Author Topic: TWAM

sam

Re: TWAM
« Reply #40 on: July 30, 2021 »
Repetition has its uses. In this case my setting it up got us past that awkward bit where it became clear david wasn't coming back (oops) without getting into a debate about your previous posts. Call me a fool for tangents, but I was fine with the I Ching.

I'm not really a debater. I like listening to ideas and having them bubble out in other ways. Doesn't help move a thread such as this along, I know, which was why I was pleased to actually have two very different people posting here. The three of us are of three generations (maybe two and a half), which gave it even more potential to be interesting.

Re: TWAM
« Reply #41 on: July 31, 2021 »
I was up for talking about the difference between tranvestite and transexual next by all means, but not quite yet - a few other things were still hanging on the art of conversation, not even mostly about more previous posts. I surely won't enjoy having the I Ching thrown over a knee-jerk reaction or two.

I also considered crying 'NO - not every thing is binary!' in a philosophical vein, with references, but this seems more argumentative and complicated and less conversational than just giving counter examples.

And I haven't got back to you yet on ties as a dress code. The symbolism eluded me up to now. Hmm. I never wear anything wrapped around the neck. Not safe.






sam

Re: TWAM
« Reply #42 on: July 31, 2021 »
I remain all ears. (Should I run that picture again? Oh why not.)


Re: TWAM
« Reply #43 on: July 31, 2021 »
I hope that doesn't mean the end of conversation.

I was surprised that even recently employers felt they could insist on sex-specific dress codes. There have been a couple of discrimination cases in the UK recently. This article is from 2018 -
https://www.tuc.org.uk/blogs/government-finally-bans-sexist-dress-codes-work

While this discussion about ties pre-dates it considerably -
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/2794223.stm
Interesting because the opinions, though various, strike me as being more evolved than a lot of contemporary ones, though missing your symbolic point.

This kind of thing concerning bar staff is a more difficult and still endemic problem -
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/women-dress-codes-human-rights-1.3476964


Any gender/sex specific dress code is a primitive idea, be it for school, work, or whatever else. On some level it has to be a fetishisation I feel, but I have a hunch most people would find this hard to accept - high heels and make-up, formal neckties are seen as ordinary enough to pass without notice, but they're all bloody weird when you think about it.

Oh dear, now I've found this, contemporary stuff -
https://www.citation.co.uk/news/hr-and-employment-law/dress-code-policy-and-discrimination/
If you scroll down it says,

Quote
"Employers can request a clean and professional appearance from their staff, particularly in customer facing jobs, and this includes make-up. It doesn't matter that this would largely concern only women, as it's a gender-norm."

Well there we have it. Explains a lot. I am beyond furious.

Also I bet it could be legally challenged on a religious basis more easily than on a logical one.

sam

Re: TWAM
« Reply #44 on: August 01, 2021 »
Still here.
I appreciate that women have generally had the worse of dress codes.

Re: TWAM
« Reply #45 on: August 05, 2021 »
It is the very existence and apparent credibility of dress codes that I object to.


I take the liberty of copying this link here from the thread on the issues around transwomen in competitive cycling -

https://quillette.com/2021/08/04/the-incoherence-of-gender-ideology/?fbclid=IwAR3oLz0iaZ11-xDaNAKuz-GTfb-CdvxavRNhRFM2X8PtdNnxyqIU-vj-q9c

Dr. Robillard makes an excellent philosophical case to debunk a lot of misunderstanding about the nature of truth with regard to the 'truth of nature' as it were. (He then goes on to get a bit cavalier with the extensions of this analysis into examples of logical fallacies affecting 'real life' situations, the result being that iff the admirable opening of the article managed to make readers re-assess logical aspects of problems of definition, then it was likely to lose sympathy later on with slightly scathing references. Hmmm.)

The proposition 'gender is a social construct' is one I have raised in politically correct circles online. No-one could really disagree with it. Few could then grasp that,

a) if gender is a social construct and we are libertarians we should be able to reject it freely, which would include rejecting being called 'cis-gender'.

b) further, if a person of androgenous looks has spent life thus far resisting other people's ideas of gender appropriate behaviour/appearance (whether just by being independent or more actively) it doesn't help that person if there is a current now (claiming to be liberatory) that reinforces ideas of gender appropriate characteristics.

Nevertheless I reckon the debunking of most trans-activist theory follows logically from the proposition 'gender is a social construct'. However if someone claims that 'gender is not a social construct, then they are claiming that some characteristics that are voluntary/customary rather than biological are inherently male or female. This is what the make-up get out clause in employment law does, and why it really gets my goat.


Incidentally the inability of many people to string a logical argument together, despite the opportunities of modern education, is the main reason I object to the reduction of mathematics in primary schools to strings of 'maths facts' based on simple arithmetic without philosophical context.

sam

Re: TWAM
« Reply #46 on: August 05, 2021 »
Thanks for giving the Quillette piece a critical eye.

sam

more
« Reply #47 on: May 01, 2022 »
A whole bunch of links that were originally somewhere else but have been tacked onto this thread.

Quote from: BenCooperisaGod
The gay rights movement didn't ask for extra rights, they just wanted the same as everyone else. The right to marry, adopt, join the armed forces etc. These were rights afforded to (and as Lammy would say hoarded by) the heteronormative majority. This was a classic civil rights battle, seeking EQUAL rights for an oppressed minority.



Trans rights wants things the rest of us don't have. The right to change your birth certificate, the right to use spaces designated for the opposite sex, the right to compel everyone to pretend they are the opposite sex.



This is NOT a civil rights battle. This pursuit of additional rights is what causes the conflicts, and why it is not the same as gay rights.

Break it down for me?
Quote
Hi all, I am fairly new to the discussion on the impact that transwomen are having on women generally and I want to more fully understand the issues (been trying to talk to my husband about it and am struggling to articulate it).

I feel so awkward writing about this as I definitely don't want to come across as sounding horrible about transpeople, I just want to understand.

Much ado about mothers
Not all of the women on the Mumsnet feminist boards are actual mums, I suspect, but they all find themselves facing the mummy double bind: you’re mocked for being obsessed with things that will never happen — no one has clean socks, there’s no food in the house, women have lost all sex-based rights and feminism has become practically meaningless — but the only reason they won’t happen is because of your eminently mockable obsessions.

Quote from: BettyFilous
Quote from: SevenWaystoLeave
Trans women have always used women's spaces. If you weren't aware of that prior to the current moral panic, it just goes to show how little trouble they cause.

Once more with feeling… We noticed them. It bothered many of us and made some extremely uncomfortable or unable to use the facility. When it was vanishingly small numbers, the majority respectful, it was easier to ignore. Now we have a significant increase in chancers and inappropriate in yer face behaviour and showboating we need a rethink. It’s no longer working for women.

Quote from: @iseult
"The answer is mumsnet I believe" he intoned, stroking his beard contemplatively.

The second gender war
The dark heart of what we are being pressured not to talk about, is how gender ideology dismantles safeguarding norms, the systems set up to stop organisations from becoming enablers of child abuse. Don’t keep secrets with children, respect boundaries, allow people to speak up, don’t punish whistleblowers. Recognise the risk that men pose to women and children: 98 per cent of convictions for sexual assault are against men. Gender ideology overturns all this and forces people to pretend that sex doesn’t matter, and must be overruled by self-identified gender. Even in spaces where women and girls are undressing, even in sporting competitions where we know that males have an unassailable advantage, even in contact sports where it is not only fairness but safety that is at stake. Even when it comes to recording the sex of a rapist, or deciding whether he can be put in a woman’s prison. Even when it comes to whether women who have been raped or subject to years of domestic violence can be allowed to recover in a female-only space.

Gender ideology corrupts all of these systems and makes them seem more complex than they are, by making the simple words man/woman, male/female, he/she fraught and apparently difficult to define. How much fairness and safety for women, children and vulnerable people should be traded off to meet the deeply-felt desire of some men to be treated as if they were female?

How about — none.





Would've worked equally well if not better if the boy had kept his mouth shut, deserved as the dig at Dems is. Speaking of which.

Daily Kos community
Two+ minutes hate. See also this exchange about "the clear inability to no longer recognize something as fundamentally unfair and, at a much larger level, fundamentally unhelpful to the actual cause." It must be frustrating for people who want to be on side to be constantly scolded* with cries of transphobe and TERF for not 100% toeing the line.

* In these examples, by someone who is an advertisement for the necessity of hinges.


A monastic rule for gender believers
The Activist shall do nothing unpleasing to the Trans identified. However, it is not their duty to educate zim/him/her/etc. Therefore they shall summon one another to counsel when they please, in order to chastise the Activist, one another, those who treacherously pretend to be their allies, and their fascist enemies, as they see fit. They shall gather at will in the Chamber of the Bird and spin their threads of chastisement, as it is pleasing to them, to the sainted Butler, and to such of their enemies as have a sense of humor.



Quote from: Climate Warrior
Some people who follow me on Twitter disagree with me over various things.

But you know what — that's totally OK. I'm not perfect. I don't know everything.

Just let me know who you are so I can block you.







Quote
Plot twist: anyone can be a woman

Quote from: nepeta
This whole trend (gender ideology taking over) has been so enlightening about the general expectations on how bog-standard women should behave.

We should prioritise everyone else's concerns, and that is the expected behaviour. So trans women, trans men, and nonbinary people (read: fully human people as compared to two-dimensional sexist stereotypes) should all get precedence and their concerns validated first, even if that means erasing our embodied identities entirely, stripping us from all female role models, and re-framing our lot as the only truly privileged one.

The sad thing is that this is working, partly, because it IS expected, so anyone protesting it is called terrible names and threatened.

Quote from: FunnyTalks
When [Trans Rights Activists] say they are on the "right side of history" they may be correct because history is subjective, told by the powerful, and women are routinely written out of it. We have whole systems, such as name change at marriage, still working against us, quite apart from centuries of bias, oppression and generally not-being-seen-as-fully-human.

This guy is appropriating a term - herstory - and thus devaluing it so that it no longer means anything of use to women. Women, the actual people written out of history - unlike this guy.



John Bercow's rant about Gender Critical women
Quote from: Bishophaha
[He] vowed to circumvent the ban, saying he would continue to attend 'with the help of a friendly passholder or go as a member of the public'.

What's that? A man is going to abuse the rules to enter a space he's not allowed to be in?

Proving those nasty feminists were right all along?

<slow handclap>

A Case For Getting Married
"Are you happy?" she said.

I wanted to say a million things—to ask her to define "happy," to tell her that happiness however defined had nothing whatever to do with the heavenly felicity that was man’s final end, to tell her that only someone with no social skills would say such a thing to a stranger, to insist that she was being utterly ridiculous. Instead, after what seemed like hours of considering my words, but must in reality have been no more than a few second’s hesitation, I simply replied, "No."

"Why are you unhappy?"

??? I know, what’s that doing here? It fits in this great big puzzle, and I was charmed by it despite that the source will be jumped on by people who think this is a right wing jeremiad.

JK Rowling is too big to cancel – so now the Left wants to pretend she never existed
I don't know who Lianna is, but she is a dull creature devoid of imagination, a person cobbled together from unthinking hipster clichés. Apparently, she is the ideal reader for The New York Times, yet another part of the cultural universe that is spiralling down into vacuous purity.

But back to Lianna who, in an advertisement for the paper, ticks boxes with her random wistful thoughts. "Lianna is a Harmony of Flavours" (is this an air freshener?). She is "a week in Crossword land" (try an easier one, babe). She likes getting lost. Then there is the political stuff. Lianna is black. "Lianna is Breaking the Binary", "Heritage in rich hues", "Queer love in colour". We are not referring to paint charts here.

So far, so meaningless. Then the punchline that has been picked out and put on posters in the New York Subway. She is "Imagining Harry Potter without its Creator".

What? Has JK Rowling been disappeared? Have the threats made against her been acted on? The tagline is "independent journalism for an independent life". But its message is clear: we will tell you what you want to hear; lifestyle affirmation sold as journalism.

Quote from: Ring Lardner
Shut up, he explained.
Many of Rowling’s critics.

How to be a Harry Potter fan without supporting J.K. Rowling ever again
As you probably already know, J.K. Rowling has in the past made some transphobic statements indicating that she is a TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist); in other words, she doesn’t believe that trans women are women. Obviously this is an incredibly harmful and dangerous belief, but instead of apologizing or educating herself, she recently decided to double down on these convictions, first in a series of tweets last week and then in a long blog post (which I recommend not reading).

To boldly go into the mind of an incurious zealot.



TERF is a slur
Documenting the abuse, harassment and misogyny of transgender identity politics.

The monsters in the library
Rowling's cultural excommunication has been levied upon her for not affirming specific mantras rooted in theories which sought to deconstruct the "normative." These theories themselves were largely formulated by a cast of unsavoury characters who have done far worse than simply propose the revolutionary notion that women don't have penises...

Without fail, nearly every thinker that has churned out walls of convoluted text deconstructing or intersectional-izing elements of sex, gender, and/or the body has a cemetery's worth of skeletons in their closet. Without fail, all of these names have contributed significantly to manufacturing the "woke" pronoun-pin soldiers we are socially policed by today. And without fail, none of them have ever been scrutinized as harshly as many of those who simply pushed back against the ideological systems they helped develop.

Quote from: Winston Smith
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them… To forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again… that was the ultimate subtlety.

Colin Wright on pronouns
When someone asks for your pronouns, and you respond with “she/her,” even though you may be communicating the simple fact that you’re female, a gender ideologue would interpret this as an admission that you embrace femininity and the social roles and expectations associated with being female. While women’s-rights movements fought for decades to decouple womanhood from rigid stereotypes and social roles, modern gender ideology has melded them back together...

Let me offer an analogy. Consider the Human Rights Campaign urging people to begin conversations with "Hi, my pronouns are _____. What are yours?" Now imagine a similar request from the American Federation of Astrologers encouraging everyone to begin conversations with, "Hi, I’m a Sagittarius. What’s your sign?" To respond with your own star sign would be to operate within and signal your tacit agreement with the belief system of astrology. If you reject astrology and respond to the question with "I don’t have a sign," the reply might be "Of course you do! When were you born?" But that’s a completely different question.

A childhood is not reversible
They held onto reality for us, when we were too young to know the difference.

Top 6 Myths About Trans Kids
Join us as we bust six of the biggest myths about trans kids. Number 5 will surprise you! ¡Sue Donym skewers Buzzfeed by adopting their uber-irritating style.

Quote from: Emily's Cat
One of the things that sex hormones do during puberty is to develop cognitive and emotional changes associated with children forming non-familial bonds, romantic bonds, and becoming independent of their parents. Sexual desire isn't limited to just reproductive organs, there's a significant element of cognition involved as well. And in humans particularly, there's an emotional aspect. Those sex hormones maturing the brain is a large part of why we, as humans, can find ourselves physically aroused by someone's personality as opposed to just their body.

A Controversial Opening (The Vagina Museum)
The museum explores the transformation which occurs through gender identity but very little on the transformation which occurs through puberty, childbirth and menopause. There is a sense that the museum is psychologically stunted and yet to grow past its own political puberty.

What Is... This Garbage?
Women are... whatever. Anything. Everything.

Women are nothing but blank canvases upon which anyone can spill paint and dopily interpret like sentient Rorschach tests.

Women have nothing to hold them together as a cohesive group, because if they did that could potentially be a basis for exclusivity, and God forbid!

Women are a nondescript, ahistorical void.

But if some sad, womb-having, vulva-owning, human milk-depositing creature dares to crawl from that void and disagree... well, then she's a bully. She's a bumbling idiot. She's not to be taken seriously. She's a bitch.

What is a woman? Who knows! It truly is a mystery. But somehow, society always knows to treat them exactly like THAT.


Quote from: Suzanne Moore
Labour has never had a woman leader and now it cannot even say what a woman is.


Quote from: Baroness Nicholson
[Hansard]
Of course, a number of colleagues in this House take their briefings from a lobby group called Stonewall. Stonewall has declared in its briefing for responses to this debate that any comments from me and others… should be responded to by saying, “Blah, blah, blah”. I suggest that this is infinitely too serious for such a response.



Quote from: rogerzilla
Yup, arguing about trans rights is not going to end well. Save it for [News And Current Affairs]

That's one way of putting it. Another is, arguing about women's rights. Except TWAW, of course. Oh what a pickle.

Quote from: nepeta
I could have a go with the arguments trans activists have made in press about sports. They vary quite a bit, of course, so it's not possible to state that there is only one general explanation.



The usual argument, as stated by Veronica Ivy, say, is that



1. Everyone has the right to participate in sports
.

2. The definition of women and men, boys and girls, CANNOT and MUST NOT be based on biological sex but only on pure inner identity. This means that trans women are women and trans girls are girls in exactly the same way as women and girls who happen to have female bodies. The latter are also assumed to base their identities on some abstract inner feeling. So the groups are identical in their femaleness.


3. Given 2. and the existence of female categories in most sports, it must be the case that trans women and trans girls compete in the female categories and trans men and trans boys in the male categories. Anything else would be discrimination against transgender individuals.


4. Fairness towards biological women and girls is not relevant as sports, in general, are not fair. Consider the unusual and rare genetic advantages some athletes have (Michael Phelps is brought in here), He won so much partly because of those unfair advantages. This angle argues that possessing a male body which has gone through male puberty is a rare genetic advantage, even though fifty percent of adult males possess it. The contradiction is solved by stating that as the trans women are, in fact, women, their genetic advantage is rare in that particular group.

5. Making a trans athlete participate in the category their sex would suggest is viewed as exactly the same as not allowing them to participate in sports at all.



Some others have also argued that there is no fairness problem at all if adult trans women have taken oestrogen for at least twelve months, though several studies clearly demonstrate that the advantage remains, and this also leaves the allowed testosterone levels of trans women very high compared to the average range of female levels of the same hormone.



The problem that follows if we accept the above is that there is then absolutely no reason to separate men's and women's sports. As gender identity is an abstract feeling and not related to the bodies, everyone should just compete together... And let the best man win, I guess.
More
Quote from: SamphiretheStickerist
Quote
I am currently having a discussion with someone who argues that the physical differences between males and females are due to socialization... . That we are weaker beacuse of Dysney basically. She cites Colette Dawling, who I must admit have not read. It would be great to have your input.

Tell her that she is considering only half of the human condition - socialisation. That would tally with the Disneyfication. Usually referred to as the Victorian Perspective, but I suppose Post Modernism demands an update in everything, eventually.

When it comes to actually measuring the human body and its potential in any physical activity then yes, that socialisation will have an effect. Think about the differences in how we persist in 'sexing' everything, whether via toxic masculinity or that Princess Effect. Boys will be boys etc. So young girls will be socially steered into 'acceptable' pursuits, away from boxing, rugby, etc.

But then look at how that has been changing over the last 50ish years. Nicola Adams, women's football and rugby etc etc. More young girls are starting those sports and, more importantly, the sports themselves not only accommodate them but encourage them.

So that deals with the half your friend acknowledges.

But the physical science tells the same story. Despite the amazing leaps in understanding the differences in exercise stress responses of sexed bodies, leading to different training regimes for males and females and an better understanding in the relative strengths and weaknesses between the sexes NOTHING can overcome the innate, built in differences.

Usually based, connected to the single most important for the species bodily differences of childbirth demand that female bodies have different hormones and different body responses to them. Think about the hormonal effects on muscle laxity during pregnancy. No male body experiences those changes, it is a sexed difference that has knock effects for anything to do with muscles, for good and bad, depending on the situation.

Placing all men along a spectrum for any bodily measure and women along a separate one the difference between any individual at the same point on the male and female lines will have the same measurable differences - that is men will be roughly 10 % stronger, faster etc. So whilst women's records in all sports have been set and broken, reset at an amazing rate that gap in absolute results remains.

That hasn't changed with the newer, better sexed training regimes. It has become more common. Yes there are areas where female bodies have an advantage. Those same childbearing abilities mean that women have a more stable stance. That Q angle of the pelvic girdle that betrays every transwomen once in motion means that all men have a narrower stance and are less stable, so in sports like archery women have an advantage in stance. But men retain the advantages of lever length, strength etc. So archery, with all the mechanical engineering of the bows etc might eventually make some different decisions about elite participants.

And the body's natural make up of lipids, muscle tissue etc is one we are getting to know more about in extreme endurance sports. Women may well, eventually, become the acknowledged elite performers here. But that allows that enough women will want to... Baby making will again have an effect.

But we know now that women's bodies can come back quite quickly after giving birth, see event cyclists etc. They regain their elite performance levels, but still don't beat elite male performers.

I might have missed something, and this is obviously an explanation not a lecture with all the stats and evidence. I hope it helps.
[close]


and more. Always more.
↑ Brilliant, wish I'd thought of it

Quote from: P&T
Well done Emma on first place. There was a huge bloke splashing around in the pool at the same time, but that was irrelevant.

Quote from: OnlyTheTitosaurusOfTheIceberg
Reading this thread, my first thought was “you invited trans allies to post, don’t immediately shoot them down when they do”. But that was before I read crap about “cis brains and trans brains”, and lazy “but she’s a billionaire as well as a ‘transphobe’ therefore anything she says can be ignored” ridiculousness to name but a couple of the less convincing arguments on this thread.

For me, something that might make a start in changing my mind in the opposite direction is when doctors are able to determine which are the roughly 15% of gender-questioning children who will persist in their desire to present as the opposite sex well into adulthood and which are the c.85% who will desist, long before any of them are prescribed puberty blockers. Because at the moment we seem to medicalising, and permanently altering, far too many of the 85%.

I’d also be more convinced if people could sort out once and for all whether being transgender is a crippling dysmorphia which gives rise to suicidal ideation if not addressed and must be treated in a medical setting to allow people, especially young people, to gain an approximation of an oppositely-sexed body to relieve that dysmorphia, or if it has nothing to do with profoundly hating one’s sexed body and is simply a means of self-expression whereby there is nothing incongruent in keeping - and indeed, often displaying - one’s (usually male, if on display) genitalia, facial hair etc, or in giving birth while claiming to be a man. Because at the moment there seems to be an element of “having one’s cake and eating it” in how transgenderism is expressed: it’s not a mental illness, but young people need PBs to prevent suicide; it’s so profoundly triggering to be reminded of one’s birth sex that we need to change language, but transmen give birth and transwomen use their penises to have sex with lesbians; (male, in particular) children need to be transitioned earlier so they have a chance of passing better, but it’s transphobic to expect someone to “pass”, and so on and so on…

Quote from: PrelateChuckles
Once you realise it's about stereotypes and linguistic sleights of hand you can't help but find it offensive.

Quote from: Still Swimming
Quote
You can be kind and respectful to people and what makes them comfortable and still debate the issue of inclusion based on what is fair and unfair biologically.

When we call a man a “woman” or a “female” and use “she” and “her” to describe him we are legitimizing the idea that he actually is of the sex that produce ova (eggs) i.e., female, when he is not.

Also when he claims access to women’s sports and women’s spaces, if we’ve already allowed him to claim womanhood it becomes much harder to not let him have the same “rights” as other “women.”

My niece will be competing next year.
[close]

Quote from: sacredfeminina
Lia Thomas could have been a trans swimmer on the male team, breaking down stereotypes. He could have been celebrated for being 'gender non conforming', and his male teammates applauded for being accepting and encouraging. It would have been progressive.

What would it take for you to say: the trans movement isn't what I thought it was?
What could be shrugged off a few years ago as the excesses of a movement that had little impact on most people's day-to-day life has become harder and harder for progressives to ignore. It's almost impossible to avoid trans issues today, and the dictates progressives are expected to observe keep stiffening. Yesterday, it was enough to accept that some people feel uncomfortable with their sex and desire to be seen as members of the opposite sex. Today, progressives are supposed to cheer an obvious cheat as he drowns the dreams of his female competitors and defend the desire of male rapists and serial killers to be referred to as "she." Unfortunately for trans activists, the average person hasn't read anywhere near enough queer theory to prevent them from recognizing what's right in front of their eyes. People want to be polite, but they don't want to be made to tell lies.


sam

Questioning time
« Reply #48 on: May 02, 2022 »

Once more into the breach:


(Let's ask Bob The Builder)

A break from the mental gymnastics.






More links?

Women's lunch causes mass death
I feel like women who can not only afford to eat lunch, but who also have the privilege of smiling from time to time, demonstrate that indeed the women’s movement has gone too far. Feminism is not about lunch. It certainly isn’t about smiling or enjoying the company of other women. It is about crying and tweeting. I hope you enjoyed your death lunch, “women” (whatever that is).

A question of bravery
We’ve roughly enough men and women already. Swapping them back and forth is at the very least inefficient.

Five rules for fighting transactivism
Given the radical scope of activist ambitions — basically, to restructure the English language so that no one refers accurately to males and females in any context it might matter — you’d think that they would be a bit more sanguine about the likelihood of an uphill struggle. But not so — every new challenge is received like an incomprehensible and crushing blow, and much drama inevitably follows.

Quote from: tabbycatstripy
‘Children are the front and validation for adults...’



I think this is the most significant motivation. For ‘transgender’ to be an innate characteristic rather than a psychological state (an identity that is formed over time and in response to conditions), there have to be ‘trans children’.

Solidarity across difference is out. Allyship and blank checks are in.
The entire campaign to enshrine gender ideology in our societies defies the possibility of understanding and celebrates the abdication of independent judgment: "They know better than you" about sums it up.

Compliance is what's being pursued here, enforced by social, economic, and legal sanctions, if necessary. Gender ideology seeks to destroy the very possibility of good-faith disagreement and public dialogue. The message to the public boils down to: "Don't look too closely. You're not capable of understanding what you see. Just trust us. Or don’t trust us—why should we care?—but do shut up.”

Quote from: OwnLyingEyes
Being forced to bear false witness against reality is never harmless, it's an imposition that's damaging to us as individuals and to society.

Quote from: nepeta
Quote from: Helleofabore
Allowing someone to fully believe in something that doesn’t reflect material reality and therefore depends on others being obligated to agree with your version of the world is harmful. The belief also in that the collective society needs to redefine itself, and the very words already very well established (and not derogatory words) used to define the world, to suit you is also harmful.

It's now difficult to write about many feminist topics when the words which once just sat there, clearly defined and simple, waiting to be slotted into the sentences in their proper places, are now lurking in the shadows, slipping through my fingers, and morphing into other words with a completely different meanings. We need agreement about what commonly used words mean if we are to communicate with others.

That the new definitions are almost always also deeply sexist makes this much worse. But the annoying extra effort needed and the clumsy sentences which still cannot be avoided are in themselves a cost forced upon us by a small minority with astonishing power.


Question Not
Question not the pleasures of the rainbow haired overlords. Not their penchant for posing with weaponry impotently threatening violence. Not their commodity fetishism for identities not their own. Not their vampiric consumption of words, draining them of meaning, leaving them lying flaccid like a clock in a Dali picture draped over a tree. Question not the prisoners of unreason who cast confusion on the young. Not their love of childish cartoons and codes of speech. Question not why so many are lost in computer games or comics or TV shows about dragons and robots. Question not their dark perversions made bright, like illustrations in books for children. Question not because we live in an age of adults speaking like children who force children to speak like adults.

What JK Rowling actually said
Quote from: Deliriumoftheendless
Ah yes, but if you take the first letter of each word, move them along by three letters, take out all the vowels, jumble them around, replace every other E O and I, translate into Latin, run through google translate you get what she really meant.

Read about it on the internet.

Quote from: AngelinaFibres
I guess it must be very hard when you have dressed up and taken hormones and done some surgery stuff, that women, who don't fit your idea of what it is to be feminine, are still the thing you desperately want to be. Those women are happy in their own skin. They can dress as they do because they are women. They don't have to perform 'being a woman' because it is what they are. Whether clothed or naked, fancied by straight men or not they are women. It must be stressful to see them having a ball because they don't give a damn whether they 'pass' as women. They are women and they don't need to give a moments thought to a man in a dress trying to be prettier than them.

The week the trans spell was broken
So I always knew it would start with sport. The great advantage sport has over, say, prisons and refuges is that it happens in public: people can see it and they are interested in it. That’s why when historians write about that relatively brief but extremely toxic time when gender extremism gripped western countries, and they describe the moment when that grip loosened, they will start with the photos of Lia Thomas, the Ivy League trans swimmer, towering over her teammates. These caught the mainstream interest in a way feminist arguments about trans women in prisons never have: here is an issue where even Homer Simpson can see the obvious problem.


You go girl!
That guy is difficult to watch. My wife laughed so hard at this that she was in pain, and we had to hit pause a few times.

Quote from: CaveMum on Mumsnet
Sharron Davies interview part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Quote from: mrsmeyers
Sports.

Not lesbians being harassed. Not rape victims being forced to humor the delusions of mentally ill men and "unlearn their trauma" or lesbians "unlearn their genital preference." Not imprisoned women being housed with male serial killers and rapists. Not children being put on fucking LUPRON as some crazy, spiritual Peter Pan shit and having their breasts lopped off by dead eyed surgeons before they can even vote. Not the rampant grooming of children by teachers, the government, the media. Not TIMs of note regularly being outed as pedophiles and sex offenders.

Sports.

What is a man?
"You're looking at one."

Quote from: Signalbox
Grace Lavery on Women's Hour
This is my favourite bit. I think perhaps us feminists do have quite a lot to learn from Gracie after all.

"One of the things that I’ve been working on in my scholarly work for the last few years and is really important to me is thinking about little techniques that seem newly necessary when one transitions but never seemed necessary before and so for example I had never worn make up to work and now I don’t wear make up at all really, I mean very very rarely, I’m not wearing make-up now and if you don’t wear make-up when you are doing an interview with Woman’s Hour you don’t wear make-up very often but I mean I but back in the early days I used to wear make-up to work a little more and Danny would occasionally give me help, but I was terrible at it I really was you know it’s just not something I done but you know and this is another thing that I sometimes think about tensions around trans people in the UK is umm so many of the problems that seem to be generated by, you know, what we might call the kind of trans liberalism of the present moment, so many of those problems seem have to do specifically with the moment of transition and much less to do with the question of how trans people exist in the world on a longer term basis, you know it has to do with moments where people don’t really know what pronouns to use or don’t really know how to talk or think about things or, you know, people feel disorientated in the wake of a transition. When one is first beginning to transition socially there are all kinds of complicated consequences, which of course affect trans people far more than they do those around us but which affect those around us too and sometimes in ways that are unpredictable and sometimes even intense so… all by way of saying I think it’s not an uncommon story for people to sort of start wearing make-up when they first transition as a way of flagging look something really different is happening in my life now, and then at a certain point to sort of start thinking well you know really I don’t need to do that I don’t really want to do that it’s not really who I am."

Quote from: vivariumvivaiumsvivaria
Quote from: mumsnut
'Word salad' is too kind a description. Word porridge, maybe?

“word jizz”





Daily Kos Equity Council presents a panel on trans rights
Wall of text or screen of cringe: pick your poison. And remember: "people change pronouns, so what's right today might be incorrect the next day." The fun never ends.

Quote from: Absurdle
It’s tempting to speculate that if you’re immersed in a fantasy where “I am a woman” is true by virtue of simply saying it, then it’s a small step to add “the law is whatever I say it is” to the rules of the fantasy world you’re living in. Unfortunately all fantasies have to collide with reality eventually.

Sympathy for the she-devil
Funny but not ha ha funny.

Deep Dive on the Dentons document
Not even a little funny.



Actually he said "I don't think that biological males should be competing in female sporting events," sport. Notice the constant push by most mainstream media to shift the language and thereby alter perception.


Quote from: MangyInseam
I don't particularly care about the personal foibles of political figures, they seem largely irrelevant to their political effectiveness. Some quite nasty people can be excellent in public life, not that I would put BJ at that level. Though I do often wonder how many people have actually read or listened to the things those quotes are pulled from.



Quote from: GAHgamel
I’m more inclined to wrench the thread back on topic with some more favourite Billy Bragg lyrics:
"Some day boy you'll reap what you've sown
you'll catch a cold and you'll be on your own
and you will see
that what's wrong with me
is wrong with everyone
that you want to play your little games on”

Penny's pointless battle
Some things add to the gaiety of the nation — and Laurie Penny’s self-absorption is one of them.

The Cotton Ceiling? Really?
So much post-modernism, so little time.

Surreal debate
The tortured logic of trans activism leads to some very silly places. It leads to apparently sensible people arguing that male puberty confers no irreversible physical advantages and that sports were only ever sex-segregated to stop the women embarrassing the men — which suggests that female athletes have been crimping their performance to spare male egos.

It leads to people claiming that no man would ever pretend to be trans just to get an advantage, as though people aren’t constantly busted pretending to be something they’re not (poorer, blacker, more dyslexic) to edge their way into a prize, a scholarship or some extra time in an exam. It even leads to Boris Johnson sounding the most grown-up person in the room.

Trans activists call last week evidence of a culture war, but it really isn’t. No one in power seems keen to appear spiteful or cruel towards trans people: the government is simply, finally, taking seriously the fact that there is a problem when groups such as Stonewall are allowed to dictate not only the law as they would like it to be, but also reality as they would like it to be.

Know your enemy
Some commentators have questioned whether people who judge this sort of material appropriate for children could possibly have kids of their own. I would question, more fundamentally, whether they have ever had sex. There seems to be a strange disconnect here, possibly borne of too much thinking and talking and emoting and workshopping and not enough doing. The material of theirs that is publicly available tends to mix up basic bodily functions, sexual practices, and social justice concepts as if each had exactly the same emotional and moral weight - sometimes to a near sociopathic-sounding degree. (So for instance, one baffling couplet from the song “Questions” excerpted earlier goes: “What's it like to give birth? What’s it like to have a fist in your ass?”) Had there been a smoother connection between loins and brains here, surely this sort of material would have given its creators pause.

Tweets from 2003: The Gender Recognition Bill
Prepare your hollow laughs….now