"What Is A Woman" by Richard Dawkins - in the the New Statesman!!

[Qbishy]

Wow, I can't imagine the New Statesman, of all mags, commissioning this a year ago...

Why biological sex matters - New Statesman

Indeed. "Privileged white women..." etc. Pretty insulting to BAME women of course, though.

We should question a mindset that viciously excludes whole groups of people

Yes, trans ideology viciously excludes women and children from single sex spaces they need. That's why a bunch of middle aged women concerned with safeguarding are questioning it.

But we already know the answer to this right? The default human being?

Manhood is apparently not so much in question.

Or maybe it has always been more in question than womanhood until now, something boys have had to earn rather than naturally acquiring with the passing of time and the onset of adulthood. 🤔 I don’t remember hearing exhortations to “Be a woman” or “woman up” or “grow a pair of ovaries” when I was a girl or young woman but I heard the male equivalent shouted at boys and men along with calling them “woman” or “big girl’s blouse” as an insult.
I remember being told that “a woman’s work is never done” and “you must suffer to be beautiful”. It seems like traditionally manhood was a prize that had to be earned and womanhood was something inescapable to be endured.

On the other hand I suppose women with short hair and wearing trousers aren’t much of threat to men and we still care about men enough to target information about prostate cancer at them, they don’t get called ejaculators, or inseminating parents very often yet. Although I suppose they might find it to be laughable when they are increasingly asked if they might be pregnant.

Perhaps the question of “What is a man?” is far too radical, too dangerous, too threatening and so nobody dares to ask it.

It would be pretty unpleasant if we singled out a particular group of men for exclusion from female-only spaces, but we don't: we exclude all men. In fact, if anyone is being discriminatory it's the gender ideologues who insist that one group of males are better than others and get to have special privileges.

the suggestion that trans women are all potential abusers invading women-only spaces

Funny how this is a suggestion that we only ever hear from the TRAs.

So much utter bobbins in that badly-written, waffly pile of woo by JR, but above all, I cannot believe that this allegedly-renowned thinker actually resorted to the WOT ABOUT WIMMIN WHO’VE HAD HYSTERECTOMIES, ARE THEY NOT WOMEN? gotcha.

Newsflash for you, Jackie: it isn’t a gotcha. We’ve dealt with that one. Aeons ago.

Also, this little gem: People over 65, especially women, are almost as gender-fluid as the young

Pray tell, where are all these post-65 female* transitioners? Because I sure as hell haven’t noticed any. Unless she means women wearing trousers, in which case the ‘argument’ is even more hilariously bad than I thought?

• ‘female’ as a term used for the first time in 19thc America of course. The fact that it appears in Middle English, in the 14th century, is a mere irrelevant detail to the mighty brains of Andrea Long Chu and Jacqueline Rose.

Helen Joyce's comment on Twitter:

"Dawkins' article was predictably excellent. But for the purposes of demonstrating the utter vacuity of genderism, Rose's was even better. Operation Let Them Speak proceeds from one triumph to another."

😂

bio political modernity

Fgs

Well, anyone who believes they are a baby is a baby! It is magic like that! And I guess any thing they think of as a baby can be a baby.

Oh… wait….

Do you think all those people who use another woman’s body to produce their child while activating that TWAW understand this? No? Maybe they believe for some unknown reason that the pomo theory only works with gender identity and nothing else.

The bit about people not thinking there were 2 sexes until there were black female slaves in the 1700s was laughable. At the beginning of Genesis which was written long before that "God" adds woman as an extra sex. Most ancient religious stories and many folk stories/ fairy tales refer to men and women, boys and girls. Rose writes such nonsense.

As I read it, she was specifically referring to the word "female", not woman.

If you take ‘female’ as a synonym for the idea that there are a distinct type of bodies that can gestate babies and breast feed them, then I suspect the human race had that figured out some time before the 17th c. Or even the Middle Ages

Yes, that's what I thought. But as @Zeugma said, that word has been in use since the 14th century or earlier. It took me a minute or less to find that on the internet. I'm surprised that a professor was unable to do such a simple bit of fact checking.

As for quoting Andrea Long Chu as the source - a man who thinks that a woman is a sex toy for men - I have no words.

Thank you to previous posters for some very insightful comments. I hope some of you consider writing letters to the magazine to put forward your well-reasoned views.

The progessive Wokesters are so facile that they can't even make a novel argument for their POV. No, they have to rewrite definitions and reinterpret language to shoehorn their cause.

This ton of crap that woman/female wasn't in use before recent history, and the definition is race-class based rather than sex-class based is so ludicrous, I wonder how she kept a straight face typing it.

Men certainly have always known who women have been. And so have women. Since time immemorial.

Wow the opposing article is a load of garbled, confused nonsense. Freud? Sexuality? Dfod!

I properly hope the New Statesman goes on to publish the inevitable take-down of Rose’s ill-conceived and inaccurate piece. It relies on very poor sources to (incorrectly) define ‘woman’ and ‘female’, the tired old ‘what about women who don’t have wombs’ argument [all biological individuals are different, but they all follow pathways which are only available to other individuals who share some specific characteristics. Humans are sexually dimorphic, so for humans, that includes sex. I realise that’s more of a mouthful, but I guess that’s the level of detail some people need 🙄]

I am soooo fed up with the trans lobby implying that GC won’t allow self-expression. GC is all about self-expression NOT being related to sex; while recognising that men and women are different, so the social contract inevitability has sex-base elements, out of respect for other people

It seems to me that TRAs are now claiming black people's struggle as their, just as they claimed women's struggle and now homosexuals' struggle as their own.

Witness their continued attempts to trans-wash the Stonewall riots, and the beginning of the Pride movement...

I mean, they're already claiming that there can be no feminism without transwomen in it...

Now they'll claim the racist struggle as their own as well.

The odd thing about her article is that she talks about "slaves". That is not the accepted term any more, it's "enslaved people". (An important progression against the dehumanising of enslaved people.) You'd think that, as a super tip top progressive academic, she would know that!

The bit about the word female and slaves was presumably a deliberate repurposing of the idea that prior to that it wasn't applied to humans only other species and was applied to slaves as part of their dehumanisation. She is trying to make it seem as though the actual word wasn't used before.

I hated this bit in Rose's part "women the mark of oppression, prejudice, low pay, the burden of domestic labour, violence in the home and on the street. For many trans women, it is a claim that arises out of the feeling that biology and a core, lived, sexual identity have been woefully misaligned. These women surely deserve respect as women, not least for discarding the straitjacket of masculinity."

Exactly - women have those experiences of oppression. Men don't. So men have neither the biology nor the oppression. Furthermore, they do not discard the straightjacket of masculinity because they are still treating themselves as much more important than anyone else when they ignore women's boundaries and force a change in language which will kill women and make it such that women have no rape crisis groups, safe refuges or ability to feel safe in hospital. Men who discard the straightjacket of masculinity deserve respect. Eddie Izzard, Lia Thomas, Robin Moira White and the likes have not done that. They've put on a frock and shown their narcissism. They're archetypal men. Men need to own their own privilege. Any man who does that would never call themselves a woman.

It is dishonest. It is a tactic. Just like the assertion that second wave feminists never believed that male and female bodies were very different in physical strength.

These are just misrepresentations to fulfill other people’s political agendas. (Not sure why anyone gives air time to Long Chu though). It is done by oversimplification or by out and out dishonesty, including lack of adequate research and being bereft of intellectual curiosity.

It's refreshing to read Dawkins on form (on the topic of biology). I particularly enjoyed these phrases and aim to steal them:

people who choose to identify with the sex opposite to their biological reality

a tiny testicular excrescence

Thanks to those who've summarised the Rose article so I don't have to read it. Are New Statesman readers able to see the difference in coherent writing do you think?

Latest - From a Dawkins comment it Turns out there was a very long delay in publishing the piece possibly because New Statesman couldn't find people willing to go up against Dawkins. I doubt it was purely because of staff pressure as NS has long published articles on both sides .

Dawkins - New Statesman commissioned my piece out of the blue (rather to my surprise) on 29th March. I sent it in on 4th April, having been told it would be published the following week. In the event it wasn’t published for more than three months. I was eventually told the reason for the long delay. Perhaps under pressure from junior members of staff (that’s a pure guess, but it’s a common pattern in publishing today) they had decided they needed to publish an opposing view. They were having trouble finding one, and I think it shows.
I should make it clear that I’m not complaining about the delay. I was treated with the utmost consideration and courtesy throughout. And I think it may be the only piece of journalism I have ever written where my prose was not messed about by the editors but printed exactly as I wrote it. For that I am extremely grateful.
Moreover, I don’t think Jacqueline Rose can be blamed for not replying to my article, because I doubt that she was shown it. Whether she should be blamed for something else – such as writing an article that doesn’t make any coherent sense – is another matter. Perhaps “doesn’t make any coherent sense” is a badge of honour among postmodernists. I wouldn’t know, as I’ve never met anyone who could even begin to tell me what postmodernism is.

https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/07/27/sex-2-dawkins-vs-rose-on-whether-theres-a-sex-binary/#comment-2055284

This article shows once again why no debate was so important. The Gender side have nothing. It is just a belief system and a very silly one.

If you take ‘female’ as a synonym for the idea that there are a distinct type of bodies that can gestate babies and breast feed them, then I suspect the human race had that figured out some time before the 17th c. Or even the Middle Ages

Aristotle was pretty clear about it.