She has no words
But don’t try to tell these sadists that there’s no way to know who is a predatory male and who is a man who wants to live as if he were a woman.
It makes her angry, more angry than she can say, that a woman who is a rape victim wants a women-only support group.
Yes that’s nice but explain to us how you know that the man in question is not a predator. Saying “she is a trans woman” does not count as such an explanation.
Always put the men first.
“Clothing doesn’t have a gender.”
Many items of clothing are gendered, in that they are more strongly associated with one sex than the other. Jeans, flannel shirts and work boots for example are associated with men than with women; skirts are even more obviously gendered the other way around. The phrasing she chose is clunky, possibly because the writer does not know what gender is and is tripping over the nebulous meanings introduced by TRAs.
If “clothing doesn’t have a gender” then why the almighty fuss over their wanting to dress “according to their gender?” Why does the DSM checklist for symptoms of Gender Dysphoria in Children include
How would that even be possible?
And if the woman has no right to sue because she “was made aware that the support group she was attending was trans-inclusive” does that mean transwomen have no right to sue a support group which makes them aware that it’s female-sex only?
Didn’t think so.
Not to mention the different cut of men’s clothes and women’s clothes, because our bodies are different. I recently went looking for a pair of shorts and the clerk directed me toward the aisle where there were shorts. The only shorts were men’s. I find men’s shorts quite uncomfortable.
And I find it disingenuous to say “clothing doesn’t have a gender”, because clothing does have a gender. It may not have a sex, but the societal expectations that make up what we refer to as gender (unless we’ve been absorbed into the trans-borg) are very much attached to clothing. We may wish it was otherwise, but at this moment in history, clothing can help tell us about a person.
Did she throw in that last line, which is arguably* true, just to confuse us about the previous two lines?
*Arguably: If we define “non-binary people” as “people who call themselves non-binary,” then it’s true. If it means “people who are really, truly neither men nor women,” then it has no truth value, because such people don’t exist.
GW
If we use the words “man” and “woman” in the Genderspeak sense (i.e. people who think/feel/identify/present/etc. in certain ways best left unspecified), I’m more inclined to say that everyone (with the possible exception of trans people themselves) is “non-binary”, as well as “gender-nonconforming” etc. If trans men are men, then I’m not. If trans women are women, they are the only “women”. As I have previously put it the closest you might get to an accurate characterization of what the rest of us are in Genderspeak would be to say that we’re all agender.
The sophistry: it burns!
An article of clothing can have a gender. When we say that inanimate objects have gender, we either refer to analogous mechanical roles (e.g., insert tab A into slot B), to typical usage, or to physical suitability vis-a-vis males and females. The way this vacuous nonsense empowers the slow-witted to pontificate like experts is… Okay, it’s not the worst thing, but it does grate.
Yes, yes it does.
If clothes aren’t gendered, why do department stores have separate sections for Women’s clothes and Men’s clothes? (Not to mention boys and girls.)
And why don’t they have a section for otters? That’s what I’d like to know! Trans otters are otters!
Otters are the forgotten people.