When we say
They’re floundering. They’re backtracking. They’re seeking any port in a storm. They’re resorting to deepities. They’re contradicting themselves.
First of all, when they say “trans women are women” yes they damn well are saying they’re the same as women (what they call “cis” women). That’s the whole entire point and always has been. Rejecting it has been and is the basis of labeling people transphobic and hounding them out of jobs and circles of friends. Of course that’s what they’re saying; if it weren’t, we wouldn’t have disputed their claims!
Second, blah blah blah – yes every person is different, it’s all so special and magical, holy personality is holy, yadda yadda, thanks for the profound insight into human whatsits. But that’s not what you mean by trans, and it never has been.
If it’s not what you mean, what does “trans women are valid” mean? Valid in what sense? They’ve paid the right sum into their accounts? Their photos match their faces? Their fingerprints check out? What?
It means what it’s meant all along, the same old gibberish: “trans women are women.” If that doesn’t mean trans women are [the same as] women, you’ve waited a hell of a long time to clarify.
In short, you’re just bullshitting.
Once again “assigned female at birth” comes to the rescue:
• “Cis woman₁” = Biological female.
• “Cis woman₂” = Person who was arbitrarily assigned female at birth and identifies as a woman.
• The bailey: Trans women are the same as cis women₁ (and should therefore be granted unrestricted access to all spaces reserved for the latter).
• The motte: Trans women are not the same as cis women₂ (the only difference being the part about being assigned female at birth).
What about those trans women who have explicitly and repeatedly argued that when they transed they changed sex and were not only truly women, but better women than those dried up Terf hags? What about those many many trans allies who would scream and shout that TWAW FULL STOP? This does feel a lot like someone whose bladder has leaked a bit as they’ve realised they have said and supported some really dumb shit. Now they want a slightly more defensible position.
Hahaha nicely crude way of putting it.
I apologise to all for my occasional crudity. I’m just finding EVERYTHING so awful at the moment words are failing me. Luckily you lot tend to have them.
Concepts of womanhood and manhood do indeed vary over culture and time. But “concepts” of male and female haven’t budged an inch. (Except, perhaps, in a tiny handful of complex fringe cases of genetic, chromosomal or hormone-related sex development anomalies.) If the trans movement was just about changing the culturally-imposed “concepts” of “gender expression” — breaking the stereotypes associated with the sexes in order to liberate the sexes — it would be fine.
But the trans movement is the exact opposite of that: it’s about smashing the biological definitions of the sexes in order to better force them into the culturally imposed stereotypes. A rational person might say, “The culture dictates that skirts are for women only, but it’s stupid to let biological sex dictate which clothes anyone can wear so we should change the culture.” But trans activists are saying, “The culture dictates that skirts are for women only, therefore anyone who likes wearing a skirt must be a woman, and we’ve got drugs and surgeries available to fix any young skirt wearers whose bodies are terrible biological mistakes.”
And deep down, it’s not really about stereotypes at all: the transgender movement is only involved with gender expression on a secondary level. The trans activists’ primary objective is to circumvent their biological sex for the sake of circumventing their biological sex. The gender expression trans-identifying people adopt — crossdressing, etc. — is a means to that end. Trans-identifying males know full-well that humans are hard-wired to react differently to male and female bodies in the context of human sexuality, and they’re trying to elicit in others or in themselves the physiological sexual reactions that are associated with the female sex. Gay men who go trans want to be seen as attractive to straight men; straight men who go trans want to imagine themselves as sexually attractive… to themselves. In the case of females insisting they’re male or “nonbinary,” they’re often trying to elude the physiological sexual reactions associated with their own sex. Women who go trans want to get out of men’s sexual field of view altogether.
Those who crossdress or gender-bend simply for the sake of having gender-bending tastes or personality traits generally don’t have anything to do with the transgender movement. Boy George dressed plenty femininely, and he never claimed to be a woman, because his primary aim was simply to express his feminine personality freely. It was not primarily to do with sex, therefore he had nothing to do with the transgender movement. Same goes for Annie Lennox: she never claimed to be a man because she was actually doing what the transgender movement only pretends to be doing: she was simply liberating herself and her sex from the gender stereotypes that were and are culturally imposed on women.
This is beyond true. That is what they always mean, and it’s what they’ve always meant. That’s what every redefinition has been intended to obscure. From the moment they insisted that to speak of men and women rather than male and female was to speak of something called “gender”, which itself wasn’t actually gender in any previously understood sense, they were just trying to find a way to say they were the same as women in a way that people wouldn’t notice that’s what was said. Because they were inventing a new, infinitely malleable category under which they could be exactly the same as women. It’s just a hop-skip-jump from there to smashing this new “gender” into gender and thus into sex.
That’s always the game plan. Invent some metric by which they are the same, then erase the boundaries of the metric. It’s rank sophistry, but sophistry works on most people.
Because the people …
… are retarded.
If this had been the basis of trans activism, we’d have been in a much better place than we are now. Rowling’s famous “This is not a drill” post in defence of Maya Forestater would not have happened because it would not have been necessary. Now, as far as that better place is concerned, you can’t get there from here. Not with the current shape, form, and leadership of gender ideology and trans activism.
It’s tragic that they decided to fight reality, going full Lysenko and taking political power in order to punish those who refused to knuckle under. It has been instructive to learn just how fragile and fallible the institutions of liberal democracy are, as one after another, they willingly surrendered themselves to the authoritarian movement to enforce the lie that humans can change sex, knowing full well (because they were told before, during, and after this surrender) that those who would suffer most would be women and children. It barely slowed them down. As a consequence it will take years to undo the damage that the rush to embrace trans ideology caused, assuming that we can first stop furthed damage being done. That is yet to happen.
There have been hints and omens that the tide is turning or that things are turning around, but sometimes it looks more like the wheels are spinning and things are standing still. Trump’s “stopped clock” correctness on sex and gender comes as such a tiny speck of seeming reason amidst an avalanche of of fascist horror, that it can’t be considered any kind of victory (providing yet another unasked-for lesson in the impermanence and tenuousness of the liberal-democratic mechanisms of government we have counted on to protect us from people like Trump). We’re not out of his yet.
In short: “Woman” doesn’t mean anything (except when it’s applied to men, at which point it does become meaningful and very important indeed).