His rights as a woman
Yet again, I don’t understand how it works. Yet again I don’t understand the basic concept. Yet again I think it’s the concept that’s broken, not my reading comprehension.
Rupert Goodwins says that saying only women are women is to deny trans women’s [i.e. men’s] rights as women.
That’s such a peculiar thing to say, and to think. As usual, imagine saying it of anything else. Saying only rabbits are rabbits is to deny trans rabbits’ [i.e. lions’] rights as rabbits.
How is it possible for men to have rights as women? If men have rights as women then what do women have? Rights as men? Wouldn’t it be simpler just to leave things as they were, so that women have women’s rights and men have men’s?
RG is saying that women deny men’s rights by saying that women are women, which is absurd on its face. The only way they can make this work is by inserting magic words which are intended to delete everything we know about what we mean by “women” and “men.” If you refer to women as “cis women” then suddenly the whole category is up for grabs, and women are just part-timers in their own sex. If you refer to some men as “trans women” then it becomes okay to pretend that women, who are only part-timers after all, are oppressing men by saying men are men.
And what, exactly, are “trans women’s rights as women”? Trans women are men, so what “rights as women” can they have? What rights can they have that make it a violation of those rights for women to say that men are men? Do men have a “right” to force women to agree that they (men) are women if they say they are? What kind of “right” would that be exactly? Surely it’s more of a liability or handicap or obstacle than a right.
It never stops being weird to see adults talking this absurd gibberish.
This is exactly what Orwell warned us about with the concept of “Newspeak”. By changing the meaning of words and demanding that words be used only in certain ways, it forces discussion to proceed only within the channels preferred by the dominant ideology, while making it almost impossible to express concepts which are disfavored by that ideology.
Can’t call him a liar, but I bet he doesn’t have any problems with TRAs calling JKR a hateful, murderous transphobe.
So let me get this straight, because *you’re* confused about *your* gender or sex, or some other part of *your* identity, the rest of us have to be put in special categories? No thanks.
Agreeing to the ‘cis’ descriptor only serves to reinforce the falsehood that men can be actual women. I’m not subscribing to that, or pronouns, or any of the other trans-cult doctrine. I do see some academics and feminists using ‘cis’ as if it points to a real thing though, which is the tragic part.
I’m not woke, I’m cis-woke. :P
You can make up anything to put in front of “women” for the same effect. For example:
I insist that my remote presence robot be allowed in the locker room. She identifies as female. You bio-women have to stop discriminating against cyberwomen. CERFs!
I see he is splitting hairs over whether or not he is lying – “I am not saying things I know to be untrue” – yet what he speaks about is something he can’t possibly have knowledge of – other peoples’ motivations. He occupies his headspace and only his headspace, and so cannot know the motivations of other people except insofar as they tell him*. Which means at minimum he is phrasing his own speculation as if it were knowledge, which may not be a lie in the classical sense but is certainly not honest. He even reveals this inadvertently: “I consider this transphobia.” A blithe declaration of someone else’s motivations because, well, he just declared it.