Janice Turner: "When self-identification trumps biology, men can be women, white can be black and age really will be just a number"

materialist I agree. I think it just says gender is made up. It doesn’t say why sex is made up. But it does say Foucault so it sounds super clever.

I've notice that Americans often have this insecurity about their intellectual status so the pretentiousness of correctly pronouncing the names of French philosophers is appealing. Makes people look wonderfully clever.

I think that's why there is an appetite for swallowing Butlers bullshit over there.

Yes with much of the ideas which come from Continental Philosophy I feel enraged with the waffly, self-indulgent, bullshitty word salad. Funny how Empiricists don't feel the need to talk out of their arses.

It is all about poetic licence to imagine what might be - instead of cutting the crap and getting down to what actually is.

All of that self-indulgent imagining without testing or proof needs to be confined to art and amusement and stay they fuck out of science and law.

Oh thank the lord! Just read the Wikipedia piece and came back to see these Butler comments. Even the dictionary isn't helping!

Confusing and disorienting people is pretty much the entire point of Butler, and post-modernism in general. There is a certain kind of person who enjoys baffling and hoodwinking with walls of text and incomprehensible terminology.

Janice is such a fab writer. Clear, concise, to the point, joins the dots and puts it all together into something that makes sense.

Rightreckoner that's a good idea.

Also just read this by Janice Turner on another matter. It’s so good. I’ve been through something similar myself. She just captures truths so simply. here

Has she been asked for a web chat?

Not just you, rightreckoner, Butler is famously incomprehensible.

You may enjoy this.

faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Nussbaum-Butler-Critique-NR-2-99.pdf

Slight derail here sorry, but I can never find the comments on Times' articles. Do you have to be a subscriber to see them, or am I just blind?

scepticalwoman
Re comments underneath, I noticed that too.
A growing awareness of the real issues I think.
I love her writing style, so direct and full of common sense.

I did not know about Judith Butler or that she is the source of new ideas. Could anyone point me to sources that pithily explain her ideas

Some references to Butler: janeclarejones.com/?s=butler

What do people think of the Reality Report 3hr chat with Jane Clare Jones, some of which covers Butler?

therealrealityreport.blogspot.com/2018/09/episode-126.html

Its a brilliant article! I was in a university yesterday with some post grad students (aged between 21-mid 30s) and they were completely taking the piss out of this, and the whole idea of "identities".

It gives me hope that not all students are buying it!

I think now is a good time to bring in Stefonknee Wolscht?

I'm pretty sure that Challenor senior identified as a small girl whilst abusing a child. (And of course Challenor junior is a baby furry...)

I didn’t know ‘sex isn’t real’ was one of Judith Butler’s ideas. I just looked her up on the wiki link but could not make head nor tail of her rationale for this view. Gender yes but sex? Still not getting it. This is from the wiki piece:

The performance of gender is not voluntary, in Butler's opinion, and she believes the gendered, sexed, desiring subject must be constructed within what she calls, borrowing from Foucault's Discipline and Punish, "regulative discourses." These, also called "frameworks of intelligibility" or "disciplinary regimes," determine in advance what possibilities of sex, gender, and sexuality are socially permitted to appear as coherent or "natural."[citation needed] Regulative discourse includes disciplinary techniques that coerce the stylized actions and thereby maintain the appearance of "core" gender, sex and sexuality

I think I would be in the bottom set for Gender Studies.

I think now is a good time to bring in Stefonknee Wolscht?

Stefonknee is a father of seven, who now identifies as a six year old girl, lives with new adoptive ‘parents’ and has sex with his new ‘dad’.

Six year old- ridiculous
Girl- good to go!

As I said earlier, let's heed the sage advice of Bunbury and limit responses to derailment attempts to one firm rebuttal per thread. Further engagement just encourages further derailment attempts.

What LangCleng said.

Please don't allow an obnoxious poster to derail the thread, which is about the article by Janice Turner.

Said obnoxious poster can go create their own obnoxious thread if they wish to so please don't give them attention here.

Ok Femenist4 I'll bite.

Like I said above, please please please don't.

It's disrespectful to Janice and giving this poster what they want.

Keep going, Janice! Another great article. And I'm amazed you managed to make it so measured - we all saw your righteous anger at Peter Tatchell this week. Self control for the win!

(And please, everyone: ignore the derailer. Diverting attention from Janice's excellent article is the aim here. It's disrespectful to Janice to allow that to happen.)

Yet another excellent article from Janice. What is very interesting is looking at the comments under her earlier articles and comparing them to more recent ones. Both in terms of numbers of people commenting and also the growing awareness, especially from men, of the dangers of the trans extreme demands that are so dangerous to children and women.
Comments weren't up when I last looked - they're usually moderated - but it is evident that the general population are becoming far more informed and aware of the opportunities for abuse that self ID offers.

I am so glad that the dialogue has finally opened up to the absurdity of self-ID for other characteristics. Trans-age and trans-race should theoretically be less challenging to defend philosophically/scientifically than the notion that trans-gender overrides sex, given that our two sexes are far more well-defined than any biological markers we have for age/race. If you had to just visually examine the body of a person, you'd be FAR more likely to correctly identify their sex than you would their race or age. Yet, as previous posters have said, the latter two categories are considered beyond the pale to allow anyone to just say whatever they feel like they are. But it's all the same thing.
A person's word, beliefs, or feelings, simply cannot override the physical reality of life or dictate other people's perceptions. You cannot erase history. Biology matters. Accommodations can be made (as everyone should be free to believe what they want to/live as they wish as long as they aren't causing others any harm), but facts have to actually mean something.

Janice Turner is consistently brilliant on this subject ❤️

Ok Femenist4 I'll bite.

Trans women matter too and they are being put in danger by your arguments.

My argument is that transwomen are transwomen, not women. They need separate provision and people with penises should not be in women's spaces. Explain how that puts transwomen in danger?