"A subset of women"

[JellySlice]

The statement "black women are a subset of women" appears to cause offence, but I don't understand why. Surely black women are a subset of women in the same way as Jewish women, Polish women, refugee women and diabetic women are subsets of women? Isn't that what intersectional feminism is about?

Is this statement offensive on its own, or only when hijacked by the AWA TRAs?

I think of sets like Venn diagrams, so being in one subset does not preclude being in another subset.

But if you think of them like biological categorisation ( the family tree type diagrams) then I can see that it would make less sense.

'Subset- a part of a larger group of related things.'

Black women are a group of women. That's all that means and it's fine as a statement alone.

The issue (as many PPs have said) is saying that black women are women in the same way as transwomen are. Transwomen are biologically different from women, however you twist semantics and however you define women saying this is hugely othering to black women.

Quite apart from the inherent racism of the statement itself, the appropriation of the oppression that black people have suffered for centuries is ridiculously narcissistic. Most reasonable people would baulk at saying it.

I highly doubt the argument was made in good faith and I suspect this thread is being watched closely.

I'm sure i recognise the OP as a very regular poster on FWR, but it could just be a very similar username I guess?

It’s the usual divide and conquer we’ve come to expect from TRAs.

For one thing, you’re not listing subsets. These are not discrete categories to fit people into. One woman could tick all of those boxes you listed (although not a lot of Polish Jews around, granted, interesting choices you’ve made there).

I do think there is a lot of truth to this: being black is just a descriptor, not a set of anything. It's such a clumsy, odd phrase; said only to make a semantic argument. Still, I can't see that the phrase would be remotely offensive on it's own.

Jellyslice is a regular poster here

Jellyslice is a regular poster here

Indeed, and is gender critical. It is tiring to get genderists coming on here and derailing, but I do think it has lead to us being too quick to call bad faith.

Silencing wrongthink is Their tactic, we need to balance allowing debate with using caution and common sense about some threads and expressing ourselves carefully.

A subset of which women?
White women?
Are white women a subset of women?

I don’t think subset is the right language or helpful language.

I guess the category “black women” is a subset of “women” in the same way that “white women” is. And that “women” and “men” are subsets in the wider categories of “black” and “white”.

All circles in a big Venn diagram.

But the problem with defining race that way is that it’s no longer discrete, whereas biological sex is.

The prefix “sub” though has connotations of “inferior”, like “subhuman” so has a bit of a Eugenics vibe to it. And it kind of assumes white women as the default which is not nice.

Is this statement offensive on its own, or only when hijacked by the AWA TRAs?

Well it is not something you would say.
What reason would there be to say a Jewish woman is a subset of woman?

This phrasing is only used to align TW with women. Women are put in to subsets so that TW can somehow be included.
The fact is all TW are a subset of men so no matter what descriptor of woman they use they will only ever fall in to subset of men so it makes no sense at all. When you point this out you are usually met with the following:
You hate black/Jewish/red haired women.
You are transphobic.
You are a bigot.
You are a nazi.

Set A(1 5 6 7 9)
Set B(6 7)

Set B is a subset of A.

Sorry if people find this offensive to the numbers 6 & 7

Whilst this is ever so pithy and clever, and stands if you’re talking about KS2 maths questions, people are not numbers to be sorted. I think it’s very fair that people find it offensive if their race, class, disability etc is described as ‘sub’ anything.

But it’s all false logic anyway.

It’s more like:
Race (Black, White, Asian, Mixed, etc)
Sex (Male, Female)

Sex and race are different sets, one is not a subset of the other.

STOP IT!!!

TRAs now have US redefining words! Just stop it!

Yes, black women are a subset of women, redheads are, blind women are, female astonuats and lollipop ladies are! It's justy an odd one to say, which is the whole point of it.

By arguing against that you are falling onto the trap of giving TWAW credence. The only response is yes, black women are a subset of women, just as transwomen are a subset of men!

And as Cwenthryth said, it's all apples and oranges anyway!

Move on, nothing to see here!

^^ Absolutely

WHAT??? I haven't finished reading this page yet but I need to jump in with that ?????
Black women are only a subset if white women are also a subset. White women are NOT the gold standard, which is what that statement seems to be saying. Neither are Jewish women or Hindu women a subset or atheist women subsets. These are all no more and no less than adjectives. "Women" is the collective noun including every one of them

OK, so I went back and read the thread before posting to see if anyone posted the same argument. Someone did. This is the HUGE problem with that first post:

They never say white women are a subset of women. They see white as the default.

When different groups have something major in common, then they are subsets of that thing.

Men are a subset of humans.
Women are a subset of humans.

Men are not a subset of women.

Transmen are a subset of women by virtue of being female.
Transwomen are not a subset of women, because they are male.

Are trans-identifying people subsets of humans? Yes, because they are humans. But are they separate subsets to men and women? No, because 'woman' is not a subset of 'female' . Woman=female.

I apologise for not including white women as a subset of women in my OP. That clearly demonstrates my personal default as a white woman in a predominantly white society. It does not imply any racism, any more than someone saying "sausages are made of pork" demonstrates anti-Semitism or Islamophobia.

I think it's the "sub" -set and the separate class

Like black women are a different type of woman. Not like us. And "sub", lesser,...

So there are BlackWomen and Whitewomen and Transwomen. The black women have in common their black-woman-ness. The white women have in common their white-womanness...

The term may be correct from maths perspective - but it's a political statement so it matters how people interpret that in social/political context we live in (black people perceived as lower, lesser, separate etc) and the intent, which is to define woman-ness into different types (black-woman-ness, white-woman-ness, trans woman-ness)

I think

I would hate to be described as a subset of anything.

Please don't throw out the mathematical baby with the TRA bullshit bath water!

Set theory is a valid and important field. A subset just means a group within a group. The set of dogs contains the set of labradors which contains the set of golden labradors. Golden labradors are a subset of dogs.
Male and female dogs are also subsets of dogs, and a golden labrador could belong to either.

So I belong to the subset of women which is 'white women'. Transwomen do not belong to the set of women at all.

HORSES
Clydesdales are a subset of horses
Geldings are a subset of horses
Mustangs are a subset of horses
Shetland ponies are a subset of horses

SeaHorses are not a subset of horses.

To argue that they are, requires emptying the word horse of all meaning first.
And possibly - nastily - casting aspersions on whether Shetland ponies are really horses, being so small, so unlike horses, better suited to being reclassified as large dogs perhaps.
Having deliberately, and artificially, brought the horse membership of Shetland ponies into doubt, seahorses feign outrage at this apparent injustice (created and maintained solely by them alone) and demand re-entry of the poor Shetland ponies into the horrid exclusionary parent horse group. (From which they were never actually excluded)
Accompanied by the seahorses, washed in on a manufactured wave of false outrage and fear and confusion by all horses that somehow certain entirely valid members of the group have inexplicably been unfairly excluded.

The argument that women (of any colour, religion, age) are a subset of women is not offensive in and of itself, used for proper purpose.
So long as the parent group 'women' has clear criteria, all indisputable members of that parent group may be subdivided into subgroups if that subdivision serves a useful purpose.

What is offensive is the TRA argument that black women (they always choose black) are a subgroup of women whose membership of the group "woman" is in as much doubt, as disputable as men's membership.
They contrive and manufacture doubt over whether black women are women at all, so that they can wash themselves into the group women on the wake of people "accepting" black women "back" into a group from which their membership was never, ever in question.

Yeah, that's pretty damn offensive.

And wot Barracker said

Is it a linguistic issue, then - 'sub' sounds offensive?

Perhaps we could say that black women, white women, cloistered nuns, transmen are 'within-sets' of women, as what they all have in common is that they are all within the group defined as women by their female biology.

Your last paragraph OP oh dear..... can open, worms everywhere!
‘Sausages are made of pork’ (not even strictly correct btw, sausages can be made of pork, but sausage is a shape not a meat) as a stand-alone phrase has no bearing on discrimination against people on grounds of their religion. You taking white as a default and black as an other, ‘sub’ category, is absolutely ingrained racism. I’m not saying that accusingly, or that you’re bad or evil, it just is. It’s the society we live in and for white people it is so, so, so easy to not see it. Because we know we’re not meaning to be racist. We’re nice people, it’s hard to accept, but we can still be racist.

Although I would prefer not to maul language. That is the MO of trans ideology.

Of course black women can be a subset of women, just like blonde women, just like tall women, just like women from Cardiff. It's not racist in the slightest. I get the feeling people who are calling it racist don't understand what a subset is and have no idea of set theory.

Spot on barracker. Many people on this thread seem to want to redefine subset because they don't like the sound of it! Sub doesn't mean inferior in this case no matter how much you might want it to be, and as for 'people are not numbers', that is beyond nonsense. Logic is a whole field in itself and if you want it not to apply to people, good luck with that. And as has been pointed out, it's the TRA argument that is offensive because it implies that there is a question mark over whether black women belong to the set women. There clearly isn't, and they clearly do, just as much as white women, women with 5 children, women who live in Basingstoke or women with a predilection for eating Nutella off the spoon at 11pm. But unlike transmen.