“”inherent differences””
The endless struggle to pretend we don’t know what we know. It must be exhausting.
Throughout the country, roughly 35 bills have been introduced by state legislators that would limit or prohibit transgender women from competing in women’s athletics, according to the LGBTQ rights group Freedom for All Americans. That’s up from only two in 2019.
Yes of course it’s “up,” because more boys and men are doing this.
The latest action in this push came last week, when Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves signed into law the “Mississippi Fairness Act.” The law prohibits schools from allowing transgender female students to compete in female sports and cites “inherent differences between men and women” as one of the reasons to block these athletes from competition.
The quotation marks can be just ordinary quotation marks, to convey “this is the exact wording in the bill”…but they can also be scare quotes, to convey “can you believe the absurdity of thinking there are inherent physical differences between men and women?”. Choosing that particular bit of wording to put in quotation marks can’t help but suggest skepticism or mockery.
The often heated debates around these bills have centered on whether transgender women and girls have an unfair advantage over cisgender women — a term used for those who identify with the sex assigned to them at birth.
A term used by dogmatists to make strange the routine humdrum knowledge that men are not women and women are not men.
Proponents say the legislation is needed in order to maintain fairness in women’s athletics by reducing what they believe is an inherent competitive edge of trans athletes who identify as female. Critics call that a false argument and say the proposals are being used as a way to discriminate against transgender Americans.
But how can it be a false argument, NPR? Could you explain that bit? Could you possibly let us in on the secret of how it can be possible that men don’t have an inherent competitive edge?
Also, the issue isn’t “transgender Americans,” it’s boys and men who cheat girls and women in athletic competitions.
But we mustn’t ever spell that out.
Gee, what a helpful translation that just happens to include the non-sequitur formulation “sex assigned…at birth.” Muddying the definition of “woman” and “sex” at the same time, in the same sentence. Such a wonderful economy and concentration of mendacity.
It’s amazing how far a movement so entirely dependent upon obfuscation and deceit has managed to go so far.
“It’s amazing how far a movement so entirely dependent upon obfuscation and deceit has managed to go so far.”
Isn’t that the GOP platform?
Sort of like Christianity.
And exactly how are they to know I “identify” with the sex on my birth certificate? The one I was observed to be at the early age of one minute? Is it just because I haven’t had my breasts cut off? Because I wear long hair? Because my name is female? (Wait. My name is one of those used for either sex; can’t go by that.) Because I married a man? (But…we now have same sex marriage, right?) Because I had a child? But I’m told that men can have babies, so no. Is it because I wear a skirt about once a year on a whim?
What is it…what characteristic..makes me “cis” gender? Since they claim there is no characteristic that women have in common, how exactly do they know that I “identify as” a woman? Since they won’t share with us what characteristics make them a woman, other than some sort of magical feeling, perhaps they would be so kind as to share with us what characteristics make us women…aside from some magic feeling they could not possibly know about, since it would be in our minds, and not accessible to theirs.
I don’t think the number of bills is up “because more men and boys are doing this”. I am convinced that the athlete bills, the puberty blocker bills, and the various abortion restriction bills all share a source: right-wing organizations fanning outrage against liberals, and possibly in this case recognizing there is a wedge between liberal factions they can use to their advantage. This has demonstrably been the case in various coordinated “culture war” bills in the past.
@sackbut, you could be correct. I live in Australia and note with great regularity how the enormous distress of my fellow Left, Centre Left and Far Left GCs is discussed on having to have anything to do with the Right of politics.
For instance, this motion passed our Senate two days ago: https://7news.com.au/news/social/one-nation-pushes-motion-through-senate-banning-use-of-distorted-gender-inclusive-language-c-2379125.amp
It was brought by One Nation, a party along the lines of UKIP. Janet Rice, the other Senator losing her mind in that article is from the Greens, and has identified as a lesbian ever since her husband announced he was a woman (he has since passed away).
Interestingly, no one in any of my GC circles was even aware of the Bill until after it passed. No idea if it will pass the Lower House, but the government does have the numbers there, but only just.
Not really. We’ve been training well intentioned people of a liberal bent to go along with whatever the new lingo is for decades. (“We don’t say that anymore; we say this.” “Saying that is wrong/immoral/offensive/exclusionary/racist/sexist/etc.” “Being a good person means saying this.”) The euphemism treadmill long ago went from a lazy walk to turn-your-blood-to-battery-acid sprint, so people stopped considering things at all. Just like with religion, because the gobbledygook comes from their tribe, people just let it bypass their atrophied critical thinking centers and get written straight to long term memory. Understanding the words isn’t even necessary. Once language like “sex assigned at birth” and “trans girls” and “cisgender” gets integrated, it acts like a Trojan horse, corrupting and destabilizing existing knowledge and flinging the doors wide open for utter nonsense.
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Sackbut: The culture war, as ever, is used to distract from fundamental concerns like healthcare, education, and economics. It’s the Chewbacca defense.
Jaded though I am, the absurdity of this situation occasionally strikes me anew:
“What… so they want a bunch of gadgies running around and jumping and that with a bunch of lasses and call it fair?”
(my mind defaults to Geordie when it’s exasperated)
It’s true about the language training (Nullius @ 6). I don’t know what to do about it though, or what to try to do about it (by yammering further). I can’t just decide language doesn’t matter, because I don’t believe that any more than I believe men can become women. All I know how to do is just go on saying language matters but the language of trans ideology is in fact malevolent bullshit.
It’s easy enough for us to see that some language really is bad, like calling someone “nigger” “kike” “cunt” (though some struggle immensely with that last, I know). Others are more difficult, more nuanced, and perhaps not even bad.
I for one cannot see the words “women’s health” or “pregnant women” as bad. In short, I was well on board with the idea of political correctness in the original manifestations of not calling people shit names just because they don’t look like us. But we rounded the bend, jumped the rails, and drove off the cliff a long time ago, and now we are in freefall into what appears to be a bottomless abyss. We may have to go back to just pointing at what we want to communicate, because all the words will become taboo.
I used to say that political correctness (a means of communicating without causing unnecessary offence) was generally actually correct. To take some old examples of politically incorrect speech: girls are no good at maths, women are bad drivers and *insert race of people here* are dirty. All three statements are easily false.
But now, what gets passed off as “politically correct” is actually false, like TWAW.