It happens in public
Hadley Freeman on the breaking of the spell:
The great advantage sport has over, say, prisons and refuges is that it happens in public: people can see it and they are interested in it. That’s why when historians write about that relatively brief but extremely toxic time when gender extremism gripped western countries, and they describe the moment when that grip loosened, they will start with the photos of Lia Thomas, the Ivy League trans swimmer, towering over her teammates. These caught the mainstream interest in a way feminist arguments about trans women in prisons never have: here is an issue where even Homer Simpson can see the obvious problem.
There aren’t the same kind of visuals coming out of prisons. At all. Lia Thomas is an absolute poster boy for This Is Not Fair. (It would be funny if it turned out he’s a double agent.)
Encouraged, no doubt, by the openness of the arguments about Thomas, protests kicked off again when it was announced that 21-year-old Emily Bridges — who, until last month, was racing as a man — would compete in the women’s British National Omnium Championship. Bridges was ruled out at the last minute when someone realised she was, rather awkwardly, still registered as a male cyclist. But a change of tone was palpable in British Cycling’s announcement afterwards that “fairness is essential”, and Sara Symington, the head of Britain’s Olympic cycling programme, said the UCI needed to change its policy of allowing transgender riders to compete against women.
The cracks are widening. There’s still an awful lot of widening left to do though.
Two weeks ago, the Times’s chief sports writer, Matt Dickinson, wrote on Twitter, “Are we really talking about fairness in sport in the transgender debate – or fear and prejudice?”
“Fairness” replied hundreds of women, including some from his own paper. The only replies agreeing with Dickinson were from other male sports writers, insisting that the way the trans women athletes had been treated was “horrendous and disgusting” (John Cross, Daily Mirror ) and “awful” (Martyn Ziegler, The Times) It’s sweet how males always stick together, isn’t it?
Sweet as in poisonous, yes.
Last month, Angela Rayner came up with a solution: “I think we should be taking it off social media and taking it away from commentators,” she intoned solemnly. Ah yes, censorship from the left. That always plays so well! Oddly, only a month earlier Rayner had been loudly insisting that the next leader of the Labour party will be a woman. Presumably that kind of woman-chat is permitted by Rayner, just not what a woman actually is.
I wonder if Rayner would think that prediction had come true if a trans woman became leader of the Labour party. I wonder if she wouldn’t think at all that it’s just more of the same but with lipstick.
https://jezebel.com/okay-ill-bite-let-s-define-what-a-woman-is-1848759016
Relevance: “And Republicans (notably Cruz) are losing their shit over trans swimmer Lia Thomas succeeding at a women’s sport, despite otherwise not giving a good goddamn about women’s sports.”
Interesting: “I must acknowledge that like Jackson, who declined to answer the question because she is “not a biologist,” I, too, am not a biologist. But seeing as none of the Republican men currently weighing in are biologists either, I will go ahead and insert myself into the dialogue to say that I identify as, and therefore very much am, a woman. It’s really not complicated.
I share many commonalities and experiences with other women, in that I apologize to chairs and tables that I accidentally walk into and I am oft told to “smile” by random men. I am also coincidentally a “homo sapien with two X chromosomes”—thanks Ted! But ultimately, I’d like to think that if I lose my reproductive organs due to some medical tragedy or choose not to procreate, I will still be a woman, because, again: I identify as one. I feel like one; I want to be one. That’s all that needs to be said.”
I don’t think such a proclamation as Me has exposed here from Jezebel can be taken as anything other than a rank capitulation of feminism as such — that is, of the social movement that said it was possible to both be a woman and not have to apologise to furniture, or to flip a man off who told you to smile. It is not a betrayal so much as a unilateral ceasefire and an unconditional surrender, an admission that a woman’s proper place is in the kitchen…or, at least, anyone who “feels like” they belong in a kitchen gets to call themself a woman.
This kind of zombie-feminism doesn’t seem to promote women’s social and legal equality so much as instantiate the permanent subordination of women, but make the category “woman” an opt-in, opt-out scheme so that anyone who personally cannot handle that subjugation can simply decline to be considered a woman any longer, while anyone who feels compelled to live within that subjugation gets to enjoy the social privileges and material benefits of womanhood — and, if they are male, they get to permanently exercise a victimology complex that allows them to bully and exercise their narcissistic rage at anyone who does not elect to participate in their gaslighting delusions, especially if said non-elector is a woman.
I once “identified as” the first sort of feminist for a long time, and I was extremely skeptical of other people (especially other men) who insisted that men could not be feminists of the first order but at most “feminist allies”. I still am skeptical of that claim, though I have seen both “male feminists” and “male feminist allies” betray the foundational principles of women’s social and legal equality enough times to understand there isn’t much of a semantic difference between the two positions in practice (much like there isn’t actually a semantic difference between agnosticism and atheism in practice, but rather only a theoretical philosophical difference rising at most to the level of syntax).
These days I have come to find the whole “identifying as” business fairly odious in general, and have resolved not to do that as much as possible, except for a few personal things that really matter to me. I am still quite sympathetic to the cause of women’s social and legal equality to men — and in particular I am not an enormous fan of how younger people seem so eager to pulverise the remarkable gains we have made to that cause within the last century or so in their pursuit of a new religious ideology — but I am out of the identification game, by and large. I don’t really think it helps anything, to be honest.
“Trans feminist” = misogynist who identifies as a feminist.
I would like it if the media stopped parroting the language of the trans cult. They could start by giving up on the lie that trans-identifying males are not being allowed to compete in sports if they’re not allowed to compete in the women’s division. Then they should move on to the lie that “trans children” are being “denied health care” if children aren’t trans-medicalized. The children are being given all the same health care as other children. They’re just not being mutilated before they have the competence to consent to that.
I’ve been wondering if definition by exclusion would be effective at cutting through some of the nonsense and obfuscation.
How about:
1 An adult human who has or had a penis and/or at least one testicle is not a woman
2. An adult human who has or had a vulva is not a man
Where has/had is to be understood in the appropriate sense and surgical simulacra of the organs listed are excluded.
As a definition it’s not kind and it’s not inclusive, and it cannot be readily applied by superficial observation – you can’t necessarily “clock it”. But lacking these attributes does not disqualify it as a definition.
It may fail to classify some cases, so it’s not necessarily exhaustive. But it probably captures the vast majority of adult humans and it seems quite serviceable for the trans activism debate.
DD @2 I don’t ‘identify’ as anything either, it’s inherently phony. As Popeye says, “I yam what I yam, and dats all what I yam…”
twiliter, that goes nicely with Popeye’s “If I’m not me, than who am I? And if I’m someone else, then why do I look like me?”
Popeye was a Class A philosopher.
And I don’t identify as anything but an otter. A plaid otter.