Woman's hour 2nd April 2024 JKR's 'hate' thread

Nice one!

Haiku by feminist teamwork.

Amazing

The expression always reminds me of Sue White, from Green Wing. (If you know the quote, you know.)

I don't know what Michelle Gomes thinks about trans issues or how happy she would be with her character's name being taken in vain by Team TERF, but I absolutely adore the character Sue White for her no fucks attitude and the way she relishes causing discomfort by pushing boundaries. She's the opposite of the kind, nice, agreeable characters that women are expected to be.

I'm fully on board with 'Do I Look Like A Mug?' as a slogan.

I think it would go well on t-shirts.

'Our god of the underworld, our nourishing mother'.

Perhaps we could rebrand ourselves Team "Do I Look Like A Mug?"

Being kind doesn't mean you need to let others gaslight and walk all over you. It's always fine to call out abusive behaviour, even if the perpetrators and enablers of it don't agree that it is abusive and are upset by you saying that it is.

This.

Women are not here to be shat on. They deserve kindness.

It is not kind or respectful to compel women to endure injustice and a lack of privacy and dignity through coercive behaviour.

Women are socialised to put others first and don't understand it's ok to consider their own rights and needs too. And feel it is not selfish to do this.

Transwoman equates witn Transgender - which is also one word. TW are men who 'identify as' women. They are not a sub set of women. In fact one is either a woman or not. There are no sub-sets. The appropriation of the language around race has been one of the means to co-opt the realities of other groups into the transgender project.

Nobody really believes that TW are women, you do know that. It is a performance piece that has its roots in post modernistic theory and in a social media culture in which manufactured identities, personas and avatars are the thing.

Hurrah! Welcome to team common sense, BreatheAndFocus's friend!

You can be a gender critical feminist and still be kind. But you do have to think critically about what is actually kind and what is not.

"Naeb'dy" and you're done.

When facing me, it's always men who mistake for another man. Women have only ever made that mistake from behind. It's almost like women's safety depends on judging sex accurately far more than men's does and natural selection has ensured that women can do this reliably.

Thank you, Dadjoke. I’ve just shown this thread to a friend who was hovering between common sense and ‘be kind’ and just couldn’t bring herself to agree with JKR - but now she does 😁 The clincher was your mansplaining and your refusal to respond to points. We had an interesting discussion about why that might be and why you kept repeating the same untruths - and she’s here! 😁 Here on the side of women’s rights and sanity.

DJ, people like you don’t realise you do our work for us 😂

I think the linking of the phrases "trans women" and "black women" is particularly relevant here.

There are any number of adjectives we could use to describe the noun "women", but you would generally only refer to several different ones together when you are describing characteristics which have some relevance to each other.

So, for example, you would be unlikely to use a sentence which contains both the phrase "short women" and "Australian women", because there is no obvious link between the adjectives "short" and "Australian". But you might use a sentence containing both the phrase "tall women" and "short women", if you are saying "tall women find it easier to reach high shelves than short women" or "short women find it easier to buy well-fitting jeans than tall women" or "tall women find that most makes of car are comfortable for them to drive, whereas short women could benefit more from driving Japanese cars because they are particularly well suited for smaller people".

So when would we use both "black women" and "trans women" in the same sentence?

My guess is that it is almost always going to be when talking about discrimination.

It would be absolutely relevant and appropriate to talk about "black people" and "trans people" in the same sentence when talking about discrimination, saying that both groups are known to be at higher risk of this treatment.

When you talk about black women, as opposed to black people, you are probably referring to the fact that this group is at risk of discrimination for two reasons: being black, and being female.

If you compare "black women" and "disabled women", you are referring to two groups, both female, both at risk of discrimination for being female, which provides a sensible starting point for discussion about the extent to which being, respectively, "black" or "disabled" increases that risk of discrimination still further. This is essentially the primary concern of intersectional feminism.

But by comparing "black women" and "trans women", you are completely muddying the waters because you are comparing a group of people who are at risk of discrimination for being female and for being black, and another group of people who are not female but are separately at risk of discrimination for being trans. You are comparing apples with oranges, and unlikely to gain much useful insight. You are also most likely going to end up excluding "trans men" from your analysis because of the word "men", when "trans men" are actually a much more relevant comparator to "black women" or "disabled women" because they are at risk of discrimination for being female, and also at risk of discrimination for an additional reason, in their case, being trans.

The whole thing is just spectacularly unhelpful, to all kinds of groups.

I started with Helen Forte's minimuslatin.co.uk and went down the rabbit hole from there.

Nae bother!

Actually, you might want to use "nae wan" - just came to me there. (I'm a natural critic, I think - can't do stuff myself but can pick holes in other people's. 😁)

My English teacher at school was called Alma. She told us all that it was very unambitious to aim for women to be equal to men, as women are clearly superior.

My Latin teacher at school (1960s, convent) was named Alma. She was permanently cross, but that’s probably because she was trying to teach Latin to children who mostly hated it.

Ooh, that does work. Thanks!

You could use "nae one". that saves you that vital syllable.

Oops, I see I’m on the tail end of many similar explanations.

I find Duolingo a bit tedious - but it has the advantage of being free.

It’s trans woman - trans is an adjective.

If nothing else, genderism has improved many people’s understanding of the English language, what with pronouns and all.

For anyone unfamiliar with the insistence of using “trans” as an adjective, it’s a sleight of language implying an equivalence between “trans” women, black women, old women, professional women, any sort of women - in other words to lead people into a perception of transwomen as women, and not what they are, which is men.

Like many strategies of this movement, it’s insidious and effective, which is why it should be resisted.

Nice!

For the benefit of all - "trans" is, and always was, a preposition. The TRAs themselves told us so.

It's yer actual Latin. We were told to "educate ourselves" about. It was in Latin texts (TRAs used "transalpine" and "cisalpine" Gaul as their examples and raison d'être for using the term and originally called themselves "transwomen"). It's also in science and us bigots should "look it up".

A prefix is added to a word, and it most often makes it clear that is has changed the word to its opposite meaning; so "happy" + "un" = "unhappy" ie "not happy". "Trans" + "woman" = transwoman ie "not a woman"

The attempted shift to an adjective is comparatively recent, and is just as forced as pronouns. It can't possibly be an adjective, in the way that "tall' and "blonde" and "black" and "young" are adjectives, because that implies that "transwomen" are actually women, and "trans" is being used to describe these "women", while we ALL know that the one thing that a transwoman has to be, in order to be trans, is a man.

Don't let them shift our language for their own purposes.

Language does change and evolve - we all know that, but this is not a natural evolution (which takes place gently in use over a long period of time, and by population consensus) this is a compelled and coerced bullying of the way words are employed.

Let them get their own words to describe themselves.

As KJK has said. The word "woman" is taken.

Edit for autocarrot

If it doesn't mean that, "trans" is not functioning as an adjective in any sentence containing the words "trans women".

I beg to differ, but it's an adjective akin to "fake", "imitation", "mock", "false".

(Reminded of Lewis Carroll again - the "Mock Turtle" )

A fake Rolex is not a type of Rolex, mock turtle soup doesn't actually contain turtles, false God is not a god, etc.

So it's perfectly possible to have an adjective attached to a noun such that the object described by the adjective+noun is not a subset of the noun, but something else.

(And Lewis Carroll was playing in that area by leaving it unspecified whether the notional Mock Turtle was actually a turtle...)