The consequences of “rethinking” the category of “woman”
Eliza speaks the truth.
For the sake of the Twitter haters I’ll just arrange the rest of what she said as an essay.
Gender identity problematizes, denounces, and confuses what women need to make clear: Our sex matters.
Women’s healthcare depends on the recognition of sex difference on the part of medical providers, scientific researchers, health communicators, and patients.
Gender identity trades clear language and targeted research into how sex differences affect health and medical care in exchange for “non-prostate-havers” and medical records that don’t even record the patient’s (objective, unchangeable) sex.
To organize politically in our own interests, women must be able to define ourselves as a sex class and focus our time and energy on issues that affect women on the basis of sex.
Feminism is not and cannot be the movement for the liberation of “all marginalized people” or it will fail to meet the unique needs of women and girls. There are many worthy causes in the world but it’s OK for one movement to focus exclusively on women and girls.
Trans activism demands that women redefine ourselves in a way that cuts sex out of the picture altogether. When women are redefined as feminine stereotypes, rather than female humans, the constituency and targets of advocacy change.
Under gender identity ideology, the ways that sex matters to women’s lives becomes not just unfashionable but unspeakable. But the inequalities and injustices women and girls face on the basis of sex don’t go away just because we’re not supposed to talk about them anymore.
When women have to constantly defend our decision to focus on the rights of women and girls, that saps time and energy that could have gone elsewhere: to fighting for abortion access and paid maternity leave in the US, curbing sex-trafficking, preventing child marriage…
The consequences of “rethinking” the category of “woman,” as Judith Butler so coolly puts it, are clear: gender identity is a contrived attack on the rights, ability to organize, & very language of the People Previously Known As Women. It makes *everything* we need to do harder.
That is a great post. We Twitter toleraters join the haters in thanking you for formatting it for easy reading.
Re medical records: I saw a post recently about a trans-identified female who was upset by the doctor asking her if she was pregnant, thus failing to affirm her male identity. It off course invites immediate comparison with the trans-identified female who actually was pregnant, and who lost the baby and precious time because her documentation and she herself did not make clear that she was female. Affirmation is dangerous.
“We need to rethink the category of woman” – but only an off-hand mention of men, revealing a difference in pressure there.
Minor quibble: I would go with ‘confounds’.
Thanks for posting this. It’s not that I hate twitter, it’s that I didn’t like how I am easily consumed by it. It’s not Twitter, it’s me.
“Non-prostate havers”. Geesh. I thought “uterus havers” and “cervix owners” were bad enough. At least we were being defined by our own parts (which some of us no longer have), but now we are being defined by not having the same parts as men. “Non-men” is a dastardly construction.
I never get sick of pointing out equivocation.*
Such as on “meaning”. There is a difference between a change in something’s meaning and a change in something’s meaning. That is, what something means it’s separate from what it means.
.
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*Actually, I’m very sick of it.
I am a notorious twitter hater, so thanks. :D Occasionally there is someone on twitter, like EM, that makes a lot of sense. Disgraceful how a tenured professor can be so wrong about so many things. I know it happens, but it’s still a disgrace. Butler has lost all objectivity in this ’cause’ and if you ask me, all credibility. Just when those of us more sensible folks thought she was done making an ass out of herself back in the day, here comes the trans cult. The category of women has a clearly defined boundary, and it cannot be rhetorically, politically, or propagandistically be redefined by people who wish it so, it is divided on the basis of sex, that is all. It’s not possible to redefine sex categories by simply calling them socially constructed gender categories. It sure doesn’t stop them from trying though. I don’t know if it’s a mental dysfunction or plain old dishonesty about our collective reality that fuels this bullshit, but it seems like a lot of people smarter, or more ‘educated’ than I have bought into it. The category of women includes trans ‘men’, ‘non-binaries’ that were born female, and women of all stripes no matter what they think (or ‘feel like’) they are. Men are not women — biology says so, not wishful thinking. It is akin to religious cultism of the worst kind.
As soon as someone uses the anti-women slur, and acronym ‘terf’, it becomes obvious that they have headed down that rabbit hole. Feminism is not completely trans exclusionary, it excludes the category of men. Trans ‘women’ are men, so yes they are excluded, and a more indulged group of (somewhat serreptitious) women haters there never were. Paradoxical, hating women and wanting to be one, but there it is. Why should feminism fight for the rights of men? The more one thinks about it, the more absurd it becomes. Butler misses some very basic things about our biological existence in her postmodern, overpoliticized, twisted mind.
Also, I saw that Butler uses the ridiculous collective pronouns they/them and has now become more than one person. Well it/whatever sucks like a black hole if you ask me, and it/whatever doesn’t realize the damage it/whatever is doing to women and girls, nor does it/whatever seem to care in the slightest.
And the woke will still know who can safely be dismissed as Karens and told to STFU.
How different is Eliza’s clear, passionate writing to Butler’s occultist legerdemain.
Holms:
I’d have gone with “fucks up”.
Ah. As my English teacher mother used to put it “In the Anglo Saxon…”