Argument is not magic
Can it get any more maddeningly idiotic?
Females-only app that banned trans woman says it was creating a ‘safe space’
Lawyers for trans woman Roxanne Tickle have argued she is a woman and was discriminated against when she was banned from using a female-only app.
Then lawyers for trans woman Roxanne Tickle are talking deranged nonsense. Women are women; trans women are men. That’s what “trans” means. It means fake, pretend, fantasy, delusion. A person’s sex is not something that can be switched via argument or declaration or assertion or claim or announcement.
There are two separate problems here and in all these conflicts. One is the desirability or otherwise of pretending that people are the other sex, and forcing others to pretend the same thing, and the other is the brute reality of human sexual dimorphism. The first is open to argument; the second is just a fact. If Tickle’s lawyers are “arguing” that he’s a woman they’re “arguing” something that’s not subject to “argument.” It’s pointless and silly to “argue” impossibilities. Adults should stop doing that.
The question of whether someone is a woman is not just biological but also social and psychological, a court has heard on the first day of a landmark trans-rights lawsuit.
No it isn’t, not in the sense that a man can be literally a woman despite being a “biological” man. Being one or the other of course brings a lot of social and psychological baggage with it, but that doesn’t make men women.
The app and its founder, Sall Grover, illegally discriminated on the grounds of gender identity, Tickle’s lawyer Georgina Costello told a Federal Court hearing in Sydney on Tuesday. “The evidence will show that Ms Tickle is a woman,” Costello said. “She perceives herself as a woman. She presents herself as a woman.”
Doesn’t matter. He can “present himself” as an armadillo, he can say he perceives himself as an armadillo, but he remains not an armadillo. Perception is reality for some things, but not for others. It’s generally quite a good idea to know which is which. You want that bridge over the ravine to be real, not a figment of your imagination.
I disagree — all sorts of dodgy claims are subject to argument as long as the issue isn’t so self-evident that it’s positively perverse to disagree. There are arguments for and against the existence of God, efficiency of homeopathy, validity of astrology, flatness of the earth, etc. A bad argument based on flawed reasoning, faulty logic, or poor evidence is still an argument that can persuade people to sincerely believe (or believe in belief.) Shutting down debate because one side is pure and simply a fact isn’t convincing. I spent enough time being told I had to be in rebellion against God because His Divine Presence had been made manifest to all.
Here’s a problem for them. If social and psychological aspects of women can be used to include someone who doesn’t fit the biological criteria, then they can be used to exclude someone who does fit the biological criteria but not the”social and psychological” ones.
This has nothing to do with the choice of an individual. Barb isn’t a “woman” because Barb doesn’t act like one. Barb has small breasts and short hair. Barb doesn’t like babies. Barb wears combat boots. If Giggle is a woman, then what’s to stop someone from choosing social and psychological criteria that prove Barb isn’t?
If the only social or psychological criteria is “I feel like a woman” without any content to it then it’s meaningless. I spent enough time trying to pin down apologists whose main “argument” for God was “God is that which can neither be defined, demonstrated, nor understood through reason.” That’s not even gobbledygook.
How is the fact that a man is not a woman NOT so self-evident that it’s positively perverse to disagree? That’s my point exactly: that it’s not arguable because it is that self-evident. An apple is not a buffalo, a train is not a planet, New York is not Los Angeles. Too self-evident for argument.
“Perversity” entails a deliberate contrariness which goes against what the claimant knows is true. I think there’s has been so much obfuscation, sophistry, confusion, equivocation, politics, and passion around this topic that otherwise reasonable people have become sincerely convinced that equating “woman” with the reproductive category of the female sex involves believing
1) all women were made for having babies and nothing else
2) women don’t get to choose how they express themselves
3) people don’t get to choose how they express themselves
4) all categories are rigid
5) nonconformity to rigid sex roles is immoral
6) gay people don’t exist or shouldn’t exist
7) fascism is good
And more. The perversity is in the doctrine, not in the people who have been seduced into it by a series of seemingly plausible stages over time. Following the tribe you trust isn’t being contrary for the sake of being contrary.
If the doctrine is perverse, then Ophelia’s argument stands, in my opinion. The fact that someone believes something sincerely doesn’t mean it is true, possible, or something to be argued. A perverse doctrine is a perverse doctrine, and a person who believes it sincerely is not necessarily to be scorned, but the idea they believe in must be scorned.
To argue that a man is a woman is perverse, even if someone has been led through your example into believing it.
That’s how I see it. I think a perverse argument can be one that its arguer should know is crap. Maybe that’s more colloquial than official, I don’t know.
I think the argument of the TRAs is that in normal circumstances in our society, it does not matter much which ‘sex’ you are. When you are dealing with the cashier at the supermarket, a student at university etc., you do not need to know anything about their genitals or reproductive status. But people are still treated differently depending on whether they are perceived as male or female.
Therefore (so I understand the argument) the biological category is a lot less relevant than the way people present themselves. Thus, the word “woman” should not be applied to the (in most cases irrrelevant) biological category but to the social perception, i.e. “gender”.
I admit that I believed this myself at some point, followinjg arguments at sites like pharyngula. I still think that it is not too difficult to imagine an alternative universe where this is actually true (e.g., if humans were laying eggs and male and female humans had less sexual dimorphism).
This argument, however, breaks down as soon as you leave the simple interactions at universities and supermarkets and look at the actual consequences of biology in society which are everywhere: FGM, menstruation stigma/menstruation huts, the higher aggressiveness of men, sports, prisons, forced marriage and prostitution, women as sex objects, rape as weapon of war etc. etc.
These make quite clear that the simplistic picture of “Usually, your sex does not matter much in every day life” is wrong in our world and our society.
I’m quite sure women in Afghanistan or in forced prostitution would opt out of their situation by identifying as men, if they could. Currently, in western societies, many young women and girls try to opt out of womanhood by declaring themselves trans or non-binary – not because they actually “feel as men” but because they do not feel like the hypersexualized stupid image that society seems to assign to women.
@Sonderval;
Yet many of the people who promote the idea that Trans Women Are Women are also strongly against people being treated differently depending on whether they are male or female.
I remember seeing a commenter at Pharyngula say something to the effect that he was coming to the conclusion that eliminating sexism would make it hard for trans people to feel validated so a sexist society might be a good thing, at least for a while. But that was just one person being honest, and as I recall nobody responded.
Sastra, I suspect that is true in theory, that if you asked most TRAs, they would say that. I suspect there are few transwomen who would tolerate it if they were just people. They need to be special, and if the sexes are not treated differently, they are not special, they are just people. For trans to be at all, there must be a distinction between men and women.
And there have been at least some of them who have indicated that they love being objectified, wolf whistled, and treated the way women are treated…because of affirmation. I haven’t seen any of them saying they love the idea of being told to make sandwiches for the meeting or sweep the floors, though.