Use the words or else
Naomi Cunningham at Legal Feminist on the pronouns campaign, one front in the larger Gender War:
There are two sides in this war. They call each other various names, but we can call them – fairly neutrally – genderists and gender criticals.
The genderists claim that sex doesn’t matter. Whether you’re a man or a woman depends not on your body, but on your inner sense of identity. A male person who says that he is a woman should be treated, referred to – and even thought of – as a woman for all purposes; and vice versa.
Meanwhile, though, the rest of the world will go on treating women the way it always has.
Gender criticals think biological sex does sometimes matter: for healthcare, for safeguarding, for everyday privacy and dignity, for fairness in sport, and so on. They think sex is determined by whether you have a male or a female body, and that it’s no more possible literally to change sex than to change species.
In other words one could swap genderists/gender criticals for fantasists/realists or loonies/not-loonies.
The attentive reader will have noticed that the “gender critical” viewpoint is made up of commonsense propositions that until about ten minutes ago no sensible person – whether on the political left or right – would have dreamed of contesting. The genderist beliefs are novel, and surprising.
And – this is important – wrong.
So what about pronouns?
This takes us to the manner in which genderist beliefs have been promoted. You can’t defend irrational beliefs with reason. By and large genderists don’t try: instead, their strategy has been to attempt to leapfrog over the usual campaigning, lobbying, arguing, persuading phases of bringing about profound cultural and legal change, and to pretend instead that the desired outcome is already accepted by all right-thinking people – and to silence dissent by visiting dire consequences on anyone who questions that claim. That, I believe, is the whole reason for the vitriol and toxicity that surrounds this subject. Anyone who points out the absurdity of propositions like “some women have penises” must be howled down as a bigot, shamed, no-platformed, hounded from her job, kicked off her course, etc.
Yes, it’s easy to see how that would work in theory, except for the fact that so few people would be motivated to promote the genderist beliefs in the first place.
Kidding. It turns out way more people than I ever realized are susceptible to this kind of cognitive engineering.
The more insidious part of the strategy is the first part: the pretence that the contentious propositions that form genderist beliefs are already accepted without question by all educated, right-thinking people. Genderists make determined efforts to weave their claims seamlessly into our language and the fabric of our workplace culture, with the aim of converting contentious claims into the kind of tacit knowledge that doesn’t even need to be stated or formulated.
And that’s where the stupid “pronouns” come in. Nudge nudge, shape shape, warp warp.
Yesterday, a friend who I thought was far more rational than that argued that “Intersex Exists, therefore Trans is Real”. Such bait and switch. And when I insisted on using the term “Disorders of Sexual Development” (since nobody is “between the sexes”, as implied by the term “intersex”), he said: “Why is it a disorder? Other than infertility, it doesn’t cause any damage.” And therefore trans! Therefore trans!
(And of course his response when I said “Women in women’s spaces — bathrooms, sports, and more, and especially prisons — shouldn’t have to play the role of play-along therapists to delusional men. They never signed up for that role, that job. Sorry. No exceptions.”, his response was basically: “But science! Science! You’re sticking your head in the sand, like deniers of climate change!”)
Oy. Talk about projection…
GW, a side point: I might be wrong, but it is my understanding that intersex and DSD refer to different, though related, things. Intersex refers to any body that has some features from both sides of the sex divide, while a DSD is any disorder, genetic mutation etc. which involves the presentation of any sex linked trait. Thus a man with XXY chromosomes has a DSD but is not intersexed, as that person is still male.
In other words, intersexed is a subset within DSDs.
@3: That may be, though even if so I believe that the term “intersex” isn’t used by the medical and scientific community anymore — or, at least, wasn’t until transactivists resurrected it.
My understanding (which, again, could be wrong) is that when transactivists say things like “2% of all people are intersex!”, they are referring to (a very high estimate of) all DSDs.
You may find this interesting… It’s a paper written by Gary Butler, Nastasja De Graaf, Bernadette Wren and Polly Carmichael – the last three work at the Tavistock GIDS – Carmichael is its director.
Assessment and support of children and adolescents with gender dysphoria | Archives of Disease in Childhood
It details “Karyotypes performed in young people attending GIDS England and Wales, and from Scotland and Northern Ireland (2009–2015), and frequencies of aneuploidy”
They say:
That is, non-XX and non-XY karyotypes were so rare, they’ve given up even checking.
Interesting indeed. Thanks Alan.
“Floridly mad” got edited out in favour of the lawyerly “novel and surprising”…
Hahaha I suspected as much.
@GW
That argument always infuriates me. The fact that some objects may not be easily classified in a set of given classes does not mean that no object can. You could as well argue that since it is difficult to determine the exact time during dawn when night becomes day, it is reasonable to say that noon is in the middle of the night.
Yes, some people may be difficult to sex correctly, that does not mean that no one can be sexed.
And, as always, notice the double standard: If biological sex isn’t this platonic ideal, and biological sex differences don’t meet a standard of accuracy, precision, simplicity etc. not observed anywhere else outside of pure mathematics, that automatically invalidates any talk of biological sexes as distinct, identifiable categories, but if the supposed “gender” differences they are talking about don’t meet any standards at all (including qualifying as a meaningful term), that makes them more firmly established than the laws of thermodynamics. I have com to think of it as the “Gender of the Gaps” fallacy. It’s more or less equivalent to saying that I am entitled to get for free what you have to pay for.
As I keep saying, even if there were no basis for talking about biological sexes as distinct, identifiable categories, it still wouldn’t follow that being a “man” or “woman” were about something other than biological sex. What would follow is that there’s no basis for talking about “men” and “women” either. If biological sexes are not legitimate categories, then neither are “man” and “woman”. If being a “man” or “woman” isn’t about biological sex, it isn’t about anything at all. If physical traits don’t make us “men” or “women”, then nothing does.
@Bjarte
Very nicely put, thanks.
Intersex (if that’s the right term?) and trans people are in some senses opposites. An intersex person like Caster Semenya is empirically identifiable as such on the basis of a physical examination. Such an examination might need to be much more in depth than would occur in the course of day to day life, or be carried out by someone with appropriate medical training, but in principle it’s possible to identify somebody as intersex objectively, regardless of how they see themselves. (I have to say that I have a lot of sympathy for Semenya, who was dragged through an intensely personal medical review and forced to confront something that would have completely shaken her sense of who she was, under intense media scrutiny.)
With trans people the situation is reversed – nothing about your body can be said to provide any indication of whether you’re a man or a woman. Trans status rests entirely on your self perception, or rather on what you report as being your self perception, and so is totally unverifiable.
The conflation between the two is due to the fact that both of them suggest that we can’t tell at a glance whether someone is a man or a woman, and this similarity is exploited to suggest that if we agree with the demonstrable truth that intersex people exist then it follows that claims about trans people ‘knowing who they really are’ also need to be taken seriously. In fact there’s no such logical link, as the implications of the reality of intersex conditions and of gender identity theory are totally different, but the surface level similarities like the fact that both issues are contentious when discussing women’s sport are enough to conceal that from the casual observer.
A couple of weeks ago I saw an argument between a TRA and a GC in a third parties mentions on Twitter. The third party eventually weighed in on the TRA side with the Gotcha that Casimir Pulaski, founder of the US Cavalry, was trans, so what do you say to that! The GC had never heard of them and dismissed the point. Neither had I so I looked them up.
They were not trans at all. Exhumation of their remains provided very equivocal evidence that they may have been DSD. Equivocal because the DNA was too badly degraded for the rests of the time and the evidence relied on was skeletal conformation (female like pelvis) and the lack of any children. Even the authors of the paper described the diagnosis as likely, rather than certain.
Point is, DSD does not equal trans, so the ‘gotcha’ was a non-sequitur.
The person who made the claim is a lawyer with a public profile in political and copyright sphere. A current late stage PhD candidate and a clearly intelligent person capable of critical analysis, except when they choose not to be.
I’ve been stewing about this for the last couple of weeks.
It’s all very stew-worthy.
@Sonderval April 26, 2022 at 11:39 pm
Yes, it conflates how we recognise sex with how sex is defined. They are two entirely separate things.
Sorry, for some reason my link to that paper I cited was wrong. It should have been this:
Assessment and support of children and adolescents with gender dysphoria | Archives of Disease in Childhood
Fixed.