Does the guardian really not see?

[Theeyeballsinthesky]

"We work tirelessly to establish the facts – and when we get them wrong, we correct them. For democracy to survive, for society to progress, we need a shared foundation of facts. If we cannot broadly agree that the grass is green, we cannot have a conversation about what to do about the pollutants that are killing it"

https://www.theguardian.com/media/ng-interactive/2026/may/06/how-to-survive-the-information-crisis-we-once-talked-about-fake-news-now-reality-itself-feels-fake

this is a good article about the importance of facts, connection and how society might navigate the current crisis of mis and dis information

and yet Viner has written the above with clearly straight face while editing a paper that hounded out journalists who said that no one can change sex and continues to relentlessly push the TWAW/ppl especially women who don't believe are nasty bigots and to put it kindly misrepresent the law in this area

dors she reallly not see or is she just as much of a victim of all the things she points out in her article?

Nobody is parodying anything here. Next you'll be telling me that the lecturer in Oxford with the large breastplate is "parodying" womanhood rather than simply trying to exist comfortably in their skin.

This is exactly the tactic that GCs and sex realists use. It is undermining, bigoted and unkind.

And you can again:

https://www.moretvicar.com/product/the-guardian-mug

Oh, not answering that question. I just thought the people claiming that you couldn't define 'woman type behaviour' were being really disingenuous when they clearly have a very strong idea of what a woman is, beyond chromosomes.

You don't need to make things so complicated. A man is the word for an adult human male and a woman is the word we use for an adult human female. We don't need to mess around with the meaning of those words. It serves no useful purpose other than to obscure and confuse.

This confusion was a conscious contruction of post modernist theories which postulated that you could revolutionise society through the manipulation of language. That we could be anything we wanted to be through altering the social meaning of words.

An adult male, a man is free ( in our society, anyway) to express all of his potential - within the bounds of social rules of behaviour - as is a woman. We can do this without having to so self consciously role play opposite sex 'performances' - but we are also free to do that should we like ( within certain social constraints)

What you seem to be trying to do is to detach the Self from biological reality, as I suggested earlier, by saying that we are not our bodies; that our bodies and our biology has no material or meaningful impact on us at all. I can see how this is an off-shoot and outgrowth of certain strands of feminism in which the female body and female biology, in particular, is seen as oppressive.....and of western concepts of individualistic, free expression and free choice.

But I suggest that denying the reality of biological sex and the consequences of it is a fool's game. To a large extent we are our bodies; we are our circumstances. We are not all 'free spiritual beings' or 'souls' floating around in a world of dense and restrictive matter looking for a place to call home. We are all born into a certain set of conditions which shape our experience. We didn't 'choose' any of them.

Sex Matters, and it matters to women, especially......which is why we have developed certain protections and safeguards. You cannot change your sex...though as you intimate....our sex does determine and shape our life experiences and choices...no matter how much we long to be transcendent beings with no restriction.

At the level of sex we are creatures like any other.

'Male' is not a broad category. It is a biological category clearly defined by the presence of XY chromosomes. It is the same category whether you are an Afghan tribesman, a Buddhist monk,or a gay man in a New York night club.

No not aimed at anyone personally. I just know what she’s getting at and noticed that some posters didn’t so just thought I’d point it out.

The problem with this is that you made up that list of 'woman type behaviour' yourself.

Some of the points are clearly wrong, like all that stuff about having macho husbands - or having husbands at all, for that matter
The normal cuddly sex thing is just plain weird, no idea where you got that from - some strange part of your mind, obviously...
Being right wing - again, from somewhere in your own mind.

So you haven't added anything objective or useful to the discussion, though you have revealed a lot about yourself and your prejudices.

I didn't make that list up. That list was compiled from comments on FWR. I don't particularly agree with it, but these are the comments I see over and over - look through the previous posts.

It really seems to me, as a reader of this place, that this forum has a really strong idea of what 'woman' constitutes, which goes far beyond xx chromasomes. As do trans people and supporters. You just disagree what those criteria are.

One criteria to be a woman and only one. To be born a juvenile human female and growing an adult human female

everything else a woman does is personality, belief, personal preference or dictated by external factors eg I'm childless because my female biology doesn't work properly not because I'm a man

Now that I've thought more about how "woman type behaviour" could be defined within my own lived experience, I've realised I have a very stong idea of what it means to be a transwoman, beyond chromosomes.

Maybe the umbrella hood of women is a free gift, available for a limited time only, when you buy Essence of Woman.

Is it the same as the 'big tent' of womanhood that some TRAs were wanging on about a few years ago? It must be budget cuts that have reduced it to only being an umbrella.

Has Aisha listed what 'woman behaviour' is yet? I need to know if I can use the brolly or not.

It fills me with rage knowing they will weep, gnash their teeth and deny all culpability as Rome burns because of them. Somehow they will STILL make themselves the victims on the 'right side of history'. Stupid fuckers.

If forgotten about that. We had a lot of fun with it though!

Do you agree then, Aisha, that it must be difficult to "tackle conflicting interests" if one group is left without the language necessary to distinguish themselves and name their needs? Your analogy falls down the moment you type it because "minors" exists, as a word, to describe a sub-group. Women no longer have the equivalent.

OK. So given that research indicates fairly unambiguously that transwomen share male patterns of violence...?

I notice you've not yet generalised typical female behaviours. Is that because it's difficult to do so without resorting to stereotype?

Can you appreciate that a group whose perceived personality traits have been used for millennia, and still are, to repress, enslave and even kill them, may be somewhat concerned about being redefined according to them?

Sorry, I realise everyone will have addressed these issues by now and I should be waiting to see what Aisha said in reply, but I'm finding the calm simplicity of their statements and assumptions of confusion on other posters' part re. basic definitions and similar (as opposed to assuming that their starting point is a rather deeper understanding of a complex issue than Aisha's posts themselves seem to be showing thus far) rather frustrating.

Gah! Last post before catching up, as PPs are of course making all my points, and far better than I do.

I just can't resist responding to this by bolding the word facts and statistics, and highlighting that Aisha's emotive use of "misinformation" and "pretend" etc. (especially the latter, which is an apparently unfounded assumption of malicious bad faith presented as fact) are, contrastingly, just opinion.

Yes, "lies, damn lies" and all that (aphorism) - but I've yet to see any convincing interpretation of the facts and stats above that proves their definitive invalidity and associated conclusions as being purely prejudicial.

Again, Aisha, please stop underestimating the women on this board. Doing so would be an excellent example of how generalisations about female capabilities and behaviours are best combatted by having a word to describe us that doesn't rely on subjective, ever-changing interpretations of behaviour but is, rather, predominantly (yeah, intersex, we know - there are no absolutes in biology) fact-based.

To replace man/woman with Group A and B behaviours is going to need some definition. I see you mentioned violence earlier. What other typical behaviours define this system? How are they classified as A or B?

I can accept some of your list. OK, definitely not the bit about becoming right-wing as menopause hits, and I'm not sure what to make of the bit about preferring macho men.

Where I differ is that I don't think this can be separated from biology. Those of us who produce large gametes have also evolved to nurture our young, and to be wary of the rather different sexual and social behaviour of those who produce small gametes, whose evolutionary imperative is to spread those gametes as widely as they can. Arguably, five of the items on your list – being (on average) less aggressive, less argumentative, more private concerning the physical body, less sexually driven, more motivated by parenthood – arise from those evolutionary demands. Sure, plenty of women (and men) don't conform to that. I certainly don't. But the stereotypes are there for a reason. Biology is key.

It appears you're mixing a description with a definition.

"Many (some?) women behave this way" turns into "Women are all the people who behave this way".

I do see where it's going.

A nihilistic pomo nightmare in which Trumpian post-truth rules because there's no longer any basic consensus about fundamental truths definining humanity's existence. A Butlerian nightmare of subjective perception "progressively" (ironic pun totally intended) dissolving the structures and boundaries society needs to function. From counting the female population accurately to provide local maternity services, to recognising that male-led car design is killing them in their thousands even in the West.

Do you see where that goes?

Without debate and majority consensus leading to agreement about the language we use to define the objective physical realities we face (whether this agreement comes about through the natural evolution of language in response to life-and-death imperative or through democratic mechanisms), the most powerful/cynical/aggressive voices win out, and the more vulnerable have no voice with which to resist this.

I've genuinely struggled to have conversations with children about the state of women in Afghanistan that they struggled to understand, because their definition of women was different to my own.

It's a very, very dangerous approach.

(Or a very clever one, depending on from where you're coming).

It's also an argument whose existence alone is evidence of the need for females to retain their words, because it shows how little female needs are acknowledged even when these can be named.

ETA: Even your post above shows the risky subjectivity of your approach. Your references to population-level trends (eg. crime in the context of trans/lesbian/wealth) expose your own biases as you require/reject/ignore parameters according to their utility in supporting or undermining your own subjective views. This undermines ever your own arguments made in support of the demographic you're seeking to defend. And trans people are losing out because of the weakness of the foundations on which the arguments supposedly made in their name are founded. I'd say the most vulnerable (the post-op transsexual who just wants to keep their head down; the confused teenage child) most of all. Again, ultimately, in a post-truth world, the most vulnerable suffer.

100%

Imagine that tomorrow 20% of all the (white) board members and senior directors of companies identified as Black, a recategorization that was universally hailed and accepted by (at least) all white people. That would solve the issue of racial disadvantage in businesses overnight. Wouldn't it?

You can't just identify as a Jew, you have to learn lots of stuff and be accepted by a rabbi. Seems it's easier to identify as a transwoman than a jew. Should women set up a training scheme for Tims with an exam at the end?

I don't think that's a great example. There's no single authority that agrees on any aspect of who is a Jew and who isn't and it is the subject of a huge amount of controversy. But it's not relevant to this subject because there are no laws that distinguish between Jews and non-Jews.

If you're interested it does crop up occasionally:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(E)_v_Governing_Body_of_JFS