Not a choice
Two months ago but still relevant.
It’s not something you can choose. That’s your whole problem right there: it’s not a choice. You can’t choose to be born, you can’t choose to be human (or not), you can’t choose to be a mammal (or not), you can’t choose to be immortal, you can’t choose to be a contemporary of Euripides. You can’t choose to be a woman.
There’s a lot in life that we just never get a choice about, and what sex we are is one item on that massive list.
Everybody, literally everybody, used to know this. The baby talk in that tweet is astounding to me.
The fact that someone wouldn’t feel comfortable in the ladies’ room with a male friend is no doubt astounding to the Trans Rights Advocate, since so much of the argument that transwomen belong in women’s spaces seems to revolve around small, personal choices involving actual or hypothetical friends pictured in this position. Forget the statistics on male violence, ignore the discomfort women feel under the male gaze, dismiss larger concerns of bad faith actors and unknowns. Instead, imagine a really, really nice transwoman, relatable and completely harmless — someone you’ve known and trusted for years — who just wants to pee … and then imagine how she’d feel being excluded.
Be a warrior for this person. Then be an advocate for all the transwomen like her, which, for all you know, is all of them.
Even for things you can choose to be, you generally have to put some effort into it before others are obliged to respect your choice. You can choose to be a doctor, but you have to put in years of study and practice and then pass all the licensing requirements. You can choose to be an opera fan, but you have to put in the effort to listen to the music, understand the stories and the history, know the difference between Verdi and Mozart, and attend performances when possible. You can choose to be a hermit, but you have to go live in a cave and avoid contact with others as much as possible*.
Gender is about the only category where saying makes it so.
*As you can probably guess, I’m neither a doctor, an opera fan, nor a hermit.
“No one should be afraid of being attacked by a scary mob of angry men.” – a recent tweet by Fielding, who did not, in my searching, have a thing to say about the possibly murderous attacks on P. Parker in NZ.
Yes. The number of life-choices made for us by blind chance and infinite probability against is staggering: to be conceived in the first place, with a distinct and unique chemical structure in which resides what theologians refer to as ‘the soul’ and I prefer to think of as ‘the consciousness,’ which is not free to move out of my particular sack of atoms and molecules and take up residence in another’s; not even into a genetically identical twin’s.
Implicit and unstoppable in those processes is our own individual and eventual death from ageing if from nothing else. So I say, enjoy your existence while it lasts; it will never ever occur again.
Our individual sex (‘gender’ I reserve for things like French verbs) is chosen for us by the same blind chance, including those factors which make some of us wish that we were of the opposite sex (there are for understandable reasons only 2). And in any case, if at my conception the zygote that I developed from had picked up two X chromosomes, instead of my present XY pair, it would not be me typing this comment, but another member of my birth family, conceived by parental desire or by accident; in my case the latter, according to what my mother eventually told me.
@Omar,
*nouns
‘your trans friend is a woman, even though this is who they’ve chosen to be’
Wait, I thought being trans wasn’t a choice, they were born that way, they’ve always been whatever ‘gender’ they’re telling us they are, they were just too afraid to ‘come out’ until now…? One of the most frustrating things about these people is they can’t even keep their story straight.
clamboy @ 3
Slight digression, but: I saw recently that there were supposedly some violent acts committed against trans-identified people sometime after PP’s speaking events in Australia, and some of the wokerati are blaming these attacks on PP. I’m not seeing this claim showing up anywhere reputable, though.
Sackbut, I suspect this might be the event to which you refer.
Mark Latham is a former leader of the ALP (centre-left) who, since his defeat in 2005, has gone so far to the right we can barely see him anymore.
The Christian Lives Matter is a small bunch of bearded muscular men who like to intimidate anyone who shows the slightest hint of apostasy. They are the same mob who tore down posters in support of CSA survivors at George Pell’s funeral.
No right on either side, IMHO, but also no link to PP, but that never stops the Transmafia campaign of guilt by 6 degrees of separation.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/the-five-words-that-led-to-a-violent-attack-on-a-suburban-street-20230322-p5cude.html
Sastra – there should be a name for that sleight of hand. Argumentum ad amicitia or something.
Demanding consitency is literal violence. It’s innate and a choice, whatever the moment needs.