Very precise indeed?
Margaret Atwood interviewed in the Times:
The Handmaid’s Tale made her not only a famous writer, but also a public figure. The oppressed class of women in the book bore a clear feminist message. Opinions were expected of her. But she was, and remains, too meticulous to give easy answers.
“Look up kinds of feminism, and you’ll find 75 of them. So when people ask me about feminism, I ask them which type and they never know.”
Fair enough. It’s a good plan to be precise about what one thinks, what one endorses, what one signs up to.
On the subject of trans rights she is very precise indeed. After our conversation she emails me a video attacking JK Rowling’s view of the issue. Rowling defends the ultimate biological reality of sexual differences as a feminist cause: “If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased.” Atwood also emails a Scientific American article stating the opposite case: “Why the new science of sex and gender matters for everyone.”
“The most bothersome thing about me,” she explains, “is that I’m a strict agnostic. By which I mean there’s a difference between belief and fact. And you should not confuse the two. You can believe all you like that trans people aren’t people, but it happens not to be a fact. It is not true that there are only two [gender] boxes. So the two questions to ask about anything are: is it true? And is it fair ? So if it’s not true that there are only two gender boxes and that gender is fixed and immutable, is it fair to treat trans people as if they’re not who they say they are?”
That’s precise? You’ve got to be kidding. It’s not precise to imply that dissenters from trans ideology “believe that trans people aren’t people” – in fact it’s a venomous calumny. People lose their minds on this subject, I swear, and I mean it literally – Atwood has a brilliant mind and that’s just a stupid thing to say. And she said it in an email, so it wasn’t just blurted out in conversation, it was typed out and then not reconsidered and withdrawn. Nobody thinks that trans people are anything other than people. What could make her temporarily dumb enough and malicious enough to say that? She’s never had that kind of full-on commitment or loyalty to feminism, so why is she suddenly a fanatic about transgenderism?
So, yeah, we know it “happens not to be a fact” that trans people are not people. Duh. Rabbits don’t talk about their gender identity or their women’s brains in men’s bodies.
Fine, it’s not true that there are only two [gender] boxes, but it is true that there are only two sex boxes, DSDs notwithstanding.
It is true to say that there are two sexes (with a small percentage of DSDs) and that sex is what it is, and yes it can be fair to treat any people of any kind as if they’re “not who they say they are” if they are lying or deluded or both. There is no moral law or imperative to treat people as if they “are who they say they are” in all situations no matter what. Trump says he is a stable genius; we do not have to treat him accordingly.
It’s the Gender Critical who argue that “gender” is a spectrum, a socially-constructed mess where one home might think “only men make good violinists” and another home assumes “violins are for sissies.” Those who believe gender is innate and biological also believe it’s immutable. “I couldn’t play the violin because it just felt wrong.”
That idiotic SciAm article.
I wish somebody would send Atwood this:
https://theparadoxinstitute.com/blog/2020/07/24/a-response-to-stop-using-phony-science-to-justify-transphobia/
Well, Ms. Atwood, your charcaterization of the gender critical position is both untrue and unfair. Where does that leve you? The need to deliberately, dishonestly rephrase your opponent’s view is a sure sign that your own position will not survive an argument.
What kind of feminism?
“Not the fun kind” – Andrea Dworkin :D
Sexual reproduction has had a long history in living organisms, going right back to the bacteria. This is for fairly well understood reasons. Asexual reproduction is useful if the favoured outcome is a bunch of genetically identical clones, as in say, grafting a bud of a favoured fruit tree onto a tough-as-boots rootstock. But sexual reproduction promotes genetic variety, which in turn gives Darwinian natural selection a range of offspring organisms to work with.
Thus in normal sperm cells and ova we have two sex chromosomes: X and Y. These can combine to form a zygote which is XX, from which a new (female) offspring will develop, or a zygote which is XY, which will go on to become a new (male) offspring. There is no third sex, because there is no third sex chromosome. Who finds who sexually attractive does not work on the simple genetic either/or basis that governs sex determination. There is no spectrum in sex as there is in say, light.
Which of the two, Rowling or Atwood, is the better thinker? It is pretty obviously Rowling, and by a country mile; because there are objective criteria for determining that. But there are no objective criteria for determining any rank order among works of literature or of any other art form.
I like what I like because I like it.
https://www.statnews.com/2018/02/20/antibiotic-resistance-bacterial-sex/
I take all the sanctimonious defenses of the (uncontested) personhood of trans people as a kind of tacit admission. Atwood can’t engage with actual gender-critical arguments because then she would have to respond with the party-sanctioned genderist dogma, and she can’t do that without making some readers wonder if maybe the terves do have a point after all.
“Lesbians are morally deficient if they don’t want to sexually engage with male genitals.” Well, that’ll go over just fine with cultural conservatives, but it might raise an a few eyebrows among the liberals who still believe that “trans” simply means “super mega gay” and imagine the LGBT as one big happy family.
“Anything uniquely pertaining to the health or reproductive rights of vagina people/ cervix people/ uterus people/ ovary people/ breast people must never be spoken of as a women’s issue. After all, not all women have vaginas/ cervixes/ uteruses/ ovaries/ breasts, and not all people with vaginas/ cervixes/ uteruses/ ovaries/ breasts are women. In fact, we’d prefer not to fully acknowledge that the people with vaginas are also the people with cervixes, uteruses, et cetera. If we zoom out and look at the bigger biological picture instead of playing ad-libs with an anatomy textbook, we might be forced to use the f-word. No, not that f-word—the other one, the one that rhymes with email.” Another tough sell. Hard not to trigger at least a few red flags.
“It is good and right and just to sterilize children and teens who aren’t even old enough to consent to sex in the nane of affirming their gender identity. It is wicked and evil and hateful to ask why the number of children and teens supposedly requiring this treatment has increased by several thousand percent over the past decade. It’s also rank bigotry to raise any concerns about the long-term health effects of what is basically a medical experiment.” Oof, good luck spinning that so everyone will swallow it—it’s going to stick in a craw or two.
And so on and so forth. Atwood’s a gifted writer and her name alone carries a great deal of leftist cachet, so she could make the case for all of these points as effectively as anyone. But inevitably, no matter how painstakingly she rhetoricized, she would still be stuck arguing positions that not all of her fellow liberals would continue to accept once they understood what it was they were really supposed to be accepting. Easier to sidestep the minefield altogether: you never have to say anything you don’t want to when you’re debating a strawwoman.
Dang, well said.
One thing I left out of my tantrum at Atwood –
Wait just a damn minute. She says there’s a difference between belief and fact, and you should not confuse the two, and then after two sentences she says “So the two questions to ask about anything are: is it true? And is it fair?” What does “is it fair?” have to do with fact as opposed to belief? It’s not a fact that it’s fair or unfair to force women to agree that men are women, or to tell men that it’s not a fact that they are women. It’s a belief. It’s a belief that can be argued, supported with reasons, explained with facts, but it’s not itself a fact.
It’s all just so sloppy, which I think is unlike her.
[…] a comment by As The Smoke Rises Upward on Very precise […]
It’s not the gender boxes, but the sex boxes. And you don’t get to identify the sex box you’re in.
Bacteria are not sexually reproducing organisms. They do have ways to exchange DNA but this is not through sexual reproduction. They reproduce by binary fission – in other words, they split in two.
When humans reproduce by binary fission, and they do sometimes as fertilised ova (zygotes) the result is identical twins; each with the same allocation of DNA, in both cell nuclei and cytoplasm (mitochondrial). If the bacteria do not have sex, they have something with the same effect down the generations, but by another name.
It was from a Margulis radio conversation I heard years ago I remember her saying that bacteria “invented sex.” I suggest that without that crucial (probably unintentional ;-) bacterial discovery, the oceans of the Earth would probably still be something like a fizzy Campbell’s beef bouillon, containing as dissolved organic molecules and dissolved CO2, all of the world’s allocation of carbon, and long before countless generations of algae had synthesised all the petroleum, and land plants had laid down the great coal measures of the world. Or am I missing something?
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https://www.nature.com/articles/480458a
This trans people aren’t people schtick really annoys me – as if the gender criticals regarded trans people like Ash in Alien, whose head is knocked off, revealing wires and tubes.
I think there’s a word for disagreeing with an argument you make up… It’s like straw person with prostate or something like that.
Omar, bacteria do not have sexual reproduction, no matter what Lynn Margulis said. They are identical clones, unless they pick up some DNA from another bacterium. They have several means of doing that, but they are not sexual reproduction.
Right now, I feel very much like I am being mansplained. I am a Biologist; I follow the science. Quite simply, bacteria did not invent sex, because they do not use sex.
Margulis is rightly celebrated for her discovery of endosymbiosis, but there are a number of other places where most scientists consider her spectacularly wrong.
It’s really odd to read anyone purporting to be a feminist fail to understand: “You can believe all you like that trans people aren’t people, but it happens not to be a fact.” It should be obvious that this language is echoing “feminism is the radical notion that women are people.” As one would answer an MRA who said “but NOBODY believes women aren’t people”, the implied answer to “Nobody thinks that trans people are anything other than people” that Atwood is making should be clear to any feminist:
If you agree trans people (like women) are people, they deserve the same rights, respect and to have their needs met like any other group of people in society (just as cis people do).
It’s also not true that there are two [sex] boxes. Most human sexual characteristics exist on a spectrum and overlap, so as a whole they aren’t binary (and even develop and change within a single person). And it especially doesn’t fit into two neat boxes for people who transition, the specific group who is being talked about.
Ah well, terfs gonna terf I guess. Start by wilfully misunderstanding clear and obvious feminist rhetoric and end up with gender essentialism and defining people by their biology.
Sayonara
=8/-DX
OK. Understood.
@ =8)-DX
Even if we accept that your version is the obvious and unambiguous interpretation you claim it is, it isn’t the gotcha you seem to think because GC feminists don’t believe your version either. Substitute your text for Atwood’s and we have the same complaint. It’s straw either way.
It’s not the sign of a healthy political movement that it has to resort to that kind of slushy sentimental over-promising babyish language – “they deserve the same rights, respect and to have their needs met like any other group of people in society” – what the fuck is that supposed to mean? All people “deserve respect”? If you mean basic default respect aka equality, sure, but you don’t mean that, do you – you mean substantive personal “you are awesome” respect. Nobody is entitled to that kind of respect; it’s not a “right.” And “to have their needs met”? Oh, really? So we all have a right to have our needs met? Cool, I need an apartment in London and one in Paris and one in Stockholm, and a pony. Pffffff. “Needs” can mean anything, and no we don’t all “deserve” to have our “needs” met no matter what we are and what our needs are.
@Ophelia:
That’s the second time you’ve asked for a pony, I’m starting to think it’s a hint…
latsot, I think it’s just that she’s read so much manure she feels there must be a pony in there somewhere…
No, the pony is a joke, but the apartments? Real!
The “oh so OBVIOUS” interpretation might be a little clearer to us blinkered terfs, if we weren’t also bombarded with similar empty slogans like “you’re denying our right to exist!” – which seems rather along the same hyperbolic lines. Which famous feminist slogan is that echoing? Your conviction on this is rather reminiscent of a chancer copyright lawyer trying to claim royalties on the word “whoosh!” that he just filed a trademark for. Yes, both feminists and gender ideologists use phrases containing the word “people”, and maybe we could engage with the substance of those words rather than transplaining what they REALLY mean?
=8)-DX
OK, sexual characteristics exist on a spectrum after a fashion. Penis shapes and sizes vary, the size of testes and the amount of semen they produce differs from man to man, some men have deeper voices than others, or broader shoulders or more muscular frames. Some women have larger labia than others, some labia are more symmetrical than others. Breasts can be large, firm, pendulous, small, flat, asymmetrical and nursing mothers differ in the amount of milk they can produce, and so-on. But, so what? Individual differences are the norm across a lot of the animal kingdom and have nothing to say about the transgender argument.
Some of the above may indeed overlap between the sexes: some men develop breasts, some women have broad shoulders or deep voices. I can’t argue with that, but when the issue is sex specific features then no, there is no overlap between the sexes. Women do not have penises or testicles: men do not have vulvas or vaginas, wombs or ovaries (and the fact that some women and men don’t have functioning reproductive systems is neither here nor there), and there is no overlapping of these features.
The sexual characteristics do indeed develop and change within a single person, that’s called ‘maturing’. The only way that development and change would have any relevance to your argument would be if a boy’s penis change’s into a vagina during puberty, or a girl’s ovaries suddenly shift down, settle into a protuding bag of skin and start producing sperm instead of ova, but as this doesn’t happen then this part of your argument is a red herring.
Aye, and there’s the rub. In order to accept that transgender is about anything other than a person’s feeling of self – their personal psychology, if you will – one has to accept the first part of your argument, the part that denies sex is binary and that there are no sex-specific features but just a spectrum of the same that can overlap the sexes. But the former part of your argument is clearly a false narrative invented solely to bolster the latter point. It is science denialism pure and simple, amplified and promoted so strongly because you are aware that to accept the genuine science would mean accepting that there is no physical reality to transgender, that it is indeed all in the head.
Good grief, enough with ‘gender essentialism’. I think I might scream if I have to read of, or listen to, another trans women saying they always knew they were a girl because they loved to play with their mother’s clothes and lipstick; or a trans man saying they knew they were a boy because they liked climbing trees, playing in mud and thought cars were cool. Frozen rat on a stick, who plays to ‘gender essentials’ more? The trans crowd or feminists who say that girls can wear pants and rough house and boys can cook and wear pretty clothes if they want to?
Turning to sex being binary or not, individual sexual characteristics are most definitely not binary. They do exist on a spectrum (some of them not on a simple linear spectrum either). Reduced to its simplest, for each characteristic, or even related clusters of characteristics, you tend to end up with a binomial distribution with the centres being the median for men and women. Some characteristics have broad distributions and others narrow. Some have little overlap between sexes and others more.
Thing is, the more of those characteristics and phenotypical traits you bring to consideration, the more clear cut it is that you are dealing overwhelmingly with biologically male and female of the species. No one needs to check genitals or quiz someone. 99% of the time a casual glance is more than enough, even with the extremes.