Stronger Together
Via NightCrow, a collection of some of the stupidest arglebargle in a very crowded field: from the YWCA in June 2021:
Trans or Cis, Women Are Stronger Together
Men or Women, Women Are Stronger Together
Bosses or Workers, Workers Are Stronger Together
Rich or Poor, The Poor Are Stronger Together
Be stronger together by no longer being together.
YWCA has always been at the forefront of the women’s rights movement, empowering women since our inception over 160 years ago. For this reason, we remain committed to centering the experiences of BIPOC communities, LGBTQIA+ folks, survivors of gender-based violence, people with disabilities, and immigrant, low income, and unhoused people in our work to eliminate racism and empower women.
“For this reason,” they say, “we remain committed to changing the subject.”
“For this reason, we acknowledge going forward that women don’t matter enough so we’ve added everyone else.”
Moving forward, we will continue to work to ensure that our platform centers ALL voices.
Women are stronger together so we’ll separate them by adding EVERYONE.
Also, if you center ALL voices you’re not centering any voices. You can’t center everyone, because there is no center without a periphery.
It’s dimwitted in the extreme to begin by patting the YWCA on the back for having always been at the forefront of the women’s rights movement and then immediately throw that overboard by adding everyone else. Just like no center without a non-center, no fight for women’s rights if it’s a fight for everyone’s rights. Everyone should have rights, and fighting for universal rights is good, but it’s not fighting for specifically women’s rights. Feminism is for women.
Especially the voices of Black women, trans women, and other women of color who are often diminished in the conversations about our collective truth.
Trans women are men.
During pride month and year-round, it is critical for us to be allies to our trans sisters, taking on the responsibility of using our privilege and platform to promote education, camaraderie, and to rebuild trust across the spectrum of womanhood and sisterhood. Our collective liberation demands cooperation. Together, with common goals of gender equity and collective liberation, we can transition from general awareness to actions for mutual empowerment.
No, it isn’t. It isn’t critical at all. Men who claim to be trans have more allies than they know what to do with, and a marked hostility toward non-supine women. Women get to focus on women.
Accept that every woman has the right to define her own womanhood.
Sure, if you mean women. No, if you mean men. Men don’t get to “define” their own “womanhood” because they’re not women. It’s not a “right” for men to force the world to pretend they’re women.
All women experience life in different but overlapping ways. Our collective struggle has the potential to unify our mission and bolster our calls to action because they are one in the same. Our voices are amplified as we stand together against a common enemy: misogyny, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia.
No.
Trans women, especially trans women of color, often experience a dangerous cocktail of misogyny, sexism, and homophobia, which puts them at high risk of harm but also arms them with a unique intersectional experience. This experience allows them to understand the myriad ways that all marginalized are affected by persecution, providing them with unique insight into how our movements can be inclusive to all people and centers them as pioneers at the forefront of civil rights, gay liberation, and women’s movements. By embracing trans women and listening to their experiences, our collective work can change the world!
Look around you. How’s that going?
Uplift trans voices and center trans women, especially trans women of color, in women’s movements.
Not enough to include them, we have to center them. We have to sit in an obedient circle around the men in dresses telling us how things are and what we have to do.
Have you lost your damn minds?
Gay men are women.
Bi-sexual men are women.
Queer men are women.
Trans men are women.
Intersex men are women.
2S men are women.
EVERYBODY’s women.
Women, women, everywhere.
sotto voce:
“CIS” women are bitches, Lesbians are homophobic, and need not apply.
Ah, an excellent example of the deepity — a phrase or statement which can be interpreted two different ways, one of them true but trivial, the other extraordinary but false. Daniel Dennett coined the term and pointed out that it’s common when thinking about and/or defending religion.
Fuzzy thinkers on sex and gender also slip back and forth between their own mental Mott and Bailey, sometimes meaning the one (“every woman should be allowed to be a woman in the way that suits her best”) and sometimes meaning the other (“every person should be allowed to count as a woman if that’s what suits them best”) — and often getting the two confused. If everyone else in the room is nodding along, the confusion gets deeply entrenched.
Slipped in from under the deck there is a lump of bullshit masquerading as a category mistake. While items 2 and 3 are OK, to be consistent with them, Number 1 has to read ”Trans or Cis, Cis are stronger together.’ And who can argue with that.? But I do not think that whoever originally drafted up this sludge quite had that in mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_mistake
Re #3, my understanding:
The implication from the original is: “Trans[women] or cis[women], women are stronger together”. But since “transwomen” are (a subset of) men, and “ciswomen” is a term they are trying to promote to refer to women, the original can be translated as “men or women, women are stronger together”, as noted in the OP. The others are riffs on the translated version.
So I disagree, I don’t think it’s a category error.
I mean, they’re not wrong… if you simply count men as women, then yeah suddenly “women” are stronger than they’ve ever been!
Yeegawds but my brain might be melting O.o
Fake or Real, [thing] are stronger together.
‘Black women, trans women, and other women of color’ – the construction of this phrase makes it seem like the writer categorises ‘trans women’ as some kind of ‘women of colour’ – ie it would have made logical sense if it had read something like ‘Black women, South Asian women, and other women of colour’.
@ #4:
An ‘error’ by definition is non-deliberate. On the other hand, deliberate ‘errors’ are by their own nature, only committed by saboteurs: usually undercover enemies, but masquerading as friends.
Some of those so mentally unfortunate as to wish they were born other than the way they were and pretend to have been so born, have my sympathy, but not my support through an endorsement on my part of their understandable delusion. So I stand fully behind my original.
Endorsement of their delusion can only be at the expense of women, and particularly of feminist women.
@sastra – This is so glaringly obvious that it’s a wonder why so few of the “gnu atheists” can see it. When I was in Phoenix I was talking to a fellow atheist about the boys in Connecticut who were running in the girls’ track events and he said “this is the one area that makes me question the whole trans thing.” I asked him why he can’t make the leap to the rest of it and he had no answer for me.
It’s one of those lessons that we learn as atheists, that we don’t always arrive at our non-belief by logic, but our prejudices are often a key factor. So, when the need for skepticism arises on another subject such as the nutrition claims of the “alkaline diet” or the trans claim, atheists are not as well-prepared to think it through as we would seem. I think we have this conceit that once atheists have set firm our disbelief for reasons we can accept for ourselves, we think that we have achieved the summit of skepticism and can just “wing it” on other subjects. We then tend to rely on argument from authority by other atheists who must have done the work to come to their conclusions so we can trust them.
I admit to doing this myself, but at least Dennett, as a philosopher, gives us the tools to use if we want to use them. I’ll be honest enough to say that I often take the shortcut of trusting other skeptics and atheists because skeptical analysis takes time and effort, and I don’t always have that to spare on every issue that should be approached skeptically. With the trans issue, I think, people avoid it because they don’t want to be associated with the sort of RW homophobes who are anti-trans because they don’t like the idea of effeminate males or masculine females. If not for Josh explaining the difference between trans and intersex to me, I may never have peaked, and perhaps that may be what’s holding back so many atheists and skeptics.
I don’t know what’s going on with the YWCA, and perhaps it may have to do with searching for more funding sources. There are vanishingly few of them around, and the YMCA’s partnership with many communities’ community centers is likely leaving them far behind in funds by comparison. This missive is shallow gobbledy-gook bending over backwards to please the progressive constituency.