Could she despise women more?
Nancy Kelley underlines her contempt for women.
That is, to make it possible to exclude MEN from lesbian support groups, women’s book clubs, women only shortlists.
That is, to make it easier to exclude MEN from women’s wards in hospitals and single-sex services and women’s sports. MEN.
If you change the law it will make it easier to exclude MEN from aspects of public life that are reserved FOR WOMEN.
It’s assumed that excluding MEN from what belongs to women is a good outcome, more reasonable, sensible, and balanced. MEN. Not women of any kind, but MEN.
So the obvious question in Kelley’s case: what’s in it for her? Men who wish they were women and are in the habit of dressing in womens’ clothes are a tiny minority on which to build a political constituency; even just for a bit of grandstanding.
It’s a mystery worthy of Sherlock Holmes.
Nancy’s making her own assumptions of policy intent. There’s the obvious one where she’s assuming the EHRC’s intent, of course. The assumption that irritates me more, however, is the one based on Genderist language games: that the policy intent of women’s/girl’s spaces is to provide separate spaces based on “gender”, by which I don’t mean sex or anything vaguely coherent.
Genderists all do this. Everything that has ever referred to gender is to be interpreted as though it refers to “gender”, regardless of whether it predates the concept of “gender”. The only way they can avoid having this be as laughably stupid as saying that “His Majesty” referred to the same person in 1123 as it does in 2023 is by appealing to the idea that TWAW is simply the result of new information about gender. It’s not, on even a cursory examination. Gender is a synonym for sex; “gender” is some nonsensical amalgam of social and psychological features. They’re fundamentally different things.
The policy intent behind women’s spaces was the provision of spaces for females. It was not the provision of spaces for particular “gender identities”, “people who are recognized as women by other women”, or any other ludicrous circumlocutions. The dishonest category error could not be more blatant or simple.
But this kind of language game is en vogue right now. Redefine a word and pretend that we just didn’t know that it’s always meant that. Whatever you do, though, don’t tell people you’re using words to mean just what you want them to mean unless you’re forced to. It’s important that what people think you mean is what you’re saying, not what you actually mean.
“Everything that has ever referred to gender is to be interpreted as”
“gender” there should be “sex” right?
I think I wrote it right, but my use of quotation marks was probably unclear. I was scarequoting, not trying to refer to the word itself. I meant that everything that has ever used the word is to be interpreted by its new meaning rather than the original meaning.
That is:
Things that talked about gender (the real thing) are interpreted as though they were talking about “gender” (the incoherent thing).
I wish scarequotes were a distinct symbol.
It’s hard to be unambiguous without a standard syntax for distinctly referring to (a) a word, (b) the referent of a word, (c) an utterance of a word, and (d) skepticism or dismissal of the referent of a word.
Never mind then! I thought that might be what you were doing, which is why I asked. Unambiguous typos I just fix without asking.
I believe that an example of what NiV is talking about is the saying “The exception proves the rule.” Some take that to mean that every rule must have an exception, or it isn’t a rule, but that is incoherent: rules with exceptions aren’t rules. The problem is that “prove” has changed meaning over time, from something like “test” or “challenge” or “probe” to something like “demonstrate to be true”. Speakers tend to interpret the saying using the newer meaning of “prove”, but it actually predates the shift in meaning, and so really should be interpreted as “The exception challenges the rule.” That is, if you have a rule, and you find what seems to be an exception, you have to either show why it isn’t in fact an exception, adjust the rule to account for the exception, or abandon the rule.
But regarding “sex” vs. “gender”, it’s axiomatic to at least some linguists that no two words are completely synonymous. Even if they have the same referent, there’s bound to be some difference in use or connotation between them. In the case of “sex” v. “gender”, I think it’s useful to maintain the difference that I understand feminists make between the biological facts of a dimorphous species and the cultural baggage that arise from that difference, and to hold TRAs to account when they try to blur that difference. Ultimately I think that’s the winning argument: sex is real, and has real world consequences that can’t be waved away, while gender is a social construct that tends to the oppression of one sex at the hands of the other. Even if you argue that gender as so construed is incoherent, it can be a useful term, much like “soul” or “god”.
And of course I wrote that whole mess before I saw Ophelia’s 6.
WaM: That’s a perfect example, and one I’ve grumbled about myself on a few occasions.
And you’re right, of course, that words with the same denotation can have different connotations. Not acknowledging this would make it rather difficult to understand obscenities and slurs and speech acts, I should think.