Guest post: Being a woman is not a performative activity
Originally a comment by maddog1129 on Differences.
What’s this “cis women” business? There’s no reason for “cis” to describe what we used to call “women” until very recently. Your forced labeling of women as “cis” women doesn’t even apply to many women you are trying to shove into that category. To the extent gender ideologists have provided a definition, “cis” as a descriptor of women is a “gender identity,” not a sex. Some women (sex) “identify with” or, more incoherently, “identify as,” or are comfortable with the bundle of gender stereotypes arbitrarily ascribed to women in some culture. News flash: since at least the 1970s, many feminist women have been pointing out that the social constructs of gender roles and stereotypes imposed on women are trappings and shackles of subordination, with no necessary application to any individual woman. Many feminists reject the notion of “gender” out of hand, and specifically do not “identify” with or as the bonds of oppression created for them. There is therefore a large swath of women (sex) who don’t have a gender identity at all. We are not “cis.” It’s not for you gender ideologists to impose a label onto others against their will.
The word “women” refers to adult humans who are female. It’s a word for the sex of the people spoken of.
BY DEFINITION, only a man (sex) can be a trans woman. That’s what the term “trans” signifies: he is a man and not a member of the sex class of women.
You WISH that the words “women” and “men” had “evolved” to slough off any connection to sex, but they haven’t, despite your fervent and desperate efforts to force such a change.
Sex is real. Sex matters. There are distinct differences between women and men, and these differences have profound effects on women (the sex), including SEXual assault, male pattern violence against women and girls, the SEXual risk of pregnancy, as well as needs peculiar to women, for women’s privacy, dignity, and safety. That’s why many facilities, spaces, services, etc., are segregated by sex, not by “gender identity.”
As much as you WISH there weren’t significant differences between women, and trans-identified men, where segregation is by sex, the differences are profound.
Men may conduct themselves so as to appear feminine. They are free to do so to their hearts’ content. They might be able in time to establish that adopting the trappings of femininity is a “valid” way for a man to live. In that sense, they might be “valid,” but it’s got nothing to do with women, or with what it is to be a member of the sex class called women. No matter what the man does to himself, he cannot change his sex. He will never be a woman. Being a woman is not a performative activity. It is a biological fact. A trans woman might “deserve” some recognition for creating a different way for men to be men, but no amount of effort, performance, wishing, sacrifice, or hardship will ever mean that a man “deserves” to be “recognized” as the sex he is not. To this, women say “No.”
“Trans women are men.”
That’s the truth. Your mantra is a lie. Trans women are NOT women. Not ever. Repeating a lie a million times doesn’t make it true. It’s still a lie.
If the immortal GWF Hegel were still around, he would certainly disagree. The IDEA of a ‘trans woman’ immediately calls into being the IDEA of its dialectical opposite, which is the idea of a ‘non-trans woman;’ ie a normal, everyday, common or garden woman: genetically XX and physically endowed accordingly, whatever other inclinations they might have.
XY people (ie men) who want everyone to accept them as XX (ie women) can generally persuade themselves on that issue faster than they can persuade anyone else.
@Omar,
That seems a bit beside the point. The idea of a fake woman, may immediatly call into being the idea of the non-fake woman. That doesn’t imply that we need to express this non-fakeness when talking about women. Certainly not when applying this non-fake label is used to imply that ordinary women have this non-fakeness as part of their identitiy.
@ #2:
The category ‘women’ in order to have meaning requires the opposite category ‘non-women’ in order to have any meaning. Where you go with it after that s up to you.
But always lurking in the background behind the fake woman is the non-fake one, sure as God made little green apples.
No it doesn’t.
Sorry, OB. I disagree. eg light vs non-light (ie ‘dark’ in everyday parlance.) Etc. Otherwise, the category ‘women’ would be boundless, and would have to include everything in the Universe.
(Come to think of it, there’s probably a song in that. ;-)
Omar, it seems that is only trivially true, just as it is trivially true that there are bananas and non-bananas, i.e., everything that is not a banana. But we don’t need a category of non-banana to understand what a banana is. Even if there is no non-banana anywhere, we can still understand banana. The non-banana then would be an empty set.
There are few issues that require us to put a label like ‘cis’ on it to understand it. We don’t need that for bananas, or automobiles, or donkeys, or anything else. Just because there is a category of ‘women’ doesn’t mean we need to know what the opposite is, or mention it, to understand and recognize the category.
If it is trivially true, it is not worth mentioning. We have women, we have men, and we have people with DSDs, who are either a woman or a man, but the category is less obvious. We need the ability to talk about women without having to talk about men, or trans-identified males, who ARE NOT WOMEN, and therefore do not need to have a word within “women” to understand them. And while trans-women are not women, they have a perfectly good indicator of what they are – men – and we don’t need any additional modifiers.
I agree with iknklast.
My point was just that having a “category” doesn’t require having its opposite. It’s not clear that there are opposites of all categories, apart from just adding “not-” to every category. Women:men in a sense make a pair of opposites, but that doesn’t mean all categories do.
For the pitfalls that arise from thinking about the category of non-X (for X=Banana, Transwoman, Raven, …) see Hempel’s Paradox.
male and female aren’t opposites in any meaningful sense, any more than ravens are the opposite of shrikes. different is not the same as opposite. Man and woman are two different categories, but they are both in the category of human. Are they simultaneously opposites and the same? Or are categories not about opposites? Are we having a nice little mental wank?
Hmm. They are the opposite sex, at least, and that does matter for some purposes. Haven’t we been arguing that that is meaningful all this time?
OB @ #8:
There no category IMHO that can include everything, apart from the one called ‘everything.’ By definition, that one has no boundary and no limit. And the opposite or ‘non-everything’ in this context is that which goes by the name of ‘nothing.’ Boundary and limit is all it has got, with nothing inside.
From my understanding, I think that on this matter, good old GWF Hegel was right. At the instant the idea of A is formulated, it calls into existence the idea of its opposite, which we can call non-A. You can’t have the one without the other.
Are women and men ‘opposites?’ Clearly, there is a need for those separate categories if we are to have meaningful human communication, though as we know, the trans lobby wants to stretch the definition of ‘women’ to include whoever wants to be included in that category, and so on till the non-cows come non-home.
Why?
How do you know?
“Woman” and “man” aren’t ideas, they’re nouns. Are you saying every noun calls into existence its opposite? Why would that be?
That’s one reason I chose bananas; it isn’t obvious to me that there is the opposite of a banana. There are apples and oranges, but they are not opposites, they are just different.
OB @ #13::
The basis of each of those words (nouns) is a distinct isolatable idea. The word is the vehicle that conveys the idea, the ‘meaning’ of that word, from one human brain to another. But also, the idea can only exist as an entity in its own right, and be used in communication between individuals, precisely because it does not include the whole Universe, present, past, and future. An idea without a boundary would be like a picture done in one colour, and without a frame, and extending to infinity in all four dimensions. In other words, mentally impossible and inconceivable. Chinese, to me, is mainly words sans ideas; though I do know a few words of Mandarin.
An individual’s identity is also arguably just such an idea, and is conveyed through use of a ‘proper’ noun. One thing that I find fascinating is the fact that pet animals can not only respond to their own names, but also show that they understand the names of other animals, and not necessarily individuals of the same species. So, in their worlds, their own ‘speech’ is much more restricted than is their speech recognition. (I read somewhere that Australian blue heeler cattle dogs, a breed renowned for its intelligence, have shown through tests that they can recognise around 250 words of English. But of course, they cannot themselves ‘say’ anything like that number. Though I did once regularly engage in friendly conversational barking with a west highland terrier, now sadly deceased, that I and my dear wife once owned. The neighbours must have wondered what the hell was going on.)
iknklast @ #14:
Different, in this instance, because they are not bananas; and recognisably so. We can thus set up two categories: bananas and non-bananas. Covers all fruits, vegetables, animals, other plants; as well as rocks, planets, stars, etc, etc.
That…doesn’t answer the question I asked.
At this point, you have one category that is too broad to be workable.
Besides, trans-woman is not the opposite of woman, and it is not a subset of women, so having a word that means the opposite of trans-woman would not be cis-woman, it would be woman. Because trans-women are men.
Why should we consider woman and trans-woman to be opposites? The ‘opposite’ of something is only clear with the simplest of concepts. We can say left is the opposite of right, but what is the opposite of ‘left hand’? Is it ‘right hand’, ‘right foot’, ‘any part of the body that isn’t the left hand’ or ‘any element in the universe that isn’t a left hand’?
Left hand is a simple concept but already its ‘opposite’ is not obvious. The opposite of trans-woman could conceivably be ‘trans-man’, or ‘trans-girl’, or trans-(non-human species)’, etc, etc, but what would be the use of the concept?
Definitions exist because we know that not all things are alike. The opposites concept doesn’t help us. If we define a banana as ‘everything that is not (not a banana), we get nowhere. We need to actually define what it is. In doing so, we implicitly accept that everything else is not a banana. But we already knew that, that’s why we felt a definition was required in the first place.
One final thought, sex is a binary, so there is an obvious opposite. The opposite of female is male. But, the definition of ‘woman’ is not simple. The opposite of woman (adult human female) could be girl (non-adult human female), boy, (non-adult human male), man (adult human male), any not yet fully mature male non-human, anything that is not an adult human female (including bicycles and football stadiums). There comes a point where the ‘opposite’ is no longer a useful concept and clearly not necessary for a definition. It does not help us understand what the thing we’re trying to define actually is.
@ #17:
‘Trans-women’ = men; ie men pretending to being women. They want to be accepted as genuine women, but there are numerous well-known obstacles for them in that quest. Nobody is obliged to go along with their bullshit.
But the idea of ‘cis-women’ sort of validates, at least in their eyes, the idea of ‘trans-women.’ I look at it in the light of Gestalt psychology, which divides the perceptible reality into field vs ground. eg as in the image at the link below. “The Rubin vase illusion, where it is ambiguous which part is the figure and which the ground.” You can see the image as a vase, or as two people facing one another. And while one cannot see both simultaneously, the one arguably validates the other. The trans-wackers are trying to market a similar illusion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figure%E2%80%93ground_(perception)
Blah blah blah. You could just admit you were talking complete nonsense @ 3 and leave it at that. These pseudo-profundities are irritating.