“We risk imposing a singular idea of what a woman is”

[Areyouactuallyseriousrightnow]

If we judge people not according to their behaviour, but according to what some third party perceives as their sex and gender, we risk imposing a singular idea of what a “woman” is..

In the Guardian today. Yes how unthinkable that we might risk there being only one clear definition of what a woman is... one as simplistic as for example ‘adult female’?

[HopeClearwater]

@TyroSaysMeow Got it, thank you!

[Disneydoll12]

So many great posts here ladies, I'm exhausted tonight from all the crap I've been reading on twitter.

This forum is like a breath of fresh air right now. If i read sex assigned at birth one more time........i had the panorama prenatal testing done in the first trimester of 2 of my pregnancies. They could tell me the sex of my children accurately even at that stage.

I'm so sick of all these grown adults playing pretend and trying to force everyone to buy it.

[TyroSaysMeow]

AGP doesn't exist - except for the people who define themselves as AGP.

It's the same old story, isn't it? All identities and experiences are valid, except those that don't fit the prevailing orthodoxy. Those identities are hateful lies designed to discredit vulnerable people and incite men to murder.

I can't help but note the similarity to ROGD, not just in the denouncement of detransitioners (and older never-transitioners), but in what might be thought of as the "social contagion" aspect. It's fortunate in a way that the ex is a right grumpy and antisocial old bugger who's never had much interest in finding online communities; he too believes he would have transitioned by now if he'd been encouraged to view his AGP as evidence of womanhood rather than a fetish.

What I get from this is: people use the linguistic frameworks they have access to, to understand their own experiences. If those frameworks are flawed, this is going to cause problems. Control over the language people are exposed to is a very powerful tool.

[Goosefoot]

@contactusdeletus

I think we should start a petition to get the Guardian to open comments on their transgender-themed articles. It's becoming truly ludicrous.

I really don't think this stuff would stand if they were getting reader feedback on it.

The Guardian created a precedent a few years ago when they decided not to allow comments on the (often bad) feminism columns, because people didn't hold back from pointing out what utter shit a lot of them were.

They had a big open comments section asking people if they should moderate them more or what, and again, the main thing people said, including many regular sensible readers, was, how about better articles?

Their solution was not better articles, but no comments (though I noticed a lot of the writers were dropped within the next year.)

Having gone down that path, it seems like they treat more and more controversial issues that way.

[HH160bpm]

I spend a considerable chunk of time at work taking information from people and translating that to and from technical language.

The non-technical people will use words that have a generic meaning, but the exact same words have a very specific technical meaning. Sometimes the non-techs do mean the narrow confines of the word, mostly they don’t. Sometimes what they say has absolutely no relation to what they technically need, if they went straight to a programmer they would get exactly what they said and then both sides would have no idea what the other one was hacked off about.

Words and common understanding are incredibly important. Deliberate obfuscating of language is powerful and dangerous.