Whilst it is unpleasant for women to be stalked and derided for their appearance whilst at a female lunch ,it does serve a valuable purpose of shining some sunlight on the pure misogyny of India Willoughby .
This exchange really underscores how the trans* are only concerned with superficialities like appearance and minor behavior (do you like trains or dolls?), and are totally oblivious to objective reality.
Seriously, I never understood liking dolls. They do nothing. They just sit there. There is very little you can do with them, though I will admit I found things. Throwing them in a bathtub full of water proved to be fun, but didn’t last. throwing them out the window of my room could be done over and over again, though not if it was glass or bisque (especially since my room was on the second floor). I didn’t try setting them on fire, because I was a good girl and didn’t play with matches. My son persuaded some of the girls in his day care to hold a funeral for Barbie, and they were in the process of digging a hole when I got there to pick him up.
It’s a cargo cult notion of womanhood. If you perform the right rituals — hair, clothes, makeup, head tilt — that should get you the same results as the women you’re imitating.
Almost as revealing as some of the selfies we have seen by TIMs supposed to “prove” their “womanhood” by the degree to which they have succeeded in sculpting themselves into some grotesque, porn-inspired male jerk-off fantasy. But remember, nobody has done more to combat gender stereotypes than trans people
I could probably list a few ways I can see incoherence in genderism analytically (by reason) and empirically (by observation). This incident of reality confusing Willoughby is a good example for my empirical list.
I don’t get it.
It’s easy to get if we define a woman as an adult human female. Then we can see the reality in the photos coherently.
My guess is IW may be a victim here of the idiotic way TRAs think of the Gender Critical. More than once I’ve been told that GC people want everyone to follow traditional divisions of masculine & feminine behavior and dress. When I’ve protested, I get hit with the following “evidence:”
1) “GC are biological determinists/ biological essentialists/ gender essentialists. Therefore, their own doctrine demands that behavior is determined by genes so they reject that gender stereotypes are culturally constructed.”
2.) “In order to police bathrooms & keep transwomen out, GC viciously turn on any woman who looks too masculine. It’s notoriously hard to tell sex, so all sorts of cis women with short hair, baggy clothes, etc. are being insulted and attacked by the GC. The GC don’t care, therefore this is fitting right into their traditionalist agenda.”
That last one gets trotted out a lot. IW doesn’t strike me as the sharpest knife in the drawer, it’s probably that, the first one, or both.
Sastra, it sounds like in #1 they’re going into absolutist mode. Suggesting that our sexual characteristics (penis, vulva, uterus, testicles, etc) are biologically determined does not mean we think that behavior (the way we act in the world) is biologically determined.
I’m sure you know that; I’m not correcting you, I’m agreeing with you. TAs are either unable or unwilling to understand the difference between biological reality and biological essentialism.
So, this has been bugging me for a while, so I’ll take this opportunity to ask: doesn’t defining “woman” as “adult human female” just push the question back to “what is (a) female”? I don’t see how it’s the knock-down, so-obvious-you-have-to-be-dumb-or-dishonest-not-to-get-it answer that it’s typically presented as.
But unlike “woman”, “female” is used for any sexually dimorphous species to denote the sex that produces the larger gamete (I think I’ve got that right, but as someone recently said, I am not a biologist). We talk about female, not “women”, cats and cardinals and gingko trees, and we don’t have too much trouble recognizing that for most such species, sex is fixed (whether by genetics or early environment). Believe me, if you’ve ever been around a female gingko tree when it’s fruiting, you’d never forget it.
So of course the TRAs can try to push back on “what is a female”, but only if they’re willing to say that it’s different for humans than for other species. It’s not a knock-down argument, but it can be clarifying. (It clarified things for me back in my Pharyngula days, when Sastra or Lady Mondegreen or someone got piled on for making that argument.)
I don’t think you have to argue for humans being different to question the clarity and practicality of “the sex that produces the larger gamete” as a definition. You still can’t tell by looking at someone what size gametes they produce, or whether they produce any at all, so Dave Ricks’ assertion that this definition would allow us to say who in those photos is a woman is wrong. The answer to “why are these people welcome at this meeting and Willoughby is not” would not be “because we checked their gametes.” You run into similar problems with offering definitions based on specific body parts (what about women who have had hysterectomies, etc.). You may, of course, be able to make a guess that is accurate 95%+ of the time.
I’m not saying that if you can’t come up with a definition that is easily applicable with 100% certainty and no edge or indeterminate cases, then all bets are off and there either is no definition, or everyone gets to come up with their own definition, or the definition is “you are if you say you are.” Most definitions have flaws but remain useful, because life is complicated and you can’t make the perfect the enemy of the good.
I’m just saying that we should accept that there is some imprecision. When I hear “adult human female” being offered as a slogan, it sounds to me like the same kind of glib shibboleth as TWAW.
[Editing to add: cross-posted with Screechy @ 11, so this is largely beside the point.]
Screechy I don’t think it’s presented as a knock-down, so-obvious-you-have-to-be-dumb-or-dishonest-not-to-get-it answer, but as the ordinary answer, the standard answer, the corresponds to the known facts answer, the what we all knew until five minutes ago answer. It’s not an argument, it’s a definition. The trans dogma says we have to redefine “woman” and feminists say no we don’t.
IW doesn’t strike me as the sharpest knife in the drawer
I don’t think that he’s even the sharpest spoon. I’ve watched him attempting to put across the ‘trans’ point of view on TV, and he bullies the women so much (including any female presenter) that I’m now starting to suspect that he is being invited deliberately by secretly GC staff, as he is the worst possible ambassador for men pretending to be women.
I don’t recall who wrote the excellent comment here, but I think it’s relevant: we don’t police everything all the time, we don’t put police on every corner looking for car thieves, we don’t check whether every driver owns the car they are driving, but yet the laws prohibit car theft. Some clubs or facilities are only for employees or club members or “authorized personnel”, but often enough they are not checked all the time; the signs are there so they can kick people out, not so that they have universal compliance. Men have been prohibited from women’s spaces for a long time, and it was only policed when noticed or when someone complained, and that’s normal; we don’t usually check everyone.
We know what it means to be a club member. There may be good ways to tell who is a member: presence on a list, vouched for a known member, membership card. Those things help in vetting, but they do not themselves necessarily constitute club membership. Some clubs have an easier time than others restricting their events to members, because they can’t distinguish members well, but that doesn’t mean the event is really open to all. Some check membership cards; people can create fake membership cards, but that doesn’t make them actual club members.
The definition of sexes by production of gametes or “adult human male/female” are fine. Those are definitions. The other thing is how to we tell which person is female. India Willoughby is male, despite his claims; his arguments really amount to a claim that he is difficult to distinguish from most female people, not that he actually meets the perfectly reasonable definition of female.
The means of deciding medically that someone is male or female is also reasonably well settled: a preponderance of sex characteristics. Kathleen Stock covers this well in “Material Girls”. I don’t recall the exact details, but (I think) five characteristics, and presence of three (or was it four) of them is deemed sufficient. That covers almost all cases.
The difficulty faced here is for the casual non-medical observer to determine if someone is male or female. We are pretty good at doing that, and stereotyped methods of dress or grooming make it easier to tell, for those who conform, and harder to tell, for those who don’t. But that has little to do with the specific medical characteristics, and nothing to do with the definition.
So no, I don’t think we don’t need a better definition. We need something, but it isn’t a definition.
It’s all a clever disguise cAmouflaging a remarkable talent. Both Willoughby and Laurie Penny (among others) have been demonstrating alchemical powers that would have been the envy of the mages of old. They seem to have the ability, with little more than the recitation of a few words (or strokes of a keyboard/pokes at a screen), to instantly transform their brains into a material whose density approaches that of lead.
That would certainly go some way towards explaining all those tilted heads.
Dave Ricks’ assertion that this definition would allow us to say who in those photos is a woman is wrong.
But I did not assert that. My first sentence in my #6 was about incoherence in genderism, and my last sentence said, “we can see the reality in the photos coherently.”
Also from Screechy #11:
I’m just saying that we should accept that there is some imprecision.
Yes, and by coherence, I mean a lack of contradiction, which accepts imprecision. I was not sloganeering (as a substitute for argument), and I was not glib.
We don’t see anything like this from trans cult activists. Why? My guess is that it has something to do with their lack of love for their fellow human beings or themselves. The comraderie of this gathering is inspiring. We know who the good ones are. Hated by the trans cultists, yet having no hate for anyone. Outstanding. :)
I came across an article being lauded by the Genderists which made a huge point about GCs saying only “adult human FEMALE” instead of “adult female HUMAN.” Apparently this is some deep clue into our psyche and said something or other about how we’ve lost our humanity or can’t accept all of humanity or I forget what but it wasn’t good. So every now and then when the occasion arises I’ll say a woman is an adult female human, in case that is going to blow someone’s mind.
We don’t see anything like this from trans cult activists. Why?
My guess is that it has something to do with our not following a lot of TRA accounts.
Screechy, I had a professor who would see a cow in the field when we were out on field trips, and state it was a dog. When someone challenged him, he would ask how they knew it was a cow. Everything they said could apply equally well to a dog, except barking, and since the cow wasn’t making any noise, it wasn’t a good diagnostic.
Imprecision is the reality in the world of biology. We learn to deal with it. We can tell the difference between a cow and a dog, but not using the characteristics most people name, and many of the characteristics that make something a cow rather than a dog may not be visually evident. Still, we know a cow when we see it.
I think the biological definitions of woman are valid. They may be imprecise for exactly the reasons that the differences between a dog and a cow are imprecise, but they are valid. Are they a knock down argument? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on the person to whom you are speaking. But that doesn’t change the validity of the answer. We can define woman and female using the gametes argument, and still tell the difference between a man and a woman most of the time. The definition is what it is; telling the difference is more instinctual. Yes, we will encounter people who are androgynous or butch lesbians or effeminate men and they may be harder to be sure, but that doesn’t make them what they are not, and we struggle the best we can.
I don’t see any benefit to using a lawyer’s argument to defeat a biologist’s definition. Some things we have to go on what we know, and leave it at that. I don’t argue with the idea that women produce the larger gametes, even though I no longer produce gametes. To take offense at that would be to play the TAs game. I do take offense at front hole, uterus haver, ovaries owner, or any of the other nasty malicious ways TAs refer to us, just as I take offense at “cis” woman.
As for how they know those are women? They know them. That can be enough to determine that, having prior knowledge is relevant.
Iknklast, I love giant breed dogs. I have never encountered one remotely close in size to a cow or steer. A cow weighs on average 1600 lbs, a steer, 2400. If you have 200 lb dog, you have an extreme outlier. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a female dog over 200 lbs. So a cow is easily 10x the size of a dog. And no dog has an udder if female or horns if male. Of your professor thought there were no meaningful ways to differentiate a dog from a bovine, they didn’t deserve their job.
This exchange really underscores how the trans* are only concerned with superficialities like appearance and minor behavior (do you like trains or dolls?), and are totally oblivious to objective reality.
I guess if you like both, you’re an NB?
Seriously, I never understood liking dolls. They do nothing. They just sit there. There is very little you can do with them, though I will admit I found things. Throwing them in a bathtub full of water proved to be fun, but didn’t last. throwing them out the window of my room could be done over and over again, though not if it was glass or bisque (especially since my room was on the second floor). I didn’t try setting them on fire, because I was a good girl and didn’t play with matches. My son persuaded some of the girls in his day care to hold a funeral for Barbie, and they were in the process of digging a hole when I got there to pick him up.
It’s a cargo cult notion of womanhood. If you perform the right rituals — hair, clothes, makeup, head tilt — that should get you the same results as the women you’re imitating.
Almost as revealing as some of the selfies we have seen by TIMs supposed to “prove” their “womanhood” by the degree to which they have succeeded in sculpting themselves into some grotesque, porn-inspired male jerk-off fantasy. But remember, nobody has done more to combat gender stereotypes than trans people
Screechy, I read that as “the women you’re irritating”. Actually, that works too.
I could probably list a few ways I can see incoherence in genderism analytically (by reason) and empirically (by observation). This incident of reality confusing Willoughby is a good example for my empirical list.
It’s easy to get if we define a woman as an adult human female. Then we can see the reality in the photos coherently.
My guess is IW may be a victim here of the idiotic way TRAs think of the Gender Critical. More than once I’ve been told that GC people want everyone to follow traditional divisions of masculine & feminine behavior and dress. When I’ve protested, I get hit with the following “evidence:”
1) “GC are biological determinists/ biological essentialists/ gender essentialists. Therefore, their own doctrine demands that behavior is determined by genes so they reject that gender stereotypes are culturally constructed.”
2.) “In order to police bathrooms & keep transwomen out, GC viciously turn on any woman who looks too masculine. It’s notoriously hard to tell sex, so all sorts of cis women with short hair, baggy clothes, etc. are being insulted and attacked by the GC. The GC don’t care, therefore this is fitting right into their traditionalist agenda.”
That last one gets trotted out a lot. IW doesn’t strike me as the sharpest knife in the drawer, it’s probably that, the first one, or both.
Sastra, it sounds like in #1 they’re going into absolutist mode. Suggesting that our sexual characteristics (penis, vulva, uterus, testicles, etc) are biologically determined does not mean we think that behavior (the way we act in the world) is biologically determined.
I’m sure you know that; I’m not correcting you, I’m agreeing with you. TAs are either unable or unwilling to understand the difference between biological reality and biological essentialism.
Dave Ricks @6,
So, this has been bugging me for a while, so I’ll take this opportunity to ask: doesn’t defining “woman” as “adult human female” just push the question back to “what is (a) female”? I don’t see how it’s the knock-down, so-obvious-you-have-to-be-dumb-or-dishonest-not-to-get-it answer that it’s typically presented as.
Screechy Monkey,
But unlike “woman”, “female” is used for any sexually dimorphous species to denote the sex that produces the larger gamete (I think I’ve got that right, but as someone recently said, I am not a biologist). We talk about female, not “women”, cats and cardinals and gingko trees, and we don’t have too much trouble recognizing that for most such species, sex is fixed (whether by genetics or early environment). Believe me, if you’ve ever been around a female gingko tree when it’s fruiting, you’d never forget it.
So of course the TRAs can try to push back on “what is a female”, but only if they’re willing to say that it’s different for humans than for other species. It’s not a knock-down argument, but it can be clarifying. (It clarified things for me back in my Pharyngula days, when Sastra or Lady Mondegreen or someone got piled on for making that argument.)
I don’t think you have to argue for humans being different to question the clarity and practicality of “the sex that produces the larger gamete” as a definition. You still can’t tell by looking at someone what size gametes they produce, or whether they produce any at all, so Dave Ricks’ assertion that this definition would allow us to say who in those photos is a woman is wrong. The answer to “why are these people welcome at this meeting and Willoughby is not” would not be “because we checked their gametes.” You run into similar problems with offering definitions based on specific body parts (what about women who have had hysterectomies, etc.). You may, of course, be able to make a guess that is accurate 95%+ of the time.
I’m not saying that if you can’t come up with a definition that is easily applicable with 100% certainty and no edge or indeterminate cases, then all bets are off and there either is no definition, or everyone gets to come up with their own definition, or the definition is “you are if you say you are.” Most definitions have flaws but remain useful, because life is complicated and you can’t make the perfect the enemy of the good.
I’m just saying that we should accept that there is some imprecision. When I hear “adult human female” being offered as a slogan, it sounds to me like the same kind of glib shibboleth as TWAW.
[Editing to add: cross-posted with Screechy @ 11, so this is largely beside the point.]
Screechy I don’t think it’s presented as a knock-down, so-obvious-you-have-to-be-dumb-or-dishonest-not-to-get-it answer, but as the ordinary answer, the standard answer, the corresponds to the known facts answer, the what we all knew until five minutes ago answer. It’s not an argument, it’s a definition. The trans dogma says we have to redefine “woman” and feminists say no we don’t.
And then, there’s this, to show us what a “real woman” looks like.
https://twitter.com/TerfASaurusSex/status/1513633783450378246?s=20&t=YGmDV8LUdorjDqXS-7II6w
But the first at least has the merit of being true (even if not 100% precise) while the second doesn’t.
I don’t think that he’s even the sharpest spoon. I’ve watched him attempting to put across the ‘trans’ point of view on TV, and he bullies the women so much (including any female presenter) that I’m now starting to suspect that he is being invited deliberately by secretly GC staff, as he is the worst possible ambassador for men pretending to be women.
I don’t recall who wrote the excellent comment here, but I think it’s relevant: we don’t police everything all the time, we don’t put police on every corner looking for car thieves, we don’t check whether every driver owns the car they are driving, but yet the laws prohibit car theft. Some clubs or facilities are only for employees or club members or “authorized personnel”, but often enough they are not checked all the time; the signs are there so they can kick people out, not so that they have universal compliance. Men have been prohibited from women’s spaces for a long time, and it was only policed when noticed or when someone complained, and that’s normal; we don’t usually check everyone.
We know what it means to be a club member. There may be good ways to tell who is a member: presence on a list, vouched for a known member, membership card. Those things help in vetting, but they do not themselves necessarily constitute club membership. Some clubs have an easier time than others restricting their events to members, because they can’t distinguish members well, but that doesn’t mean the event is really open to all. Some check membership cards; people can create fake membership cards, but that doesn’t make them actual club members.
The definition of sexes by production of gametes or “adult human male/female” are fine. Those are definitions. The other thing is how to we tell which person is female. India Willoughby is male, despite his claims; his arguments really amount to a claim that he is difficult to distinguish from most female people, not that he actually meets the perfectly reasonable definition of female.
The means of deciding medically that someone is male or female is also reasonably well settled: a preponderance of sex characteristics. Kathleen Stock covers this well in “Material Girls”. I don’t recall the exact details, but (I think) five characteristics, and presence of three (or was it four) of them is deemed sufficient. That covers almost all cases.
The difficulty faced here is for the casual non-medical observer to determine if someone is male or female. We are pretty good at doing that, and stereotyped methods of dress or grooming make it easier to tell, for those who conform, and harder to tell, for those who don’t. But that has little to do with the specific medical characteristics, and nothing to do with the definition.
So no, I don’t think we don’t need a better definition. We need something, but it isn’t a definition.
It’s all a clever disguise cAmouflaging a remarkable talent. Both Willoughby and Laurie Penny (among others) have been demonstrating alchemical powers that would have been the envy of the mages of old. They seem to have the ability, with little more than the recitation of a few words (or strokes of a keyboard/pokes at a screen), to instantly transform their brains into a material whose density approaches that of lead.
That would certainly go some way towards explaining all those tilted heads.
From Screechy #11:
But I did not assert that. My first sentence in my #6 was about incoherence in genderism, and my last sentence said, “we can see the reality in the photos coherently.”
Also from Screechy #11:
Yes, and by coherence, I mean a lack of contradiction, which accepts imprecision. I was not sloganeering (as a substitute for argument), and I was not glib.
We don’t see anything like this from trans cult activists. Why? My guess is that it has something to do with their lack of love for their fellow human beings or themselves. The comraderie of this gathering is inspiring. We know who the good ones are. Hated by the trans cultists, yet having no hate for anyone. Outstanding. :)
I came across an article being lauded by the Genderists which made a huge point about GCs saying only “adult human FEMALE” instead of “adult female HUMAN.” Apparently this is some deep clue into our psyche and said something or other about how we’ve lost our humanity or can’t accept all of humanity or I forget what but it wasn’t good. So every now and then when the occasion arises I’ll say a woman is an adult female human, in case that is going to blow someone’s mind.
My guess is that it has something to do with our not following a lot of TRA accounts.
Screechy, I had a professor who would see a cow in the field when we were out on field trips, and state it was a dog. When someone challenged him, he would ask how they knew it was a cow. Everything they said could apply equally well to a dog, except barking, and since the cow wasn’t making any noise, it wasn’t a good diagnostic.
Imprecision is the reality in the world of biology. We learn to deal with it. We can tell the difference between a cow and a dog, but not using the characteristics most people name, and many of the characteristics that make something a cow rather than a dog may not be visually evident. Still, we know a cow when we see it.
I think the biological definitions of woman are valid. They may be imprecise for exactly the reasons that the differences between a dog and a cow are imprecise, but they are valid. Are they a knock down argument? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on the person to whom you are speaking. But that doesn’t change the validity of the answer. We can define woman and female using the gametes argument, and still tell the difference between a man and a woman most of the time. The definition is what it is; telling the difference is more instinctual. Yes, we will encounter people who are androgynous or butch lesbians or effeminate men and they may be harder to be sure, but that doesn’t make them what they are not, and we struggle the best we can.
I don’t see any benefit to using a lawyer’s argument to defeat a biologist’s definition. Some things we have to go on what we know, and leave it at that. I don’t argue with the idea that women produce the larger gametes, even though I no longer produce gametes. To take offense at that would be to play the TAs game. I do take offense at front hole, uterus haver, ovaries owner, or any of the other nasty malicious ways TAs refer to us, just as I take offense at “cis” woman.
As for how they know those are women? They know them. That can be enough to determine that, having prior knowledge is relevant.
Iknklast, I love giant breed dogs. I have never encountered one remotely close in size to a cow or steer. A cow weighs on average 1600 lbs, a steer, 2400. If you have 200 lb dog, you have an extreme outlier. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a female dog over 200 lbs. So a cow is easily 10x the size of a dog. And no dog has an udder if female or horns if male. Of your professor thought there were no meaningful ways to differentiate a dog from a bovine, they didn’t deserve their job.