It's language isn't it

[CaptainWarbeck]

After listening to the Witch Trials podcast, I've been trying to get my head in the space of trans activists. I am trying to see their point of view and find any common ground, in the spirit of checking your own beliefs.

So essentially what I can see is that it boils down to the use of language first and foremost.

If you say 'woman' and by that you mean 'feeling feminine, feeling that many female stereotypes are more your thing, rejecting masculine things', then feminists saying 'you're not a woman' WOULD be hurtful and also 'denying that you exist' right?

Because you are saying you're all of those things, and someone is telling you that you are not. And they're personal things that no one else can really see - so I understand how it would feel rude and invalidating for a feminist to tell you you're not experiencing them.

And if by identifying as a 'woman' (also read nonbinary, asexual etc) in this sense means that you feel you fit into the world better and feel more accepted generally because people make less stereotypical assumptions about you, then that would be helpful, right?

And if feminists say 'no you can't do that - because of biology you are not a woman' - that would feel reductive, and like you were being put back into the box you're trying to escape from I imagine.

The issue is that when each side uses 'woman' we mean entirely different things. Defining the language we're using in order to have a conversation is essential. We're talking at cross purposes.

And the other thing which is impossible to fix but which would help enormously is waving a magic wand and eradicating gender stereotypes. There's no need for 'gender' if you can present/dress/behave however you want regardless of sex.

That's my best understanding right now. I think feminist rhetoric does hurt trans feelings. The issue is that following trans ideology saves hurt feelings, but has far worse consequences for biological women. No one really wins here. That is unless society (patriarchy) miraculously becomes more accepting of gay, lesbian and gender nonconforming people.

The thing is though, we don't usually pander to teenagers and their tantrums do we? Unless we're their exasperated parents.

In other circumstances people would just roll their eyes, tell them to grow up a bit and move on, just like we were told when we came out with self indulgent nonsense at that age. But nowadays they have social media to indulge their tantrums fully.

And yes, many of them are hurting, and looking for a way out of their distress, but actually I think us going along with their delusion is not helpful in the long run. We don't do this for any other manifestation of body dysmorphia - for example, anorexia. Can you imagine affirmation only from a clinician? Yes yes yes, you're still too fat, keep starving yourself....it's madness.

But with gender dysphoria the 'solution' is to be affirmed and placed on damaging hormones from a young age. They need to be protected from this, even though they don't fully understand why. It's cruel to be kind, and it's what a decent society should be doing to protect our young people.

Here is a link to video by a transman outraged at the medicalisation of children, it's brilliant.

https://twitter.com/NotScottNewgent/status/1634682798903635970?cxt=HHwWhMC90YfWx68tAAAA

Until about 5 minutes ago everyone know what a woman was. It wasn’t up for debate or discussion. Hurt feelings or otherwise.

If I kick a brick wall really hard in bare feet it will hurt. It will hurt physically and maybe my feelings too. But that’s my responsibility.
No amount of language twisting, hurt feelings or any other feelings can change that.

Everyone still know what a woman is. Even those who say they are women, but are not. They can kick that wall as much as they want but they can’t change the fact it is a wall.

I don't but recall Cordelia Fine mentioning raising her child like this in her excellent book about the brain. I watched a program exploring it about a decade ago about it. I can't remember more details. It was quite the thing for a time. Very progressive. I think it gained ground in the Scandi countries first but don't quote me. As I said I knew some followers personally. Everyone was anti pink for some reason.

Wellies54
Part of the problem is that all these are deeply narcissistic and focused only on their own perspective. Women's downfall has been that we are constantly trying to balance our own rights and feelings with the feelings of others. But when the other side shows absolutely NO regard for us and NO willingness to compromise, our feelings are simply getting steam rolled out of the way.

This is very true. It reminds me of this:

"Meet me in the middle," says the unjust man. You take a step towards him, he takes a step back. "Meet me in the middle," says the unjust man.

Women can never win here, and for many TRAs the only acceptable outcome is us giving up everything we have - language is just one part of it.

How did that pan out when the child started to experience puberty? It would be quite obvious then surely.
Most children are androgynous at a young age anyway.

That quote sums it up! That's why Kellie-Jay is so important. She's not falling for any of the be kind bullshit and she's not being bullied. She is absolutely standing up and saying, no, I'm not budging for you! I'm not pandering to your hurty feelings (which I know are made up anyway) This is what's good for you and this is what's balanced and right! Firm but fair!

OP, I think that there are some people who think the way you suggest, but it's really a 12 year old way of thinking about the world. Old enough to be able to abstract a little, to be beyond the concrete thinking of childhood, but not old and experienced enough for really higher order thinking.

I also would say that the idea that somehow if we had real freedom from gender norms this would go away, is vary naive, on a few counts. One is that while I do think we've had some hardening of gender norms in the last two decades, the fact is there are tons of people who flout them, or just don't pay attention. If you walk down an average street in an average town, most men and women will be pretty regular, not thinking much about their clothes or hair or make-up, just doing their own thing.

It's always more fraught for teenagers because they are trying to build an integrated sense of self, and get used to themselves as adults, with adult bodies, having adult relations with other people, including those they are romantically interested in. They feel a lot of pressures, and aren't even sure what they really want. But that's the result of their place in life as much as anything. Everyone has to decide what is important to them and it's a process.

The idea that we could have some perfect gender neutral society, where the physical differences between the sexes, and other differences that come out of reproductive roles in different ways, weren't reflected in material culture, is just a pipe dream. And actually I don't think most people would even want that. Human beings are very interested in sex differences, especially at an age when they are looking for a partner. Attempts to enforce genderless societies are usually pretty unsuccessful. I don't think that's a realistic remedy.

But there is a deeper issue there. People who want to be, or believe themselves to be, the other sex, (even if they call it gender) are not just people who happen to like lipstick if they are men, or happen to dislike it if they are women, or anything like that. They are wanting to take on the appearance and social role, or recognition as belonging to, the other sex in some way. Wearing certain things and all the rest are just how they try and instantiate that - it really isn't the main point.

Same. I suspect it's fairly niche, but I'm sure BlooDeBloop has seen it.

And it's something that I can understand, to be honest. If you are trying to eradicate sexism, disguising sex is certainly one way of doing it. And that's what I think a lot of transactivists end up thinking.

Which is why women constantly reiterating that sex is binary and it's perfectly obvious which sex is which, might come across to them as sexist and regressive in itself. They stop thinking about the premise before they get to the end.

Because of course, if everyone did disguise their sex, you would have less sexism. As no one would know who to target.

But the problem with that, quite apart from the fact that it is, by necessity, only something you could do for a few years before sex becomes obvious, is that it also just disguises sexism, it doesn't address it.

Which is why, to me, it's not feminist. It's trying to avoid sexism, rather than challenging it.

I think part of it is quite simply an age thing.

The older women get, the fewer fucks they have left to give. And they've lived 40 or 50 or 60 or more years as a woman, most of them have birthed children, they've pretty much all experienced sex discrimination, and the idea that any of that is something a male person can just "identify as" seems ludicrous to them.

Whereas girls and young women often haven't experienced all of those things yet, their lives haven't diverged so much from those of their male friends yet, and they worry a lot more about being liked, and being seen to be cool and progressive and kind.

OP, I find your posts disingenuous. At best.

Eradicating gender stereotypes and enforcing gender stereotypes by making girls wear grey and boys wear sparkly tutus are diametric opposites.

I was at a thing recently where I had to sit behind a couple of dozen primary school children. They'd been captured by the ideology to the extent that all the girls had long hair (tied back) and all the boys short (it was a rural school, that might not be true in a town) but they were all wearing the same school uniform - dark sweatshirt and sweatpants, light coloured polo shirt, school crest, trainers of choice. No stereotypes in the clothing, stuff could have been passed between sisters and brothers no problem, no transitioning required.

A couple of years ago I was in a Facebook group for women in France which turned out to be completely captured by gender ideology.

There was quite a lively discussion around the Robert dictionary's decision to include the new gender neutral pronoun "iel", with most people agreeing that this was a really positive sign of France taking a step out of the dark ages towards a more progressive future where, it was heavily implied or sometimes explicitly stated, the English speaking world already is.

One of the women said she was a non binary person raising two non binary children. I asked her what that meant. She said that for now they were non binary but if when they were older they decided they wanted to be a boy or a girl they could choose to be either.

I started probing, saying, "Yes, but what would they be choosing between? What do they think a girl is, and what do they think a boy is? And what do they think non binary is?"

Round and round in circles we went. She started getting more and more defensive.

So I started being more explicit. I said, "When I was a child, I understood that my brother had a willy because he was a boy and I didn't have one because I was a girl. If your children think they can choose whether to be a boy or a girl, presumably they don't believe a boy is a child with a willy and a girl is a child without a willy, because that's not something they get to choose. So what do they think a boy is? And what do they think a girl is?"

At that point she started calling me a fucking weirdo for talking about children's genitals and there was a massive pile on, the group admin deleted all my comments and I left the group in disgust.

RosaBonheur
**
Haha, she sounds bonkers. I dunno, to me non-binary is just another version of 'I'm so special, I couldn't possibly be like other people'. And you know what, fine if that 's what she wants to do, but don't expect other people to go along with it.

It would be interesting to hear how she feels she had children in the first place if she's not a woman.

@CaptainWarbeck

The issue is that when each side uses 'woman' we mean entirely different things. Defining the language we're using in order to have a conversation is essential. We're talking at cross purposes.

And the other thing which is impossible to fix but which would help enormously is waving a magic wand and eradicating gender stereotypes. There's no need for 'gender' if you can present/dress/behave however you want regardless of sex.

That's my best understanding right now. I think feminist rhetoric does hurt trans feelings. The issue is that following trans ideology saves hurt feelings, but has far worse consequences for biological women. No one really wins here. That is unless society (patriarchy) miraculously becomes more accepting of gay, lesbian and gender nonconforming people.

Yes. The two sides define 'woman' in completely different ways. The gender identity church argues that 'woman' is a floating inner feeling of being feminine, nothing more. The gender critical church argues that 'woman' is an adult female human being.

We are told that if we insist on using the second definition we are bigots and transphobes because we are erasing the identities of trans and nonbinary people. But what we are NOT told is that if they insist on using the first definition they erase our embodied identities or definitions of ourselves as women.

As we are many more, the two cases are not symmetrical, and as effective feminism absolutely requires a name for the victims of sex-based oppression we are losing enormously if we allow the first definition to stand.

Those who transition don't always believe in the abstract floating blue or pink soul idea, but many do. Many nonbinary female people clearly define 'woman' as 'someone happy to be treated like shit for being of the female sex' and believe that they are unusual in opting out of that by making a private contract with the patriarchy. This will not work (sexism will spot them easily), but it harms most of us that they try, because they are telling us that we are happy to be Stepford Wives or Barbie dolls and they are not.

How all this cropped up again in a bizarre return to the 1950s values is something I have never understood. But back it is, only this time it's supported by both the left and the right that 'woman' is someone playing submissive, passive, emotional and nurturing roles.

The second wave feminists whose work I have read didn't all think the same way, but many of them were adamant about trying to fight gender stereotypes and gender roles, because those were, to a large extent, what held women down, just as they are doing that job in many countries even today.

The belief that women should never be in leadership positions was common, the belief that gatekeeping sex was women's task only was common (and led to the idea that rape may have been caused by what she wore or where she went), and the belief that most unpaid work was to be done by women was everywhere.

To start to make any changes at all, gender stereotypes HAD to be fought, and the second wave was partially successful in that. Or so I thought, until now.

In a way the gender identity ideology replaces feminism which questioned gender norms, roles, and stereotypes with something which appears to offer a way out of those, but only for a small minority who are willing to be on medications and have surgery. The rest will remain in the hierarchical system, and the ones at the bottom will still have vulvas.

I believe this is incredibly regressive and misogynistic.

Just to add: I have tried to understand how a world where female sex cannot be mentioned at all would function. People would not forget about it, misogyny and sexism would know exactly where to strike and whom to assault, but fighting back would become incredibly difficult.

But what if they could forget about it and just ignore all the bad things which would keep happening to female people? Why, under those conditions, would any forms even ask for gender identities? Why would they have any relevance at all? It's like asking people to put their favourite dish or colour in such forms.

So in that sense the gender identity movement would be self-defeating. But they don't expect that to happen, because, in fact, their movement is crucially dependent on the biological sex -identifying female people to exist so that others can use them for their identification purposes as the boring background noise.

@nepeta Exactly.

I think this is clearest in the context of non binary gender identities.

In order to call yourself non binary, you need at least 90% of the population to have the gender identity of "man" or "woman". And these gender identities need to usually, but not always, correlate with the sexes "male" and "female".

If there was a 100% correlation between male sex and man gender identity, and female sex and woman gender identity, not only would trans people not exist, but it would be obvious that there were only supposed to be two gender identities, because gender identity would not exist separately from sex and therefore the non binary gender identity could not exist.

If a third of the population identified as non binary, there wouldn't be a binary at all. Gender identity would be ternary, to reflect the fact that the population was roughly divided into three gender identities, so they'd need "man", "woman" and a different word not suggesting that nearly everyone else is either a man or a woman. It would also be quite obvious that non binary people - or whatever their new name was - would still all have a very binary, male or female, sex. So the third category of people would be subdivided into those who share the same sex as men and trans women, and those who share the same sex as women and trans men.

If 100% of the population identified as non binary, it would cease to exist. There would be no men, no women, and no non binary - just humans, half of whom were male and the other half of whom were female. We would return to the status quo as it was from the beginning of human history, until about five minutes ago.

They rely on everyone else playing the roles they have chosen to cast them in, in order for their identity to exist. This doesn't account for others' free will, and therefore renders their identity a rather fragile, feeble thing in my opinion.

Similarly, trans women wouldn't exist without women. Women would exist just fine without trans women. We would continue to live our lives, womaning along, menstruating, getting pregnant, having babies, losing to men in sports. But if we didn't exist, trans women couldn't exist. I don't mean in the sense that without us, no one would exist, although that is true. But a women's toilet without any women in it is just a toilet, and a women's swimming competition without any women in it is a men's swimming competition, or an empty pool.

That's why it's so crucial to their existence that we must fall into line. Maybe that's what they really mean by us denying their right to exist. In a way, it is true. They only exist if we play the roles they have assigned to us. And that's why it makes them so angry and fearful when we say, "No, we're people in our own right. This isn't The Sims, you don't get to tell us what to do."

So true and excellently put, @RosaBonheur.

RosaBonheur:
So I started being more explicit. I said, "When I was a child, I understood that my brother had a willy because he was a boy and I didn't have one because I was a girl. If your children think they can choose whether to be a boy or a girl, presumably they don't believe a boy is a child with a willy and a girl is a child without a willy, because that's not something they get to choose. So what do they think a boy is? And what do they think a girl is?"

At that point she started calling me a fucking weirdo for talking about children's genitals ...

Ha. Neat story. Exemplifies nicely the trans ideologist's basic insoluble semantic difficulty. The ordinary sense of 'being a girl' is one they can't countenance, because if that's what it is to be a girl, it's plain that a boy can't be that. ('Boy' also in the usual, ordinary sense too, of course.)

But if not that, then what? - The demand is for a sense of 'girl' that both is, but also isn't, relevantly like the ordinary sense. Impossible, of course. So, 'No debate!', 'Oh, look, a squirrel!', 'You evil transphobe!', 'Section 28 all over again!', 'You're obsessed with genitals!'... Anything except face the fact that the meaning you are seeking is ruled out of court by the conditions that make you search for it.

It seems, from this, OP is actually wrong to say, 'The issue is that when each side uses 'woman' we mean entirely different things. There are not two different meanings in play, just one (which we all understand) and one failed attempt (doomed by its own requirements) to create a new meaning.

(This is why the question, 'What is a woman?' or, equivalently, 'What does "woman" mean?' (and cognate queries) is the crucial tripwire it is for trans apologists.)

Trans ideology does not make sense because it cannot make sense.

I have always wondered why the fuck they couldn't have done this from the get go and owned it. You're a transwoman, s born male who feels like you should have been a woman. Nothing to be ashamed of! But not the same as a born female and pretending so only leads down s path of insanity.

Accept who you are, and who you are not, transfolk!

Very well put!

It may have started as a language issue but it’s become about power, narcissism, and hatred of women.

CaptainWarbeck

The issue is that when each side uses 'woman' we mean entirely different things. Defining the language we're using in order to have a conversation is essential. We're talking at cross purposes.

I think that it would be a very good thing if the Government were to introduce a rule that, in all official communiqués, woman should mean woman, not someone mansquerading. And the same for man.

If need be, they can also use trans woman / trans man, as applicable.

The Mail is reporting that the gender bread figure may be banned, so it could be indicative of an outbreak of sensibleness.

I can’t see their point of view because every which way I turn in my head when embarking upon their “line of reasoning” 🤔I hit a block very quickly and get a headache and so give up.

I think that may be why TRA types resort to insisting that it’s very “complex”, or throwing single-word hyperbolic insults or just plain old physical violence because they become mentally frustrated by the lack of logic, too, and have a similar brain meltdown but just can’t admit it.

It's not complex.

Humans can't change sex.

Every argument in favour of trans women in women's spaces is just a fancy way of saying, "Because they want to be in women's spaces and they don't care what impact that has on women."