People with the capacity for pregnancy... would that be, women?

[PaddleBoardingMomma]

https://twitter.com/gregprice11/status/1546891926997188608?s=24&t=XMXJzvWWonOzM4sYUG56g

I mean... what can you say 👀

They've never had any issue with the word woman being used before and I don't think they have now either!

Repeating "people with the capacity to become pregnant" several times is very clunky when there is a simple word "women". Women who are infertile for one reason or another know that these arguments aren't referring to them, there's no need to clarify.

If transmen are men, why would they end up pregnant?

I strongly agree with this post which states the fundamental problem very clearly. Women and girls have always been oppressed on the basis of their sex. When we remove the names for our sex class, we make the continuity of sexism and misogyny and the way they pick their targets invisible.

We make fighting for women's rights much harder, if not almost impossible, too.

And the new euphemisms and the forced redefinition of 'woman' also take away the way most of us actually define our own womanhood. We are asked to be women on some other, novel, ground, but nobody is willing to even give us a definition that wouldn't be subjective, unfalsifiable belief in a gendered soul, not that different from a religious belief. And if we refuse to worship at that church, we are called bigots and worse.

I'm so angry that the left is putting up women like this to fight for women's abortion rights. She had a golden opportunity to say, "Yes, Senator Hawley, this IS a woman's rights issue and you are denying women the right to full bodily autonomy by denying them the right to an abortion."

Instead, she took the bait, pivoted, and now is a gift to the GOP come whatever next election could be tight.

@DdraigGoch

If transmen are men, why would they end up pregnant?

This is a very important question, for reasons of the deep theory behind the gender identity ideology, though it is always answered by veering away from the question and by asking why they shouldn't have the right to get pregnant.

The answer from their deep theory is that they have redefined 'woman' so that it is nothing but sexist stereotypes and assumed comfort with the gender norms and roles a culture assigns people of the female sex.

And those are the things many trans men seem to want to avoid by transitioning (though some may also have body dysmorphia). I have seen pretty open statements by some of them to that effect.

Why this is a problem for our side is pretty obvious as we have all now been redefined as the gender which is passive, submissive, emotional, and nurturing (from the definition of femininity).

So those who use inclusive language for the sake of trans men, say, also buy into the idea that 'women and girls' now has no basis in biological sex, but is a concept which refers to people whose gender identities are close to the Barbie Doll end of the old Mermaid's graph about how to find your gender identity.

I think I would prefer "women and...." why should the word "woman" be excluded. That way everyone feels included.

Indeed, the answer is women.

My theory there is a large section of society that will be forever resentful about it and that is why they find so many ways to punish us for it.

Honest to goddess, I'm so angry right now...if the topic is women's reproductive autonomy, I want the trans activists to shut the fuck up and go away. This is about ABORTION and we ALL KNOW WHO THAT AFFECTS.Talking about transphobia during a critical juncture in American politics and women's rights is an extraordinary waste of oxygen and the worst kind of distraction. We can't even build a women's movement right now due to the word police and regular people's fear over this massively obnoxious, and minuscule, topic.

US women started a movement with the Women's March, it went global, and then that capitulated. It was grassroots and glorious for a hot minute. US women don't even have a visible, well-known leader like we did in the past (we have no 21st century Gloria Steinem, no Shirley Chisholm, no Bella Abzug). Kamala Harris is now eerily milquetoast despite a few years ago she made that famous line during the Kavanaugh hearing, “Can you think of any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body?”

UK women have JKR, Julie Bindel, Helen Joyce and even controversial Posie Parker. I swear I'm jealous and pissed at the same time that when we need a woman to stand up and fight for us, we end up with this idiotic, earnestly sanctimonious Berkeley professor.

My only hope is Amy KIobuchar who keeps talking about a woman's right to abortion.

This is the YouTube bit about the exchange

She employs the familiar technique (if you have seen one of these exchanges on Twitter you have seen them all) of arguing that asking about the definition of 'women' is transphobic, and that this will immediately cause transgender people to die by suicide. But she does give a new figure related to suicide here (new to me): that one in five transgender people have attempted suicide.

So the only way we can prevent transgender suicides is by completely stopping all debates about the competing demands for rights? That means we already know which set of demands will win.

This is a brilliant post.

It's easy to forget how hard women fought for our rights and how easy it is to lose them. You only have to look at the middle East, Poland, Ireland and some South American countries to see how easy it is for women to lose our liberty and security.

We need to name what we are fighting for it we have a chance to protect ourselves.

As to the suicide topic, there is a class of US women who have the highest rates of suicide (for women) in the country - Native American women. This is documented in our CDC, Centers for Disease Control. Sadly, those numbers have remained shockingly high for many years. Higher numbers of Native American women live in states with abortion bans like North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Texas, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, Arizona and Oklahoma. Native American women's pay gap is the worst in the nation (tied in some measures w/ Black American women). Though Native American women make up just 0.3% of the overall workforce, they made up 0.5% of the front-line workers during the pandemic.

Native American women face the highest rates of sexual assault in the United States — in fact, 56.1% of Native American women have experienced sexual violence in their lifetimes, and Native Americans are twice as likely to experience sexual assault compared to other races.

If we're going to talk about suicide and abortion, spokespeople should make it count for the women who's lives are the most by these issues.

agreed @OfficerArrestThatRuffian that is a brilliant analogy.

I wonder if they will.

I saw some of the Rubin Report about this whole exchange. It was fairly long so I only watched part of it, but he was pretty scathing, both about her attitude to women, to being challenged, and her direct refusal to ask the question does an 8 month fetus had value.

My thought was similar to yours, with people like this no wonder people like Rubin are fleeing progressive politics.

But given the way progressives, especially in the US, simply refuse to engage at all with conservative or right media - even moderate stuff, maybe they will never see it? They watch tiny clips to ridicule, but usually have a very warped view of what the actual responses of conservative voters are, they tend to reduce it to racism or transphobia and don't connect it at all with what is happening on the left.

Yeah, that was interesting. He was going for the angle that she could hardly talk about discrimination being against women if pregnancy isn't about being a woman. I'm not sure if he was trying to provoke her to go all cracker-pots, but it certainly made her look like a person with an agenda rather than an argument.

That woman needs to watch the brilliant Aja's poem about racism and trans ideology: twitter.com/ecuadorianmum/status/1547089511280267264?s=21&t=-n-wFb9BXBWQz5mIiUs8qQ

It takes nothing away from me to recognise this. I can still get health care for my needs too.

For the moment - you might think it takes nothing away from you. Long term - this is creating a dangerous territory for women.

The word "woman" is now becoming taboo, unless it's referring to a male, then it's ok.

The words "women" and "mother" are being removed and replaced with terms that describe bodily function. The same is not happening for men. Why?

It won't be too long before females lose all rights they have had to fight hard to get, and in a blink of an eye we'll all just become sex slaves ("sex work is work"), and baby gestational vessels.

Soon we won't be able to work, have an education, to have a bank account in our name, and have control over lives. We are going to be rounded up and treated like cattle thanks to people like @GoodJanetBadJanet, who happily gave away the rights of all females.

It may not mean much to @GoodJanetBadJanet, and that's because @GoodJanetBadJanet is blind to what's actually going on.

The sad thing is that many on Twitter believe this woman bested her opponent, instead of allowing him to divert things away from the very important topic of woman's right to bodily autonomy.

Well, they do get raped too. Or, like many other adult human females in the US, they may not have access to birth control. Either due to partner abusive control or lack of family planning centers or a pharmacist who refused to fill their prescription, or maybe ignorance due to lack of sex education where they went to school. Maybe they got bad medical advice re: fertility and medical transitioning.

Maybe they work for Hobby Lobby. Senator Hawley was co counsel for that firm's Supreme Court case fighting against a mandate to include birth control coverage in the health insurance policies offered to their employees. Because it's an abortifacient.

It would be nice if people talked about Hawley doing that instead of this scripted interaction.