Its all very terribly complicated, you see

[Morningmeeting]

The response ' the questions aren't simple and neither are the answers.'

Seems to be a standard TRA response for failing to be able to answer the most basic questions about their core concepts or for failing to define the absolute most key terms in their position.

They seem to have redefined this as a virtue, as if it shows how clever and complicated their position is, far too clever for those simpletons who expect basic coherence in foundational concepts.

How can they honestly not see how this is a self-serving and frankly stupid line of argument to take?

If you can't defend your key position, its probably because its not defensible.

I'm sure that we were told on another thread that gender is more than a feeling, it is an Inner Perception.

I tend to reply with - the material world we inhabit is a lot easier to understand than that subjective world individuals also inhabit, and it's important to be aware of what we are talking about..

-We can talk about observable, measurable phenomenon such as sex.

• We can talk about self perception and feelings, often merged into a construct called gender identity.

-we can discuss ideas about how the two might intersect

I point out that the sense that it's complicated comes from people struggling to separate the objective and subjective.

💰💵💸💷💶

Simple, really.

Yes we were, and when this idea was interrogated, it turned out that the poster meant ‘feelings’.

I find the 'it's all too complicated for logic, just accept that it is' argument very similar to the response religions give to uncomfortable questions (eg. why does God allow terrible things to happen to children?)

I had this exact response from a very evangelical friend when I tried to explain my atheism, and that I think too much.

See, I think there is a difference between the responses from religious people and GI people.

Your friend may not have an answer but lots of religious people do. Those answers, to things like the problem of suffering, even through they don't satisfy me, do actually have a coherence to them. Even when religious people don't have an answer, they acknowledge that they believe anyway because of faith. Which I find fair enough. Faith based belief, after all, is about faith. Religious faith is just that, its not an evidence based position based on scientific deductive reasoning.

GI people operate in an odd place where they are claiming their position is an objective, reality based truth, not faith based, but also fail to have a coherent argument they can defend and also fail to define their key terms. Religious people, after all, do have definitions of their key terms. Christians can tell you what they mean by salvation and sin and creation and prayer and discernment and all their other key concepts. GI people cannot.

GI people operate in an odd place where they are claiming their position is an objective, reality based truth, not faith based, but also fail to have a coherent argument they can defend and also fail to define their key terms. Religious people, after all, do have definitions of their key terms. Christians can tell you what they mean by salvation and sin and creation and prayer and discernment and all their other key concepts. GI people cannot.

Yes that's a really good point and I think it's a big part of why they often get so disproportionately angry when questioned or challenged.

I might say "But you have reached an understanding of it, despite it being complicated. So how did you do that?" I have found the response to this with various young people as attempts to educate me, and discussion but usually until an impasse was reached. Invariably this has resulted in a strop and an unfriending. However, I am hopeful that it might have sown a seed of genuine logical thinking. I observe some of the new media interviewers I like doing this.

That is a good way of putting it. I try to find out 'what exactly is it YOU mean by it, even if it's not exactly what others mean?'
But ya get waffle to that

A sex-based definition of "woman" isn't entirely straightforward. There's a number of edge cases which require special thought.

But at least GC feminists can offer an approximate definition. Trans activists can't even approximately manage to define what "woman" means to them. (At least not without resorting to circularity or obvious stereotypes.)

Morningmeeting · Yesterday 18:59

So their failure to answer becomes a fault of questioner, rather than a failure of the coherence of their position.

I do like the way you've set that out and the entire post.

It's probably 'very complicated', because a deep dive into the fascinating world of underlying theories shows the millions of contradictions which cannot be reconciled in them. So if you still wish to support this ideology, you will simply have to accept it, deny that anybody else is hurt by it at all, and argue that the underlying concepts are all very scientifically sound, empirically supported, but so very complicated that they can only be understood by the super-intelligent, and whoever they are speaking to is clearly too stupid to ever get it but should just accept everything.

Now that was a long and complicated sentence!

More seriously, I have given years of research and thinking to this, because I very much wanted it to be possible to give transgender people all the rights they demand AND keep women's rights (which haven't not yet even been won in most of the world) from being negatively affected. But this is simply not possible.

I've mentioned this before, but what they ask for is as if they are asking for a seat at the table where societies make their decisions, and when they are told to pull up a chair and join the others they refuse and absolutely insist on the chair women's rights is currently trying to sit on.

And that's what is very simple about all this.

What is interesting about analogies with faith and religion is that most faiths are based on believing in an omnipotent being. With Christianity, it involves believing in Jesus.

With trans ideology, the analogy is more like believing people who say they are Jesus are Jesus and being Jesus is an identity.

I am an atheist, but I have friends from all faiths who would not accept someone identifying as one of their deities.

Its more than an approximate definition.

The fact that some people are blind does not change the fact that humans are a sighted species. No-one would argue that saying humans are a sighted species is denying that blind people exist, or wanting to commit genocide against them or all the other hyperbole we get when we say there are two sexes and here is how they are defined.

The process of a new human being formed is complicated ( note GI people, we can still describe and define that process and all the terms for the component parts of it), and, as we are not produced on a factory line, there is variation and things can not go as intended. This is what happens with a whole range of disorders and disabilities that people are born with. The fact that some people are born with DSDs does not really change the robustness of the definition of woman or man/ male or female. It just means sometimes the process of creating a male or female has not gone as it should. The same as sometimes the process of creating other parts of a human body does not go as it should.

"It's complicated" to them because they can't explain it properly without sounding like sexist morons and admitting it's just bullshit.

They know that for every one of their answers we have logic reasoning and questions that unravel every single argument.

They try to avoid it by being vague on purpose, changing the subject, hyperboles and insults meant to stop the conversation.

It's all bullshit and on some level they know it.

Because there's been a pile of sexist bs neurotrash scientific papers to align with their beliefs. Because GI sells and is a big money spinning machine

They "believe" it's science.

I think that now GC beliefs have been legally recognised we should ensure that the way forward involves ensuring the gender identity beliefs are also beliefs.

Then, the debate can turn to what is reasonable to expect/demand in terms of others being expected to follow the practices of another's belief.

Single sex spaces do, of course, sit outside these discussion as they are about sex and not gender (regardless of whether you want to abolish or worship gender)

"It's complicated" to them because they can't explain it properly without sounding like sexist morons and admitting it's just bullshit

I think this is a good point. I had been thinking that 'its complicated' was invented for the benefit of third parties, to justify to third parties why their questions could not be answered.

But actually, it also works to justify to THEMSELVES why they cannot make it make sense.

I once heard a woman of faith talking about her Holy book ( I won't say what religion). And she said that if there was a part of her book that she could not understand, or otherwise found difficult, then she saw that as a fault in herself, not a fault in her Holy Book.

I think the same mindset may be happening here. That the maintaining the belief is what matters. If they are struggling with that, its because it is 'complicated', not because it is incoherent. Because it cannot be incoherent as the belief is ALL and must be sustained.

PP failure to even try to answer core questions, or instead to give answers defending why she could not answer, illustrated that, I think.

(I still can't get over someone simultaneously telling their child that gender roles and expressions make them a girl, yet also claiming to be very against sexist stereotypes and to challenge them whenever they see them. That's some cognitive dissonance!)

Yes we are sexually dimorphic and despite the hyperbole around, no one has ever been able to meaningfully dispute that.

I agree with this. I used to be much more TRA, though never a fully paid-up member. And I could not hold my own in arguments where I was challenged, despite me being generally good at debating. Deep down I knew it didn't really make sense but didn't want to admit it (my entire circle of uni friends was at stake).

Personally I think there's a lot of projection in the insults. If you're reasonably intelligent and are used to being able to robustly defend your position, it makes sense you'd feel stupid and embarrassed when you can't.

You really see this in action when like last week, you see some poor woman on the stand in court who's been sent to carry the can for activists. And there's no option to shout insults and flounce at a judge, and you can see them horribly aware that the material they've been fed is not working against rational questions.

Interested to read about that court case @Froodwithatowel- am guessing there’s a thread on it?

Link to the second thread (there's a link to the first thread in the opening post of thread 2)

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4988632-another-gc-employment-tribunal-roz-adams-vs-edinburgh-rape-crisis-centre-2?page=1

Thank you @Boiledbeetle.

I can provide an example of one thing that is common to 99.9% of women.

TRAs can't give one thing that is common to two women.