£10,000 prize for arguing both sides of trans debate

@currantname

It's the fact that the word woman is incorporated in a descriptive of someone born a man.

By their own admission, trans means being "on the opposite side of" something.

And we all know what's on the opposite side of being a woman...

Surely the issue isn't whether there's a space between trans and woman or not. It's the fact that the word woman is incorporated in a descriptive of someone born a man. So a man who dresses as a woman is a transvestite. A man who has been castrated is a eunuch. A woman is always a person born a woman.

Actually I think you have a point. I was going with an academic essay needs academic references, however, how non-academics understand transwomen to be women will be very relevant.

A cogent argument is a cogent argument whether it’s presented in a blog post or a journal article, and the quality of academic arguments on this topic is usually embarrassingly bad. But it’ll be your loss.

Haha yeah, I mean journal articles, not blog posts and the like.

I know the arguments debunking the idea we all have a gender identity, but where could I find good quality academic arguments that support it?

you could have a look at the blog post I linked upthread. Not “academic” per se but it’s intelligent people writing, light years from the average TRA.
https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/04/04/intellectual-turing-test-results/

Also there is an argument by a well regarded academic philosopher centred around the concept of “gender feels” which tries to make “gender identity” into a coherent concept and does pretty well considering what there is to work with. (The resulting framework is still dumb as shit, naturally.) I think it was Kathleen Stock who reviewed the book? Sorry I can’t remember the name!

This seems to have some useful references

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5844490/

I think "good quality" is optimistic, but you can find academic philosophers looking at why TWAW.

philpapers.org/rec/JENAAI

I'm a UK undergraduate, I could take part in the competition.

The TWAW claim seems to hinge on the idea that we all have a gender identity, and in the case of TWAW, there is a mismatch between their gender identity and their sex.

I know the arguments debunking the idea we all have a gender identity, but where could I find good quality academic arguments that support it?

I have to override my phone autocorrecting transwoman to trans woman...

Apple autocorrect does this by default. However, it does NOT extend the same logic or courtesy to "transman", which is autocorrected to "tradesman". Why would that be, I wonder?

And why is this contest, which claims to be "arguing both sides of the trans debate", focused exclusively on whether transwomen/trans women are "women" and completely ignoring whether transmen/trans men are "men"?

I got told off on my Facebook page for using transwoman in an entirely non-terfy post about a fairly interesting talk I had been to given by a relatively reasonable transwoman who wasn't towing the TWAW line and other sane diversions from the TRA handbook. Even though my review of the talk included that the transwoman had said that the slogan TWAW is meaningless and unhelpful, this person's reply to my post was just to helpfully let me know that I should never use the word transwoman as it carries an implication that transwomen aren't women.

Thank you. I usually use transwoman but was worried I was using the 'wrong' word. I can see I'm not.

FlirtsWithRhinos

I read the TRA arguments and think "I can make a better case than you and I don't even believe it!"

I thin that "arguments" suggests an intellectual rigour, which is simply absent in, what to me is just aggressive emotional blackmail.

Hold my beer!

Genuinely.

I read the TRA arguments and think "I can make a better case than you and I don't even believe it!" I'm literally willing them to see the same better arguments I can!

(Actually that's not true. I do mostly believe it. I believe most people who claim a gender identity (trans and cis) are expressing something they genuinely feel and I think it's valid to want society to recognise it. I just don't think it's interchangeable with sex so it shouldn't have the same name nor be used as justification to appropriate single sex support, spaces or opportunities.)

Actually I like this idea, mainly because I think that as soon as undergrads are required to genuinely explore the case against they will be converted.

I suspect this is exactly what the competition organisers are thinking too - it's an experiment to see if undergrads can be bribed into using logic and reason for 10,000 quid.

That my view too. Look at the court hearings, you have people who have been using their power to abuse people for years on the basis of unexamined and bizarre views and when they're invited to defend them in a forum structured around logic, rationality, and coherency, they're all over the place, flailing about and discrediting their cause.

Actually I like this idea, mainly because I think that as soon as undergrads are required to genuinely explore the case against they will be converted. The TWAW arguments are dross sustained only by shouting over the other side. Well done to the organisers.

The 'tip top' argument will rest entirely on what the AI provided upthread:
"Gender identity is one’s internal sense of being male, female, neither, or both, and it does not always match the sex assigned at birth."

It doesn't explain what this means, it never does. Never specifies what actually differentiates a woman from a man in terms of gender. Somehow the above sentence is accepted as a sentence that can be parsed and/or communicates meaning.
To me it's like 'colourless green ideas sleep furiously'.

@pickledandpuzzled

I know that the difference between "transwoman" and "trans woman" is an inportant concept to dissect, but I'm not certain that it is as important a distinction as a trans privileges advocate would have you believe.

Just because the latter has a separate noun, and a TRA might claim that that therefore means trans women are a subset of women, I don't think it necessarily is so.

Take for example ersatz woman, or fake woman, nbeitherof these constructions automatically means that the subject is in fact a woman.

@Circumferences Transwomen are not a type of woman, like a seahorse is not a type of horse.

Thanks, I shall be using this one.

And inherent in that is that the 'everyone' it's better for is actually only adult men and that women and children aren't worthy of consideration at all because even 30seconds of consideration shows that it's NOT better for them. And that's even without 'transwomen' like the Scottish butcher just convicted of kidnapping and assaulting a schoolgirl and Dolatowski (convicted of attacking a child in the women's toilets) .

It's the most misogynistic take there is.

This could be valuable. It's asked genderists to provide their absolute tip top arguments. Either it'll be a load of gish-gallop with misinformation and emotional blackmail or it'll be an argued-in-good-faith religious treatise.

Both could end up as being valuable. At the moment we have massively self-indulgent books or things like the Freda Wallace comedy act.

Yes, I think the thing that's tripping me up is the premise that transwomen are women.

I don't see how one can convince anyone of that, other than claiming it's because of DSDs and then they'd have to pretty much fudge it anyway.

Unless they're going to change the definition of woman. I wouldn't mind someone having a go at that. It's incredibly revealing how sexist they look when they try.

At the very least, I believe this will show up that, when they say woman, they don't actually mean a woman. So that's moving the conversation along a tad, at the very latest.

One of the frustrating parts of this is that people don't actually even get to have the bloody conversation.