The shifting language around the T issue.

I will point out that my view is that you can waste a lot of time trying to piece the concepts together.

Yes. There's a magpie element to it. Grabbing bright and shiny things and using them, even though together they make no sense.

No! Wait! David Attenborough is calling! Not magpie! Vogelkop bowerbird!

I don’t s see how anything can be both centred and boundless. A centre is the point equally distant from the boundary, eg the centre of a circle is a point equally distant from the circumference.

What I read in this demand for centering transness and boundlessness and limitless possibility is: infantile demand.

The eternal puer, or Peter Pan syndrome.

I honestly can't believe that anybody is even giving this nonsense the time off day. I'm supposed to be retraining for a new career after babies nuked my old one, but instead I'm defending my right to not undress in front of men, specifically men who are so fucking stupid that they think women are nothing but a figment of their own imaginations. And policy makers are entertaining this! That is what female oppression by men looks like. These men have absolutely no fucking clue.

like a language from an undiscovered tribe, so much of the concept of 'transness' just cant be fully grasped if you're not experiencing it yourself.

Transness can't be fully grasped by the not-trans because they do not experience being trans. And there's no use to try and explain it, because the unknowing cannot understand because this requires the knowing that comes from living it.

But, via a mental and emotional mechanism that only the trans have mastered, those not born female can know what it is to be female without being born into and inhabiting a female body. Here the unknowing do not need to experience being female to know what it is to be female. And because of the magnificence of those blessed with transness, their knowledge of what it means to be female is superior to that of the mere females who have experienced it from birth.

As Louise Moody pointed out though at the Edinburgh event, what is entirely unclear is whether any given individual male's conviction of being female is founded in a collective trans knowledge of being female while male or whether the knowledge each and every man claiming womanhood possesses is different.

An answer to this question would, I suspect, be counterproductive to their cause. Because a collective trans knowledge of being female while male will undoubtedly be based on sex stereotypes of expression, appearance and behaviour, of prejudice and sexist notions of femaleness. If it is individual and distinct, it will probably come back to nothing more than a question of personality. Neither will do them any favours in their campaign for legal privileges.

Can anyone name a Trans Ally who is capable of being a spokesperson?

No. Neither can I.

Academics have made tits of themselves, while radical feminist academics have blown their batshittery out of the water.

When the Trans Allies tried to steal the terms and descriptions of intersex people, (eg assigned at birth) they were exposed as insensitive, offensive frauds by Intersex Advocates.

Black women take them to task for their racist view of the position of black women in the female category.

Pink News will have to live with the words from Julie Bindel that have reverberated across the world thanks to Twitter.

I despise your woman-hating, anti-lesbian rag, and would rather give Donald Trump a massage than speak to you.

When Stonewall tried to bolster the trans narrative with so-called 'research' and surveys, they were taken apart by the likes of Transgender Trend, Fairplay for Women, WPUK, and some very clever Mumsnetters. (Yes, our lurkers and contributors have day jobs and expertise that trans allies would envy).

Where is the Trans Ally that can match and debate with Sharron Davies?

And finally, what are we to make of the spokespeople that have so impressed our MPs and peers (Bradley, Challoner, James et al). That's right - they couldn't help themselves and a whole heap of kinks came tumbling out.

In their own bubble, the Trans Allies and spokespeople might sound convincing to themselves. Outside the bubble, they daren't speak for fear of embarressing themselves.

P - U - L - L !

Ursula Le Guin has based a lot of her fiction on name magic as well AlwaysComingHome. She's one of my favourite authors and a lot of the connections I've made about this trans thing have come from ideas I first found in her work.

This is so interesting to me. Back in the day I studied classical history and did a lot of research on Plato's Cratylus and the concept of "name magic" through history. It's a rabbit hole well worth going down. The Cratylus is based around a discussion of natural correctness in names - whether words have true names which describe their essence, or whether they're just assigned by custom/ culture and can therefore be easily changed. Hermogenes, who basically serves as the straw man for the point Plato is trying to get to, is very much of the Humpty Dumpty school of thought "When I use a word (...) it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” The whole conversation is more or less a vehicle for Plato's ideas about meaning and reference (i.e. the distinction/ connection between language and what that language refers to) which culminates in his proposed "theory of forms". This is all about the idea that in order to reference something, the thing you're trying to reference must a) exist and b) be unchangeable. It's an early version of Wittgenstein's set theory in a lot of ways - see also Peach Yoghurt's bicycle analogy. We know what a bicycle is - even if it gets a flat tyre, or loses it's seat, or get's chopped in half. We still call it a bicycle because we are (according to Plato) referring to the perfect whole concept of "what it means to be a bicycle". We make similar arguments ourselves about the words women and female - we know that someone is a woman, even if they are infertile, or don't menstruate, or have a female DSD because we are referring to a template of "what it means to be a woman" which centres around a typical biological pathway. In this case our "theory of forms" is grounded in physical reality, just as Plato's chosen example of "what it means to be a hammer" can be reproduced with an actual physical hammer. But Plato uses this theory in a metaphysical sense as well, to try and ground language about love, justice, peace etc in reality. The point of this is to protect it from changes in language - the words we use to point to justice may change, but "justice itself" is a real thing that never changes. He knows there is no such physical thing as justice, but he posits that it exists in an abstract world of perfect forms. The concept of justice, for him, is a literal and fixed reference point that language points to, rather than a social construct. Religion often uses this idea as well to point to systems of morality as being objective. This is my best guess about what trans people are trying to get to when they talk about an innate gender of "woman-ness" or "man-ness". Where our concept of "what it means to be a woman" references a normative biological modal, their's (which must by necessity transcend both biology (material reality) and stereotypes (social constructs)) points to a metaphysical idea of " woman-ness" as a reference point. This woman-ness or Man-ness is accessed by gender identity, in the same way that Plato thinks "justice" is accessed by an innate sense of "being just", or religion thinks that "morality" is accessed by an innate sense of conscience. This fixed template can then be actualised through social constructs like appearance stereotypes as well as physical transformation. That's the closest I can get to understanding what they mean when they claim that something can be both biologically innate and culturally relative, both internally understood and yet without reference to anything in the physical world.

These arguments have, of course, been dismantled many times over since Plato first wrote about them. I don't believe in a metaphysical template of woman-ness any more than I believe in a objective morality handed down from God, but there seems to be a very strong human urge to ground what often feels like a rather slippery and unsatisfying physical reality in something complete, unchangeable, and untouchable.

The subject of "name magic" - the adopting and assigning of "true" names as a form of control and power - is fascinating, and takes you through religious texts, paganism, fantasy, physiology, and right into modern day ideas about "dead naming". It's especially important as a form of ritual and I think it's a huge part of the success of the trans ideology. But since I've just written an essay I'll bore you with my theories on that another time.

I haven’t experienced a boundless reality since the Nineties.

You just can’t get good psychedelics anymore.

No I know very little about these so may be wrong but isn’t this anarchism?

It’s nihilism, not anarchism. Anarchism means no rulers, not no rules.

Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed features an anarchist society and, if anything, it is more rule-bound than the capitalist society it is contrasted with.

How do they know 'cis' people are incapable of experiencing these boundless realities?

How can they allocate the term 'cis' to anyone else? A person could easily internally be one way and externally another...

"With a bump"

If the trans nature is so beautiful, boundless and limitless to be indescribable, how does anybody come to realise they are trans?

If there is no language to describe trans realities, how would a group of people who identify as trans know they are all sharing this reality?

How do they know 'cis' people are incapable of experiencing these boundless realities?

Butter true female devotees of transness will either be donating their reproductive organs to men or, if they are cis-slaves, offering their uterus up for use in situ

Reality is irrelevant. Sex is an irrelevant construct. Only the gender-feelz are relevant.

Honestly, this is what makes it clear it's a men's movement.

The only people who will suffer from this opinion are women - who as much as they wish and believe they are male, or non-binary, unless they take active steps to avoid PIV sex or use contraception (and are lucky with no accidents) are going to have reality hit them with a little bundle of joy bringing the fact of biology back with a bump (haha.)

If we're doing harm by calling people binary (trans/cis) or non-binary, aren't they saying that feminists were right all along, and we're all just people?

Exactly.

How do they square any of that with the reality of sexed bodies?

Reality is irrelevant. Sex is an irrelevant construct. Only the gender-feelz are relevant.

Trans ideology is inherently anarchistic (the rules by which society functions do not apply to me) and embraces the master/slave philosophy of enforcing participation in fetish behaviour.

Birds, yes could easily become anarchism. However, if essentially a person truly has no self imposed boundaries and are free and happy to be anywhere, then they can be free and happy respecting other people's boundaries. It would be 'no skin off their nose'. They can be super chilled about everything.

then we need to recognize that the promotion of a nonbinary/binary trans dichotomy does more harm than good.

I've been squinting at this, trying to get some kind of anything out of it.

Promotion of people being either nonbinary or binary does harm.

But what's that got to do with trans? Doesn't trans necessitate a binary? This side or that side?

Non-Binary is also trans I thought (even though that makes no sense given the words) - so who's doing this separation of binary and non-binary anyway? Isn't it the people talking about trans and cis?

If we're doing harm by calling people binary (trans/cis) or non-binary, aren't they saying that feminists were right all along, and we're all just people? They just don't want to admit that?

How do they square any of that with the reality of sexed bodies?

wowowowow I take ‘boundless’ to mean like you they have no boundaries but also that they are not bound by other people’s boundaries. They can do what they want. No I know very little about these so may be wrong but isn’t this anarchism?

We stray from easy solutions and digestible understandings

Yes, because that would just be altogether too uncontroversial and boring. No one wants a simple easily understood solution. What would there be to talk about?

It doesn't really need saying but I'm sure transactivists would not like to be seen as endorsing a form of slave and master ideology, though, Floral.

Unless it is more than that. Unless you can be boundless and still underprivileged. Enlightened but vulnerable. Have power but no responsibility (ability to respond...).

Thus, we close our essay with a call for people of all genders and especially cisgender people to embrace complexity over a false sense of readability of trans realities

People already do. It is why they don't accept being defined as 'cisgender'. When, then, will this label cease? It's why people don't accept the term gender as it is a socially defined construct that does not fit the complexity of real people.

How long can this violent agreement go on?