More on that
I’ve realized I have more to say on Peter Tatchell’s fatuous remarks to the Guardian on the definite rightness of the Royal Academy’s libel of Jess DeWahls:
Veteran LGBT rights campaigner Peter Tatchell said: “Trans women are different from other women, but being a different kind of woman is perfectly valid and no justification for the denial of their identity.
Let’s think about this. How are trans women “different from other women?” They’re different in being men. That’s a very differenty kind of difference. You could replace it with the word “not.” Trans women are different from other women in being not women. Well yes, that’s different all right, and it’s also a negation, and an opposite. Not-man is not an exhaustive definition of woman, but it’s certainly a crucial one. Women and men are the two human sexes, and there are no others.
So, yes, actually, being a “different kind of woman” in the sense of not being a woman at all, in the sense of being a man, is not “perfectly valid” in the sense of being the thing you in fact are not. That whole claim is simply perverse. It’s like saying “the fact that a potato is not a blueberry is no justification for denying their identity.”
How did we get to the point that grown-ass adults are talking this kind of gibberish?
And then what does “perfectly valid” mean? Nothing. It’s just a club to whack you upside the head with if you try to resist.
And then what does he mean “the denial of their identity”? The identity is not theirs. That’s the whole point. If I say I’m the pope, that doesn’t establish the “validity” of my “identity” as the pope, for the crude but compelling reason that I’m not the pope.
Gibberish. It’s all such gibberish.
“If an artist denied Jewish, black or gay people’s identity, most people would say that the Royal Academy would be right to remove their works from the gift shop. But when Jess denies trans people’s identity, she and other trans critics say that it’s her right to free speech and she should not be penalised. This smacks of double standards.”
What on earth does it mean to “deny Jewish, black or gay people’s identity”? That’s not a thing. Nobody does that. The problem is the opposite of that – it’s saying the identity is spoiled, is bad, is something to belittle or demonize.
And one more thing. Of course Tatchell says “If an artist denied Jewish, black or gay people’s identity” but doesn’t say “women’s identity.” Well he couldn’t, could he, because that’s exactly what he’s doing.
I’d like to put Tatchell to the Foshaug Test. Let’s hear in what non-circular, non-trivial, non-stereotypical ways that TIMs are women, too. What features, properties, and characteristics do they share with women but not men? That list is gonna be mighty short, and that set is going to be very empty.
Besides, isn’t Tatchell sort of skeevy/pervy on the whole age of consent and sex with minors thing? Why is anyone asking him about anything?
Yes he is and I don’t know. I suppose laziness partly, but it’s really not that difficult to think of other lesbian or gay people who have thoughts.
I reckon that it was either that, or that trans women are a “close approximation” of women, as some say.
I love your writing.
I know this is off-topic, but the writer who called upon people to take up machetes against Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and J. K. Rowling published an essay about the elective surgeries they undertook to become not-woman, and I am not sure how to react. There is a certain monumental arrogance in their spiritual claims, but there is also something that makes me feel a kind of repulsive pity. Anyway, the essay is available here.
I obviously like this post, since it points directly to the fatal flaw at the very heart of gender ideology.
It might be useful to think of it in terms of competing Venn diagrams. The Gender Lobby wants us to envision one large ellipse labeled “women₂”* and another one labeled “men₂”. Inside the first ellipse they want us to envision one circle labeled “cis women₂” and another one labeled “trans women₂”. For the second ellipse just substitute “men₂” for “women₂”, and the same thing applies. For all the various “non-binary” genders (represented by the ever expanding alphabet soup following “LGBT”), envision a bunch of smaller circles outside the two main ellipses (or partially overlapping with both? This is where things get messy!). The justification (to the degree that one exists) for placing both “cis women” and “trans women” inside the first ellipse and outside the second one is that both supposedly share the same “feminine” ways of thinking, feeling, or behaving best left unspecified. As I keep saying, cis woman” is not another name for “biological female”, which is why I cringe whenever people on the gender critical side start referring to biological females as “cis women”, thus buying into the gender lobby’s framing of the issue with all its implicit claims about what’s going on inside other people’s heads.
In the Gender Critical view, we once again envision one large ellipse labeled “women₁” and another one labeled “men₁”, but in this version there are no circles labeled “cis women₂” or “cis men₂”, the circle for “trans men₂” is inside the first ellipse and the circle for “trans women₂” is inside the second ellipse. Again we can envision other (very tiny!) circles outside the two main ellipses (or partially overlapping with both? It’s still messy!) to represent the small number of “sexless” or “intersex” individuals out there. The justification for placing “trans women” inside the second ellipse is that both “trans women₂” and “non-trans” men₁ both share a strong preponderance of innate physical traits more representative of fathers than mothers, while the opposite is true of “trans men₂” and “non-trans” women₁.
Like (other kinds of) religious apologetics, gender apologetics is very much like a leaky boat: You might be able to put a plug some of the holes some of the time, but you quickly run out of plugs such that the only way to stop the water from leaking in in one place is to remove a plug from somewhere else, thus opening up another leak. E.g. if you press TA on exactly how “cis” women₂ are supposed to think or feel, or point out that by their criteria most biological females probably don’t qualify as “women₂” at all (i.e. they do not in fact think or feel in the ways required), it’s convenient for them to argue that “cis” simply means “not trans” (whatever “trans” is supposed to mean…), but in doing so they totally destroy their own case that “cis women” and “trans women” are the same in any way other than in name only (like fruit bats and baseball bats), which was after all the whole justification for why they both belong in the same bathrooms, sporting events, domestic abuse shelters, prisons etc. in the first place. In other words there is no ellipse uniting “cis women” and “trans women”, and once again it’s all just a bad pun.
*They would never accept the indexing, of course, since it pretty much gives the game away right off the bat.
Bjarte: noted.
But suppose it was:
That works. I can maintain that I am a giraffe, and without having to specify what sex of giraffe. So it leaves it open for me as a male human to identify as a giraffe of either sex; and I have not even started to explore the possibilities latent in identifying as a transgiraffe, of which there have to be at least two kinds: male giraffes that identify as female (cow?) giraffes, and female (cow?) giraffes, that identify as male (bull?) giraffes.
But let’s not be speciesist. A transgiraffe of either sexual prefernce can identify as a member of any other species of either sex in that species. And we have not begun to talk about identifying as trans members of either sex in that species.
Which is where it starts to get complicated.
If a woman had said those words, the machetes would be out.
If they want to say that they’re exactly the same, why don’t they just identify as cis women, rather than trans women?
The woman on this Reddit thread (bottom of the thread here) says: “Sorry I can’t help you, but I’d just like to add something. I feel like a cis guy (all the time) but I’m a trans guy. I’m not, but I don’t feel ‘trans’. I just kinda am.” If she can admit that even though she “feels” like a cis man all the time, she’s actually a trans man, why can’t she simply say that even though she “feels” like a man all the time, she’s actually a woman?
The common sense intuition that lies at the bottom of this ideology seems to be that our minds are more important than our bodies. They’re who we are. Science- minded people reconcile the apparent dualism with everyday analogies: “I’m paralyzed but Im still me; I’m old but I’m still me; If I had a brain transplant I would NOT be me.” What really matters to one’s identity is the mind.
I suspect this is one major reason why they think that being a woman is a mental state, an inner awareness that you’re female. Doing this is supposed to elevate the status of womanhood by attaching it to what’s really real when it comes to ourselves. Otherwise, we’re reduced to pieces of meat: arms, feet, stomach, and gonads.
It’s the only way I can make sense of this bizarre absolute conviction that men who are sure they’re women really are women. Mind over matter.
If a fifty year old said he was a trans child, Peter Tatchell still wouldn’t buy him a drink.
@11: What do you mean? An alcoholic drink, and Peter Tathcell wouldn’t buy it for him because Trans Kids Are Kids and therefore you can’t buy them alcoholic drinks? Or a non-alcoholic drink, and Peter Tatchell wouldnt buy him a drink because he would expect him to be able to buy his own drink?
Papito: Oof. Just oof. Yet somehow a girl who thinks she is boy is insulted and undergoes a crying fit when she is ignored at a (male dominated) gay bar by all the “bigots” therein.
GW, Peter Tatchell is, at the very least, an apologist for the freedom of adults to rape children. He pays lip-service to the idea that a man can ‘really’ be a woman, but we all know that he wouldn’t expect a child rapist (who may or may not have the initials P.T.) to go for a fifty-year-old ‘trans’ child.
Yikes, I didn’t know who he was. Horrid.
-Peter “Pedo” Tatchell