‘Philosophical problems with the GC feminist argument against trans inclusion’

So regardless of whether trans women are women or not, they have no claim on the rights and accesses of "women" that were based on the needs of people of the female sex, either because trans women are not women, or because if trans women are women, then these rights and accesses for people of the female sex are not rights and accesses of women, because women are no longer defined as female.

Yes, exactly. This (better) explains the point I was trying to make about the book Eve where Kate Womersley, the doctor and psychiatrist, reviewer who seemed to agree that TWAW and that we needed more women focused medical research. However, if you believe A, then this rules out B because it is biological men who are TW and it is biological men who are the focus of medical studies. Therefore if you believe TWAW, ipso facto, women are already the focus of medical studies.

However you cut it, the rights and accesses of the female sex belong to, and only to, the female sex.

Meant to… but if the NHS, scientists, sports councils, teachers, civil servants, the police, and, crucially, our politicians believe TWAW then there are no more separate rights for women. Logically, we end up with Sarah’s case whereby there’s a men’s group, a trans gender group, and a group for anyone claiming to be female including a 6 foot bloke in a beard wearing typically male clothes who doesn’t even have to declare he’s a woman as asking him is literal violence.

Again and again genderist "thinkers" fall into the same trap.

Female and male bodied people definitely exist.

A thing called gender identity may exist, but certainly people who feel a thing they associate with the opposite sex to their own, or some partway state, exist.

So, we have the old definition of woman as adult human female, and a newer, conflicting definition of woman as a mental gender.

Also undeniably, there are people claiming to be "women" under both definitions.

But the thing that the first group are, and the thing that the second group feel, are manifestly different things. There is no connection, no continuity between these two concepts. So there is no basis to claim, as genderists are, that the second group are somehow a more - real? authorative? - version of the first group.

In short, the second you try to claim "womanhood" based on gender identity, you immediately and unavoidably undefine it based on sex, and thereby make all pre-existing rights and access of "women" invalid for your new group because by your own acceptance that trans women are women, you are also defining these pre-existing rights as based on something that is not womanhood.

So regardless of whether trans women are women or not, they have no claim on the rights and accesses of "women" that were based on the needs of people of the female sex, either because trans women are not women, or because if trans women are women, then these rights and accesses for people of the female sex are not rights and accesses of women, because women are no longer defined as female.

However you cut it, the rights and accesses of the female sex belong to, and only to, the female sex.

That's what genderists never understand. These rights and accesses are not about the name Woman, they are and always have been about the people who happened to bear that name at the time.

The author isn't a philosopher - he's a law academic. That shouldn't debar him from trying his hand.

However, this piece is just not very good philosophy.

A few things (of many possible):

"It has been argued that gender-critical feminists make a mistake ... third, in not treating gender identity seriously as relevant to determining who counts as a woman." (P.2)
-- Why should we treat gender identity seriously? There is no such thing as gender identity. Gender identities are as serious as paranormal auras or guardian angels.

"... feminist critics of gender-critical feminism insist that we have no
unmediated access to biological realities." (P.3)
-- The author agrees with this insistence, though not on the basis of any argument, just on the bald assertion of a requirement for 'discourse' to enable access. "No unmediated access to biological realities": huh? We can't tell a bull from a cow, a chicken from a fox, ... or a man from a woman? Do cows have "unmediated access to biological realities"? Do chickens? (What 'discourse' do chickens engage in when the fox appears? What 'discourse' enlivens the herd when a bull is brought to the field, or the flock when the ram arrives to tup?) What nonsense this all is. (Of course, we are regaled with reference to Judith Butler's egregious misreading of J.L. Austin. The author of this piece has never read Austin, although "How To Do Things With Words" is there in the refs. They never read it; it's always there.)

Oh, and "Rules are entrenched generalizations." (P.5) No they're not.

At least there's an argument to be had about rules: we could look at Kripke on Wittgenstein, Goodman on "grue" and "entrenchment" ... and so on and so forth. But for the rest, well, "If gender identity exists then ..." gets the author what he wants: ex falso quodlibet, after all. And that's it, really.

Once again, for emphasis: there is no such thing as gender identity.

Maya is a very clear thinker and writer and an formidable researcher.

Her and Helen Joyce are my go tos for practical, sensible, legally coherent opinions based in material reality.

I admire Doc Stock enormously (especially her extremely dry wit and stylish wardrobe!!) but Stock is a philosopher and philosophers are not a natural point of call when talking about the practicalities of managing conflicting rights in a pluralistic society.

There is a good comment on the Maya piece re: the dubious peer review process of the article in your OP.

Agreed, DrBlackbird.

The massive difference is that, currently, any man doing this knows that he is doing wrong. That may not stop anybody who is determined to do something, but their behaviour is categorically not being endorsed by the authorities/the majority.

The changes that are going through/being pushed for are not just seeking to legitimise this behaviour, but are actually telling anybody challenging it that they are wrong to do so.

See, I just don’t understand this opinion: Men can go anywhere and do anything they want without a grc at the moment therefore making it easier to get a grc makes no difference

If I said, men can kill anyone, anywhere and anytime they want to at the moment therefore making it easier to get a weapon makes no difference, would you agree with me?

How is that logic different? If laws didn’t matter, why do we have any? Really struggling to see any logic with that argument…

Pmk for later digestion.

@SpiderMaam that was a great read, and the article by Sam GFree that Maya links to was an excellent takedown of the paper, unfortunately Medium removed it from their site but it's still available archived: <a class="break-all" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200703193833/medium.com/@gfreesam/a-response-to-aleardo-zanghellinis-critique-of-gender-critical-feminism-8e0c04911c44" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://web.archive.org/web/20200703193833/medium.com/@gfreesam/a-response-to-aleardo-zanghellinis-critique-of-gender-critical-feminism-8e0c04911c44

If you change the meaning of all the words in the sentence "I like a cup of tea in the morning" you can make a convincing argument that the statement is incoherent nonsense; except it isn't.

well if you assume TWAW then GC philosophy is incoherent

Maybe so, but most people don't assume this, because males are not women, so it's a meaningless argument. "If you assume the the earth is flat, you shouldn't sail close to the edge".

Good to hear, @AgentK! Good luck. :)

1. you'd have to be insane to think Kathleen Stock is any good arguments
2. Men can go anywhere and do anything they want without a grc at the moment therefore making it easier to get a grc makes no difference.

Strong disagreement with point 1, partial agreement with point 2 but misses the whole point of the GC argument against self id.

Can't be arsed wading much further in - same old same old in pseudo intellectual prose.

The above is by Maya Forstater, btw

I suggest sending this link back to your friend:

https://a-question-of-consent.net/2020/06/01/aleardo-zaghellini/

”he describes this as trans women being "unintelligible as women". In layman's terms, it would be a sign that people do not believe they are women or accept them as women.

”The reason this article and others like it are written using such complicated language is that if they were written using plain English, anyone reading it would be like, "Well, that's because they aren't women, obviously."

It’s funny, but my inbuilt reaction to men moaning that “people do not believe they are women or accept them as women.” isn’t so much "Well, that's because they aren't women, obviously” as “Diddums…”

OP, if this was a well-intentioned query, I hope you'll be back soon (or, if you're not back, that you're ok & not going through a tough time - always a possibility).

Alternatively, if this was someone just trying to make a point (to be generous, again) then what exactly do you think you've achieved?

Currently, the likeliest interpretation to me is that you're a bit taken aback by how easily posters critiqued the article, & don't have a comeback. If this is the case, hopefully you're either re-thinking your own preconceptions, or can rebut some of our thoughts...

Alternatively, you may be smugly chuckling to yourself that we took the "bait" & wasted our time posting. If so, the joke's on you. Posters love dissecting, debating, trying out different perspectives & testing different arguments here.

And it's our readiness & ability to do this time & time again that reassures us we're on the Right Side of History.

And, meanwhile, any lurkers are reading & learning all the time, looking for your reply and wondering why there isn't one. And drawing their own conclusions accordingly.

This strange article also seems (to me at least) to assume the basic TRA lie that people who deny that TWAW are seeking to deny the existence of trans people and/or that they should have equal rights to everybody else.

It makes as much sense as saying that, because somebody states that Belgians are not the same as Dutch people, that somehow foments hatred against one of the two groups - with the supposition that one should have fewer human rights than the other - when what we are clearly saying is that people can have the same/equivalent human rights and be treated as valuable as any other person, yet they can still be different.

Most Belgians cannot get a Dutch passport or driving licence, but they can get the Belgian equivalents that are appropriate for them, that allow them to have exactly the same rights and privileges - and vice versa. In the same way, everybody is entitled to various single-sex facilities, which allow them basic human privacy, dignity and safety, but they will be the appropriate single-sex facilities for them.

If we are being hateful in seeking to keep males who identify as women out of women's single-sex spaces, then we must be just as hateful in seeking to keep out all males - the vast, vast majority of whom have no desire whatsoever to invade female single-sex facilities, instead of their own equivalent appropriate ones - and I haven't seen or heard a single TRA fighting for the rights of ordinary male men to also be allowed to use the inappropriate single-sex facility for them (in the highly unlikely event that they may wish to)... so it seems like the TRAs are extremely in favour of 'the right kind of discrimination'. Remind me: who are the haters again?

It really should not need to keep being said, but when it comes to single-sex spaces, the equal (sex-based) human rights that trans people should rightly have are, thankfully, very much in place. The only problems come when certain of them wish to take those same rights away from women and add them on to their own.

It's extremely simple to understand, even for the youngest child, as long as you have a fair mind and no ulterior motive or agenda. If Jimmy is given five special personalised sweets with his name on them by his mummy, and his sister Jenny is given five of the same kind of sweets with her name on by mummy, they have been treated completely equally and fairly. Jimmy is not being discriminated against for not being given the Jenny sweets and Jenny is not being discriminated against by not being given the Jimmy sweets.

It does NOT in any way make it fair if Jimmy then wails and screams to mummy that she must hate him and that, to prove otherwise, she really must give him Jenny's sweets as well as his own and ensure that he too has some sweets - whilst completely ignoring the fact that so doing would then leave Jimmy with double sweets and Jenny with no sweets at all - and then both Jimmy and mummy turning on Jenny and calling her hateful, bigoted and a nasty, wicked little Jimmyphobe who needs to check her privilege for even suggesting that she should also be entitled to the same or direct equivalent as Jimmy has had safeguarded for him all along.

Just seen. Naively. Not natively.

Seriously scary he has the credentials he has & gets such a basic point of law wrong & writes such manipulative, unacademic waffle. I used to assume those in academa, politics, positions of leadership must, on average, be somehow brighter, more logical, more ethical than me. Not all, but most.

The cream rises to the top.

I miss those days.

I honestly think it's the other way round now - that the more authority & power someone has, the more like they are to be natively ideological or cynically self-interested. The system doesn't reward nuance or reason.

The top is all foam - hot air?

(There's less polite ways of saying it...)

A rebuttal from Maya. I despair of academia

a-question-of-consent.net/2020/06/01/aleardo-zaghellini/

The other point that gets completely lost when discussing whether trans women's offending pattern is the same as men's or not is that including trans women in women's spaces would still be dangerous to women even if all trans women were completely harmless, because there is no practical means of allowing trans women in but keeping other males out.

so one 'point' in the waffle seems to be that we are assuming that data re male offending applies to TW too without evidence to substantiate that. There is some debate about the data pertaining to the high number of trans identified males in the prison system. But how many rapes are now committed by 'women' and what about the evidence of our own eyes as regards the violence, intimidation and genuinely just being a nasty viscious shit human that we ser at let women speak rallies etc.? If you're hanging your arguments, in any part on the idea that men who demand to be called women are any less dangerous than other men then you may as well hang up your hat now.

I only skim read it but on the issue of the "separate but equal solution" (in layman's terms, third spaces), the author rejects this for two reasons. The first, which is actually a reasonable point, is that the small number of trans women makes trans women only spaces unviable. But then he concludes that the most practical solution is for trans women to share women's spaces. He never contemplates the even more practical solution of trans women sharing men's spaces. The second reason is that trans women only spaces wouldn't be validating, but he describes this as trans women being "unintelligible as women". In layman's terms, it would be a sign that people do not believe they are women or accept them as women.

The reason this article and others like it are written using such complicated language is that if they were written using plain English, anyone reading it would be like, "Well, that's because they aren't women, obviously."

Yes that’s why I double-checked the date! Even in 2020 it was clear from the available evidence that TW are not less likely to pose a risk of sexual violence to women than other men. But not many people were looking at the evidence back then.

Since then, there have been too many highly publicised examples of trans-identified rapists and other sex offenders for that paragraph to pass the laugh test.