Women's rights general conversations - Thread 4

@PurpleBugz

Obviously there's no prize but it is for women and it could end up in a book

I think it's this
https://www.palettepoetry.com/current-contest/

However if you give me five minutes magi Gibson is putting together a book of poetry (although we did beat her to the punch with our book mind) of women's, actual women, poetry to be released in the autumn

What country is this?

I'd be tempted to enter personally as I've got a poem in draft stages I'm very proud of. It's called violation and it's about how putting man into the word women without consent is a violation

At this point i think some organisations have been so brainwashed that NO they don't see what a piss take it all is. And how fucking insulting it is. Either have competitions based on sex or don't. But don't claim it's for one sex but open it to the other under the guise of be kind, be inclusive.

It makes my head hurt at times trying to work out how they can say these things with a straight face.

Do they realise how much they are taking the p?

So that would be a poetry competition open to everyone.

Why can't they see that?

In my inbox today, a poetry contest with a substantial prize on offer:

NOW OPEN:
The Sappho Prize
$3,500 + Publication Awarded

We are honored to create this space for women poets to step forward. Thanks to the past efforts of The VIDA Count and other initiatives to highlight gender disparity in literary publications, the poetry landscape has made progress toward equity in recent years. Still, more remains to be done to honor and uplift the work of women poets. Palette is yours as much as ours, and we are committed to making this journal an inclusive, welcoming space where women's voices are amplified and offered tangible support.

This contest only accepts submissions from women poets. All women are welcome to submit (cis and trans). The winning poet will be awarded $3000, publication, and a brief interview in Palette Poetry. Second and third place will receive $300 and $200, respectively, as well as publication. The top ten finalists will be selected by Palette editors, and Guest Judge Evie Shockley will then select the winner and two runners-up from among the ten finalists.

So - just as likely to be won by a male-bodied person with delusions as a woman then. And this amplifies women's voices and offers them tangible support how?

I think one of the things that's behind the capitulation of scientists, is that biologists actually do tend to think of people as bundles of cells differentiated into different groups, everything amenable to scientific experimentation and taking groups of cells apart, putting them back together to see what they do, identifying the mechanisms that make one cell male and another female, etc. So, if the rest of the world starts calling women "people with ovaries", biologists will just turn it into an acronym (PWO?) and carry on as before. Buried somewhere, deep in a Materials and Methods section, will be references that link the acronym back to the people formerly known as women.

And, I suspect that scientists as a group will not perceive themselves as being affected by the elimination of female-only spaces, because science is already something mainly done by the privileged. For example, how many women who have been through the prison system will become scientists and speak up for the necessity of female-only prisons? We like to think of science as being this ideologically neutral space that only considers the strength of the idea and the evidence. But in reality, scientists are just people, and hence are subject to the temptations of politics and ideology, just like everyone else.

I think there are plenty of people on TRSOH who are absolutely capabale of evaluating data - many on JtT for sure - but choose to ignore it, claim it doesn't exist, or simply reframe the debate in a way that doesn't require critical thinking at all. Guilt by "association" seems to be the claim-de-jour. That utter bastard Russell Bastard Moyles nee Bastard was on a Julie HB clip on Twitter, just swiftboating away with a load of utter, irrelevant shite about PP. Lie after lie, even after being called on it.

And that paper about merit in science being overtaken by powerful ideology had a section on which journals have been captured. It's shameful and cowardly. Nature, The Lancet, Science, ffs.

@Kucinghitam "It was always patently obvious that the really important thing to the TRSOHers was being on The Right Side, amongst the Good People Tribe, and if a bit of pious fraud and selective blindness would keep them safely ensconced therein, it was more than worth it."

Yes absolutely agree with this. First they pick their tribe, then they pick their ideology based on their tribe, then they justify their ideology using arguments fed to them by their tribe.

And on the conservative side, many do the same thing.

One of the big problems with this is that most people cannot, in fact, evaluate all the data themselves, neither progressives nor conservatives. So most of the general public DO have to develop their ideas by trusting in "experts" to do their job properly. So a big part of reaching a reasonable outcome is having experts who have shown themselves to be worthy of trust. That is why I feel so strongly that scientists have made a mess of this. I believe there was a solution to this problem that would have given transgender people a hopeful path forward, not necessarily with perfect ability to simulate being the opposite sex, but with increased research, some reasonable public accommodations, and a chance that future research would come up with really effective solutions for living happily in the sex in which they were born. And instead, gender ideology advocates went for a scorched earth solution that is (how do I put this nicely), bat$#%t crazy, and scientists have failed to mount an effective defense. Now it's all politically polarized, and those of us with children under the age of 18 have to worry that our kids may decide to mutilate their own bodies and shorten their lifespans with cross-sex hormones and there won't be a darn thing we can do about it.

Yes, sure I remembered some talk here about Nature magazine. Found this:

https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/09/04/the-science-journal-natures-goes-woke-claiming-that-both-sex-and-gender-are-nonbinary/

That this is bollocks, I mean, obviously.

"Here's my so-called scientific evidence of why sex is a spectrum in which it is impossible to tell what sex anybody is/ clownfish and snails mean that people can change sex/ other pseudoscientific nonsense"

Then surely, actual proper scientists should be saying this in public, loud and clear. Where are the likes of the Royal Society on this?

I'm not a scientist of any stripe, but I think I can tell men and women apart using my eyes to a remarkably reliable degree, as can most people who aren't lying for some reason.

For example, I was chatting (elsewhere, sorry) about how people can't change sex. I was assured by this other person that they can indeed change sex and that mine was a politically motivated, unevidenced belief that I was using to demean people. Later, he admitted to someone else that you can't change biological sex. So what did the first part mean? What other kind of sex is there? Imaginary sex? Surely that's gender or something? It's impossible to talk to people who are so dishonest, disingenuous or just stupid.

I think what's happening is essentially a multi-pronged approach to changing public opinion. When one "argument" (and I'm using the word argument VERY loosely) fails, they simply switch to another, even to another argument that is the opposite of the first. Along with this, there is a strong push for cancellation of, well, of the most effective voices, including any scientists who dissent from the new gender orthodoxy in public, and a vast river of propaganda masquerading as information. What seems to be the main approach now is to present "the science" on sex as being so complicated that biological sex essentially...doesn't exist. It's all so complicated that the best way to determine someone's biological sex is to "ask them."

What bothers me about it is the absolute gaslighting of it and that apparently it's working! I've been told (me, a scientist with a PhD in Biology) by friends ("friends") who have zero science education post-high school, that I don't understand that male and female are impossible to define and that your gametes don't have anything to do with your sex. These people consume propaganda placed by gender ideology advocates and think that they have been given accurate scientific information rather than a highly biased political document with an extremely selective array of "facts." And then they present their propaganda as if it's the latest scientific update.

I have to be honest, I've sorta given up. I try to be very respectful of nonscientists and to understand that my role is not to steamroll over them but to use my knowledge for service and share it when appropriate. But when people, in all seriousness, counter my careful, nonthreatening explanations, with BS like "well does a woman become a man if she has a hysterectomy nyah nyah gotcha!" the only conclusion I can come up with, is that the reason this ideology is winning, is that people are really, really, really stupid.

I still blame my fellow scientists though. It's not our job to let political ideologies bias our science, nor is it our job to pull the wool over people's eyes for political reasons. It's shameful really.

I’ve lived in the USA. The cultural and legal landscape is very diverse and in so many ways it is a very different place from the UK. In many places in the States it’s very much white straight men are the default vs everyone else. Women’s rights, marriage equality, abortion access, Black Lives Matter etc are all on the same side of a long line (still) fighting for social justice.

In that context, you can see why those who identify as progressive would feel they need to support “trans rights”, because they’re on the same side of fighting for a fairer, more equal society, right? Throw in the mix the extremely polarised and tribal view of politics in the USA. I may very well be with them if I still lived there.

Whereas in the UK, at a society level it is fairly well established that abortion is legal, all adults can legally marry who they like, and we have the protected characteristics of the EA. Individuals may still face prejudices, but the state provides a legal framework for them to get support.

Because if these differences, situations arise like JKR’s essay where two different bodies of people react in very different ways. I’ve not gone anywhere near this topic with my American friends because I know how they’d react and it would break my heart. We’d align on 95% of our world views otherwise.

often sincere - there are always grifters.

I think they are sincere, but they seek narratives which support their preferred conclusions, rather than being committed to understanding the truth especially if that truth is inconvenient to their beliefs. "What could explain what my beliefs?" and "These facts do not support my beliefs, therefore they cannot be correct" rather than "What are the facts, what do they show, what could they explain? - hence my beliefs"

Which I find really disorienting. I can't get a grip on what these people believe or if they actually, in all honesty, expect you to accept that they believe this stuff. Or is there some other through the looking glass interpretation of meaning here where you accept that they believe this for the purposes of belief but you're supposed to understand that it's a strategic belief.

Sadly most of the other comments are supportive of Jennifer Boylan's argument.

"There are researchers who would tell you that brains are not more gendered than, say, kidneys or lungs. Gina Rippon, in her 2019 book “The Gendered Brain,” warns against bunk science that declares brains to be male or female — it’s “neurosexism,” a fancy way of justifying the belief that women’s brains are inferior to men’s.
And yet scientists continue to study the brain in hopes of understanding whether a sense of the gendered self can, at least in part, be the result of neurology."

If only the writer had read their own article. Bunk. It's right there in the quote. The fact that some people keep looking doesn't mean there's anything to find.

Appalling in the washington post today.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/05/01/transgender-biology-brain-science-freedom/

First comment:

The Washington Post has disgraced itself by allowing someone with a background in English to lecture us on the true nature of biology! It's very clever using the opinion section as a vehicle to let someone so totally unqualified, and in love with pseudo-science, bury the readers in horse-hockey. The business of the chromosome variations proving multiple variations in sex is not legitimate. In fact, it's absolute bunk. It's not hard to find lectures by a real biologist on YouTube, where this "shell game" is exposed. And no, things like a woman that has had her uterus removed does not prove that you can't determine sex by looking at the body. This is leading us into darkness, and it's tragically comical that the Post is leading the charge.