That it's not just what you say, it's also how much you talk about it.

[NicolaHare]

Surprise, another trans thread! But the dynamics of online spaces fascinates me.

Take MWR. Some stats. Feminism Chat has been active since 2010. At this moment 364 pages of threads have been generated. 144 of those pages contain threads that were created or active since January this year. At the beginning of 2018 a significant portion of threads were trans themed and these threads tended to contain the most posts, and the board has only grown more fixated with the topic since then. You have to go quite a ways back to find a page of threads that isn’t 90-95% to do with trans people.

Nowhere else on the site is so obsessed. For example: on the LGBT themed boards you only have to go back 1 or 2 pages to find threads from 2017 and earlier. There aren’t any trans threads in the 1 and a fraction page of threads from 2018 on the politics board. There are, I think, about 2 in the half dozen pages of threads from this year in the currents affairs and news forum. And in 2018, all the education forums combined have generated about 5 trans threads.

This is weird, right? Why is a general feminism board with an overwhelmingly non trans userbase so fixated on a group of people they don't belong to and the issues surrounding them? It would be weird regardless of what anyone in any thread had to say on the subject.

Not surprising, though. Trans sceptical feminism ironically almost always ends up focusing on the transgender question to the exclusion of all other topics that its proponents believe that trans inclusive feminisms are neglecting, and so neglects them to an even greater degree. Honestly, I’m sceptical that they are being neglected at all: it seems to me that conversations about pregnancy, menstruation ect are happening in public view at far greater volume than ever before, taboos surrounding bodily functions are increasingly discarded by the discourse and pop culture, and that when we talk about erasure we’re actually quibbling about terminology, the trappings of language and not the substance of the conversation. To assign a motivation to the common theme on feminism chat of “We are being silenced elsewhere!” a significant part of it might be the catharsis of imagined persecution. “We are saying the truths THEY don’t want you to hear! We are rebels!”

(This interview with a former gender critical trans woman is worth reading. It’s American and several years old, but it describes the many of the other toxic intellectual cul-de-sacs you can observe in MWR. www.transadvocate.com/is-sadism-popular-with-terfs-a-chat-with-an-ex-gendercrit_n_18568.htm)

But to set aside the discussion of substance. Do you think that the mere volume of trans threads in feminism chat is indicative of a kind of transphobia? If it were a forum of straight people talking about nothing but same sex attracted people, even if what they had to say was positive would we not be inclined to see in it's users a troubling insecurity with regards to queerness. If it were a forum of white people talking about nothing but people of colour in the most effusive terms, would we take this at face value or would we assign sinister motives (as the resonance of Get Out suggests many would)?

The word 'cis' is meaningless to all but the truly woke

It’s meaningless unless somebody thinks they have a gender identity.

I'm sure there's some relevant discussion of related verbal techniques in Lundy Bancroft

Yeah, not seeing a definition of 'woman' in that essay. Certainly nothing that could replace 'adult human female' in the dictionary, in law or in science.

Because in both cases it benefits certain individuals to ensure that there's a pool of easily manipulated people who don't understand what's happening. If the words they needed to explain why they're not comfortable with what's happening have been eliminated or their meaning changed, Newspeak style, then resistance becomes a lot harder, especially collective resistance.

(That was to Red)

Self reflection is also a very pomo problem-solving approach which is only effective wrt internal problems (i.e. those that relate to ones own feelings / identity). It's no solution to material problems like the physical presence of rapists in women's prisons.

There are woke pomos who will tell you, that the problem with being raped is how you frame what happened to you, due to societal norms and taboos. In that vein, raped women might become unraped upon proper self-reflection and thus could - in pomo world - solve the material problem of rape by reframing it as some neutral experience.

It is possible to be a trans lesbian if your sex is female.

If the words they needed to explain why they're not comfortable with what's happening have been eliminated or their meaning changed, Newspeak style, then resistance becomes a lot harder, especially collective resistance.

THIS

I think gender is a cluster of traits - physical appearance (biology if you will), presentation, self-concept, actions, and how we are seen by others. Most of these are spectrums of a kind and if a person falls on the masculine or feminine side for the majority of traits, society usually assigns to them the label of male or female.

Masculine or Feminine are nebulous concepts that change over time and have transcended biology. Hence the gendering of the non-human. For instance, Anna Karenina is female even though she is words on a page arranged by a man. In the words of Terry Pratchett, human beings are pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee. We yearn to be taken in by fiction. Lady McBeth has always been a woman even though she was originally played by a boy in a dress.

To make it very plain, though you've done a little bit of directionless spinning since you put forward this idea, and I'm not going to let you off the hook on it - you posted a link to someone saying nasty things about lesbians, which you then justified as 'self deprecation' on their part, and when that notion was challenged because the person in question is not in a position to be self deprecating because they are not part of the group 'lesbian', it was pointed out that you posted without careful thought, asking about 'cisgender lesbians and gay men' which is evidence that not only are you homophobic and approving of when others are too, your bias is very clearly away from women and their own self determination because you added a 'qualifier' cis to the female homosexual and not the male.

Oh, and how about that important equation mentioned earlier by Sophocles? It's a huge unsolved conundrum.

There are woke pomos who will tell you, that the problem with being raped is how you frame what happened to you, due to societal norms and taboos. In that vein, raped women might become unraped upon proper self-reflection and thus could - in pomo world - solve the material problem of rape by reframing it as some neutral experience.

It's funny how they can't pomo their way out of the "epistemic violence" of being misgendered, though, isn't it?

I thought this was going to be about encouraging people to talk about this as much as possible in real life, even if you havent got all the academic arguments, to make the point that it's a legitimate conversation.

The demand that people engage in self-reflection about who they're attracted to, or not, is particularly interesting. I mean, sure, I could do that, but at the end of the period of reflection who I am and am not attracted to wouldn't have changed at all, and most people know that, so what we actually have there is a demand that people pretend to have been wrong about what they thought and felt before, and change their behavior in ways that facilitate orgasm for others while making them completely miserable.

Also always interesting to examine who's being asked to self-examine and who is not.

It's funny how they can't pomo their way out of the "epistemic violence" of being misgendered, though, isn't it?

True. What an astute observation!

Most of these are spectrums of a kind and if a person falls on the masculine or feminine side for the majority of traits, society usually assigns to them the label of male or female.

No they don't.

There are still people who say we shouldn't talk about it, even now. Transactivists think they're the only people who should talk about it!

merrymouse

It is possible to be a trans lesbian if your sex is female.

True, but I bet that isn't who Nicola meant. Also, don't you think that a female who has become a transman - if conforming to the right way to think - would refer to themselves as heterosexual?

If a trans supporter refers to a trans lesbian, you can bet your bottom dollar he or she is referring to a transwoman.

There are woke pomos who will tell you, that the problem with being raped is how you frame what happened to you, due to societal norms and taboos

Yes but this is bullshit and we must keep saying so. There are social constructs which depend on language and there are material realities often involving evolutionarily determined reinforcers which are independent of language. We need to keep on pointing out which is which for the benefit of the easily-confused.

Fascinating thoughts on the broader concept of what constitutes gender. Now, given that much of that is a straitjacket that forces the two sexes into boxes they don't fit into, perhaps you'd also like to explain why, when feminists have spent a long time trying to dismantle the prison of Gender, you think it's a very important inner essence that must be slavishly enforced?

If you want your rapist to be punished by the law you are a carceral feminist which is a bad thing.

what we actually have there is a demand that people pretend to have been wrong about what they thought and felt before, and change their behavior in ways that facilitate orgasm for others while making them completely miserable.

The ALC interview literally calls this behaviour out as a selfish impulse, she concedes your point.

and if a person falls on the masculine or feminine side for the majority of traits,

Can you list some of these masculine and feminine traits OP?

if a person falls on the masculine or feminine side for the majority of traits, society usually assigns to them the label of male or female.

Holy fuck. What happened to our educational system?

Most of these are spectrums of a kind and if a person falls on the masculine or feminine side for the majority of traits, society usually assigns to them the label of male or female.

"No they don't."

Indeed they don't.

Masculine or Feminine are nebulous concepts that change over time

But you can still assign sex on the basis of them? How does that work? If the concept of masculine and feminine keeps changing, do people keep changing their sex? Why?

It's funny how they can't pomo their way out of the "epistemic violence" of being misgendered, though, isn't it?

Interestingly, the problem with being misgendered genuinely is how you frame what happened to you due to social norms and and taboos.