Saying
The punchline of the now notorious “What is a woman?” by Kat Grant that has caused all this marching up and down is one of the silliest punchlines ever punched, and the need to say why has been bugging me for a couple of days now.
Remember it? Short, and absurd. “A woman is whoever she says she is.”
And by “she” Kat Grant means anyone who says she is, by which she means anyone who says she is, by which…
Infinite regress, but also, infinite nonsense. Is that a special privilege granted to women? Do men have to stick to the truth while women get to claim to be anything and everything and it will be true because it’s a woman saying it? If so, won’t that create a certain amount of confusion?
But also, of course, if a woman is whoever she says she is then actually all a man has to do is say “I’m a woman” and he is a woman. How do we know? Because he said he is, and a woman is whoever she says she is.
I could go on this way all night, but won’t. But I do wonder why Kat Grant is so pleased with her absurd tautology, and why FFRF saw fit to publish it.
” “A woman is whoever she says she is.””
So if a woman says she is CEO of Center for Global Development, or former Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, or Hollywood actress Sydney Sweeney, we should believe her?
Absolutely. It’s a very profound insight.
Rachel Dolezal is a woman – a white woman who says she’s a black woman. Of course Nobody believes her…
She might be a black woman by the one drop rule but no male is a woman period and can never become one no matter what.
It’s also a pretty brazen example of answering a different question. The question is what, not who. No one asked, “Who is a woman?” Telling us that a woman is whoever she says she is doesn’t tell us what a woman is. It certainly doesn’t tell us which people are women and therefore have the capacity to commit identity theft as an act of will. That’d be something on the level of X-Men mutant powers and definitely cause to reorganize nearly every security system ever conceived. Somehow trans activists manage to make the most sweeping, grandiose, world-altering claims without even realizing it.
The question was not ‘who’ but ‘what’ a woman is, so it fails to even attempt to answer.