What a “cisgender” woman is allowed to believe
Our new friend Zack just keeps on giving. Thanks to the vagaries of Twitter I didn’t see this one yesterday, despite clicking on all the view threads and replies I did see.
It’s breathtaking, isn’t it. We impudent women “can,” according to this man, “believe” (stupid credulous creatures that we are) that our biology is “part of” what makes us women – only “part of,” mind you, we’re not allowed to “believe” it’s the whole of it. Also we’re not allowed to “believe” it’s what makes women women, we’re only allowed to believe it of our single selves, “personally.” He misused the “inclusive” their/them, and sowed confusion by doing so – he meant “a cisgender woman can believe her biology is part of what makes her, personally, a woman” – but she is required to believe that other rules apply to other women.
But wait! Not only is it a mere belief, not only is even that a mere part of what makes her a woman in her silly personal belief, but also – she is not allowed to “assert that this is the only way one can be defined as a woman.”
So many rules and limitations and orders in one little tweet, all telling women what a man will allow us to believe and assert.
That takes some fucking brass neck, I must say.
I’m not the only one.
There are a lot of replies like that – aka it’s a dogpile, and we’re told and told and told not to contribute to Twitter dogpiles – but what can we do when a conceited smug man who thinks he knows it all makes assertions about what women can believe, personally, about what makes us women, but cannot assert such beliefs about other women? What can we do when a smug conceited man says all that to a man and entirely ignores all the women who object to his domineering pronouncements about us? When the smug conceited smug man in question is a senior correspondent at Vox? He’s not a random Twitter fella, he’s an opinion-maker, and he won’t even reply to a single one of us.
Yes so when I saw that tweet just now and my hair caught fire I contributed to the dog pile. One more reply for him to ignore.
This is the transgender version of “As a Catholic I am personally against abortion, but because I would not impose my beliefs on others, I’m Pro-Choice.”
Well, I guess that’s okay, then.
How about this for a definition?
A woman is any member of the species Homo (does not have to be sapiens) which has a Twitter account, identifies itself as a woman, uses womens’ dunnies and other facilities, and may wear womens’ clothing always, sometimes or never at all and given on occasion to converting said Twitter into a pile of mediaeval dog shit, or should that be a pile of shit from a mediaeval dog, or perhaps a pile of shit in a mediaeval street ie a mediaeval sewer?
He speaks as if he believes womanhood is a state of mind, and that there is a debate as to how much of this womanhood mindstate is informed by biology vs. other sources of influence. And so to him, it is a debate about nature vs. nurture – to what degree is being a woman determined by being female? In this framework of sex and gender, by saying womanhood is a matter of biology, we are the primitives claiming that everything about one’s personality is biological; that we are railroaded into manliness or womanliness purely by having a penis or vulva.
It never seems to occur to them that this framework is very similar to that of the social conservative view on sex and gender. The social conservative says that there are masculine and feminine social roles and that sex determines the role each person has; the TRA differs only in that they consider the roles opt-in.
The gender critics are the only ones questioning whether these roles ought to exist at all.
Yes, and brilliant women like Rebecca Reilly-Cooper and Jane Clare Jones and Meghan Murphy have been pointing this out for YEARS…but guys like this smug beardo won’t even listen.
I am so fucking fed up of men telling women we don’t exist. Men I used to think were smart and not misogynist. It’s fucking with my head. I can’t trust any of them. I want to go live in a lesbian separatist commune.
I’ll give him credit for one thing: He did a superb job of picking out his twitter profile picture. The picture makes him look like an obnoxious mansplaining dudebro, and it turns out that’s exactly what he is.
True, Skeletor; he does look the type for whom the phrases well, actually and umm, I think you’ll find figure large in his conversations.