Does anyone else think the language of this gives the game away a little bit?

[lechiffre55]

https://twitter.com/NakulMPande/status/1727549822557962498

Specifically this one line.
People who refuse to believe trans women are women

The word "refuse" not "don't".
Refuse says to me that what you believe is irrelevant, you should/must/will believe what we tell you to. Your free will and thinking for yourself doesn't come into it, in fact it's positively discouraged. We will tell you what to think and believe. Refusal is anti-social, probably violent, and lots of other nasty words of condemnation too. Do what I say!

Not sure who Nakul Pande is, but surely quoting 4 people explaining clearly and logically why you’re wrong doesn’t really support your argument?

The absolutely fabulous Ross Tucker takes him and his fatuous arguments to bits

https://x.com/scienceofsport/status/1727672403898057174?s=46&t=aWQLrPtVicDNf6MQpq5WVg

No one believes that transwomen are women.

This is an argument about vocabulary.

It should be People who refuse to obey transwomen’s rewriting of language so that the word ‘woman’ now means anyone wearing a skirt with lots of make up, and the word for someone with a clitoris is ‘ciswoman’

It was not being able to make the cognitive jump to believe that transwomen are women that caused me to scratch beneath the surface.
Until I heard that phrase I thought it was as clear to everyone else as it was to me that we were all just pretending.

“He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

I agree. 'Refuse to believe' gives it away completely.

It does mean 'think what you're told'. And we see over and over again that this is the province of those with zero respect for other humans, or for diversity and inclusion, but who get really high on controlling and bullying other people. Its a fabulous vehicle for people with problems to give them an airing.

Who does this chap I'd never heard of before I clicked on this thread think he is? The grown-ups have spoken and his opinion is the squawking of a thwarted toddler.

I agree OP. Either a TW factually is a woman, and can be proven by defining "woman" and demonstrating how TW match that definition...
Or it's a subjective belief based on confusing sex with gender, or dismissing sex for gender, or just not being very good at critically analysing what you claim.

Another aspect that my subconcious picked up on with that statement has finally arrived at the concious part of my brian.

A belief is a deep personal understanding that is core to a person's personality. They may change over time but tend to be fairly immutable,and affect how we react to life. Beliefs are at our very core.

In telling people they should change their beliefs he's being very hypocritical/double standards.
A man who believes he's a woman should not have that belief questioned because it's their true authentic self despite the physical evidence to the contrary. A woman who doesn't believe that man is a woman must change her beliefs to suit that man and ignore her true authentic self.
The respecting of a person's beliefs only works one way, and if you're not on the right team your true authentic self counts for nothing.

A sports presenter. His arguments are very ideologically driven on this topic.

Basically, he's saying the quiet bit out loud.

So, another dick like Jonathan Liew, who thinks that women should "just budge up a bit" in the name of inclusivity?

Yes, surely he means people who refuse to pretend they believe?

I wonder what’s in it for this guy? He’s a sports journalist, so in this instance it’s not possible that he’s ignorant and stupid enough to believe himself.

And as OP says, the “refuse to believe” is telling. He doesn’t believe, but he wishes to force compliance on others anyway. Of course no one really believes this crap, but there’s a sliding scale from total cynicism to total immersion in the fiction. He seems to be of the cynical ilk.

Men who go to bat for this nonsense are all alarming to various degrees. But men who are doing it for cynical rather than groupthink reasons, in the year 2023 when everyone can see the tide turning…. 🤐

Refuse to believe is very telling, isn’t it. If he believed that men who claim they are women really were women he’d say “They don’t understand that” or similar.

He implicitly gives away the information that he himself knows this is a belief and not a fact and that he sees those who don’t agree as difficult people who are not making the effort they ought to.

Of course the reality is that nobody actually believes men are women. If they did, they wouldn’t need to chant the mantras so often.

Just reading the excellent report about the review of law on the other thread which reminds of the Human Rights articles 9 and 10 for people not to be obliged to manifest beliefs which they may not hold.

A belief is a deep personal understanding that is core to a person's personality. They may change over time but tend to be fairly immutable,and affect how we react to life. Beliefs are at our very core.

In telling people they should change their beliefs he's being very hypocritical/double standards.

This is exactly why I challenge the impact of the belief that we all have a gender identity (and the impact of it being compelled as a truth when creating legislation etc), rather than the belief itself.

When I'm challenging this, I don't ask anyone to change their belief and agree with me that we don't all have a gender identity. Some people will continue to believe that we do (or will say they believe it even if they don't), no matter what. But in my experience, most people are somewhere on the journey to believing that we don't.

I think it's part of a broader effort to reframe beliefs as something it's possible to choose.

I don't think it's possible to simply choose or decide what you genuinely believe to be true. I think you can choose to act as though you believe something, choose to expose yourself to information and experiences that may change what you believe, or hope something is/isn't true. But I don't think that you can, by an act of will, just decide to believe/not believe something. I believe that if I poke myself in the eye it will hurt. Unless something materially changes (say, I get a local anaesthetic), I cannot choose to change that belief and instead truly believe that it will not hurt. No matter what I tell myself, I'll still know that it's gonna hurt.

An inability to choose beliefs is inconvenient for those who would like to condemn others for making a poor moral choice to believe what they believe. If you accept that people can't just choose to change what they believe to be true, you accept that being a conservative/an atheist/a sex-realist/a Muslim/whatever is based on beliefs about reality that they're not able to freely change any time they want.

@DumboHimalayan

I think it's part of a broader effort to reframe beliefs as something it's possible to choose.

Just like redefining homosexuality to be same gender attracted as opposed to same sex attracted despite the word sex appearing in the word homosexuality.
Perhaps they should use the word homogenderuality?
Then telling people they should "choose" to have sex with people they are not inantely attracted to.

Someone else gets to choose what you should believe or be sexually attracted to.

It also reminds me of the way atheists sometimes get framed by religious people as rejecting or denying or turning away from Christ/ God. Instead of simply not believing in the same thing.

I'm no more capable of believing that trans women are women than I am of believing that the earth is flat.

I could choose to pretend to believe that trans women are women, and many people make this choice or are effectively coerced into it. But that is not the same thing as actually believing it.

Is it the lack of belief that offends them, or the lack of willingness to pretend?

Yes, as RavingStone says, it's very evangelical.

'People who refuse to let Christ into their lives'

Those who refuse to be saved

Is it the lack of belief that offends them, or the lack of willingness to pretend?

My guess is that it depends on the motivation of the individual that is offended.

Broadly speaking, my guess is that the self-serving acronym people get themselves to a point where they eventually don't care whether people believe, pretend or push back (all of it helps them feel like they've got power over people... part of the thrill), the genuinely dysphoric ones and non-binaries would assume that it's incorrect and incomprehensible that people wouldn't believe that we all have a gender identity/inner sense of gender (perhaps exacerbated by autism) and the vocally supportive "handmaiden" types don't want to let on that they worry about whether it really is something that they believe, being too busy trying to push away doubts to show how "educated" they are compared to the "ignorant GCs".

The acronym people seem to be split in to those that know they have it and those that don't. Presumably those that don't know just end up at the same point as those that do, where it really doesn't matter as long as they get what they need out of it.

All of this is solved by repeating the mantras and framing any "heretics" as refusers and ignorant. No critical thinking is required at this point, which probably provides a sense of relief that nobody will penetrate the belief with difficult questions. It's definitely a very good solution for any evangelical-type group that wants to keep people believing, whatever motivations are held by individuals within the group. It's also quite interesting that this exact same argument is thrown at "believers in gender critical ideology". That helps to shore up the gender identity belief defensive walls even more.

Obviously there are some exceptions where people know that their gender dysphoria is a mental health condition (e.g. Blaire White, Buck Angel), are happy to state this and will recognise their sex. But I'm assuming that they still have an inner voice telling them that they are in the wrong-sexed body, even if they don't recognise this as a belief in the idea that they have a gender identity.