FACT
The ACLU is digging in.
But that’s not a “fact.” It’s an ideological construct, of a peculiarly fatuous kind, and it’s not true; it’s the opposite of a fact.
Nonsense.
Include trans people on sports teams by all means, just not male people on female teams, because it’s unfair.
http://www.drhartnell.com/uploads/1/2/1/5/12150034/6919865_orig.jpg
CALVIN: I think we’ve got enough information now, don’t you?
HOBBES: All we have is one “fact” you made up.
CALVIN: That’s plenty. By the time we add an introduction, a few illustrations, and a conclusion, it will look like a graduate thesis.
Besides, I’ve got a secret weapon that will guarantee me a good grade! No teacher can resist this!
HOBBES: What is it?
CALVIN: A clear plastic binder! Pretty professional looking, eh?
HOBBES: I don’t want co-author credit on this, OK?
(From the whole “bats are bugs” storyline.)
I see they cite intersex people. Ugh. It’s so disingenuous to bring up intersex people all the time, as if that is a very common condition and trans people are part of that category and a small addition to it.
The only way they get some of the high numbers they cite for intersex people is by counting all sorts of conditions where sex characteristics or hormones or receptors aren’t completely normal. The bottom line is, to quote Wikipedia, “The number of births with ambiguous genitals is in the range of 0.02% to 0.05%.”
These are real people with real medical issues, but this a very rare situation. There’s no high school anywhere with two intersex people snapping up most of the medals in a sport, for example.
Fact: The ACLU has gone off the deep end.
OK, I’ll bite … according to their ostensible ideology, why do they support the existence of two teams at all?
Like, yes, I get it, it’s really so that men can indulge their fantasies at the expense of women, and there needs to be a “women”‘s team so that men can do that. But, like, how would they justify that?
So, trans women are women.
Question: Are women trans women?
If some women are not trans women, then there must be a difference between trans women and women.
In which case, trans women are not exactly women, and the only real alternative to women is men.
Therefore, trans women are men. Who claim to be women.
Re @GW #5
There are people (I’ve known some) who do hold that the ultimate goal is that there be no sex segregation in sports, that it’s only a matter of training. I think that’s nonsense, but at least they see the issue. But I haven’t found anyone who thinks TWAW, who agrees that men’s sports and women’s sports should be separate, and who can explain why that’s the case.
Re @Mike B #6:
“Trans women are women” I believe is parallel to “black women are women”. Obviously it isn’t the case that “women are black women”. In the TWAW case, though, they have this undefined category ‘women” that is meant to contain both “trans women” and “non-trans women”, and they can’t really come up with a coherent category definition that doesn’t rely on stereotypes and isn’t circular. In any case, they won’t agree that there is a difference between “women” and “trans women”, except that one is the whole category and the other is a subset.
Of course it is. White woman aren’t women, because they’re not oppressed enough. Unless they’re White trans women, of course.
What’s this nonsense about detrimental effects to all people if affirmation is denied?
Is someone supposed to be affirming (cis) female people as women, and if they are, citations please, and further, demonstrate how it helps women?
I cannot think of any woman who ever did sports to “be affirmed as a woman”… except trans women. Who also find bathrooms affirming. And wigs. And heels. And skirts. And if skirts are affirming to trans women, perhaps they could have those, instead of our sports.
Arcadia, TRAs recognize that, and use that as the whole “cis privilege” argument. “Cis”-women were handed womanhood on a silver platter, at birth or even before birth. They never had to do anything to earn or achieve womanhood, like pushing their way into a women’s sports team or women’s bathroom. Sooooo “privileged”.
ACLU lies four times in quick succession. And they used to be the good guys.
They defended members of the KKK and got Heather Heyer killed. They were *never* the good guys. They just weren’t the bad guys.
@ Blood Knight, given that the Unite the Right moves were supposedly in the service of free speech and freedom of assembly, they’ve done a complete u-turn on those stances at breakneck speed when it comes to women’s speech on gender issues.
Once again, I can top that: There is no one way for women’s minds to be. As fuzzy as the boundaries between the sexes may be* they’re still orders of magnitude more clear-cut than the supposed differences between “male” and “female”, “masculine” and “feminine” ways of thinking and feeling that are so vacuous and ill-defined that most gender ideologues don’t even try to come up with a non-circular definition. So I guess the question is why we still need words like “man” and “woman” at all according to these people.
A certain organisation I have been supporting for years recently sendt out a survey, and I was almost at the end when I was asked about my “gender identity”. No options that didn’t presuppose acceptance of the whole ideological framework in which such a question even makes sense. I sighed, abandoned the survey, cancelled my monthly donation and unsubscribed from all their emails. You cannot have Gender Ideology and my support at the same time.
* I.e. far less than TRAs make them out to be which is why the whole faux concern about constantly having to look into people’s pants is just plain stupid.
Where are all the trans men dominating mens’ sports? They have to be there, right, since hormone treatment erases all natural physical advantages.
A: why are trans girls, girls?
Answer #1: Because girls come in many shapes and sizes, they don’t all have uteruses or breasts, and some girl babies have had problems in the womb which make them look like boys.
Answer #2: Because they’re called “trans GIRLS.”
They should probably be reversed.
The story on the intersexed was; they were regularly subject to surgical interventions to ‘normalize’ their bodies. Often without any consultation or review. Surgeons would practically flip a coin to decide what appearance they could make from the existing genitals of infants.
With that dire example, how obscene is it that the mere existence of (very rare) intersexed individuals is recruited as a rationalization for enforcing transness on adolescents who resist gender stereotypes?
Or “inflatable women are women”?
HAhahahaha good one.
Um … explain?
Sex dolls.
It’s never a good idea to ask a linguist to explain a joke. But, since you ask…
One justification I’ve seen for saying TWAW is duh, it says women right there, so trans women are just a subset of women. But that’s not how language works: the ADJ + N construction doesn’t necessarily create a subset of the union of all things ADJ and all Ns. In some cases it does (though there are complications that I won’t get into here); that’s clearly the case with “black women”. But there are adjectives whose meanings explicitly indicate that the object described is not in fact in the class denoted by the noun (fake, ersatz) (or not a full member), and there are ADJ + N combinations that have the same effect, even if individually neither denotes that (a red herring isn’t really a herring, or red; I could probably think of a better example given more time). “Inflatable woman” is of that sort: by itself, the adjective “inflatable” doesn’t indicate that the noun it’s modifying isn’t really a member of that class, but most of us would understand that an inflatable woman isn’t in fact a woman.
So in short, black women are women, but inflatable women aren’t. Neither example tells us whether trans women are women.
Are you sorry you asked?
Or, you know, what Ophelia said.
lol
I swear we didn’t arrange that, it was pure chance.
Skeletor @3 objects to the inclusion of intersex people in the list, but what galls me is the addition of disabled women. How the hell does whoever wrote this equate disability with a person’s self-declared gender identity? (Or perhaps the ACLU will soon be calling for people who self-identify as disabled (don’t you *dare* ask for documentation!) to have places in the Paralympics?)
I’m looking forward to the ACLU’s fight for the inclusion of sawhorses, seahorses, and pommel horses in the next running of the Kentucky Derby.
Not at all. Thank you! (I’m a bit of a linguist myself, though my training is mosly in philology, so I appreciated the explanation very much.)
So apparently all one needs to do is to put “FACT:” in front of a dubious statement and it becomes truthiness? So how does one state actual truths? Leave off the FACT: ? Okay, easily done.
The ACLU is a bunch of delusional, lying assholes.
Precisely. Welcome to the internet.
Incidentally, “FACT” doesn’t need to proceed the statement; it can also follow it, in the form of: “Trans women are woman, and that’s a fact!”
The statement “Seahorses are horses” is considered transphobic hate speech (!) by this University of Edinburgh student: https://thetab.com/uk/edinburgh/2020/11/27/more-transphobic-stickers-have-been-found-on-edinburgh-uni-campus-68683
YNnB,
Don’t forget the horse of a different color.
GW,
Always nice to meet another language nerd (which is also one thing I appreciate about Ophelia).
Nice to meet you.
And on the topic of linguistics and horses of a different color, I quote a chat conversation that I had with a friend a few months ago:
He: καὶ εἶδον καὶ ἰδού, ἵππος χλωρός καὶ ὁ καθήμενος ἐπάνω αὐτοῦ ὄνομα αὐτῷ ὁ θάνατος καὶ ὁ ᾅδης ἀκολούθει μετ᾽ αὐτοῦ. [Revelation 6:8: And I looked, and behold a χλωρός horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.] χλωρός is usually translated “green”, but it’s also the color a person turns when they blanch or are sick or whatever. Sappho says “I am green as grass.” Siince thiis horse is associated with Death, and since horses that are literally green are unusual outside of Emerald City, it’s not unreasonale to translate iit “pale,” as Jerome already does.
Me (perversely): Do some non-Hieronymic translators say that the green horse of the Apocalypse is indeed from Emerald City?
GW, that’s some article. I noted this:
We attack nothing of the sort. We attack trans women being given the right to take away rights from women. We attack the idea of the special privilege (not right) of being able to demand that others see you the way you see yourself. Women have no such right. Men have no such right. Even seahorses have no such right, no matter how much they might be horses.
And at the end, the author talks about equality and rights for everyone…the problem is, everyone in this formulation does not include women. We do not have the right to determine what we are called, or call ourselves. We do not have the right to determine that we wish to be safe in vulnerable public areas such as restrooms. We do not have the right to perform sports without enormous male bodies mowing us down. We do not have the right to insist that the woman of the year be a woman, or that the woman-only shortlist include only women. We do not have the right to escape our male abusers in a female-only shelter and have female counselors. We do not have the right to talk about our rapes and abuse anymore, because that is “weaponizing our victimhood”.
And the reporting of each of these individual stickers as a hate crime to be added to the hate crime statistics gives us a lot of insight into why trans are subject to so much hate crime…because they call not agreeing with them a hate crime. Hell, if being disagreed with is a hate crime, I have been the subject of hate crimes nearly every minute of my existence. Maybe I’m the most oppressed ever.
Yes, I think that TRAs literally, seriously, and non-ironically believe that saying (or even implying) that transwomen are men is exactly the same as writing “DIE IN A GAS CHAMBER TRANS SCUM.”
@iknklast, exactly. Exactly!
Maybe they should grow a pair of … oh wait, most of them still have the ones that they had at birth.
Actually, from what I’ve seen, it looks like they think it’s much, much worse. They believe telling us to die in a grease fire, or a gas chamber, or creating guillotines for us is much less violent than our saying “hey, I don’t think you’re a woman, but go ahead and think that. I just can’t endorse it.” These are people who regularly refer to what JK Rowling said as hateful and violent, when it was neither.
And they think their truly hateful speech is justified by their perception of our ‘hateful’ speech.
iknklast, I thought that this was simply a double standard, not a case of A is less violent than B. I wonder if you are actually right — that is even more frightening than a double standard, I think.
GW, I’m basing that on things they have said, but I could be misunderstanding them. They do seem to be misunderstood a lot (which could be because they change what they mean the minute someone understands them correctly).
Interesting. i can sort of see the argument, If you would say “DIE TRANS SCUM”, that’s not so bad, beceuase you haven’t literally killed them. But if you say “You aren’t a woman, as you claim you are”, then they are going to go kill themselves, because their sense of self and identity is so fragile, so therefore you have directly contributed to (or even directly caused) their death.
…or something?