Article on "arguing with a TERF"

[MyAmpleSheep]

I love to keep up with the other side, so here's a lot of words just to say "it's complicated." meanwhile he ignores the obvious answer to his own question.

www.fasttrackfemme.com/p/why-you-cant-win-an-argument-with

Struggle to take seriously an adult who uses the word “switcheroo”.

I think I’ve just done what he says “TERFs” do 🤭

What seemed a little strange to me was that his 3 intellectual levels were all represented by male figures. So if a TERF is a species of radical feminist, those blokes are also radical feminists? It seems to be spreading the label pretty wide.

On the one hand the article should be commended for actually trying to engage GC arguments, which is rare. But it's notable that the real GC arguments can't be stated, presumably out of fear triggering the delicate reader or being 'unsafe'.

The real GC arguments are:

1. A woman is a an adult biological female.
2. In our society, for the most part, women (as defined above) and men are treated in the same way and it's up to the individual how they respond to presentation (as in those males presenting as women) and requested pronouns.
3. In all cases dignity, respect and non-discrimination should be afforded to all people irrespective of their presentation.
4. In some cases singles sex services, spaces, associations and activities are needed and in those situations transwomen are always to be excluded because they are male and not female. And it should be possible designate those by saying they are for women, without resorting to the phrase 'adult biological females', i.e. language should be abused to placate the trans lobby.

These are extremely simple and not hard to understand. There are TRA arguments against these points. Some being:

1. Biological sex is a misnomer. Instead sex is a spectrum of phenotypes which vary in the human population; so no individual can be classified as 100% male or 100% female, and cross sex hormones and surgeries can move one along the spectrum. In fact, for many they are sufficiently potent that hormone and surgery treated males are actually more female that some females.
2. Woman doesn't actually mean adult biological female. It's a social construct and inner essence that is expressed in behaviour, presentation, and inner life. Because it's performance and identity males can be women.
3. Strict rules about who is a women are harmful to society and especially to women. Disallowing men to identify into womanhood, harms women and strengthens the patriarchy.

In combination these argument justify a category of women, trans women, that is just as much a woman as non-trans women.

The GC rebuttals to these arguments have been answered many, many times on MN and elsewhere.

But what's remarkable is it's still impossible for TRA to state the the real GC arguments, even in order to rebut them. It's a chief reason that trans people are so ill served by their own activists.

It concerns me how few people even recognise blatant AI slop. If you can't make the effort to write something, I'm not making the effort to read it.

His switcheroo is a switcheroo. He's arguing that the statement 'you're not a woman' is not a complete answer to the question 'why shouldn't I be treated as a woman?'. Like the onus is on us to prove that he doesn't have the attributes from which the legal and customary treatments of women stem, or that treating him as a woman would be harmful. It's not. The onus is on him to prove that he does have those attributes, or that treating him as a woman would not be harmful. Even if he can (spoiler: he can't), he's only one man, and can't answer for anyone else.

I expect he quotes things like the Target survey (I think) from the US saying they found no problems with men in women’s spaces and other observational studies that ignore the fact that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

All those arguments start with the assumption that men’s desire to be in women’s spaces is a genuine rights claim, having never established a genuine need, nor having considered alternatives that don’t include invading women’s spaces.

If you argue the medical model (now well outdated) it was that these men are patients, who need to be in women’s spaces for their mental health. If that need was genuinely established, and there were no alternatives, then arguably you are looking at a genuine rights clash. That might require the balancing of rights between the number of women who would be negatively affected by men in their spaces against the genuine benefit those men gain.

So really, it’s a transactivist argument that starts out with the assumption that men have that right/need and it’s all about weighing their rights against women’s. Most of us refuse to cede that claim because moving those men into women’s spaces was never discussed and women’s needs weren’t even considered before it was done. Nor was there any consideration of alternative arrangements, which are the obvious choice, if those men really have a genuine need for spaces away from other men.

So he’s presumably moaning we won’t debate on his terms, which would involve us ceding women’s rights before we even start. It’s similar to those men who claimed we could have a debate, as long as we accepted TWAW as a starting point. Just no. We want all our rights as they were and if men want to argue they should have access, they need to present a convincing argument as to why and why genuine alternatives are unreasonable.

Unsurprisingly, they never want to start from there. They moved in without considering women at all. Our rights are assumed to be negotiable without ever having to put in the hard work of demonstrating why men should be admitted to women’s spaces at all.

Now I'm going to have to read this, aren't I?

His “TERFs” are men most likely because he feels uncomfortable addressing women and telling them what a woman is. It’s like how they pretend we’re all right wing. They can’t deal with left wing women not agreeing with them.

In the part about people switching a hard question with an easy one and answering that he unironically writes: “In one narrow biological sense, the sentence is true. I wasn’t born female. I don’t produce ova. I can’t become the kind of woman my mother is. Fine. Granted. I don’t need metaphysical perfection from the universe before I’m allowed to exist with dignity.”

He doesn't know what TERF stands for, does he?

None of those men are feminists, let alone radical ones.

But men like him don't think of women as actual human beings. To him, 'woman' is just a costume that he can choose to wear.

So he spent years of his life haranguing people on Twitter with daft ideas like men can be women, found that almost everyone thought his arguments were tosh, so slunk away to rage out an AI slop blog post on how simple-minded and stubborn his interlocutors for not recognising his argumentative brilliance. What a loser. I almost feel sorry for him.

I think it's hard to argue with TRAs because if you try and discuss the salient point of the issue ie "do women need spaces separate from men" you can talk back and forth until you're both blue in the face and at the end the TRA will say "well ok, women need single sex spaces and trans women are women so I'm happy with that and we agree 😀".

There's no point having the discussion until you've agreed on the definition of the terms you're discussing. To be fair I can see why TRAs wouldn't like this, as discussion of whether trans women "count" as women in all circumstances is surely uncomfortable for them as it challenges their core belief about themselves. I don't see how you can have the discussion without it being uncomfortable though. I guess that's why they clung on to #nodebate for as long as they could.

Whenever I see anything about how TERFs don't want to debate, TERFs won't have a good faith discussion, so unreasonable etc etc I just remember #nodebate and know that the problem with not wanting a discussion doesn't lie with us.

Well put @Kinsters. By the MRA'S logic if trans women really are women then they really are women in all circumstances and situations. That includes a when a TW commits the most violent appalling act. They can't acknowledge that TWAW but sometimes not because that blows the argument appart.

Yes, as soon as you have any exceptions the whole fallacy falls apart. A woman surely is just a woman, no exceptions or conditions necessary.

I did wonder why they were all blokes! I don't think men can be terfs, even the likes of Mr Menno. (Although I'm probably on the intellectual level of the pub bloke. Men can't be women, women can't be men, non binary is bullshit, end of.) Interestingly TIFs get ignored again!

They are literally strawmen.

The writer lives in a world where only men's views matter.

The basic grounds of term definitions have to be agreed before debate is possible, but the basic grounds of genderism and material reality feminism are immiscible.

I wonder if he noticed the generated photos were men?

If deliberate, it might be that he is only arguing with men in real life. It could explain why he's not addressing the idea that women have the right to exclude men for reasons other than safety. Lots of men don't see beyond that issue.

It’s yet another reversal, a DARVO.

Yeah, I know. I can't stand those cheesy diagrams as well.

I need to see an article on “Arguing with a TRA; Like Shouting into a Bin.”

It's a very odd article. Apart from inventing complicated theoretical frameworks which no one has ever needed or ever will need, it's all about a world where everyone is male. Also, apparently, English, given the pub man.

😂