, which I assume is where the area of gender is relevant, someone who is identifying as “trans” anything is saying that they are not simply that thing but, as you have said, a subset of that thing which necessarily can not be without the modifier in order to be identified. (not well said) And in this case, given the mix of biological sex type and social gender type, I don’t see how it’s possible to do without the modifier which pretty much cements the situation.
Perhaps this is a UK thing, I don’t know. But when my wife and I talked about the school toilets business she said that toilets at her school were already horrible in the 70s and 80s. Female bullies hung out in the girls toilets and made miserable the lives of the other girls. I went to a different school but the exact same thing was happening in the boys toilets there.
Precisely because they were secret places and that complaining about it would get you beaten up even more. I had the living shit kicked out of me in various school toilets. I was (inexpertly) stabbed once in a school toilet. These are places where violence occurs by default already. Why in all fuck are people trying to make it worse?
Just to complicate things further…actually sometimes a black woman can be a white woman, and a black man can be a white man. Take Obama for instance, whose father left early and whose white mother and white grandparents raised him. Once during his presidency he said, I forget in what context, that people see him as clueless about white people from flyover country but they forget that those are his people too. I’d forgotten it myself, and was startled to be reminded of it. You don’t get much more flyover than Kansas.
zubanel, that’s a tricky thing, I think. I agree that it can’t do without the modifier, because there are differences (substantial ones in many cases) between the set “trans-woman” and the set “woman”. The problem arises in the contradictory way that trans-women want to be both “trans-woman” and “woman” in the full meaning of the second set, which means adult female human. Which is fine until they insist that everyone recognize it.
The other problem is that modifiers are often used to relegate a person to an “inferior” subset. For instance, I am a playwright, but I’m not, because I come with modifier “woman-playwright”. Only white males can be called just “playwright”. I am a scientist, but I come with a modifier “woman-scientist”. Only white males can be called just “scientist”. So modifiers are loaded. On one hand, the concept of woman-playwright is an accurate designation, in that I am a woman and I write plays. It can also help to identify those who are in a group that is traditionally oppressed, and underrepresented onstage to allow people to say, “ah, yes, she fits that group, and we’re trying to get that group represented, so in this contest, she is eligible to be considered”. This is the meaning the trans-women want for their modifier – it means that they are more eligible to be considered for opportunity than others who belong merely to the group “women”, just as white male playwrights would be ineligible for any competition limited to “woman-playwright” or “black playwright” or “black woman playwright”. They want acceptance into a world that gives them opportunities to narrow the playing field, so that they don’t have to compete with those that have traditionally dominated the field and have an advantage. They want to enter the field with a handicap that gives them a larger chance of succeeding.
The other way of using that is a negative, a pejorative. She’s a “woman-playwright”. Oh, then she writes like a woman, not like a playwright. She thinks with a woman’s brain, operates from a woman’s POV, and has a woman’s interests and ideas. And she might, horror of horrors, write about women. (Which is the excuse always given for excluding women playwrights – they write about women). This is the sense that sets the person apart from the group, and gives them disadvantages in a world dominated by a different group. This is the meaning that trans-activists claim to be working against, but it isn’t the same categorization at all. There is no real difference between a woman playwright and a playwright; there is no real difference between a woman scientist and a scientist. (or black, or Asian, or gay, or any of the other modifiers that get appended to those words). But there are substantial differences between the set “women” and the subset “trans-women”. There are substantial biological differences that don’t matter in the other subsets I mentioned, but do in this one. There are also differences in how many of these trans-women have been raised, the experiences they have encountered, that do not mimic the social and cultural realities of the larger set, “women”, that the trans-women want to be a full, non-modifier member of. While still keeping their modifier to make them “special”.
It’s really all just messing with people’s heads in some serious ways, and trying to get us to equate things that are not equal.
zubanel,
I should’ve clarified that I was using the quote from you more as a jumping off point to help clarify (to myself, as much as to anyone else) my views on the issue. And since my education is in a certain school of linguistics which deals a lot in the theory of categories, that’s often the approach I take in trying to figure things out.
You’re right that a black woman can’t be a white woman, but I think in that case we’d agree that both are full members of the category “woman”; skin color/race/ethnicity isn’t in any way a characteristic of womanhood. A black woman can still have all the prototypical characteristics that we attach to the category “woman” (as can a white woman). (And of course it gets more complicated–there are characteristics that we attach to the category of black women that we don’t attach to black people in general or women in general. Words aren’t Lego blocks (I could unpack that statement a lot more, but this is already getting long).)
On the other hand, using the example I gave above which I think should be uncontroversial, an adaptive mother lacks at least one of the characteristics we attach to a prototypical mother; namely, she didn’t give birth to the child in question. She’s still a mother, just not a prototypical mother.
What I’m saying (and what I think you’re saying as well) is that the category of trans woman is more like the category of adaptive mother than the category of black woman. Trans women can still be women, but they are not prototypical, in that for the most part they lack the biological and developmental characteristics of the prototype.
Addendum: iknklast’s @19 is an excellent example of what I mean when I say that words aren’t Lego blocks. When we combine words, we often end up with meanings that aren’t present in any of the individual words.
What a Maroon
They can only be “women” if “woman” is defined by gender performance. At which point “woman” becomes an incoherent category, as lots of (biologically defined) women reject the associated gender performance. Worse, “woman” as a political category–a distinct class of people in society, with their own interests–gets identified as “people who perform gender signifiers” rather than “adult female people.”
“What a Maroon” And “Inklast”, you both make good and thorough points and I agree with them. I think in the end, the pain in the ass issue is there being either social or worse, legal consequences to identity claims not being agreed to when there are real social and legal issues to be taken care of. Personally I don’t care what you call yourself. It usually isn’t of consequence but as far as the sports thing goes, what a great way to start up whole new sports leagues made of trans folk who are evenly matched in the same way there are weight classes and skill level categories in other sports. These are not insoluble problems.
“iknklast February 20, 2019 at 10:03 am #19:
“They want to enter the field with a handicap that gives them a larger chance of succeeding.”
Well doesn’t that sum it up well?
An intriguing nod to the instability of mind that breeds the confused thought processes that accept such terms as “female penis”
Assuming you’re applying the primary definitions of the words “handicap” and “succeeding” . . . ; >
Lady Mondegreen,
Apologies in advance for what will probably be a long response; if it sounds like ‘splaining, that’s not my intent. I’m trying to put down for the first time in writing some thoughts I’ve had for a while about this issue, and part of my purpose here is to help me think this through (so if there is ‘splaining going on, I’m the main target).
First, to reiterate, I’m approaching this from the perspective of a linguist, and more specifically a cognitive linguist. As a linguist, my bias is toward the descriptive rather than the prescriptive; as a cognitive linguist, my thinking has been heavily influenced by the likes of (George) Lakoff, Langacker, and Sweetser (though I’ve been out of grad school for over a decade and my day job is only tangentially related, so some of my thinking may be out of date).
Some preliminaries to my approach, then: first, dictionary meanings are out; meaning in encyclopedic. Second, our categories tend to be radial, with strong prototype effects, rather than necessary and sufficient conditions. Third, while we can generalize about meaning across a population, there are also bound to be individual differences in our prototypes and how far we’re willing to stretch a category beyond the prototype (what’s a saucer for the goose may not be a saucer for the gander).
To take the case of “mother” again, the prototype (and I should say that I’m talking about middle class America here) has certain biological features (conceives, carries, gives birth, maybe nurses), legal features, social features, and emotional features. A person can be a mother without fulfilling all of the prototypical features (e.g., she might not be emotionally supportive in the way we think of mothers). What I want to focus on here, though, is the difference between a birth mother and an adoptive mother. A birth mother (assuming she gives the child up for adoption at birth and has no further contact) only has the biological features of a mother, while an adoptive mother can have all of the features except the biological ones. If you try to come up with a single dictionary definition that covers both, you’d probably fail (unless you admit an and/or in the definition), but most people wouldn’t have a problem considering both birth mothers and adoptive mothers as mothers. And yet we can also understand that both kinds of mothers have different needs and different problems, and we can see the need for both to have, e.g., separate support groups.
When it comes to the category “woman”, again there are biological, legal, social, psychological, and religious features to our prototypes (again, I’m trying to be descriptive here). Some women may fit the prototype fairly well, others may only fit the biological features. And then there are people who fit some of the other features, but lack the biological features; some of those people call themselves trans women. The question at hand seems to be whether to stretch the category of “woman” to include those people; I’m agnostic on that question. But regardless of your answer, I think this framework can help show (or at least helps me understand) that there is a class of biological women who should be seen “as a political category–a distinct class of people in society, with their own interests.”
I hope this is clear. As I said, I’m still thinking through these issues myself, but I think this is a helpful framework.
I don’t know that I would have a problem with that, except…it does seem that the definition of that category of woman is based so much on the gender essentialism so many of us have been fighting against, and have found standing as an obstacle in our way any time we wanted to move out of that social category of woman, that stereotype that gets dumped on you from birth if you have the biological categories.
Then, the trans community fails to recognize that they are indeed imposing an essentialism, and claim that they are the ones moving away from essentialism…solely because they believe men can magically become women. That is never what the problem was; the problem is with a definition of woman that includes the idea that there is some inherent essential thing that makes women “female” or “feminine” with qualities defined in opposition to the “male” or the “masculine”. With, of course, the “male” or the “masculine” qualities usually being those most valued by society, even though we try to cover that up by pretending to value nurturing as much as we value blowing s**t up. We don’t, we haven’t, we likely never will.
Busting the gender binary does not mean declaring yourself to be the opposite gender than your sex just because you have characteristics long established for that gender. Bashing the gender binary means recognizing that you, a male, have characteristics that most people assume are female, and that having those characteristics does not, in fact, make you a female, a sissy, a girly-man, or anything other than what you are – a man who likes wearing make up and dresses, or whatever characteristics you happen to express. Just as I am a woman who has a mix of “traditional” male characteristics and a mix of “traditional” female characteristics, and that doesn’t make me half one/half another. It makes me me.
So, yeah, it isn’t so much redefining the category “woman”, when you think about it. It’s re-establishing that list of stereotypes that have long been shoved onto women, and simply claiming that anyone who fits those, or thinks they do, is, by definition, woman.
What a Maroon – That’s interesting. “Adoptive mother” does seem like a useful analogy. “Trans woman” could (in the abstract) work that way, but in practice that’s not happening. Adoptive mothers don’t form groups to attack and threaten birth mothers, or spend most of their energy demanding that everyone agree that “adoptive mothers are mothers.”
Another salient difference is that adoptive mothers are, in general, doing a good thing for another person, i.e. providing an orphaned or abandoned child with a mother. Transing is more self-focused, which isn’t inherently bad but given the other issues…again, it’s not working out all that well.
My reply overlapped with iknklast’s – i.e. I hadn’t seen it when I replied.
What a Maroon, thanks for the thoughtful reply. I still have to reject that proposed definition of “woman,” for the reason iknklast expressed so well.
Ultimately, though, that’s as much a political fight as a linguistic one, no?
As a linguist, you must know Mark Twain’s famous remark about the distinction between a dialect and a language (the language has an army.) I think trans activism currently has the army (though they’d deny it.)
The discussion still seems to be how to accommodate trans people in sport. The thing is, they’re already accommodated. Although we think of sport as being sex-segregated, it isn’t; not really. We do have restricted categories which only some people will fit into, such as women, or people with disabilities, because people in those categories have real-world disadvantages when it comes to competing in any sport which is also open to fit men. But, historically, those categories were created precisely because the people who fit into them were excluded from competing in the main category. But now that women and disabled people have the chance to compete against one another, what was originally the ‘male only’ category has been opened up to all. It’s just that almost all women and disabled people cannot qualify to compete against the fit men in almost all sports.
Trans identified males aren’t prevented from competing in the open category; but MRAs like Mr McKinnon don’t want to. Their real agenda is to use the idea of being trans to remove all rights and spaces from women. They won’t be happy until there are no women in sport at all.
iknklast and Ophelia,
Thanks for your responses. As I said, I was trying to be descriptive, but I realize that description necessarily entails all the stereotypes and abuses that currently pervade our culture. I don’t think we can ever be free of stereotypes, but perhaps we can make them less toxic. Maybe this model can at least help describe where we are now, and what we can do to move towards where we want to go. Or not. (It probably would do more potential good if I aimed it at a different audience, but I think you can imagine the response I would get there.)
As for the example of adoptive mothers (I keep writing “adaptive”), I meant it more as an illustrative example than an analogy, though I realized as I was writing it that there are some nice parallels. But all analogies are imperfect, and I think you homed in on its major weakness.
Lady Mondegreen (did I ever mention how much I love your ‘nym?),
Not Twain; it was someone in the audience of a Max Weinreich talk. In the original Yiddish it was, “a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot.”
Taking “adoptive mother” analogy further: I think something your application misses, Ophelia, is the magical thinking aspect. To make it closer to what seems to be happening with extreme trans activists, our shouty “adoptive mother” group would have to be claiming also to be the actual, biological birth mothers of their adoptive children. They would be laying claim to a part of “motherhood” that they have not and cannot experience with their adopted children, and that the actual fact of their not having given birth to the children in question is transormed into birth-motherhood by declaration, and “misplaced syllogisms” as you put in your “If-then” post. These extreme adoptive mothers might also insist that their genes would match those of their adoptive children and they would be compatible tissue donors for them as well, despite the impossibilities of this (barring adoption by a close female relative of the birth mother). I think that is the level of delusion and fantasy we are seeing in those trans women who claim that their penises are women’s penises. Maybe I’m stretching things too far, but I think the TRAs are stretching things further.
I’m still not over the whole “the average transwoman does not have a size or strength advantage over the average not-trans woman” idea.
For that to be true, it would have to be the case that transwomen don’t have and never had male bodies, etc.
And for that to be true, they would have to not be trans. Because they can only be transwomen if they have male bodies that “don’t match” their inner gender.
Are we now not even supposed to believe that transwomen are transwomen? They were always non-prefixed females in every respect?
I think that one was more like Trump’s “I don’t care, I believe Putin.” It’s not based on anything, it’s just fingers in ears NOT TRUE NOT TRUE NOT TRUE. Aka stupid.
Ben, #34
If that’s the case then technically transwomen (cistranswomen? This is in danger of becoming silly!) would have been, for a large portion of their lives, living as transboys/transmen.
Now my head hurts!