Oh lord, what’s that I was just saying about how childish it all is? Jo Bartosch on Furries vs Feminists:

Why are men who identify as cartoon animals planning to protest against a women’s rights rally?

Because they’re pathetic risible losers.

Next month, followers of what is known as the ‘furry fandom’ will descend on Glasgow for the ‘ScotiaCon’ convention, Scotland’s leading get-together for furries. Furries are people who identify with and often dress as anthropomorphised cartoon animals.

Is it kink or just infantile?

The word is now out that some attendees are planning to take a break from the main convention to do what maladjusted young men have done for millennia: get angry and shout at outspoken women.

The final day of the Glasgow furry conference coincides with an event organised by Kellie-Jay Keen’s Standing for Women (SfW) group. SfW is planning to demonstrate against Nicola Sturgeon’s recently stalled gender-recognition reforms, which would ride roughshod over women’s rights, and furious furverts have planned a counter-demo.

Makes sense. Grown men who think they can be women, grown men who think they can be cartoon animals. Not good company either way.

So who are the furries? And why might they want to join in the transgender crusade against women’s rights? FurScience, a dedicated academic research body into the fandom (yes really), suggests that furries are about 20 times more likely than the broader UK population to identify as transgender. And just as with extremist trans activists, the furry fandom is an overwhelmingly young, nerdy and majority-male community. Ultimately, both identities are clearly appealing to those who prefer fantasy to reality.

Just what I’ve been saying.

And, you know, if they were content to just do that – prefer fantasy to reality, and act accordingly in their own heads and in private – I wouldn’t quarrel with them. But of course they’re not; they’re hell-bent on punishing women who think their fantasies are destructive of women’s rights.

While some claim that underneath the furry’s oversized anthropomorphised beast head is a person who just wants to innocently express themselves, others say it is a fetish. And research supports the view that there is a sexual driver. In a survey of the men at the ‘Furry Fiesta’ convention in Dallas in 2013, 96 per cent admitted that they consume furry-themed pornography.

Furry porn. There isn’t room in my skull to roll my eyes enough.

The optics of these furverts protesting against women’s rights could hardly be worse for the trans lobby. Surely, even the goggle-eyed gender loons in the SNP must have enough nous to see that adult men who get a kick from dressing up as animals are not the ideal spokespeople for their self-ID bill.

But the gender lunacy itself is just as deranged. They’re both ludicrous.

Besides, it’s not actually respect, is it. It’s humoring. It’s nervous humoring, the way you would humor a jittery angry terrorist who was holding you captive and claimed to be the reincarnation of Charlie Chaplin.

We don’t humor other people’s fantasies that way unless they’re jittery angry terrorists. That’s not a thing. It’s not something adults do. It’s certainly not considered respect – if people did do it it would be considered pity, not respect. We play along with children’s games of pretend, but that’s it – we don’t do that for anyone else. Once past childhood people are expected to keep their fantasies private.

I wonder if the weird (to me at least) development of adults taking various entertainment industry fantasies seriously, going to conventions about them and dressing up as them and talking about them, has been a bridge to this ridiculous new version of “respect.” If people in their 20s and 30s can go to Star Wars conventions maybe it then seems reasonable to pretend that people can change sex to live out their fantasies.

It seems horribly pathetic to me, the way Sheldon on Big Bang Theory is pathetic albeit funny.

Piers Morgan isn’t always wrong. (I hate it when people on the left are this wrong – it’s so cringey.)

“Respect” ffs. Suppose a rapist dresses up as a laydee in order to rape women, and says as much upon being arrested – should we “respect” his disguise? Why is there any obligation to pretend to believe other people’s fantasies? Why do we have to “respect” such things? Why do people think we have to respect such things? I know one reason is endless shouting, but if everybody stopped “respecting” the fantasies the shouting would die away pretty fast.

HER continued abuse of HER victims.

insert rage face here

All completely healthy and benign…

A substitute teacher at the King Middle School in Portland [Maine] was removed from the classroom last week and banned from teaching at the school after parents discovered the sub had shared inappropriate sexualized TikTok videos with students.

…

The teacher in question was a substitute teacher named Lydia Lamere.

The teacher has also gone by Chris Lamere, Lydia Moon, Clodagh Moon, and Clodagh Lamere, and has identified variously as non-binary, as a transgender woman, and as a transgender lesbian, according to a review of public social media.

It’s not clear which name was used to apply for the role at King Middle School, a process that would have involved passing a criminal background check.

…

Mark Davey, a Portland resident whose daughter attends King Middle School, said he learned about Lamere’s prurient posting when he saw videos of the scantily clad substitute teacher on his daughter’s phone.

…

“Her gender or sexuality has nothing to do with why I’m upset,” said Davey. “The violation here is the sexualization of children,” he said.

Here’s a funny thing. The word “groomer” appears nowhere in the article, but it does appear in the url. Someone signaling for help?

Ah yes the old “some women are so ugly they look like men unlike sexy pretty womany me” says the man who calls himself a woman.

Today:

A year ago:

Emma Barnett: There’s one just to put here again to you, Anneliese, if I can, from Jill and I have to say a whole series of these messages came in at the same time. I would legislate for a clear definition of what a woman is. You’re in this position and Labour still, it seems to be the position that Labour would update the Gender Recognition Act to enable a process of self-identification. How does that fit with also trying to support the implementation of single sex exemptions? How do those two  things go together? Which I believe is Labour’s position.

Anneliese Dodds: Well, they go together because of a very proud Labour achievement ultimately, which was that Equality Act 2010. One of the last measures that we were determined to put into place as a Labour government and that Equality Act, as many people listening to this, I’m sure will be aware and they may well have used its provisions actually against discrimination. It protects on the basis of sex and it ensures that there can be change from the usual principle of, for example, the inclusion of trans people where that is proportionate means to a legitimate end. It’s spelled out very clearly within that act, and we’d uphold those provisions. So that’s how it goes together. You know, really we need to end up in a situation where we see equality across the board where we make sure that we have that future where everyone can have those  opportunities

Emma Barnett: And Labour’s definition of a woman?

Anneliese Dodds: Well, I have to say that there are different definitions legally around what a woman actually is. I mean, you look at the definition within the Equality Act, and I think it just says someone who is adult and female, I think, but then doesn’t see how you define either of those things. I mean, obviously, that’s then you’ve got the biological definition, legal definition…

Emma Barnett: With respect, I didn’t ask for that. What’s the Labour definition?

Anneliese Dodds: Oh, I think with respect, Emma, I think it does depend what the context is surely. I mean surely that is important here. You know, there are people who have decided that they have to make that transition. You know, I’ve spoken with many of them. It’s been a very difficult process for many of those people. And you know, understandably because they live as a woman, you know, they want to be defined as a woman. That’s what the gender recognition act…again a Labour…is brought into place.

It’s all context. Labour’s Equality Act protects women but who is a woman is all a matter of context. How can legislation protect women if who is a woman is up in the air?

This announcement has been the object of withering scorn from people who know what they’re talking about.

The response Cathy Devine refers to: When Ideology Trumps Science: A response to the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport’s Review on Transwomen Athletes in the Female Category. Authors Cathy Devine, Emma Hilton, Leslie Howe, Miroslav Imbrišević, Tommy Lundberg, Jon Pike.

he recently published ‘Scientific Review’ by the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport about transwomen’s participation in female sport doesn’t deserve its name; it is wholly unscientific. This publication follows a familiar pattern. The body is not important anymore when it comes to categorisation and eligibility in sport; instead, it’s all about a psychological phenomenon: gender identity. This side-lining of the body (which makes the side-lining of female athletes and the inclusion of male-born athletes possible) is now reinforced by an attack on the bio-medical sciences. Their agenda is – allegedly – the oppression of minorities. Only the socio-cultural disciplines can give us the answers we are looking for (in sport), because only they understand the coercive nature of academic disciplines and institutions which focus on material reality, rather than on social identity. The CCES Review is another attempt to replace materially based eligibility criteria in sport with ‘social identity’ as a passport to inclusion. We (a group of scientists and humanities scholars) have written an expert commentary about the CCES Review, highlighting its shortcomings in methodology, and its sometimes incoherent, sometimes misleading argumentation. We argue that the CCES strategy is a continuity with the history of the exclusion and oppression of female athletes in sexist, misogynist, patriarchal sport structures whilst, at the same time, masquerading as inclusive, anti-sexist and anti-misogynist.

A masquerade is what it is – men excluding women while pretending to be inclusive, anti-sexist and anti-misogynist. It’s not the fun kind of masquerade.

Bad analogy Peter! Really really really bad analogy!

Just because a very tiny minority of Muslims are terrorists, we don’t place restrictions on the whole Muslim population. And likewise with the trans community, just because there may be a few bad apples, in fact some horrendous bad apples, we don’t therefore penalize the whole trans community, most of whom deport themselves with responsibility and respect for women.

One, it’s not penalizing anyone to have spaces for women, any more than it’s penalizing anyone to have personal spaces. I get to close my door, and I’m not penalizing anyone by not leaving it open just in case any passers-by want to come in and see what’s in the fridge.

I still can’t believe that grown-up journalism does this. The Beeb:

A trans woman who raped two women before she changed gender will not serve her sentence in a female jail, Scotland’s first minister has said.

Isla Bryson was remanded to Cornton Vale women’s prison after being convicted of carrying out the rapes when she was a man called Adam Graham.

“When she was a man” ffs. He is still a man. He always will be. It’s only men who can rape women.

Even in their own terms – the terms that say we must refer to men who say they are trans as “she” – there are very obvious reasons for thinking this guy is not actually trans in the sense of actually believing he has a magic gender. There are very obvious reasons for thinking he’s pretending to be trans, not least of which is opportunities to rape more women.

Bryson decided to transition from a man to a woman while awaiting trial.

Is that the BBC hinting that it knows perfectly well it’s a con?

But the BBC shouldn’t be hinting and it shouldn’t be lying to us about this rapey man.

Bryson is due to be sentenced next month after being convicted on Tuesday.

But where that sentence should be served has been the subject of heated debate, with concerns being raised about the safety of other women in the jail if Bryson [were] placed there.

Right, and this is why the entire mandate to pretend that men are women is such a bad dangerous harmful to women thing. (One why. Sadly, there are others.) This is why it needs to stop.

Speaking at First Minister’s Questions in the Scottish Parliament, Ms Sturgeon said she agreed with the chief executive of Rape Crisis that it was not possible to have a rapist within a women’s prison.

And what is a rapist? A man who rapes. Women can’t rape because women don’t have the body part that does the raping.

The first minister said any prisoner who posed a risk of sexual offending was segregated from other prisoners including while a risk assessment was carried out.

She said: “There is no automatic right for a trans woman convicted of a crime to serve their sentence in a female prison even if they have a gender recognition certificate.”

Why? Because they’re not in fact women. That applies to all trans women. Trying to force us all to lie about it is not going to work out.

The first minister also stressed it was careful [crucial?] that people “do not, even inadvertently, suggest that trans women pose an inherent threat to women”, adding: “Predatory men, as has always been the case, are the risk to women.”

Yes, and trans women are all men, and some of them are predatory. For that reason they pose the same kind of generalized threat to women that men do: the threat created by the fact that we can’t tell which ones are predatory so we are forced to take generalized precautions around men we don’t know. That’s why it’s not safe for us to pretend men can be women.

They’re upping the pressure on Amy Mangano of Artifacts.

Signs noting that gender is a biological construct are posted onto a downtown Athens store’s front door, causing some citizens to reach out to City Council with complaints about the signs.

Complaints…about signs that say “humans can’t change sex” and “say no to men in women’s sports.” Hey listen City Council there’s this woman who doesn’t believe humans are magic and able to change sex at will. Have you ever????

During Tuesday’s Athens City Council meeting, At-Large Council Member Micah McCarey said he received several emails and verbal complaints about Artifacts’ signs from citizens asking that the city do more to promote diversity and LGBT inclusion, particularly in uptown businesses. He received the messages both as a council member and as the director of Ohio University’s LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans) Center.

What about inclusion of women? What about diversity in the sense of women, who are different from men? Why not diversify by including more women? Real women, not men who call themselves women.

Athens’ Deputy Service-Safety Director Andrew Chiki said City Hall is aware of the matter and has been discussing it internally.

What “matter”? The matter of women who know what women are? Women who speak up for women, not men who cosplay as women?

Nearby at Casa Nueva on West State Street, the restaurant has posted a sign in its window that says “We support and stand with our trans and non-binary workers, community member and friends. Casa Nueva is proud to be an inclusive and safe space.”

Blah blah blah. Shorter: “We don’t support and stand with women.”

“My friend Kaycie Tillis and I decided to organize the protest due to the outlandish propaganda Artifacts has on their door, going as far as to label transgender women as predators since they don’t fit into what radical feminists have decided is the ‘perfect woman,’” said Rylee Lee, one of the organizers of the protest. “The point of the protest is to reaffirm that feminism is for all women, and that the Athens community does not tolerate hate in any capacity.”

Jesus. It’s tragic. A whole lost generation. Can you imagine alert committed young Black activists sneering about “what radical BLM activists have decided is the ‘perfect Black person'”? Hell no. But when it’s women – those bitches have to be punished and ostracized and mocked for saying women get to be in solidarity with women.

A useful question.

My answer was “It means do what you’re fucking told.” Many others answered the same way.

It’s cheering to see that this is so widely understood.

More nonsensical strutting and chest-puffing about the horrible crime of burning a single copy of a widely available religious book:

Sweden should not expect Turkey to back its Nato membership bid, Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday, days after a copy of the Quran was burned in a Stockholm protest.

…

“It is clear that those who caused such a disgrace in front of our country’s embassy can no longer expect any benevolence from us regarding their application.”

Erdogan is a dictator in all but name; that’s the real disgrace here.

Turkey, a majority Muslim country, denounced the Swedish government’s decision to allow the protest as “completely unacceptable”.

“No one has the right to humiliate the saints,” said Mr Erdogan in his televised remarks on Monday.

One, no “saints” are “humiliated” when some people burn a book. Two, oh yes we do have the right to express our dislike of a religion. Three, Erdogan isn’t a shining example of concern for human rights.

Oh get a grip.

Turkey has condemned the burning of a copy of the Quran during a protest in Sweden, describing it as a “vile act”.

Nonsense. It’s just a book. It’s just one copy of a book that’s available in many editions. There must be literally billions of copies of it. Burning one is a gesture; Turkey doesn’t like the gesture; Turkey should get a life.

It said the Swedish government’s decision to allow the protest to go ahead was “completely unacceptable”.

Nonsense. Governments aren’t there to enforce theocratic etiquette toward holy books.

Turkey, which had appealed to Sweden to stop the protest, earlier called off a visit by Sweden’s Defence Minister, Pal Jonson, saying the trip had “lost its significance and meaning”.

It was hoped the trip could dispel Ankara’s objections to the Scandinavian country joining the Nato military alliance. Turkey has so far held up both Sweden and Finland’s Nato applications.

Turkey wants political concessions, including the deportation of critics of its President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Kurds that it claims are terrorists.

Turkey is already a Nato member, which means it can block another country from joining. Sweden and Finland both applied to join Nato after Russia invaded Ukraine.

Great. So a nasty theocratic dictatorship gets to veto two liberal secular countries that want to join Nato. Is there some mechanism by which we can veto Erdogan?

Muslims consider the Quran the sacred word of God and view any intentional damage or show of disrespect towards it as deeply offensive.

That’s their problem. It’s perfectly possible to think of the contents of the Quran as “the sacred word of God” while still understanding that one of billions of copies is just one of billions of copies. It’s even possible to see the burning of a copy as rude or even oppressive without losing your shit over it.

Turkey is a majority Muslim country. Its Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement denouncing the act, which it said happened despite “repeated warnings”.

“Permitting this anti-Islam act, which targets Muslims and insults our sacred values, under the guise of ‘freedom of expression’ is completely unacceptable,” it said.

No it isn’t. Genocide is unacceptable, torture is unacceptable, war crimes are unacceptable. Burning one copy of a widely published religious book is not. Focus on the real. Even believers can do that if they try.

A heart-warming tale:

A Scottish man who identifies as transgender has been found guilty of raping two women, and will be held in a women’s prison for up to a month while awaiting sentencing.

That’s nice. So sensitive, so compassionate, so generous – to the man who raped two women. It’s not so sensitive and compassionate and generous to the women in that prison, who aren’t there for raping women.

Adam Graham, 31, began identifying as a woman after he committed the sexual offenses and now goes by “Isla Bryson.” He has been referred to with feminine pronouns both in court and in UK media coverage, and court documents had charged Graham with raping the women with “her penis.”

Here he is showing off said penis:

Oddly enough women don’t wear their hair covering their faces, because they prefer to be able to see where they’re going.

During the trial, Graham was called “vulnerable,” and the defending counsel argued that the he was “in no way a predatory male.” Defending him at the High Court in Glasgow, lawyer Edward Targowski was heard comparing Graham to his victims, claiming that all three individuals involved in the case should be considered “vulnerable,” including the rapist.

It could be true that Graham is “vulnerable” in some sense or senses, but that doesn’t nullify his raping two women. Unmistakably the two women were vulnerable to him in a way that he was not vulnerable to them.

Targowski also leveraged Graham’s self-declared transgender status in his defense, as reported by The Daily Mail, and told the court: “She is transitioning from male to female gender. If you accept that evidence, that she is transitioning, that she is aiming to continue on that path to becoming female gender, that goes a long way to acquitting her of these charges.”

Excuse me??? No it doesn’t. Rape is rape even if it’s a guy called Betty who does it.

Now there’s a headline –

Pompeo dismisses Khashoggi as ‘activist’ whose murder was overblown by media

Overblown. Really. It’s no big deal for state agents to murder an activist inside an embassy by carving him up like so much roast chicken. I did not know that.

In a new book, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo derides the idea that Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post contributing columnist who was brutally murdered in 2018, was a journalist. Pompeo sympathizes instead with Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia who was found to have ordered Khashoggi’s assassination, and defends at length the United States’ relationship with Saudi Arabia.

In “Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love,” published Tuesday, Pompeo said Khashoggi did not deserve to die and called his killing “outrageous, unacceptable, horrific.” However, he then goes on for several more pages mocking the “disproportionate global uproar” over Khashoggi’s death, arguing that Khashoggi was an “activist,” not a journalist, whose death was “hammered” out of proportion by an overly sympathetic media.

You know what’s disproportionate? The fact that Mike Pompeo was once a secretary of state. That’s out of all proportion to his talents and learning and character.

“Just as the media spent years trying to drive a wedge between me and President Trump, they spent the ensuing weeks trying to fracture America’s relationship with Saudi Arabia,” Pompeo wrote. “The progressive Left hates MBS, in spite of the fact that he is leading the greatest cultural reform in the kingdom’s history. He will prove to be one of the most important leaders of his time, a truly historic figure on the world stage.”

Oh is this one of those “woke” things? Is it “woke” to think Saudi Arabia is a monstrous murderous theocratic prison? Do the good patriotic Republicans think it’s cool that women have no rights in Saudi Arabia, that Raif Badawi is still not allowed to leave to be reunited with his wife and children, that domestic servants from Kenya and Vietnam are treated like vermin there?

Pompeo, who is reportedly exploring a 2024 presidential run, also pushed the claim in his book that Khashoggi was “cozy with the terrorist-supporting Muslim Brotherhood,” a charge that both Khashoggi’s family — and Khashoggi himself, when he was alive — denied repeatedly.

Stupid man. Saudi Arabia has far more in common with the Muslim Brotherhood than Khashoggi did.

In a statement Tuesday, Fred Ryan, publisher and CEO of The Washington Post, said it was “shocking and disappointing” to see Pompeo’s book “so outrageously misrepresent” Khashoggi’s life and work.

Well, it’s like this: Pompeo is a very bad man.

But what if you identify as someone who doesn’t know when she might want to re-read or browse or look for something in this book and this one and this one?

Some people treat books like totemic, magical objects. I know, I was one. About 10 years ago, my (divorced) parents moved house at around the same time, and gifted me a number of books about which they presumed I might feel sentimental, but which became a sort of albatross in my relationship. When I moved in with my husband, he had very few books, not because he is not a reader, but because he grew up in a Buddhist household, prefers an uncluttered environment and places little value on physical objects. Once he has read a book, he simply donates it or gives it away, and holds on only to the ones he is sure he will reread.

Bully for him, but that doesn’t mean everyone wants to do the same. You can want to re-read a book you didn’t know you were going to want to re-read until this minute. You can want to browse a book. You can like having favorite books present in case you want to re-read or browse them. And here’s the thing about having a lot of books: they will still be there to give away when you move on to the library in the sky. You don’t have to give them away now because someone else can give them away later.

I was thinking about him the other day when I saw an internet discussion about a man who told a bookshop employee that he only owns one book at a time, buying a new one when he has read the last one and got rid of it. “The horror! How could he? I simply couldn’t!” people wrote, leading me to reflect yet again on that contemporary tendency to treat having books as a sort of identity.

That’s not necessarily what it is though. Here’s the thing about books: you can’t absorb them by reading them once and never again. If it’s a bit of fluff, that doesn’t matter much, but not all books are bits of fluff. (I hope I don’t need to present evidence for this? I think it’s rather obvious?) Take Hamlet for instance – as a book it’s a slender thing, but you can’t just whip through it and put it in the nearest Little Free Library and get all there is to get out of it. History, philosophy, law – books in those fields can’t just be gulped down like a glass of lemonade.

Sure, no doubt people can be pretentious and smug about having a lot of books, but that doesn’t mean there’s no reason to have a lot of books.

So easy for him to say.

Fair?

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? at Miscellany Room.

I had originally written this as a contribution to the comment thread responding to the story that Mike B mentioned here before discovering that you needed to be a paid member to post. Not wanting to pay to do that, I thought I’d post it here instead. Keep in mind this was intended for a different audience, so forgive me if it reiterates arguments and ideas I’ve made here already. But with fewer swears. The direct link to the story and its comment thread is here:

Why oppose this definition: Women are adult humans who identify as female. As I said above, is it simply an unflinching desire to defend the truth about the dictionary meaning of a word? Or is there something else you object to?

I object to men who claim to be women being put into women’s prisons. This something that is already happening. I object to men claiming to be women demanding access to women-only rape shelters. This is already happening. I object to the crimes of men claiming to be women being attributed to women, thus invalidating statistics used in policing, law enforcement and public policy. This is already happening. Why should “gender identity” (whatever that is) have any bearing on facilities, spaces, and positions allocated on the basis of sex? It shouldn’t; they are two completely different things. Yet trans identified males are demanding, and being given access to, what had once been women’s single sex spaces, all on the coat-tails of this new, non-standard definition of “woman.” This is not simply about defending the dictionary meaning of the word woman. It’s more importantly about the health, safety, and dignity of women. That hijacking and distorting language is one of the avenues through which women’s rights and safety are threatened, that is on those pushing the new definition of “woman” that includes men. “Of course transwomen are women! It’s right in the name!” Well, by such logic, sawhorses and pommel horses are horses, and I look forward with interest to their inevitable racing in the Kentucky Derby.

Language is more than just important in this discussion; it is vital. I will digress here to make a note on usage. In the interests of clarity, I do not use the term “transwoman” or “trans woman,” but “trans identified male” to refer to males who, for whatever reason, believe they are, or claim to be, women. They are not women of any kind. They never will be. If this is “transphobic,” then reality is transphobic. Trans identified males remain males however much or little they alter themselves surgically or hormonally. Keeping this fact clear makes discussion more open and honest. It makes what is at stake and what is being demanded more obvious.

Trans activists will sometimes admonish feminists for supposedly conflating “sex” and “gender,” but at other times use this very conflation to advance their cause, regardless of the cost and danger to women. Humans can’t change sex. So that’s a hard no for access to facilities segregated on the basis of sex. But somehow a male “perfoming femininty” is supposed to be given entrance to these spaces because he “identifies as” a woman. Dressing up as a woman is supposedly enough, but not even necessary. Under self identification, or “Self ID,” (which is a concept being pushed in many jurisdictions), any man, “trans” or not can claim to be a woman and gain entrance to women’s single sex spaces. This makes it harder for women to defend these spaces, as it removes the ability to prevent any man from entering, because they might “identify as” a woman. This makes it easier for predatory males to access female only spaces. The best course of action is to bar all males from such spaces, however they might “identify”. Demanding entrance to women’s spaces automatically makes any such man a risk. It’s big red flag that women are being told to ignore.

…the real question is why are people so vexed and insistent about this? If you admit that people can change genders, why fixate on “but not sexes.” I don’t buy that it’s just about defending the truth. People who defend the idea that sex is malleable are not more confused about any of the “facts” than their detractors are.

This question works just as well in the opposite direction. People so keenly interested in breaking down the concept of sex, in redefining “woman’ in such a way that it includes men (while, curiously there is nowhere near the equivalent pressure and insistence on redefining “man” ) seem to have an intense interest in allowing men to have access to women’s spaces, positions and facilities. That seems to be the whole point behind all of these efforts to redefine “woman.” Women are certainly the ones being asked to stand down, step aside and pay the price by letting men in. If humans can’t change sex, then yes, those who see sex as “malleable” are confused about the facts, and one is left to question why they are so insistent on defending something that isn’t so.

Being female is a condition of material reality, not something you can “identify” into if you are not female to start with. A man can no more become a woman through “identifying” as one than I can become an invertebrate, or made of antimatter, by “identifying”. My identification and wishful thinking matters not a bit to the universe. I will remain a vertebrate made of ordinary matter for the rest of my life, however fiercely I may “identify.”

It’s interesting that some of the same people who object to Rachel Dolezal’s claim to be Black furiously deny that her imposture has any parallel with the claims of trans identified males, even though unlike sex, racial identity can be a “spectrum” depending on one’s parentage. Whatever one may think of the utility of the concept of “race,” people of diverse ethnic and geographic origins have children all the time, and they can exhibit a wide range of features that one might attribute to “racial” markers: skin colour, blood types, hair types, eye colour, etc. Without further investigation (and the testimony of her family), it could have been the case that Dolezal was of African American heritage. There is no way that a trans identified male is in any way female. The embarassing thing about the Dolezal/trans comparison is that trans claims are less credible, that is to say impossible. Yet rejecting Dolezal’s claim, while accepting those of men claiming to be women, like swimming cheat Wil(Lia)m Thomas, is supposedly “progressive.”

In humans, sex is binary and immutible. The existence of people with disorders of sexual development (or, less accurately “intersex”) does not change this. Sex is not a “spectrum;” there is no third sex, no intermediate between sperm and ova. Certainly there is a small number of individuals with conditions of sexual development that represent edge cases, but those people are still male or female. Most DSDs are specific to one sex or the other. Their existence does not suddenly render the concepts of male and female useless and incoherent, any more than dawn and twilight invalidates the concepts of day and night. The cursory nod to so-called “intersex” conditions is simply a way to justify the appropriation of the DSD concept and terminolgy of “assigned (sex) at birth,” as if doctors and midwives attending births have to guess at a newborn’s sex, decide arbitrarily, or flip a coin and write down M or F based solely on heads or tails.

The only reason I can see is that people want to pretend that it’s just a “natural biological fact” that people can’t do whatever thing they want to do, when what they mean is “don’t do that” or “its wrong to do that.” People want you to call a blastocyst a baby because they want to make abortion illegal. People who call BLM protestors “thugs” do so because they oppose BLM. If that’s not you, then what is your reason? I think you could pick a better fight.

This isn’t the winning argument you think it is.

I’ll accept that those who are so keen to change the definition of “woman” to include men want to use this new, idiosyncratic, and counterintuitive definition to do something that the customary, standard one would prohibit, things that would normally be met with “don’t do that,” or “it’s wrong to do that.” So what is it that men want to do in women’s single-sex spaces? It’s a hell of a lot more than “just go pee.” Male sex offenders aren’t suddenly discovering they’re “trans” just to go pee. Mediocre male athletes aren’t jumping to women’s leagues just to “go pee.” This deliberate trivialization and minimization of trans identified males’ demand to “just go pee” hides the real, brutal cost that women are already paying for accepting these newly-minted “women” who are men into their spaces. This is not accidental. The issue is much more than “bathroom bills,” but women’s real, legitimate concerns are brushed aside as outdated prudery, or vindictive bigotry. Attempts to fight against opportunistic distortion of language is painted as pettifogging bookishness. It’s just one little word: woman. How does expanding the meaning of one little word hurt anybody? I’ll tell you how. How can women defend their rights in law if the law doesn’t know what a woman is?

Steven Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan at 3 Quarks Daily tell us how stooooooopid people who think women are adult human females are.

For the last several years, elected Republicans, full of anti-trans zeal, have challenged their opponents to define the word “woman.” They aren’t really curious. They’re setting a rhetorical trap. They’re taking a word that seems to have a simple meaning, because the majority of people who identify as women resemble each other in some ways, then refusing to consider any of the people who don’t.

Yes that’s an honest account. Most people “who identify as women” are alike “in some ways” and then there are other people “who identify as women” who are not alike in those unspecified “some ways.” It’s entirely a matter of who identifies as what, and vague hand-wavey “resembling each other.” It’s squishy all the way down. It’s opinion, it’s idenniny, it’s resemblances; it’s all a matter of choice and taste and preference. It works the same way with identifying as human – most people who identify as human resemble each other in some ways, but others don’t. Clear?

They go on to explain that this is so clear, and so true, that dictionaries have taken note.

On December 13, the Cambridge Dictionary broadened their definitions of “man” and “woman” to include people who identify as either.

The original definition of “woman”: an adult female human being.

The new addition to the definition: an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth.

So there! It’s in the dictionary! Take that, Republicans! Dictionaries don’t police words, they tell you how words are used, so once enough people say that men who call themselves women are women, the dictionary has to say it too, and therefore it’s true that men can be women, and we’ll police you if you don’t believe it.

In fact, the definition of the word “woman” has been considered complicated for quite some time. For more than 30 years, at least since the publication of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, people have understood those complexities.

Judith Butler doesn’t get enough recognition. All by herself she changed what the word “woman” means – she should have some kind of Nobel Prize, shouldn’t she?