Gappy Tales: Laurie Penny's T*RF Wars: Aguide to cognitive dissonance

Ok, I have a suggestion, given that this is a very clear change of tactic and yet again, it's a linguistic trick.

We do not need to press 'you can't change sex'. The immutability of sex is pretty self evident at this stage. Besides which, the cult language has done what we predicted about a year and a half ago, and shifted away from changing to confirming, so the person has always been 'female', etc.

The TRAs are doing this - 'Of course you can't change sex, but actually sex is a wide variety of possibilities that are almost too complicated to clearly define, and essentially pointless for all practical purposes'.

The best counter to this is - There are two sexes, and for some very significant things, SEX MATTERS.

Because this is, and always has been, the crux of our argument. Keep saying it. Don't let them own the narrative.

Sex is real, and sex matters.

I'm now going to screenshot every time i get told on Twitter that there's no such thing as biological sex.

Another 'This Never Happens'

The natal sex thing is hilarious - after JKR's essay half of the activists were busy saying "no one is saying natal sex doesn't exist!" while the other half continued to assert that "there's no such thing as biological sex!" Laurie Penny is an entitled Oxford leftie who will write literally anything to keep in with the Owen Joneses - she's one of the reasons I no longer read The Guardian. Or vote Labour.

im sensing that there's a concerted switch of tactics here re the whole "of course we never meant people could literally change sex" after saying for the last few years that it was completely possible

denying biological sex exists is an exercise in futility because it's so easily proved that their are 2 sexes and now more sunlight has been let in, it's one of the things the general public are going to 'get' straight away.

as it's one of the things we've hammered away at for some time, it's now going be used against us vis 'of course we never meant people could actually change sex, those feminists who've been attacking us on this basis just dont understand he difference between sex and gender and look how mean they've been when all we want to do is live our lives quietly'

then all the times we've gone on about how you cant change sex will be held up as an example that we in fact are the deranged ones going on about sex being immutable which they the reasonable ones have had to deal with it even though of course they never meant that in the first place

dont let them get away with that shit

It's saying tha sex is so irrelevant to anything that there are no names for female and male sex
It's also implying female and male personalities

Why do they keep saying that? What does the phase 'assigned female at birth' mean if it is not denying that natal sex is a real thing?

Wow, paragraph after paragraph.

I found this sentence hidden deep in the Laurie Penny weeds instructive: "Nobody is actually saying there is no such thing as natal sex."

Instructive, because it seems to contradict the Trans Women Are Women mantra.

A similarly long stream of justificexplanation has been turning up in my social media and hyped by Pink News; this video by gynecologist Mama Doctor Jones

At about 9 minutes 25 seconds in, she admits "Nobody is really claiming that you can change your genetic sex. "

Why aren't these two people being taken apart as horrible transphobes?

Excellent piece.