Brag elsewhere
Oh ffs. If you don’t understand something that basic go do something else. Leave women alone. Go shout at magpies or the man on the telly or the sky. Leave us alone.
Because saying you’re a lesbian (or a gay man) is not an extraordinary claim. Same-sex attraction and love has been known about for literally thousands of years. and it doesn’t require any magic to get over the incredible bits. A man saying he’s a woman is an extraordinary claim. There’s a well known rule about extraordinary claims: go find it.
Also Stock doesn’t say she “feels she is a lesbian.” That’s your gloss so that you could compare it to “feeling” one is a woman when one is not. Stock doesn’t feel she is a lesbian, she is one.
Compare like with like. It’s a simple and useful rule for arguments.
Bragg denies Doc Stock agency because she has the gall to refuse to fuck men like Bragg.
For Bragg, biological reality is women only having sex with men for the purpose of procreation. Or male satisfaction.
Well she might be lying about being a lesbian, because we don’t have telepathy but it’s something you can do or not do; it’s demonstrable.
If she’s having sex with women but doesn’t like it, well, what’s the point?
And they still don’t explain what it means to ‘feel like a woman’. How does someone who is not a woman know that what he is feeling is like a woman? What exactly gives him the proper life experience to determine that? In the end, it seems to come down to stereotypes, or just wanting to shove into women’s spaces.
Re “Both are responding to a sensibility at odds with their biological reality”:
I note that he acknowledged that a man’s claim that he feels like a woman is at odds with his biological reality. That seems like an important admission.
I am unclear, though, what “biological reality” he means in reference to KS. I assume it’s “biological reality” for women to feel attracted to men, and her feeling of attraction instead to women is at odds with that, is that correct?
I think that’s where Alex Richardson was going in his tweet. Feelings are the only relevant fact when someone says “I like satsumas” or “I feel sexually attracted to people of my own sex”; there may be ways to collect objective evidence about these feelings, but it is the feelings that matter. But saying “I feel like a woman”, even if true, is irrelevant to the question of whether the speaker actually is a woman. (Just like saying “I feel like I’m six feet tall”, in AR’s example, is irrelevant to the facts of the matter.)
That seems to be what he means, but it’s silly. Attraction isn’t comparable to, say, genitalia. It’s not obvious or material in the same way.
It doesn’t matter whether we believe anybody or not.
Ultimately what’s at issue here are rights, and rights aren’t needed for, or based on, what’s inside our heads.
Kathleen Stock can’t be discriminated against for being a lesbian. That means she’s free to behave in a manner consistent with her sexual orientation, without legal consequence. If sexual orientation were simply a matter of subjective feelings it wouldn’t need protection. And if it were simply a matter of applying a label to oneself and publicly proclaiming it, that would be covered by the right to free speech.
As for “a sensibility at odds with their biological reality,” homosexuality isn’t that. It’s true that sex evolved as a method of reproduction. It’s true that “female” and “male” refer to reproductive roles. You cannot get from that to “any sexual act that doesn’t result in pregnancy is at odds with your biological reality.” Ask any bonobo.
Lady M, I really wish I spoke bonobo!
Good assessment of the situation. You have a way of hitting the nail on the head.
Thanks, iknklast.
A woman declaring herself to be a lesbian might infuriate men who believe that women were created for the sole purpose of serving men, but she’s not going against biology (it’s not just when the bull is in the field that the heifers have a lot of sex), nor removing the rights of any other demographic when she does so.
It’s the men responding to her boundaries (only wanting women in her dating pool), by declaring themselves to be lesbians and demanding that she have sex with them, who are denying reality and removing her right to freedom of association.
Who is Billy Bragg anyway? Apart from a bloke whose name was adopted by a whole lot of people on Twitter last year? I’ve seen his moronic tweets referenced here before, but why does his voice matter? It’s not as if he ever tweets anything interesting or intelligent. I’d never heard of him before that name sharing thing.
“Who is Billy Bragg anyway? Apart from a bloke whose name was adopted by a whole lot of people on Twitter last year? I’ve seen his moronic tweets referenced here before, but why does his voice matter? It’s not as if he ever tweets anything interesting or intelligent. I’d never heard of him before that name sharing thing.”
tigger_the_wing : Before he became obsessed with the trans issue, Billy Bragg was an indie musician. And he was a good one too. “A New England” and “Between the Wars” are great songs.
Bragg was never very successful in the US, but he was popular in Europe, especially in his native Britain. Bragg was also an outspoken left-wing activist, and used his music to campaign against the Thatcher government, which earned him a lot of respect.
I’ve no idea why Bragg’s fallen down the TRA hole. Maybe he simply assumes the trans cause must be right since most of the Tories are against it. But yes, Bragg has become obsessed with it, to the point it’s all he seems to post about nowadays. He’s become quite the transervant.
“Transervant”: good one.
I don’t think it much matters to any of us if a trans woman “feels” like a woman — what matters is what he does, and what he demands that the rest of us to do. It starts with his need for “validation” and in many cases it never ends.
Billy Bragg is a musician who due to 11-Plus exam results was streamed into ‘secondary modern’ school, secondary education not targeted at advancing to university, but not vocational either. Formal logical reasoning is not really what he does.
The sheer sexism is breathtaking. The idea that lesbians and gay men are somehow at odds with the biology of maleness and femaleness is worthy of Lord Douglass.
John, I am ceaselessly amazed at how the TRAs and transervants go so far out on a limb to say that people who recognize the existence of sexes are displaying some form of phobia or bigotry, while at the same time displaying stunning levels of misogyny and hatred towards homosexuals and lesbians. The beam in Billy Bragg’s eye…
@papito – I think there is an intersection, but not a concurrence, between the characteristics that mark a reason for the perceived joint needs of trans-claiming individuals and same sex attracted individuals, and it’s a function of the inherently misogynistic nature of gender. TIIs are reinforcing the misogyny in affirming the primacy of gender, but LGB don’t necessarily conform, they are a broad range of individuals even though they are stereotyped as gender non-conforming due to their sexual orientation. I think this is very confusing for people, and easily conflated by the teecue, which is why the charges of bigotry stick so easily.
I may need to develop this thought for a Substack podcast.
Do. It’s true and it matters.
Thanks for the explanation, Mostly Cloudy. I’ve never been interested in popular music, so if he was on the fringes of that it would explain why I hadn’t heard of him.
I agree that to the vast majority of the population, which mostly fits in with the dominant culture, those people who don’t or refuse to fit in are easy to dismiss as an amorphous subculture; and that gets a boost by media always referring to them as LGBTQI++XYZ instead of admitting that none of the people represented by each of those letters have much in common with one another, let alone the rest of the alphabet. Most people aren’t interested in thinking about anyone who isn’t in their family or social circle. All they know about anyone else is what they read in the news or watch on TV. It’s how someone can say racist things whilst claiming not to be racist because they have friends who are of different races. We all take mental shortcuts like that; we simply don’t have the brain power to think about everything.
I hope this helps clarify my thinking. It’s difficult concepts like this that generally require actual philosophers to untangle, https://mikehaubrich.substack.com/p/an-intersection?sd=pf
I often feel like there are too many knots in this thread.
“O time thou must untangle this knot not I, it is too hard a knot for me to untie.”