Equally valid
Tatchell preaches the gospel.
No there aren’t. Not in that sense.
It depends on what you mean by “kinds,” for a start. There are millions of “kinds” of women in the sense of human variety, but in the ridiculous sense Tatchell is using, there aren’t. He might as well say there are two different kinds of house, one a building made of wood or bricks or stone for humans to live in, the other a tall animal with a long neck that eats acacia leaves.
There are two kinds of… is usually the lead in for a joke but he couldn’t find a way to make it funny, apparently.
There are two kinds of women is what he’s saying “those who are, and those who aren’t.”
Then he adds something about validity.
Trans “women” need constant validation because they are not adult human females. Women generally don’t. “Recognizing” the difference between reality and fantasy must be exceedingly difficult for some, obviously. Peter is unconvincing at best.
Mike @1 Right, a male transvestite or transsexual who sees himself as a woman is a type of man, not a type of woman. Maybe he’s just confused. :P
There are two kinds of women: those who are women, and those who aren’t. And we have to accept the latter as women, even though they aren’.
Are there two kinds of men, too? Are they also both “equally valid?” Is he ready, willing and able to date the kind that aren’t really men, but claim to be men?
If any of this bullshit were true, we wouldn’t need our near-constant “reminders” of this, would we? Sometimes I think that those twittiots who keep posting TWAW! TWAW! TWAW! TWAW! TWAW! TWAW! might have watched Beetlejuice a few too many times.
For my own part, I admit that I am the second kind of building, as I find myself with a plate of acacia leaves for dinner more often than is quite right.
Kinds. Hey, remember when we had to deal with talk of kinds from creationists? Remember how a kind was an ever widening net, an ever shifting goalpost? Good times. I doubt we’ll ever see that kind of evasive, amorphous nonsense from anyone else. It’s just too obviously stupid.
Nullius, I was thinking pretty much the same thing as I was reading that nonsense: “Does he appreciate how much he sound like Ray Comfort right now?”
What follows islikely old hat to many here, but something I’ve come to realize, partly in the course of writing this very comment. It might be completely off-base, but still, I’ll run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes.
Tatchell is being surprisingly candid, and perhaps unconciously so. First, he’s distinguishing between biological women (in reality, the only kind there is) and socially constructed “women” who do not share the biological characteristics of actual women. The claim of “both” being “equally valid” depends on the admitted existence of actual, biological women. The putative “equal validity” of “socially constucted women (i.e. TiMs) has nothing to emulate, aspire to or usurp without the existence of an original, authentic prototype or exemplar. Without women, TiMs have no destination, no end point to aim at. And everyobody knows this. Everybody knows what a woman is. Without women, TiMs have nobody alongside of whom they can declare themselves to be valid. The paradoxical attempt to dilute or dissolve the definition of “woman” is an attempt to lower the drawbridge long enough to be admitted into the inner circle of the definition they must overthrow to be included in. Once they’re “inside” they need a definition of “woman” that includes them, but still permits actual women in whose reflected existence and validity they can bask.
Like the contradictory and self-defeating need of TiM sports cheats infiltrating women’s leagues and teams, it stops offering affirmation and validation if everyone else on the team or in the league is a TiM. They’re no longer “one of the girls” because at this point there are no real girls left. Ultimately, this is as disastrous as “lesbian” TiMs having only other TiM “lesbians” from whom to find dates. They know that other TiMs are not really women either. Cheating is only a worthwhile strategy so long as there are enough honest players against whom it can be deployed. It’s like the Larson cartoon where a group of wolves in sheep’s clothing are just realizing to their surprise and disappointment that there are no real sheep left. It’s not really much of a “community” at all if the presence of other ostensible “community” members ruins your strategy of selfishness, which only works for “lone wolves.” It’s a pyramid scheme that can only ever satisfy the first ones in. Johnny-come-lately joiners fail to win the big payoff of validation, which has been skimmed off by the pioneering TiMs who managed to gain access while there were still enough women to satisfy the TiM-narc supply.
The near pathological contempt and hatred that some trans activists evince comes across as a variation of the Madonna/whore dichotomy. How can it be that men who are claiming to actually be women despise the sex they aspire to be or become so much? If they loathewomen as much as they do (and far too many of them do), why on earth would they ever want to be one? Perhaps it’s more than just the realization that, because humans can’t change sex, they can never achieve their goal. Maybe discussion of exclusively female experiences and issues is triggering for more reasons than the fact that TiMs will never experience them. Maybe part of the rage is their unacknowledged dependence upon the existence of female humans as a role model or standard in the first place, and why erasing them completely is self-defeating for their own impossible goals?
TiMs count on women’s socialization to “be kind” in trying to gain access to women’s spaces, yet never show “womanly” kindness themselves. Yet if they drive women from single sex spaces, the absence of women will deprive them of the validation they’ve come for in the first place. A women’s rape crisis centre that ends up having only TiMs as clients stops being attractive to them because there are no real women among whom they can situate themselves, which was the point of accessing these spaces in the first place. It’s the “team full of TiMs” all over again. Forced inclusion ends up being self-defeating. Would Clymer and Admiral Whatshisname have been happy to preside over a group of “lesbians” made up of TiMs only? No. It would be like ending up with a gender neutral toilet. That’s like getting a participation award when what you want is to win the gold. Being given a space of your own is pointless when what you really want is access to women’s spaces. That doesn’t happen if all the women have left. Then you’ve got to go find out where the women have gone, locate whatever facilities and services that they’ve set up for themselves, and then demand access to that. It’s a never ending cycle of perpetual disatifaction. They can never win for long. They will always need women to intrude upon, to be “women” alongside them. They realize, as does Tatchell, that they are not actually women. Never have been; never will be.
Another bad pun. There is a bat defined by biological species & a bat defined by being used for hitting baseballs. What there is not is a definition that makes it meaningful to speak of both as bats/women in the same sense of the word.
YNnB? #9
Well said! I don’t find your comment off base at all.
Indeed. I have seen women denounced as TERFs (almost certainly even by Tatchell himself) for far less. Once you accept “wom[e]n defined by biological sex” (as opposed to defined by “gender assigned at birth” vs. “gender identity”) as an identifiable group in its own right, we can talk specifically about them and their issues as a separate topic which is the ultimate Thoughtcrime according to Gender Ideology.
Room 101!
Off-base? I think not. It’s Tatchell who’s off-base…off-base and in the red light district and drunk out of his gourd.
Tatchell’s failure to deploy the standard rhetorical tactic of atomizing women into the usual “intersectional” categories of Black women, disabled women, infertile women, etc., keeps him from being able to sneak TiMs in as “just another kind of woman.” Here he’s done the work for us of uniting women under the traditional definition, which excludes TiMs (but includes TiFs), which trans activism must perforce muddy, undermine, and deny. This is very sloppy on his part.
On the other hand, could it be more than a careless mistake? Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but it might also be evidence that the pushback against the racism implicit in classifying Black women as somehow less than fully female has rendered this tactic untenable. Ditto for disabled women, infertile women and all the other “sub-women” posited by trans activists in order to slip TiMs into the mix. It’s certainly a bad look for anyone claiming to be progressive. Perhaps Tatchell is smart enough to realize this and this unexpected change in approach is a tacit admission that the SOP is now too costly.
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