Legal magic
Speaking of “Stonewall language” as opposed to BBC language or ordinary language or non-drunk language, here’s economist Frances Coppola using it in a blog post bashing Maya Forstater a couple of weeks ago:
Forstater and her supporters aggressively promote their beliefs on Twitter, hijacking threads to grandstand their agenda, forcing their opinions on people who have not invited them, misrepresenting what people have said then gaslighting them when they object, using emotionally-loaded language to short-circuit rational argument, resorting to ad hominem attacks and appeals to authority, insulting people who disagree with them, sealioning people who try to disengage. In short, behaving just like all the other cults that infest this increasingly toxic space. The effect of their behaviour is to prevent rational debate and silence dissenters.
While I sympathise with their emotional intensity, reducing this complex and difficult subject to a simplistic binary definition solves nothing. All it does is arbitrarily exclude some of the most vulnerable people in our society from the rights and protections that others enjoy, at potential risk to their health and even their lives.
See it? “the most vulnerable people in our society.”
Really? How? Why? In what sense? Who says?
No; no how; no reason; no sense; Stonewall says.
It’s bullshit. Vulnerable people are refugees, asylum seekers, religious minorities, peasants, exploited workers, trafficked women and girls, political prisoners, poor people, migrant workers, abused children, homeless people, people with severe mental health problems, people with chronic disabling medical conditions…and so on. I don’t think trans people are that kind of vulnerable unless they’re also trafficked or homeless or the like. Some are, but then their vulnerability is because of those circumstances and not so much because of their being trans.
I think the fervor and maudlin sympathy with which people recited the Stonewall “most vulnerable” creed is insulting to all the seriously vulnerable people out there and even insulting to trans people themselves.
There’s another odd thing about Coppola’s post and her comments in the discussion with Maya that followed it.
Currently, the law permits people who are born one sex to transition legally to another. Whether someone is a “woman” is no longer determined by their biological sex at birth.
It’s that. She says it again in the comments.
A person who has a GRC has gone through a process of gender reassignment that may or may not include surgery and/or medical treatment to make their physical characteristics resemble more closely the norms of the sex to which they have transitioned. They are thus legally female whether or not you or anyone else thinks they “look like women”. Whether someone is female or male is defined by the law, not your opinion, and the law says that someone who has a GRC is legally the sex to which they have transitioned.
…
The fundamental issue here is that you do not believe a man can ever become a woman, whatever the law says. Please don’t imagine that I haven’t noticed your weasel words. You “recognise the change of legal status”, but you don’t accept that the person has changed sex.
She thinks (or claims to think) that being legally declared a woman is being a woman. She thinks (or claims to think) that getting a Gender Recognition Certificate equals literally becoming a literal woman (or man) – that it’s not just a legal change it’s also an ontological change.
When Maya makes the distinction Coppola accuses her of “weasel words.”
The fundamental issue here is that you do not believe a man can ever become a woman, whatever the law says. Please don’t imagine that I haven’t noticed your weasel words. You “recognise the change of legal status”, but you don’t accept that the person has changed sex.
Well yes, because how could we? And why should we? Why do we have to agree that men literally turn into women the moment they receive the GRC? Why are we required to subscribe to fatuous, nonsensical beliefs?
That line of argument never, ever addresses the converse – that in a place where the law prohibits the legal reassignment of gender, there are no transgender people.
Actually, it isn’t complex and difficult until they get involved. Sex is a binary definition. You are male or female, defined by your biology. It is only complicated for a small group of individuals who have conditions that make those statements more ambiguous, but they do not actually support the idea of a gender spectrum.
Actually, they are defined by biology, but whatever. Other things came to my mind:
The law has defined a tomato as a vegetable.
The law has defined a whale as a fish.
The law has defined a person of color as 3/4 a person, and demanded runaway slaves be returned
The law has defined discussion of contraception obscene and illegal.
Not all of these are still laws; laws can be corrected when they are wrong or bad. They change as society changes. The mere legal definition of “woman” is irrelevant to what one is in really real reality. It may confer certain legal benefits on the transwoman, but that does not make the transwoman a woman. It makes the transwoman a legally sanctioned usurper and trespasser.
The belief that the law confers proper ontological status is rather rich coming from someone who no doubt condemns colonialism.
“Look, if you’ve been conquered you’re now British property, whether you like it or not. The law says you’re a born slave by nature. Facts are facts. Deal with it.”
Exactly so.
The fundamental issue here is that you do not believe a man can ever become a woman, whatever the law says
Sane people also don’t believe that pi = 3 just because a legislature passes a law that says so. There’s a difference between legal statuses, like citizenship, which really are whatever the relevant law says they are, and features of objective reality, to which legislation is irrelevant. A law can establish a process whereby you become a US citizen, but it can’t establish a process whereby you become a giraffe.
Similarly, legislatures can and in some cases almost have defined the value of pi, most famously many years ago in Indiana in which the official value was to be 4.00 before the debate was halted by the comments of an appalled mathematician who happened to be a tourist visiting the chambers. However, had it passed into law, would that have made the value of pi as derived through established mathematical steps somehow suddenly equal to 4.00? Of course it wouldn’t.
Oops, I see that my point was already made by Infidel753 just before me. The hazard of not reading the comments before posting.
Now I’m going to have to find out more about that Indiana legislature move.
Excellent illustration of the point.
But it is a GRC, not an SRC. Sure you can change genders, because genders don’t exist in material reality. But a person’s biological sex doesn’t change regardless of surgeries or hormone treatment.
So, I think the push to change it to 3 was to make it conform to the Bible’s description of a big cauldron, or something in order to make sure that the Bible was accurate on roundness. But rounding Pi up to four is quite a leap, and I can’t imagine the purpose. Was it proposed in order to satisfy a demaind for elliptical circles by some religion?
The Indiana bill was not to set pi to 4, but 4/1.125, which to be fair is closer to a correct value.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill?fbclid=IwAR2ArqwLsAMMRt1aioQhL_GbgV7EI1wNlI4Xjo_IoNR9mSGeX5YNGzbOlFU
Still wrong though. The Egyptians had it closer 5000 years ago.
Strange
that is 32/9 = 3.555…
22/7 = 3.14285…
A much better approximation.
Eava @ 9. indeed, but that’s not what Coppola said. She said sex.
On trans people being the most vulnerable everything:
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/neither-marginalised-abused-nor-vulnerable
Can you say, “projection”? This is actually the T agenda playbook, what they are accusing people of who actually are only stating facts. Forstater and others are not “emotional” about the topic in the sense of irrationally passionate regardless of the facts. It’s rational adherence to the facts coupled with astonished outrage at the irrationality of the OTHER position (and its advocates).