"Trans women ARE biological women"

[TangenitalContrivance]

I see this argument and comment more and more the last few weeks and hugely over the last 3 days.

For example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/transgenderUK/comments/1k1tliv/trans_women_are_biological_women/

This statement, and the comments underneath it absolutely baffle me.

The approach, one that I am sure will only work with a minority of the people who said TWAW, is to undermine the definition of words, yet again, and deliberately cloud the water when it comes to speaking clearly and using terms that everyone agrees with

I have seen it said in more places than Reddit however, and by respected people

Otherwise known as we humans know everything 😁The arrogance!

Absolutely.

God those posts are horrendous.
BeKind indeed.

all this flim flam arguing round the edges for the exceedingly rare situatuions where someone may not quite fit the reporoductive mould.

and yet, what is the point. These one offs are increasingly rare and more than likely are not under the gender umberella anyway. We know 99.9999 of all these men larping as women are exactly that. DNA swab the cheek and they are going to come up as your common-or-garden man.

and all this 'oooh you dont know, you might not be a woman' nonsence. Well on a site like MN, where the clue is in the title, its pretty likely there is a pretty big bit of evidence that shows that we mums are.

It’s because it’s a silly TRA gotcha. As pp said on another thread earlier, I first remember Rachel McKinnon using in about 2016/17.

And they still don't get that all this "I am biological!" "I am a woman!" misses the point anyway.

They are assuming that if they can twist a word to include them now, it somehow gives them the natural right to claim whatever already exists for the use of "women". The biggest tell that TW really do not get (or choose not to get) womanhood at all is how they seem to believe it's all just a matter of semantics, as if "women" were a bloodless concept with no connection to anything real.

But it doesn't work that way.

Women's spaces and women's rights didn't come into being in a vacuum. They didn't just weirdly pop into existence fully formed for no reason at all, like a big bang of newly formed rights looking for some people to glom on to.

Every single women's space and women's right that exists, from the ladies changing room to the girls' STEM club to maternity rights to women's officers to the menopause support group, exists because of a real and material problem faced by female people because of our sex or because of how society treats us because of our sex.

The real world needs of women preceded the rights of women.

The rights we have today are what they are because that is what women needed, so that is what women worked to create. Women's rights are not given or arbitrary - the rights of women are shaped by the real world needs of women.

And these rights were called women's rights only because we were called women. Our needs, our rights.

Genderists are twisting the word woman or biological now, after all that, to chsnge its meaning to include a group of people who were never part of that, and by that sleight of hand to claim women's rights. But those rights only exist in the first place because of the needs of a group of people that Genderists also say are not what "woman" means.

What they miss, or perhaps chose not to see, is that "woman's" rights don't belong to the word woman, they belong to the people that word signified. And when they change the meaning of the word, break it from the original group of people to mean someone else, they in doing so also break the link between the word and the rights.

Saying because someone is a "woman" now, under a new way of defining women, they have the right to everything created then, under a definition they don't even consider valid, is like swapping the words for blind and deaf and insisting it means white canes are for people who can't hear and hearing aids for people who can't see.

It really is!

No I don’t. I just know that science and biology is very messy, we humans don’t fully understand it - we pretend we do and like nice neat categories and definitions. Genes work in messy complex ways that we dont fully understand - and the concept of male and female is reductive and a social construct.

I'll just keep bumping this periodically to remind readers that all the clouds of whataboutery are not relevant.

The minority argument is never a good one. Gays or red heads are in the minority - does that mean they don’t have equal rights?

Also they are not one offs or increasingly rare 🥸

Dear lurkers, can you see how you're being snowed?

I wish there was an eloquent patient person on my LinkedIn feed to do this!

Exactly. All this focus on the incredibly tiny exceptions as if that justifies ignoring the fact that for 99.lots% of humans, our sex is obvious and for women especially, our sex has physical and social consequences that if not mitigated for put us at a disadvantage in society.

The argument that because 1 in 80,000 people on the planet might have Swyer syndrome, 4 billion people on the planet don't deserve sex-based protections even though that 4 billion people certainly do suffer sex-based inequity is mind blowing.

You obviously don't know enough but think you do. You keep saying "we" instead of "I".

Based on your posts I (as in me) definitely know more than you. Stop saying "we"

I can feel the Fausto Sterling 'common as redheads' nonsense coming. I can just sense it....

False equivalence.

We don't remove the rights of, oh, let's say blind people because some people have red hair. But apparently we should remove the rights of female people because some people have DSDs?

Yeah thats not my argument 🙄 Remove the rights of ‘female’ people.

I just know that science and biology is very messy, we humans don’t fully understand it
While that is certainly the case it doesn't mean you can make shit up and claim it is true without any supporting evidence.
Back to those experts other than Prof Winston and Richard Dawkins: why did the Scottish government not call on them for witnesses in this court case?

It's weird reading all these Reddit/TRA talking points now. They were always bollocks, but now they just feel so terribly dated and old fashioned in a 'people really did once think that the Sun orbited the Earth' kind of way.

Thank you for the summary. Having lost an hour of my life revisiting this is tedious rehash of pseudo scientific whataboutery, rhetorically this is the fundamental flaw of their argument.

Science and biology is messy and complex, but that doesn’t mean we don’t know anything.

Sex is measurable and observable via biological markers of various kinds, and these markers were not constructed by society. The markers would still be present even if society disagreed. It therefore fails the test as a social construct.

How sex is treated by society and how we have expectations of each sex is a social construct.

Two different things.

Individuals with DSD have asked not to be brought into this debate but just very briefly, they are still either male or female, but with differences in their development. The name was changed from intersex to DSD because intersex implies they’re between sexes, and that’s simply not the case.

I can't even...

Yes!

Unfortunately, you are making a category error. To say that ‘we don’t know everything’ is not the same statement as ‘we know nothing’.

Similarly, to argue that because genes are complex the concept of male and female is reductive suggests that you need to re-examine the concept of ‘foundational knowledge.’ There’s a difference between an over simplified concept and one that is basic to, say, reproductive biology.

And you keep saying ‘social construct’.

I do not think that phrase means what you think it means.