Guest post: The only “people of gender” around
Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on The same rights as others.
As someone who doesn’t think or feel in any of the ways required to qualify as either “man” or “woman” according to gender ideology, what I want to know is this:
• Which toilet am I allowed to use if there are only two and both are reserved for people who think or feel in ways that I don’t?
• Which sporting events am I allowed to participate in if they’re all reserved for people who think or feel in ways that I don’t?
• How am I supposed to fill out all those forms that require me to tick off a box for either “F” or “M” if this is for all relevant purposes equivalent to asking an atheist to tick off for either “Mormon” or “Sikh”?
On a more positive note, I guess I can’t go to any jail…
Seriously, though, I think the best way to deal with these people is to take them at their word and point out that by their own criteria they are pretty much the only “people of gender” around while pretty much everyone else would have to be classified as agender. After all, the whole point of redefining “man” and “woman” in terms of thoughts and feeling is to justify putting biological males who get some kick out of imagining themselves as the opposite sex in the same box as biological females. If the biological females are taken out of the box, they are back to square one.
Also, is it left wing to insist that the discrimination biological females face specifically as biological females go forever unaddressed and unopposed because even acknowledging biological females as an oppressed group in its own right with its own specific issues that are not entirely reducible to those faced by biological males who prefer to be called “woman”/”she” is a hate-crime?
This is not spin by the way. There simply isn’t an identifiable way of thinking or feeling that “cis women” and “trans women” have in common while being different from the ways of thinking and feeling common to “cis men” and “trans men”. Also notice the double standard: If biological sex is messy and not everybody falls neatly into either the “biological male” or “biological female” category (as You’d expect when dealing with physical reality rather than pure mathematics and idealized Platonic forms), that pretty much invalidates biological sex as a category. But if the supposed “gender” differences they’re talking about are so vacuous and ill defined that most “genderists” don’t even try to come up with a non-circular definition, that makes them more firmly established than the laws of thermodynamics.
Yay!
Such a good point.
Really useful way of framing this issue, thank you.
@Lady Mondegreen #1
It’s funny, isn’t it.
If defining “man” and “woman” in terms of biological differences doesn’t meet their standards of accuracy and precision (despite describing the vast majority of people on the planet well enough to be useful), then You definitely wouldn’t expect any the circular non-definitions in terms of thoughts and feelings to meet those very same standards.
But once again the standards are whatever they have to be to get to the pre-determined conclusion. What it really reminds me of are religious apologists who claim victory by default for the God hypothesis unless atheist can provide an ultimate justification for truth, knowledge or ethics that they are even less capable of providing themselves.
(I guess I should clarify that the second to last paragraph is from an entirely separate comment than the rest of the post, hence the first sentence of the last paragraph points two paragraphs back).
I think that’s exactly what these nutters want. They don’t want to be part of the female sphere, they want to be the definition of female and damn the rest of us. For example, the redefinition of “vagina” as the surgically created orifice and we actual vagina-havers get “front hole”. There are people on social media who claim that trans women are better than biological females. Hmm, sounds like a familiar attitude, I just can’t put my finger on it…
This is the straw man argument that makes me lose my mind. Yes, when you study it deeply enough, there is a lot of phenotypic variation in “male” and “female” categories of all sexually reproductive species. It’s irrelevant whether there are hard biological lines between male and female. There aren’t hard biological lines with hardly anything in biology. We don’t even have a sharp line between alive and not-alive (not as in dead). We don’t claim that everyone who claims to have blue eyes has to match a strict definition of color. Most diseases can have atypical presentations – see COVID19 or pretty much everything else.
There are people who fall into a liminal space between male and female: intersex people and some chromosomal abnormalities. Also irrelevant, with the greatest respect to those people. We have two categories, male and female. We have a broad set of characteristics for each category including physical measurable forms internal and external.
The fact that a spectrum exists does not mean categories are not useful or meaningful. Ask any epidemiologist. There is a whole branch of mathematics devoted to this, we call it probability and statistics. The next time some moron brings this spectrum nonsense up, ask them to explain the binomial distribution and how it is used in logistic regression (a type of analysis of categorical traits). Then laugh as they slink quietly away. If they insist the binomial distribution is not applicable to sex, they can have fun asking every journal to retract every paper that used it in their analysis. It might take them a while, since there are millions of papers out there just on sex. At least then they’d be out of everyone’s hair (except for poor journal editors).
Claire #5
I agree that they want to be the definition of female. As I have previously written their agenda is not one of inclusion, but rater of replacement. I don’t think they’re willing to let the biological females out of box they have created for themselves, though (or, more accurately, accept that they never belonged in the box in the first place). The tortured logic seems to go something like this:
1. I want to be one of the people commonly known as “women” or “females”.
2. But I don’t have any of the physical traits that separate these people from the group commonly known as “men”/”males”.
3. I also don’t want us drop labels like “man” and “woman”/”male” and “female” altogether. After all how can I be a “real woman” if there are no real women?
4. Therefore something other than physical traits has to make both me and the biological females part of the same group while excluding the “men”/”males”.
5. This “something other” should be sufficiently personal and “internal” to be immune to empirical refutation.
6. Whatever the internal criteria for being a “woman” may be, they obviously have to apply to me. After all validating my “womanhood” was the point of this whole exercise (the part about being the definition of female).
7. But they must also apply to the biological females* or we’re not part of the same group after all, and it’s all been for nothing. After all it’s not enough to be called by the same name as these people; I have to be what they are. Or, more accurately, they have to be whatever I am and think/feel in whatever ways I do.
8. However, many of the biological females may not appreciate having specific internal traits attributed to them (especially if said traits seem to be be entirely based on sexist stereotypes, pornography, and male sexual fantasies).
9. Therefore the exact nature of the “female” ways of thinking/feeling should be keep sufficiently vague to keep vast numbers of biological females from protesting that this doesn’t apply to them at all. In fact, better stick to tautologies and circular definitions and avoid specifics at all costs.
* An exception can be made for a minority of “trans men” and “non binary” people as long as no one challenges the overarching narrative of “male” and “female” ways of thinking or feeling.
And of course, even if it did, it still wouldn’t imply that being a “man” or being a “woman” is about something other than physical differences (just like refuting evolution would not validate creationism and refuting all of conventional medicine would not validate homeopathy). What it would do is invalidate categories like “men” and “women” altogether which is the last thing these people want (see item (3) above).