A movement to expand what those words mean
A comedian named Sarah Keyworth writes a letter to JK Rowling and asks everyone to share it.
From that letter:
There is no attack on what it means to be a woman, or a lesbian. There is simply a movement to expand what those words mean.
But that is an “attack” on what those words mean, isn’t it. It is a campaign to change the meaning of a word that picks out…well, what does it pick out. Let’s see.
- Half or rather more than half of all humans
- The sex that gives birth to all humans
- The sex that has historically been dominated by the other half
- The “weaker” sex – the sex that in a dimorphic species is overall the smaller, less muscular, less aggressive one
- The sex that thanks to 2-4 has always been conceptualized as inferior to the other one
- The sex that feminism exists to establish as not inferior to the other one
Those are the people the word “women” picks out.
If you “expand” that word to include people who are not described by 2-6 then you are making 6 impossible.
At the end our wise comedian writes
I hope you read this. If you do I hope you take some time, maybe a day before respond [sic] with some scathing quip about sex, butch lesbians or periods. Maybe read it out loud, maybe send it to your editor and ask your husband what he thinks.
Now let’s talk about the word “patronizing.”
Why is Keyworth “really terrified”? Is this more of the same irresistible overreaction that makes some people believe that children aren’t safe in Rowling’s presence?
Now there, little lady, if you don’t see the sense in what I said, maybe you should ask your husband about it.
Nope, don’t need any more feminism.
Did you see this reply?:
https://mobile.twitter.com/radicalhag/status/1269658404366188544
I did.
I read comments like, “I don’t stop being a woman after menopause,” and, “having female biological characteristics isn’t what makes me a woman,” and I really wonder what it’s like not being smart. Honestly, what is the phenomenology of normal-or-lower intelligence? Would I prefer to destroy my intellect if I, like Algernon and Charlie, knew the experience of both?
To be clear, both comments were written by the same person, with the first intended to demonstrate the second.
A distinction without a difference. Per the description, Luna is male and therefore is a boy whether he considers himself one or not. He is a boy who loves the things he loves (the colour pink, MLP, skirts and dresses), and loving those things does not make him a girl. To think that this is even plausible is to accept the stereotypes surrounding sex. It is a view that accepts and promulgates gendered stereotypes.
ELL OH ELL how new to this subject is this ninny?
Just once, I would like to see a TRA not conflate sex and gender.
“Penis/vagina” denotes sex, the rest are the gendered expectations lumped with the sexes. And we actually agree on this point! We too would like to abolish such damaging expectations. This is the very core of the gender critical position: there should not be any personality expectations placed on a person simply because they belong to a given sex. With that as a goal, it follows that Luna should not be considered a girl just because he likes pink ponies and dresses. That basis of transing people is rendered superfluous.
…
And yes, that finish was powerfully patronising. My mother left my father because he had similar notions of how the marriage ought to be.
I’ve got two ideas on this stuff. I haven’t heard these from other people, so maybe they’re obvious, or useless, but here goes.
1. I read an article (uhhh…within the last few years) about gay men in (I think) Iran who are transitioning (hormones, surgery, the whole nine yards) to women so that they can be with (marry?) men. See, homosexuality is strictly forbidden, but if the man is actually a woman, then it’s not gay sex, and the gov’t/imams/society are OK with that.
To us, this seems bizarre and abhorrent. But we essentially do the same thing to trans people in our own society.
We have rigid standards for dress and behavior for men and women. Back in the day, there was no room at all for anyone to deviate from these standards in any way. I have a first-hand account of a man who was a teenager back in the 1970s. He finally worked up the courage to walk down the street wearing a dress, and was promptly arrested by a police officer.
Today, we do allow some flexibility in dress and behavior, but we do it on the Iranian model: a man who wants to dress and act like a woman has to *be* a woman.
What if we treated dress and behavior the way we treat sexual preference? Which is to say, what if we did not tie dress and behavior to chromosome complement? If a man wants sex with men, that’s his business; if a man wants to wear a dress, that is equally his business. He doesn’t have to claim or pretend to be a woman in order to dress the way he wants. Or to walk down the street in peace.
2. I heard a podcast (Savage Love?) a year or two ago. The guest was (I think) a sociologist. He was talking about political correctness (PC) culture, particularly in academia, where students call out teachers for some kind of PC transgression and sometimes teachers get fired for this and teachers are basically walking on egg shells for fear of triggering some student.
He likened this to tribes that still live on some islands in the South Pacific. These tribes are head-hunters. The way you gain status–street cred–within these tribes is you kill someone (and bring back their head). If they have a beef with someone in their own tribe they can kill them, but more commonly they kill someone outside their tribe. And the problem for the outsiders is they have these tribesmen coming into their communities and killing people and the outsiders would really rather the tribesmen didn’t do that.
The guest said that this is what is going on now within academia. Students aren’t calling out teachers because they are threatened, or offended, or triggered. They are calling out teachers for these PC transgressions because they are head-hunting. This is their way of bringing back a head, and building up status within their own peer group. And the problem is that this head-hunting is imposing a lot of cost and grief on the rest of us.
This would explain why these transgression can be so bizarre and vaporous. It is because the transgression itself is inessential. The important part is that you called someone out: you brought back a head.
Transphobia is real; sometimes it is violent. But this wolf-pack behavior, this baying for blood because someone dissented from–or merely declined to affirm–some orthodoxy regarding trans people–it looks like head-hunting to me.
Holms:
You’ve been around this subject long enough to know that not acknowledging the existence of the movement’s sex-denial wing is part of the overall strategy. It lets them stay safe in the motte while simultaneously playing in the bailey.
They don’t deny that biological sex is a real thing, they just deny that it has anything to do with biology that happens below the neck. It boils down to the ill-conceived idea that one’s biological sex automatically matches one’s gender identity, which is how a gender-fluid individual can be biologically male in the morning, biologically female in the evening, bits of both at the same time, say, 30% male/70% female for an hour or two, or even completely androgynous, and none of this involves any physical change of the body, just a shift in the state of mind.
So, yes, they do acceptbthat biological sex is real, it’s just that their version is completely psychological in origin, which isn’t at all self-contradictory because hey, the brain is part of one’s biology, right?
Ah Steven, I have tried this line of reasoning with TRA’s. Honestly, at 68 I don’t care who wears what, and if a woman is happy in overalls smothered in engine grease and a man is happy in a dress and 5lbs of makeup, why should I care? This is really a place where we judge people by “the content of their character”.
But that doesn’t satisfy TRA’s. It means I don’t understand, I am trying to tell them how to be their “authentic selves”, that it isn’t up top me to “dictate” and I am just just being a bully and causing harm.
Logic, reason, and compassion are not wanted.
Acolyte of Sagan:
WHARGARBL!!1! I just got done sayi—
Damn, I just got played. Well played. Well played, indeed.
Steven:
It’s transphobic to say that people should be able to live their lives as they see fit. No, really, that’s what TRAs think. I’m not joking.
(I’ve linked this video before, so apologies to all those who’re bored by it.)
Re “I’ve linked this video before”
I hadn’t seen it before. Good gosh, how bizarre it is.
Ugh. Who IS that?
You’ve covered him before.
Keyworth opens by saying she is a fan of HP, and has used the stories for educating young people, particularly her 10 y.o. goddaughter, “who needed a character like Hermione to show her that being a girl can be really, really cool.”
How does she know? How does she know that anyone is a girl? How does she know that Hermione is a girl? How does she know what “being a girl” is, or means? Couldn’t the goddaughter have learned all about how cool it is “to be a girl” from Neville, or Dean, or Draco, or Harry, or Ron, or Dumbledore? That statement right there, about Hermione being an example of how it can be cool to be a girl, contains all the social assumptions that everyone makes about sex and gender. Keyworth isn’t complaining one bit about the boys/girls sex segregation in the stories, or the lack of transgender characters, or the *horror* of assuming that males are boys and females are girls. Therein lies the hypocrisy of pretending that society doesn’t really reflect actual sexes. The jumped-up angst for the child Luna is completely artificial.
Luna was born with male genitalia, so “everyone expected, *because of this*, that they would like football, blue, and … tractors.” NO. That’s absolutely not entailed by being male. That’s the entire point about “gender” (social expectations) not being the same thing as biological sex. What feminists have been saying for decades is that sex (female) is NOT determinative of what you like or what you want to do or what you are capable of doing. The male genitalia has NOTHING to do with, and is not causative of, liking football, blue, tractors, or pink, MLP, or dresses. That is so messed up.
As for not knowing if Luna is trans … I don’t know how anyone can know what “trans” is, unless it means (for a male) being male and just liking things that society has (wrongly) assigned as appropriate only for females. How can it mean anything else? As for not caring what Luna likes, or what he says about his “identity” or what he “identifies as,” he will never be a loved little girl; he can only be a little boy who is loved no matter what he likes or wears or says about himself. Calling him a girl is not “loving” him; it’s telling him that his male body is wrong, when he actually has a male body, and it is the only body (himself) that he will ever have.
“Nobody who advocates for trans rights is denying that biological sex exists.”
The hell you’re not. Look what you say next:
“We are saying that the things that make up what we understand to be gender – penis/vagina, boy/girl, she/her, blue/pink – is so loaded with expectation that it is toxic and damaging.”
That is such mixed up BS. Keyworth has mixed up sex and two different kinds of gender in an incoherent blob.
Penis/vagina are characteristics of biological sex. Boy/girl are words for juvenile human beings of each biological sex. She/her — what a Freudian mistake. You left out the gendered pronouns (“gender” in language pronouns in English refer to biological sex, generally) for males (he/him) entirely. Linguistically, it’s called “gender,” but it means sex, in English at least. Blue/pink are genuinely social-construct-type gender, that has absolutely nothing to do with sex. There’s no reasonable connection between male=blue or female=pink associations. IOW, you are totally mixing up and denying biological sex and gender by pretending that gender stereotypes (blue=boys, pink=girls) somehow change the body’s biological sex. You’ve got entirely the wrong thing (artificially assigned preferences) as more basic, more important, and more controlling over actual biological reality.
As for claims of hurting people: where is the hurt? How is anyone actually hurt by saying that women are women? Who is actually being hurt, and how? Show the connections in concrete terms.
Whereas, trans ideology (trans women are women) does actually hurt actual women and actual lesbians. Keyworth is wrong. Women are not safe. Lesbians are not safe. Anywhere women have to be undressed and vulnerable in the presence of men is not safe. A society where women have no right to single sex facilities is not safe for women. Reparative rape threats against lesbians from aggressive males is not a safe environment for lesbians.
I have no idea how they can be so sure of their nonsense in the face of R R-C’s catalog of vitriol heaped on JKR just for saying that women are women.