Continuation of Polypostwonder thread

In the last few decades UK language has become much more Americanised (swim club???), presumably due to media influence. Some people's language is much more influential than others'.

But the majority of people don’t want the changes, it is only a small % of people making the demand. Even though some people like to falsely claim that the majority of people are fully supporting the language change, this is untrue.

I doubt that many people would agree with a change where there was no longer defined and reliable category boundaries around the words to define female and male people. What population would make such important words utterly meaningless by having two words that effectively grouped the same people instead of into meaningful opposite categories.

Unfortunately, if enough people want to do it you can indeed change the English language as it is conventionally spoken; which is why constant pressure to oppose such changes is necessary.

‘Agency’ does not equal ‘having others treat my belief in a subjective reality as being universal material reality.’

Objectively, there has been no change to your sex category, you are male. You could say ‘a male person who has undergone extreme body modifications’.

Objectively, you cannot change the English language and expect any other people to accept that demanded change. Some may. But no one has to.

I definitely have a feeling that certain drugs are involved. It is rather rambling and Lewis Carroll-esque. I might stretch that feeling to a belief even if that belief isn't based in reality.

Welcome to the world in which ordinary women have lived for the past umpteen years, women who mostly would not call themselves gender-critical or any other label of that sort.

Their lived experience of finding themselves in a women's space with somebody they can see perfectly well is male, has been denied. They have been told that "there are no men here", that he is a woman, and that daring even to see what they have seen in that way, let alone speak of it, is hatred, bigotry and phobia.

Nurses have lost their jobs over this. A woman raped on an NHS ward was gaslit, and the police were lied to, until CCTV footage forced the NHS to admit that one of the "women" on the ward was a man who identified as a woman, and that he was the culprit.

So perhaps coming on here has given you an inkling of what it is like to have your reality denied like that. The difference of course being that on an internet board there are no real world consequences for you.

When posters like polypost are set on denying material reality, and factual science, making up bullshit about history isn't really much of a stretch.

It is absurdly untrue that concern for single sex spaces is recent in origin, @polypostwonder , or that it is just some kind of "anti-trans" fad.
One obvious example:
Prisons here in the UK in the 18th and early 19th century were not segregated by sex. This led to widespread sexual abuse of imprisoned women. People like John Howard and Elizabeth Fry, who investigated prison conditions, were appalled by what they found, and campaigned for prison reform. This led to an Act of Parliament in 1823, which among other things instituted separate imprisonment of men and women. It was sorely needed.

While I think of it are digital assistants, Siri, Alexa etc female names and agentic AI, Claude etc, male?

He really seems to be enjoying this new opportunity to play stupid word games doesn't he?

And how did doctors ever have the authority to do that?

They didn't.

You're perilously close to saying an incorporeal being can self-identify according to his mind-sex. I would prefer to say its behaviour was a consequence of his male socialisation in life.

Edit: with the rise of AI this point may not remain entirely academic.

That is a misreading/misrepresentation of the Gender Critical position.

We 100% recognise trans people as an identifiable group with unique experiences and existence independent of sex. In fact as people with gendered experiences that do not align with their physical sex they are very much expected and understood within Gender Critical Feminism (or as we used to call it when Woman simply meant female, "Feminism") and were it not for the current aggressive de-existing of the female voice we face from TRAs, would even be supported by Gender Critical Feminism as fellow escapees from rigid gender roles.

The only point of contention is that we simply do not believe this thing that is not sex and is independent of sex is somehow also magically the same as sex, is what sex always meant really, and is unproblematically interchangeable with sex for all social, legal and political purposes.

As feminists, we experience the demand to shackle our sex to your "gender" as the exact opposite of empowering. We see empowerment as entirely separating these ideas of gender from our physical sex not tieing them even harder together.

Your position therefore is what I would describe as Gender Absolutist - you require that Gender must not only exist as well as sex, but must in all things override and take over from sex.

And where this is not physically possible you require we must nevertheless pretend it is, even to the degree that we no longer even need names for the two human sexes, because what possible need could we have for them?

I'm a gamete fundamentalist.

I certainly agree that people who identify as trans exist.

If trans includes Darren Meagher, who just changed the marker on his driving licence, it's very difficult for trans people to explain why they are 'an identifiable group with unique experiences and existence independent of sex'. However, that is not my responsibility.

I just need to protect sex based rights, and to do that I have to be able to explain what sex is.

I don't need sex based rights because of my identity or because of how I present. I need sex based rights because of the material consequences of being a human female.

Jacob Marley was definitely male he barged into a space where he wasn't wanted.

I'm not.😂

Ephemeral essence of trans we did in the summer didn’t we? Internal cognition? Trauma trumps? It’s not my consent that matters it’s the intent of my rapist.

I am happy to concede that a ghost no longer has a sex.

Well unless you are floating around unattached to a human body, it's a fact.

You are correct. The progress in women's rights and the condition of woman in Australia was suddenly thrown into reverse in 2013 when sex was replaced by gender in law.

Can assure you I was concerned when a transwoman masturbated in front of me in the ladies, around 1996.

Trans people have always been here.

...aaaaand this is your belief.

There is no existence independent of your sex, what are you talking about?