Definitions matter
Again.
First – why is UN Women, or the social media officer of UN Women, talking about this at all? What’s it got to do with women? What’s it got to do with women’s issues? What’s it got to do with the reasons women need a UN branch?
Second – for the billionth time – none of that is true.
It’s not a simple truth that “trans people are who they say they are.” It depends on what they say. Some trans people describe being trans accurately, and some insist that they literally are the other sex, despite the fact that the word “trans” means they are not.
And especially, the witless announcement in the tweet is laughably far from the truth.
How people choose to define themselves is no one’s business.
Oh really. So if I choose to define myself as US Secretary of State it’s no one’s business? Even if I act accordingly, and try to make my way to “my” office at the State Department? If I choose to define myself as the driver of the bus I’m on and try to eject the person usurping the driver’s seat, it’s no one’s business? If I choose to define myself as your spouse, it’s no one’s business? If I choose to define myself as someone you owe eleven billion dollars it’s no one’s business?
It’s just complete absurd childish nonsense to claim that how people define themselves is no one’s business. That’s true only in instances where it doesn’t matter – how we define ourselves in our heads, the content of our fantasies, the games we play with willing others.
And yes, it matters to women if men start “defining themselves” as women and insisting that means we have to welcome them into our toilets and changing rooms and feminism. It is our business.
“I consider myself a supporting of trans rights: I don’t think that trans people should be denied housing, employment, etc. because of their trans status.” — Many people
“Fuck off, you’re no supporter, you’re a TERF. You hate trans people and want them to die!” — Trans Rights Activists
Especially if – in order to make it true that “trans people are who they say they are” – the definition of “woman” has to be changed so it no longer includes most of the people for whom the word was originally coined. Even more so if every right that the people formerly known as “women” have managed to wrestle from the patriarchy is supposed to go with the name rather than the actual people and will henceforth apply to men who prefer to be called “woman”/”she” instead of the people for whom it was originally intended.
As other women have figured out, if it’s “nobody’s business how we define ourselves” then we can all define ourselves as transgender. I’m a Trans Woman if I know that’s who I am despite being unfortunate enough to have been born with a uterus and vagina. Very distressing when female hormones kick in naturally.
I demand my spot on LGBTQ panels and organizations; I demand to be treated at Gender Clinics; I demand equal consideration as the most marginalized minority of a marginalized minority. I’ve a woman’s mind and identity trapped in a man’s body trapped in a woman’s body BECAUSE I SAID SO THAT’S WHY.
Some women have written this as a joke (look up ‘circumgender’) but I’m wondering if it’s a way to get around some of this definitional chaos. Answer: no, because the magic of self-definition only applies to men. ‘Trans men are men’ to the contrary, no one takes trans men seriously…because everyone knows they’re women, and no one cares about women.
Trans people are people
But Emma even says they are trans people, so she is identifying them herself. How can you even talk about trans people without acknowledging that they are trans people? Which means not biological men, and certainly not biological women. So if Emma says trans people are what they say they are, then she must mean that if they say they are trans people, then they are. I don’t see a problem with that. Truth claims are tricky that way aren’t they. So if a trans woman says she is an actual woman, then that is an invalid truth claim because she, as a trans woman, starts from the foundation of her transhood, which means that if she’s an actual woman, there would be nothing to argue about. So in short, trans women are trans women. Problem solved. Actual women don’t argue about whether they are women or not, so people who argue about whether they are women or not are definitely not women.
In world o’ reality, yes, but in woke world that’s not how it works. Making sense isn’t part of the plan.
In a much more positive comment, I saw an OB/GYN billboard today that announced that they are a leader in dealing with women’s health problems, and had the woman symbol without the superimposed man symbol. Guess trans hasn’t taken over all the things in central Nebraska yet.
I was accused of being woke once by a young person. I said no, I’m observant and nitpicky and that’s not the same thing. I don’t think being ‘woke’ is simply a matter of being aware of societal issues anymore, so I was mildly offended (but I got over it because I think he was trying to pay me a compliment of sorts).
I started a long, academic, pretentious-sounding reply in Miscellany to something that appeared in a link to that other place, but got lost in the weeds and deleted it. From the ashes of that reply, though, I’d just like to point out the following: even the most dyed-in-the-wool, “sex is a social construct” TRAs implicitly admit that there’s a need for a label for the category of people with female reproductive anatomy; that’s why they come up with circumlocutions like “uterus-haver” or “menstruator”. Of course, there’s a perfectly good word for that class, but that word also evokes other traits, some biological (primary and secondary), some cultural, some psychological (that doesn’t mean that everyone we label with that term has all those traits, but this is where I start sounding academic and pretentious; just look up Lakoff on prototype theory). But TRAs have decided that for whatever reason reproductive anatomy isn’t a legitimate marker for that class; that cultural and psychological traits override the biological traits.
And so they accuse gender-critical people of having an unhealthy obsession with genitals, and yet by labeling someone as “trans” (or AFAB, for that matter), you are making a statement about the reproductive anatomy that person was born with. You cannot get away from anatomy, no matter how you try to stretch the language. The very existence of a category of transwoman entails categorization based on reproductive anatomy, and reproductive anatomy is a fact that has a profound effect on how lives are lived.
WaM, I suppose Humpty Dumpty was the first transgender egg then:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
J.A.,
Yeah, that post at the other place seemed to be taking a Humpty Dumpty approach to language, which surprised me because the person in question is usually smart about linguistics.
Maroon, yes I think so too. The fact that trans categories are divided into male, female, and even non-binary, whether reproductively potent (as categorized) or not, implies the capacity and potential for the biological reproductive processes. No matter how you slice it, it boils down to biological sex, and the confirmation or denial of such, as it pertains to traditional definitions based on procreation. I think that if they want to create their own esoteric language to talk about their own difficulties in being recognized as whatever, and delineating the baoundaries about what and who fits into this new societal faction, then that’s fine, but don’t try to hijack feminism, gay rights, civil rights, or try to redefine scientifically known facts. Just make your world the way you want it and let those of us who are ouside the boundaries be aware of it, and how we can make it better for you to not feel left out of the human equation. But the stuff that’s happening, and some of the extremists who are making the most noise are not helping forward that agenda. Far be it for me to understand their experience, but I think there’s a better and more effective way if they could find a few intelligent and articulate people to express it for them, instead of the shouty, stupid shits who maliciously attack people like JKR because of hearsay and shallow, herd mentality propaganda put forward by immature, angry trolls.
twiliter,
Back when I used to haunt that other place, I naively thought that there must be some middle ground–that there are issues which affect both trans people and women, but also issues that affect only trans people, and issues that affect only women. I never actually expressed that thought there, in part because I’m not in either group, but I left there soon after it dawned on me that if I did I’d be branded a TERF or transphobe.
#14 That’s really the only right way to approach these issues in my opinion, but it looks like most of the arguments (with a few brilliant and notable exceptions) are being held at the shallow end of the pool, so to speak.
#14, one issue that comes to mind about the middle-ground is the one of whether transgender women have a competitive advantage in women’s sports. What I’ve observed is that for trans activists, to admit there might be such an advantage would mean that transgender women aren’t truly women, period, end of story, and that is not acceptable to them at all. So they offer rationalizations such as hormone levels being an equalizer and little else, and argue in bad faith if they even bother to argue at all and instead just repeat TWAW. If you don’t acquiesce to the brute force of that assertion, you’re guilty of hating transgender people. No admission of anything less than TWAW is ever acceptable.
J.A., so much that. And then…they claim that rejecting transwomen is like rejecting black women or tall women or women who eat macaroni, or any other group of women they can find…but particularly black women, because that emphasizes that all rad fems are white, or something (and, of course, all these white middle-class to wealthy transmen don’t have white or middle class privilege any more because, well, trans).
And they won’t admit that (1) the allowed testosterone levels are higher than those of women; (2) no one has demonstrated that you lose all your advantages when you lower your testosterone (quite the opposite; you still remain a huge size and muscle mass over your female opponents); or (3) the most egregious failure to acknowledge of all, that they are doing everything they can to remove any limitations on participating as women, so they can maintain all their male hormones, their penis, their male entitlement, their male privilege, while competing with women who do not have those. Disingenuous, no?
Yeah, back when I thought the TRAs were being reasonable, I always thought to myself that it wasn’t like they were asking for men to compete in women’s sports, or for lesbians (or straight men) to sleep with them.
Yeah, I was naive.
iknklast #17
I wonder what would happen if real women decided to play this game — if there are now XX women and “XY women”, in the same way there are Italian women and Canadian women, why can’t we have a club or sport or organization JUST FOR the XX women. In the USA, it is legal to have private clubs and events for Italians or Canadians or Italian women or Canadian women.
The “XY women” could not squawk because if the club is merely only for women who share a certain characteristic (blind, ethnicity, chromosomes, etc.) then it is not really discriminating against the TIMs. You can’t join a club for blind women if you are not blind, so why wouldn’t it be allowed for XX women to have a club that only women who have had the test and can show they are part of that group can join?
Just wondering.