Excellent response piece to bad "intersectional feminist" piece about "anti trans feminism"

[Ereshkigal]

A few weeks back a poster plopped this terrible article:

www.versobooks.com/blogs/4090-i-m-not-transphobic-but-a-feminist-case-against-the-feminist-case-against-trans-inclusivity

This is a brilliant response piece. It very clearly lays out the case on both sides and refutes the original argument point by point. It would be a good one to share with social justice conscious people who are just starting to question some of the trans agenda.

conatusnews.com/gender-identity-preclude-male-violence-reply-finlayson-jenkins-worsdale/

Started a new thread to discuss the response piece by Holly Lawford Smith and Emily Vicendese as I felt it deserved its own.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3428896-excellent-response-piece-to-bad-intersectional-feminist-piece-about-anti-trans-feminism

What a fool I am.

Meant to post that on the other thread. Need !

A very thorough and balanced response!

Just read that and thought it was excellent.

The only issue I would take with it is a nit-picking one. I thoroughly dislike the use of "trans women" as opposed to "transwomen". Using two separate words is making "trans" an adjective to "women". They say that themselves yet still do it.

( We both agree that trans women are not female (that’s what the “trans” in “trans woman” means), )

I shall read this again when I've had another coffee or two, but in the short term the one sentence that is going to stay with me is this:

Because gender identity is a purely mental phenomenon, it is only verified by first-personal introspection.

I thoroughly dislike the use of "trans women" as opposed to "transwomen". Using two separate words is making "trans" an adjective to "women". They say that themselves yet still do it.

Me too. It's a journey though for many women. I used to use "transwoman". No longer.

As in I won't refer to males as women in any sense.

The article talks about trans women and non-trans women. What the actual fuck is going on when women who aren’t men are called non-trans women? I tried to read on but it was so infuriating I had to stop.

I wish we could go back to calling them transsexuals, transvestites, transgender, autogynephiles, or gender dysphoric men, whichever was appropriate in each case.

None of those groups are women in any medical, biological or dictionary definition sense, and it’s high time we reclaimed our own class descriptor of “women” for our own exclusive use, before these entitled narcissists erase its meaning completely.

There is a lot to criticize in the article.
Women are 'women'. not 'non trans women' or 'people born female'. The Equality Act spells that out. The fact the authors are unable to use the correct term as specified in law spells out the problem with trans ideology in a nutshell.
The ideology erases women and therefore all of our hard won rights. Its right there on the page.

''..the authors fail to note that only 4,910 people in the UK have GRCs under the current law, and that a shift to sex self-identification would be expected to increase that number to between 200,000 – 500,000 (which is the number of trans people in the UK according to a recent estimate by the UK Government Equalities Office. That’s a big increase in population, and it might make a big difference to the numbers of trans women in the women’s prison estate.''

With self ID, it would be possible for every male in the UK to self ID as a woman. There is nothing to stop them and no consequences.
Karen White has not been prosecuted for falsely calling herself a woman. Trans women are women, and Karen White is a woman.

The article talks about trans women and non-trans women. What the actual fuck is going on when women who aren’t men are called non-trans women?

I feel that the author is attempting to create a binary and I mention this because @LadyPrincesexual aka Jane Clare Jones has recently written about binary matters and it's very thought-provoking. A very simplified tl;dr would be that in that binary of trans women and non-trans women, it is the non-trans women would be subordinate in the hierarchy...

Okay… so a binary isn’t ‘X or Y.’ As I’ve said, binaries work by being both a) hierarchical and b) by defining the ‘inferior’ term by negation. A binary isn’t constituted as ‘X or Y,’ it’s constituted as ‘X and not-X.’ ‘European’ vs. ‘African’ is not a binary. The racial binary is constructed by white supremacy, and conceptually it functions around the contradiction, ‘white/not-white.’ So, to look at a specific instance, ‘Blackness’ is constituted by the white imagination as an inversion of the privileged qualities of ‘whiteness.’ (Particularly in this case, ‘civilized vs. not-civilized (primitive)’, ‘rational (mind) vs. not-rational (emotional, sensual, embodied), ‘human vs. not-human (animal).’

This whole thing gets into a right mess here, however, because the gender binary and racial binaries don’t map exactly onto each other. The gender binary is laid on top of the biological difference between male and female people. The racial binary isn’t actually one thing, because the ‘white/not-white’-structure functions in reality as a conceptual relation between ‘whiteness’ and various different ‘types’ of ‘non-whiteness.’ Therefore, you can’t make a straight analogy here.[1] The structure of the gender binary is harmful because it is hierarchical, and because it ties sexed bodies to certain types of acceptable social behaviours, but if we follow through on the analogy used here, what we get is the claim that the ‘real’ harm of the gender binary is that it erases the other ‘natural’ differences it’s laid on top of – i.e. that it erases the people who are neither male or female, which would be, actually, nobody.

janeclarejones.com/2018/11/08/on-the-being-of-female-people/

That’s really interesting arran and I can see the sense in it. Of course it’s not simple because using the word woman to describe men is something I just won’t do anymore. I wonder if it had been explained in the beginning of the piece it wouldn’t have been so rage inducing.

These are fair comments and I guess I thought some of the arguments were put very clearly for people new to gender critical ideas, so ignored the flaws.