Guest post: If none of the female students did
Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Ad absurdum.
I wonder what Bristol SU would do if every single male student self-defined as women.
Or, perhaps more to the point, if none of the female students did. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, these are the points I think need to be hammered home at every opportunity and in every possible way:
• Redefining “woman” in terms of thoughts and feeling to make it tautologically true that “trans women are women” makes it no longer true that biological females who fail to think or feel in the proper “female”/”feminine” manner are women.
• Even if we were to accept that – according to their own definition (if they had one) – TIMs are “women” it still doesn’t imply that they belong in the same spaces as biological females, because then there is no longer any justification for saying that the latter are “women” in any relevant sense of the word (the flying mammals vs. clubs for hitting baseballs distinction again). As Daniel Dennett put it in a different context, it’s all “just a bad pun”. Indeed if you have what it takes to detect a pun when you hear one, you know pretty much everything you need to know to debunk all of gender ideology.
• What the trans lobby is advocating is not taking the circle that already includes the biological females and expanding it to also include the TIMs, but replacing the circle entirely.
• The old circle included roughly half the world’s population. It’s far from clear that the new one includes anyone but the TIMs, so who is really being most “exclusionary” here?
• What exactly are the ways of thinking and feeling required to qualify a “woman” anyway (circular logic doesn’t count), and how do we make sure that only people who really do think / feel in the ways required are allowed into “women only” spaces?
• Any “gendering” what so ever is misgendering, and any bathroom, sporting event, domestic abuse shelter, prison etc. that’s “gendered” in any way is gender-inappropriate in my case.
• If trans men are men, then I’m not. If TIM’s are women, they are the only “women” as far as I’m concerned.
One further advantage of this approach is that there is nothing the TAs can object to without totally giving the lie to the idea that this is all about trans people’s right to define “who they are”. There is no way to claim access to the spaces of biological females without defining who the latter are as well. If I am what you are, then you are what I am. So ultimately what they are saying is: “Biological females are whatever they have to be to make me one of them, and they don’t get a say in the matter”.
*stolen*
Excellent analysis.
When GC women say they don’t feel an “internal sense of being a woman,” the popular response is that yes they do, but because this sense matches their body they don’t realize it’s there. Trans women feel it because of the mismatch. Other women who are more sensitive and self-attuned feel it. Conservative women who firmly believe in gender roles claim to feel it. Therefore, some self-reports count more than others. The “minority” gets no say. Everyone is born with an innate gender identity.
And yet there’s an alternative possibility: the “internal sense of being a woman” could be a creation, a product of a girl both learning her sex and being told what it “means” at such a young age that it later feels innate. Not acceptable. It’s clearly groping at straws in order to deny the obvious. Everyone is born with an innate gender identity— including those without one.
If Trans Women are Women, then I’m apparently Non-Binary.
Sastra: That’s why I say that the transgender cult is just Calvinism, and gender identity is just the sensus divinitatis. They posit a properly basic sense that gives reliable access to knowledge about [preferred bullshit], and claim that everyone has this sense innately. That someone claims not to have the sense is merely evidence that the person’s sense is not functioning or is being denied.
Like … The comparison isn’t even a stretch. It’s a direct one-to-one correspondence.
I am presently in a days long argument with a trans woman who tells me that women can’t be defined biologically (because any characteristic is not unique to only females); AND that he was categorised male at birth in error, but is actually female; AND that the ONLY thing that all women have in common is that they all say they are women.
I do not say I am a woman, I tell him, it is simply observably true. I am female (lists female sex characteristics).
Then you *do* identify as female, he crows.
No, I say, I am referring to material reality, you are referring to a sense, a feeling. I don’t have that feeling.
No, he says, you’re a woman, and female, like me, but you’re cis.
I’m not cis, and stop misgendering me. I do not have a gender identity. I do not know what women “feel like”.
The only reason you don’t know is because you’re cis, he says.
You tell me how you know you’re a woman then. What are you basing it on? You’ve ruled out your body and your brain, how do you know you’re a woman?
Gee, *that’s personal* he says.
Well, you claim there’s nothing consistent between women to make them think that they’re women, but that all women do in fact think it, so why do *you* think it? Why don’t you think you’re a man, or a rose, or silver, or a river? What is the basis of your claim?
And round and round and round it goes.
Arcadia, in order to get anywhere with them, you first have to untangle certain words whose meanings have been muddled. “Identify” is a perfect example. The TIM wants to use it synonymously with being aware of something (or even just being that thing) while simultaneously treating identification as a purely psychological phenomenon. That reduces every fact about anyone to mere convention. You have to defuse this tactic before they can use it.
Of course, there are lots of other landmines that must be disarmed, but that’s the whole point of their impenetrable web of incoherent doublethink, isn’t it? It’s the principle of explosion adopted as the organizing principle for an entire brief system, letting them always be right and you always wrong. The critical theory literature, from which this nonsense derives, is rather open about it’s scorn for clear definitions and epistemic adequacy.
@ Nullius, what you say is true. But, for that to work, he would need to agree with me on a definition, and so far, he won’t. I don’t expect him to ever change, ever. I just have these conversations in public forums (Facebook) so that others can see and read his nonsense for themselves. Plus it keeps him busy – he seems to spend a lot of time bothering and reporting others, but never me. Perhaps I amuse him? I think the best way to peak the general public is for people to hear what they say.
Malleable or differing definitions, quasi-sciencey sounding stuff, impenetrable doublethink, polite fictions, obfuscating language, fancy highfalutin language (just vomit up a thesaurus and they’ll think you’re smart and surely correct) and logical fallacies do a LOT of heavy lifting in these “conversations”. All combines into one big confundus charm.
I like to think (and I hope it’s true) that the simple truth should be simply expressed and easy to understand.
I’d love to read something in plain language (please God not more academic language) that goes into how all these processes work in relation to trans rhetoric.
As a biologist, I cannot wrap my mind around this statement. Uterus? Unique only to females. Cervix? Unique only to females. Vulva? Unique only to females. Unless, of course, you are accepting that males can be females, in which case the argument is circular, using what you’re trying to demonstrate as a proof in the argument.
If he means there is not one particular single characteristic that makes someone female, I can agree with that; all living organisms are a suite of characteristics that they share in common; for females, some of which we share with all humans, some of which we share with all mammals, and some of which we share with all life. But there are certain characteristics that are unique to female, and with some of them, I would say by themselves would establish femaleness. One of which is the XX on the sex chromosome; actually, more the absence of Y, since there are some males that are XXY. Uterus practically screams out female, as does the rest of the female reproductive apparatus. And if you want to point to individuals with both uterus and penis, or other characteristics of both sexes, that is an extremely rare condition that makes someone ambiguous in their sexual characteristics. It does not mean men can be women by saying so.
The lack of any sort of logical reality in the minds of these people just boggles my mind.
Arcadia #4
Makes you wonder why we ever needed a name for “people who call themselves by that that very same name” in the first place, and why being recognized as a “woman” is so vitally important if the name itself is all there is to it?
iknklast #7
And, once again, as messy as biological sex might be (i.e. far less than the trans lobby makes it out to be), it’s still orders of magnitude more clear-cut than the alleged “gender” differences they’re talking about. If sex differences don’t meet their standards of accuracy and precision, you definitely wouldn’t expect any of the totally nebulous and unspecified differences between “male” and “female”/”masculine” and “feminine” ways of thinking and feeling to meet those very same standards.
@ Bjarte, I don’t believe the word is what’s important to them, it’s all the things that are tied to the word: the aesthetic stuff, the social deference (being treated “like a lady”), the access to women only things/spaces/treatment like bathrooms, change rooms, sports, political positions etc, and getting to be/be with the forbidden/impossible: lesbians. My suspicion is that if they could have accessed all that without societal interference, then the word itself wouldn’t have mattered too much. It’s also difficult to say overall, because there’s at least two groups with differing motivations at work: those who want this in order to live the quietest life possible that’s suitable for them, and those who take considerable pleasure out of forcing others (particularly women) yield to their will. The second is doing the most effort, claiming it’s in service of the first. Most of the public are aware of the first and steadfastly hoping the second is some sort of urban legend.
@iknklast: if I pick the uterus, he comes back at me with: what about this one rare DSD where a man has a uterus; and what about women with this DSD born without a uterus; and you’re saying all women with hysterectomies aren’t women; and you’re reducing women to walking uteruses, how misogynist of you. Which, of course, is not what I’m saying.
The crazy thing is he’s never claimed to me that he has a DSD, but claims to be female, just that the doctors didn’t understand. He’s a special kind of female that looks like a normal male, apparently.
Arcadia
To be clear, I didn’t mean to imply that you were saying it’s all in the name, but it sure sounds like your opponent did:
I agree that in reality the word itself is not what’s important to them (as I have previously hinted at, if this was all about what to call these people, it would rank very low on my list of concerns), but since they don’t really have anything else, the language itself has to do all the heavy lifting.
The argument is essentially the fallacy of the heap/beard; i.e., a Sorites. A Sorites argument infers from the presence of a continuum that there is no difference between any two points along that continuum. Explicitly: it concludes that there is no distinction to be drawn between points at the extremities. Because there is a continuum of color between red and blue, there is no difference between red and blue.
[More drawn out example for those who are logicophiles: 11:58 and 12:02 are noonish. (12:00 is vacuously noonish.) Removing or adding a single minute from/to a noonish time results in a noonish time. So 11:57 and 12:03 are both noonish. Continued inductively, all times are noonish.]
A Sorites paradox is a quite useful thing for the philosophy of language. It allows us to figure out where terminology is vague (an actually technical term, believe it or not, partly due to Sorites analyses) or complex (i.e., is not applied on univariate basis). However, people be stupid when they conclude that, because there is a continuum between noon and maximally-not-noon, there is no such thing as noonish, no such thing as noon, and no such thing as maximally-not-noon. This would be like saying that because there’s a continuum between blue and red or blue and purple, there’s no such thing as blue, red, or purple. Not only is that crazy talk, it’s fucking underlined as crazy talk by the fact that when people make such arguments, they tend to insist upon their place at a pole. But a pole only has meaning if it is distinct—i.e., distinguishable—from its opposite(s). Insisting that a ball is red and not blue only has meaning if red and blue are understood to mean different things that can be understood as different things. If A and B are different things, that means there is some set of properties (contingent or essential) possessed by A and not by B or by B and not by A.
That’s just what being different means.
It is literally incoherent to simultaneously say that there is no discernible difference between A and B while maintaining that x is A and not B. (Or B and not A, duh. Commutative.)
Nullius
One of the great big ironies here is how many of these self-identified “progressive” types see themselves as the only people in the world who don’t “think in absolutes”, “see the world in black and white” etc. while being some of the worst black and white thinkers out there. Thus, when two oppressed or marginalized groups are making competing claims of discrimination, rather than thinking “We should probably take extra care to give both sides a fair hearing before jumping to conclusions”, the black and white / all or nothing mindset requires every ethical principle in the universe to be 100% on one side (typically the side with the loud, aggressive, intimidating biological males who promise to make your life hell (or end it) if you don’t fall in line) while the other side can’t have a single legitimate concern and can only be motivated by %100 pure and infinite evil, malevolence, bigotry, and hate for its own sake. And you don’t even need to listen to the arguments, since anything other than 100 % blind, unconditional, unthinking agreement with the former and demonization of the latter in advance is “hate”, “violence”, denying other peoples “rights”, making you an accomplice to “murder” etc.
Superficially, what some have called the False Continuum or “Baldness” Fallacy on the one hand and the False Dichotomy fallacy on the other may seem like opposites (ignoring the extremes vs. ignoring the middle). On a deeper level, though, I think the former ultimately boils down to the latter, since the underlying premise seems to be that differences must either be absolute (black) or not real differences at all (white). Incidentally, the only internet “meme” I have ever made (back before memes became a meme) that went half-“viral” featured three images next to each other. The first image, captioned “The World as a Scientist Sees It”, showed the Earth as seen from space in all its wonderful colors and nuances. The second image, captioned “The World as a Fanatic Sees It” was the same as the first, only in black and white. The third image, captioned “The World as a Postmodernist Sees It” was just a monotonous grey square without nuances of any kind. I still think it was kind of clever…