What is wrong? This guy.
Still pushing this line. Is he six?
“What is a woman?” is not the same kind of question as “What is big?” or “What is right and what is wrong?”
He must be confusing “What is a woman?” with “Tell me everything there is to know about women.” The first question is just a definitional question with a very concise answer. The second, obviously, is not.
But based on these idiotic deepities we’re supposed to agree that anybody can be a woman just by claiming to be one.
He writes:
In other words, “I know what a woman is, but I don’t understand why there is a problem in pretending some men are women”. He also likes to use poorly-defined buzzwords such as “inclusive” and “divisive”.
No, buzzwords are not sufficient reason to reject true statements. And yes, there is harm in pretending some men are women.
Plus he changes the subject on himself. He starts with “Too fuzzy, can’t define,” then switches to “We know the definition but let’s not use it because it’s kinder that way.” He doesn’t have enough mind to make up, I guess.
What is a hen?
What is a doe?
What is a mare?
Try to stay on point, Ed. Oh and traditionally a woman is an *adult* female.
Further down he makes the tired (and false) argument that because genetic defects occur, males can be female. So with that in mind, just because there are a small number of people who are too stupid to understand the concept of males and females, doesn’t mean we are all that stupid.
If he thinks that is a good argument, he must think that we could be recognized and accepted as god if we identified as god.
I like this response:
I dunno; it works for cats.
Maybe if he thought about his niece spending a few days in a jail cell with Barbie Kardashian he’d be a leeetle bit more divisive, and less inclusive. I personally think he would.
Why is it always ‘What is a woman?’ Why is it never ‘What is a man?’ And (this is not irrelevant): why do we hear so little about Professor Stephen Whittle – the person who arguably did more than anyone, in Britain and internationally, to guide us into this fog of willed confusion? Could it be (whisper it quietly) that Stephen is – a mere ‘trans man’? And yes, I know Stephen turns up sometimes to grump on social media. But do we see ‘trans women’ giving credit and praise for all the hard work? The carefully crafted arguments? The many, many hours spent proselytising for the cause?
He needs to clarify when he’s talking about definitions, and when he’s talking about frames. For example, he claims that “your definition of what “big” means might not be the same as mine,” but I very much doubt that his definition of “big” matches my definition of, say, “green” or “lawn mower”. I suspect that we would all agree that “big” means something like “substantially larger than normal”. How we apply that definition, though, depends on the frame of reference: what’s big for a dog may be small for a horse. And when there’s a mismatch in our frames, we may disagree on whether an exemplar of a category is big or not (think of Europeans and Americans discussing cars).
You can say much the same about his other examples. Something that is wrong goes against the established norms of a frame (2+2=5 in arithmetic; eating pork among Orthodox Jews); we may have different frames, or disagree about the norms within the frame, but we generally understand what someone is trying to say when they say something is wrong.
But there’s really only one relevant frame for the word “woman”, and that’s the human species. Everyone agrees on that frame (how could it be otherwise?), so we are arguing about definitions. What we say a woman is (adult human female) is not what they say, but they haven’t come up with a coherent definition, and they tacitly acknowledge the need for a word or phrase that covers the same semantic ground when the say things like “people with uteruses”.
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