Matt Walsh Tweet Critical of Feminism

[PorcelinaV]

https://twitter.com/mattwalshblog/status/1683820604883869697

Feminism set the stage for trans activists by insisting for years that there are no significant or inherent differences between men and women apart from anatomy. They are the ones who came up with the idea that most differences between the sexes were “social constructs.”

So if a woman is just a vagina and breasts and chromosomes don't have any effect at all on inherent tendencies, responses and preferences - then a man that acquires a vagina and breasts is just as a much woman as a woman. If not, why not?

So do you think that male predilictions are inherent: that there is an elevated tendency in males towards fetish and paraphilia - that is not there in women?

If that is the case, which definitely seems to be true - then it does seem as if biology/chromosomes and biological do effect and influence behaviour differntly across the two sexes.

I think people are reacting more against his style of communication, and that is due to the fact it appears on twitter, rather than the content.

I've long come to the conclusion that certain strands of feminism - those that deny there are any natural differences between the sexes - has, in significant part, laid the foundation for transgender ideology. That and Queer Theory - which itself arose from both the women's movement and from the gay liberation movement.

It is obvious that 'sex' goes deeper than just secondary physical sexual characteristics. Obviously, to my mind, family background, culture, period in time anmd personal characteristics moderate or influnece the expression of organic sexx based differnces - but to deny that they are there seems a stretch too far.

The reason why lots of younger, and older, women seem to be on board with trans ideology - is because their version of feminism has always been predicated on 'equality' - whereby equality means 'sameness' - with women tending to coalese around previously coded masculine norms of behaviour or activity.

There has been a rejection and a devaluying of feminine/female roles - seeing them as inherently oppressive. in short - being female is positioned as a burden, a source of oppression. That is where I think someone like Carolone Nokes is coming from, and why she is so keen on TWAW.

This is just falling into the same trap as those Lefties who castigate women as " alt right" and "nazis" for believeing that sex is real and has consequences.

Is being supportive of women as mothers, and being supportive of the family unit such a bad thing?

Is feminism just about being 'equal' or is it also about valuing the female/the female roles and being appreciative of those?

I don't think the Left has the sole ownership of feminism/or respect for women - in fact we are now seeing that the Left seems willing to throw women under the bus in the name of 'equality' and social justice.

Obviously transgendersim is also a product of this particular juncture in time: one in which pharmaceutical/surgical and technological developments make it easier to indulge in fantsasies of transhumanism and being free of the limits of the human body and nature.

People have been trying to escape nature forever; trying to dominate and control nature; denying nature - because people want to feel free and limitless, and the body and the earth don't permit that.

I would say it's more likely that he's reacting to left wing feminists who seem to feel that they own the issue and are outraged that anyone else is talking about it and having an impact.They are also very publicly outraged at other left wing women they don't like or who use the incorrect words or methods too, not just right wing people, so it's not like he's making it up.

Meghan Murphy's new series explores this issue:

To be honest, I no longer use the term 'feminist' to describe myself. Feminism, when adopted as an identity label, can become just as prescriptive and ideologically constraining as any other form of Intersectionalist identity politics.

I now view my self as an adult human female ( a woman) with an obvious and inherent interest in women's issues. Women's issues do not belong to the Left.
Sex is real, and so are sex based differeneces - even if not rigidly and prescriptively so.

Feminism set the stage for trans activists by insisting for years that there are no significant or inherent differences between men and women apart from anatomy. They are the ones who came up with the idea that most differences between the sexes were “social constructs.”

Yes, he's a right-wing misogynist. And today's news is?

Feminism is just as guilty as any other'ism of throwing out knee jerk accusations of bigotry or prejudice.

I'm curious, are people denying that the idea among many progressives have that men and woman are almost functionally identical, even in sports, exists?

Because I don't see how anyone could, we come up against it all the time, especially with the sports issue. That woman who was being questioned in the US by the congress who thought Serena Williams would be competitive against top tear male tennis players for example - a university educated woman representing a major lobbying organization.

If that's not being denied - where do people think it came from if not the feminist movement?

Those sorts of peculiar ideas long predate feminism (they predate Darwinism!) eg Blank Slate theory goes all the way back to Aristotle.

There has absolutely been a strain of Feminism that fully embraced the nurture side of the nature/nurture debate but the idea that men and women are exactly the same and the only difference is socialisation is pretty fringe (and rather bonkers, because how would anyone know which babies to socialise to sit nicely with their knees together and which babies to encourage to fight each other?)

If you belive that the body is just 'a meat suit' ( a Mary Harrington phrase) and has no bearing on the person inside that meat suit at all, then it easy to see how transgenderism might arise. Likewise the belief that there are no inherent differences between male and female, men and woman - aprt from what the individual feels or prefers.

How do people think the social coding of masculine and feminine arises - if not extrapolated from the biological functions of the body?

So if a woman is just a vagina and breasts and chromosomes don't have any effect at all on inherent tendencies, responses and preferences - then a man that acquires a vagina and breasts is just as a much woman as a woman. If not, why not?

With current technology the things that such a man acquires are not breasts and vaginas.

Should technology advance to the point that we genuinely can implant functioning reproductive systems, replace chromosomes, make men's bodies smaller, undo the effects of their puberty etc etc., then yes, he would be a real woman. Until then, silicone boobs and a surgical hole don't cut the mustard I'm afraid.

How do people think the social coding of masculine and feminine arises - if not extrapolated from the biological functions of the body?

One of the big questions of feminism but some of us still contend that masculinity and femininity are patriarchal social constructions designed to oppress women.

Signed,

A Woman who is not 'feminine' and who deeply resents the behavioural socialisation she was/is subject to that is embedded with this expectation and which punished her when she transgresses.

More from Matt Walsh. I LOL'd a couple of times - at both the videos in this clip.

https://twitter.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1684295168571199494

You are the sum of your experiences. From the day you are born, the body you are in determines what you physically are, how people treat you and how you see yourself. It is the interface through which you know the world and through whoch the world knows you. If it is just a "meat suit", it's one you are sewn into the instant you are conceived and live inside until the day you die, and that in itself affects who you become.

A man who transitions in the current state of the art experiences nothing of this. Even if the technology existed to truly reboot a male body as entirely and genuinely female, a person whose experiences of life from birth until the switch were of being and being treated as male is not the same as a person who from birth was and was treated as female.

I think our sex does influence some aspects of our mentality directly through our hormones, but with as much variability within the sexes as between them.

I think living with the capabilities of our bodies influences us a lot, eg being a person who is tall and strong, or a person who needs to think about periods, or doesn't need to think about shaving their face, or has carried a child or nursed a baby or many many other sex-based physical experiences will affect how someone's personality develops.

And finally, I think the social expectations and freedoms that society imposes on us, through social norms, through media and culture representations, through the patterns of life and work have a massive effect on how our personalities evolve.

So yes, I think we can recognise the "meat suit" isn't something we can just shrug off as separate to an inner essential self without having to believe men and women are just innately very different types of mind.

There are differences in behaviour at a population level/statistically. E.g. men are much more likely to be violent than women. But that doesn't mean you can assume an individual man is violent- if we followed that line of thought then in would make sense to severely restrict the movement of all men. That would be wrong. The irony is the exact same people who would get up in arms at that sort of generalisation (e.g. Matt Walsh, others of the "all feminists think all men are rapists" school of thought) are quite happy to extend those generalisations to women (women are made to be homemakers because on a population level women are more nurturing). In fairness you could probably find women/feminists who do the opposite - men are dangerous but it's wrong to say there are differences between men and women. I think they are far less common than Matt Walsh would have you believe though.

So you can't really change sex.

But if you can sometimes imitate the other sex, why would reproductive biology be that important to single sex toilets or changing rooms?

Presumably it's for social and psychological reasons that you want single sex spaces, not for strict biological reasons.

That position may be fine for a conservative, but I'm not sure it would work for someone claiming to be GC.

GC women appear to be upholding gender roles (to some degree) if they want single sex spaces, on the grounds that "sex matters" in some contexts.

But presumably this is because of the social and psychological dimensions of gender, and not really "sex" considered in isolation.

But if you start saying that men and women are just inherently different at the level of gender, and so we need to uphold different roles for them, (a little bit), then that appears to be in tension with being "gender critical"?

No, not at all.

My position is simple.

As long as men have screwed up ideas about women, women need spaces and protections from men.

As long as society (both men and women) has an unfair bias towards men, women need woman-only opportunities to counteract that.

As long as women bear an unequal reproductive burden, women need social supports to ensure being a mother doesn't disempower them socially, politically or economically,

As long as women's bodies have different capabilities to men's, women need women-only sporting opportunities.

The last two, being centered in the body, will never go away.

The first two are social/gender and in theory could go away. As a gender critical woman I don't think there's any innate reason we need separate spaces, toilets, maths clubs or whatever. But I do think they are necessary now. I even accept they become a self fulfilling prophecy - we have separate toilets because we consider those spaces private so men fetishise what they can't see so we need to keep them separate to keep those men out....but even understanding that, I'm not prepared to accept the way to break that cycle is just to let men in until they get over it.

And as per my previous post, just because I don't think gender is innate, it doesn't mean I think a person born male can switch into the "gender" aspects of womanhood, because gender is as much the internal result of growing up female in society as it is the way people react to you in the moment.

In short, when it comes to "gender" ( ie non innate differences), my GC position is gender-based needs are still rooted in sex, not because of innate difference but a necessary evil due to a sexst society. Fix that first, then the social/gender based provisions won't be needed.