Hang on a second
There’s an odd thing about Matt Dillahunty’s trans dogma though.
Ok so trans women are women in the sense of having (or being or living or some other verb) female gender, but not in the sense of being of the female sex. But in that case, what makes it ok for trans women “to access spaces where women and girls are undressing, such as changing rooms?” How does gender, a social construct, make that safe and reasonable?
And for that matter, how can someone who concedes that trans women are female according to gender but not according to sex also say flatly that trans women are women? How can it be that simple and self-evident and absolute? If women are women physically as well as socially while trans women are men physically but women socially, why are we called terfs for saying that that difference matters? If Dillahunty himself concedes that trans women are not physically women then why is he so abrupt and belligerent and absolutist that all the same they are women so shut the fuck up?
It doesn’t really make any sense. I mean even in his terms it doesn’t make any sense.
It can only make sense if you think religiously, and/or ignore all the evidence that the ‘trans’ activists are saying that gender overrides sex, and/or don’t care about men taking away the hard-won rights of women.
tigger, I think you’re right. Matt and the like think gender trumps sex. The only possible reason anyone can believe that is….. misogyny. Or, at the very least, sexism, if there’s a difference. He either doesn’t believe that women have always been and continue to be oppressed because of their sex or he believes it but thinks it doesn’t matter. At least, that it doesn’t matter as much as the warm feelings he personally gets from the adoration whenever he flat out tells women that their oppression doesn’t matter.
I’m not surprised any more. Men prioritise men over women. They get to feel righteous when they prioritise Trans-identified men, so double bonus for them.
It’s not their rights they’re giving away.
If commenters could stop posting what I’m trying to say more cogently and quicker than me, that would be great, thanks.
He has strong blinkers on this topic. I recall hearing him tear into* multiple religious callers making the a particular class of argument on his call-in show: I know Jesus / God / Allah etc. exist because I feel the presence, a real physical sensation rather than taking the word of the preacher / holy text. In those cases, he correctly points out that they are feeling something and then applying their own interpretation to that feeling. Matt, and atheists in general, dispute the interpretation.
Later, a caller pointed out that this same argument can be applied to trans people and the nonsense of ‘feeling female internally’; that the trans person is applying an interpretation to a feeling, and it is the interpretation that is being disputed. Matt’s response: we don’t dispute the claims made by a trans person’s inner landscape, because the claim being made is personal and has no consequence outside that person. A response that has numerous problems, I think you will agree: there are consequences outside of the individual which stem from that claim, for starters.
The caller began to point this out, but was drowned out with abuse – terf, bigot, transphobe, fuckhead etc. etc. and then hung up on. The man has been on that kind of power trip for years, it’s basically his brand, and now he has free license to run wild with it.
*Incidental observation: people that are intentionally ‘the guy that forcefully shouts down nonsense’ in a debate/discussion frequently turn out to be arseholes. I’m kicking myself for only realising this recently.
But if he says gender is a social construct, he has already given up the ship on trans participation in women’s sport.
According to one Twitter thread, Dillahunty is living with a transwoman.
I agree, Naif. No amount of yelling at women is going to protect him from a ‘trans’ Twitter mob now.
According to a lot of Twitter threads actually.
I’ve seen atheists defend “gender is more important than sex” on the basis of the mind takes precedence over the body. Not in terms of mind/body dualism, but more like Stephen Hawking being a giant among men despite his disability. The brain is “who you are.” Those who believe that “women”is a sexed-based term are therefore equivalent to religious believers who deny the significance of the brain in favor of souls.
In other words, it’s slip-sliding dualism:
Our brains are physical.
We are our minds = we are our brains.
The rest of our physical body is subordinate to our brain-based identity. (Brain > Body)
Men & Women are brain-based sexual identities.
The reproductive system is subordinate to brain-based sexual identities.
Brain-based sexual identities = gender identity.
Trans people are the gender they know they are.
Gender> Sex.
Therefore:TWAW & TMAM.
Skeptics and atheists who support this are certain that brain studies will show that being transgender is a neurological condition (a difference, not disability.)
Sastra @ #10, that was pretty much my reasoning when I believed that I was trans. Hanging around with GC feminists and others who pointed out the flaw in my reasoning (largely down to misunderstanding… well, everything) meant that I was able to see that gender is a set of behaviours expected of, and imposed upon, us from birth based on our sex and regardless of our personality.
It’s not innate that female people will want to obey the particular suite of behaviours labelled ‘feminine’ in the society in which we are born; and some women, particularly lesbian women and those of us on the autistic spectrum, don’t even understand the rules, let alone be able to internalise them. We’ll rebel, we’ll not understand or accept the ‘reasons’ put forward for why we should dress and behave in particular ways, and far too many of us fall for that list and believe ourselves to have ‘male brains’ and therefore be trans because, as an explanation, it’s very, very hard to see where that list is being economical with the truth.
@tigger_the_wing:
Skeptical atheists who accept trans doctrine — which presumably includes Dillahunty— wil often argue that their use of the word “gender” does NOT involve sexist stereotypes or anything of the sort. Instead, gender is an inner sense or expectation of being male or female — something in the brain equivalent to a sense of where your hands are. Trans people are often Gender Non-Conforming for their own gender, so that a male can be a masculine woman, and a female an effeminate man. That’s part of the reason they think accepting trans people as the “gender they identify as” undermines “gender roles.”
In practice, though, they aren’t really separated, as you report. And when it comes to children they’re all about the gender roles.
Usually. I ran across one woman, a GC mother of a boy who claimed to be a trans girl, who reported that her son agreed that boys and girls had no special nature, liked cars and “boy toys” himself, but kept insisting he was really a girl. Not sure how that came about, though I suspect some school lessons on how “trans isn’t about stereotypes” had some influence.
@learie #4
LOL. Yah, me too.
Sastra @ #12 (sorry for the earlier fumble on your name), one of my grandsons spent a whole year insisting that his real name was Leon. It isn’t, and he knows nobody by that name. My brother insisted he was a tiger, and would roar his protests that yes, he was too a tiger through floods of tears when we told him he wasn’t. Children try on different personas (especially the kids who read a lot), and test their parents to see what is, and isn’t, reality. The absolute worst thing we can do for these kids is agree with them, contrary to what the predatory ‘trans’ industry would have us believe.
tigger, when I was a kid, I thought I was adopted. Never mind how much I looked like my father, and have my mother’s eyes. I felt like an outcast, and was sure I was an orphan they adopted and decided they didn’t like much. It probably didn’t help that my sisters frequently told me I was adopted. I wasn’t. And there isn’t anything wrong with being adopted, but since I wasn’t, there was no reason for my parents to go along with that.
I suppose now they would go out and get some legal paperwork to formally adopt me because I identified as adopted?
tigger, some might say that your parents’ failure to get surgery for your brother to more physically resemble a tiger was horribly oppressive – conversion therapy, no less – and it’s a shame that he couldn’t find a fur family online to adopt him away from them.
I hope your brother is well, and has come to accept his bipedalism and other dysphoria-producing elements of his species.