‘Cis’ woman asks: “Does believing there are difference between trans and cis women’s experiences make you a TERF?” Cis woman here, It kind of reminds me of the argument 10-30 years ago about cis men and women being different but it was used in a hateful way. I agree that the way we are raised and physically are different. Depending on how much testosterone or strength you have in your body physical things could be harder for a woman than for a man. I don’t think that is sexist though men always used it to really discriminate in other ways, but literally it was true. Anyway,
These days I move from fear, to hate, to nausea, to disgust, to grief and back to fear seamlessly whenever the issue if trans ideology comes up. Honestly, I never in a million years imagined that girls and women's indoctrination into patriarchy could be so complete that most women simply cannot recognize their own erasure, not to mention the destruction of their children. It's surreal and terrifying to the point of contributing to PTSD in those of us who see all of this unfolding like an unending nightmare.
Setting aside that this feels like the start of total societal collapse, I'm fascinated by the men that make these kinds of statements. Are they all suffering from mental illness or have they just absorbed a steady stream of bad info to the point of believing it (not that those are mutually exclusive)? What would it take, from a clinical perspective, to reorient them to reality?
Very good essay Frederick. Four and a half stars out of five -- at least ... 😉🙂
Only quibble or qualification I might have is your apparent suggestion or implication that everything is subjective. Maybe we're all living in vats indulging in collective delusions. But even there, the vats are "real".
We can maybe delude ourselves for awhile, but brute facts tend to be trump; we're probably wiser to recognize that BEFORE burning ourselves on hot stoves.
ICYMI, my article on Wikipedia's Lysenkoism; of particular note is a quote of and link to Elizabeth Finne's rather brilliant article on the tyranny of the subjective:
Wow, for a half out of five stars, huh? I take that as a compliment from you, one of my most vigorous intellectual sparring partners! Thank you. Yes, I do think it's all subjective. But, as I said, that does not mean there is no reality out there. It just means we don't have any direct access to it. It's analogous to Plato's cave metaphor. Even the hot stove is a subjective experience. In absolute terms, the rate of molecular movement is what you would call the "reality". Our perceptions of heat may differ. Please don't confuse the neurobiology with Elizabeth's critique of "lived experience." They are two very different things, my friend! As always, I enjoyed the exchange.
🙂 Though hope you noticed that I gave you 4 1/2 out of 5 -- not just the half you suggest -- and the other half was pending a detailed look at your post ... 😉
But while I quite agree with "Plato's cave metaphor" -- a remarkably durable one over 2500 years -- and I agree that there IS a subjective experience of the hot stove, the question is whether there really is a hot stove there outside that cave. Or how closely those subjective experiences correspond to or reflect it.
That's why I think your "it's all subjective" is somewhat wide of the mark or inconsistent. If the hot stove is only a "subjective experience" then not sure how or why you wouldn't say the same thing about "the neurobiology".
Seems something of an important dichotomy there -- the subjective experience, and whatever it is "outside the cave" that produces that experience.
But kind of a fascinating topic; expect you've run across David Chalmers but in case you haven't, one of his essays, and a quote or two therefrom:
"Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. .... More likely, we will take experience itself as a fundamental feature of the world, alongside mass, charge, and space-time. If we take experience as fundamental, then we can go about the business of constructing a theory of experience. ..."
Oh, my bad. I use dictation software and it misunderstood me. I did mean 4 and 1/2! Thank you, again. Yeah, there is a stove. And, I know Chalmers. We just don't want to confuse "subjective experience" with "arbitrary experience". Saying that we experience something differently does not mean that what we're experiencing isn't caused by something. Of course there is something out there. You just don't have direct access to it. Nor, do I. Is it a blue dress or a red dress? That's up to our brains. That does not mean that there is no dress "out there."
Incredible bizarre phenomenon in so many ways. But fascinating in other ones -- I've often argued or suggested that part and parcel of the issue is imprinting, a fairly durable psychological concept:
"Lorenz demonstrated how incubator-hatched geese would imprint on the first suitable moving stimulus they saw within what he called a "critical period" between 13 and 16 hours shortly after hatching. For example, the goslings would imprint on Lorenz himself (to be more specific, on his wading boots), and he is often depicted being followed by a gaggle of geese who had imprinted on him."
You might also be interested in Woody Allen's Zelig - "The Chameleon Man" - as an amusing illustration of how people pickup and "ape" the behaviours of those around them. A very human thing to do but has some serious pathological manifestations:
"We can bond over shared discrimination and things we experience in our present day..."
That's the crux of it for me. Women have been taught that some abstraction of solidarity has some sort of cultural impact. The proof that it doesn't is in the "trans women are women" mantra. A nothing-burger of feminism based only on ideas of oppression rather than actions, of women caring for women, remains a nothing-burger — albeit a sadder one — once that notion of solidarity is expanded to include some sorry-ass confused men.
And by "bond", they mean for us to become accessories to their delusional costume. They have no intention (or ability) to reciprocate. They are just typical men, wanting women to perform labor for them. We should start asking the women who simp for them whether they'd have a bumper sticker that said "Have you hugged your rapist today?" In their confusion and outrage, they might be made to understand that cheerleading for a pack of narcissistic predators who have ALREADY decimated the rights, safety, privacy, and dignity of women is pretty much the same thing.
To the 'commenter' who says that cis women (Ew!) don't share the same experiences as the four billion other women on the planet, so that's the same as their not sharing the same experiences as trans women like him. Fella, to trot out a stupid comment like that one, you know nothing and understand nothing. Not surprising since you're male.
Can someone help me find a connecting flight to the point here? I believe everyone deserves to be treated with love and respect. But, I am missing how life experiences make one female. I always thought that was the work of XX chromosomes. To quote a quip I read recently, Science doesn’t care what you believe.”
Technically, it's producing eggs that makes you a female not XX chromosomes (females of other species don't have XX chromosomes but produce eggs as well). I know it sounds like nit-picking but if we want to fight ignorance with science it's important to be precise. https://www.theparadoxinstitute.com/read/what-are-sexes
MoominMamma: "... it's producing eggs that makes you a female not XX chromosomes ... but if we want to fight ignorance with science it's important to be precise."
Amen to all of that; agree 110% -- at least. 🙂
Quite a good essay there by Zach Elliott over at The Paradox Institute. ICYMI, evolutionary biologist Colin Wright reposted that one of Zach's, and one other one, on his Reality's Last Stand Substack:
"Engendered" some fairly extensive and thorough discussion.
However, while Zach does make several good points, I think he eventually, or fairly quickly into his essay, snatches defeat from the jaws of victory by putting feelings before facts. More particularly, he starts off well by quoting the "universal biological definitions" which come from the Glossary of an article in the Journal of Molecular Human Reproduction [MHR]:
"Biologically, the female sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the larger gametes in anisogamous systems.
Biologically, the male sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the smaller gametes in anisogamous systems.
Lehtonen & Parker (2014). Gamete competition, gamete limitation, and the evolution of two sexes. Molecular Human Reproduction, 20(12)."
Of maybe some related interest, it seems that that MHR essay is fairly popular on Twitter, being tweeted thither and yon by all and sundry -- to the general discomfiture and chagrin of various transgender ideologues:
But where Zach drops the ball is going from those MHR definitions to a broader and totally unsupported extension of them:
Zach: "This is what sexes ultimately are: discrete reproductive strategies involving the production of two different gametes."
Those MHR definitions say absolutely diddly-squat about any "reproductive strategies". What's required to qualify as a member of the male and female sex categories is being an organism, of all sexually reproducing species, which "produces smaller gametes (sperm)" and "produces larger gametes (ova)". Period.
But that politically-motivated muddying of the waters is something that Wright -- and his co-conspirators, Heather Heying & Emma Hilton -- are equally guilty of, though maybe more overtly. From a letter they had had published in the UK Times -- hardly a peer-reviewed biological journal:
"Individuals that have developed anatomies for producing either small or large gametes, - regardless of their past, present, or future functionality - are referred to as 'males' and 'females', respectively."
Diddly-squat in those MHR definitions about "developed anatomies"; they're all about current function (producing gametes right now), not a past or future one.
Moot exactly why Elliott, Wright, and Company are so desperate to peddle and promote what is a profoundly unscientific if not an anti-scientific definition. But this tweet of Zach's suggests that he's less interested in scientific accuracy than in not "offending" those who would qualify as "sexless" on the basis of those MHR definitions:
"Discrimination is not eliminated, and true acceptance is not shown, by embracing the scientifically incorrect and morally problematic claims that people who differ from the norm are both or neither sexes."
They seem to "think" that our sexes -- our memberships in the male and female sex categories -- are "participation trophies", that everyone has to have one, rather than being labels denoting present reproductive abilities.
We go off the rails when we allow "morally problematic claims" and the prospect of being "offended" to trump scientific facts and theories. Zach and Colin might just as well endorse "teaching the controversy" because religious fundamentalists might be "offended" on being told that the Earth is older than 6000 years and not the center of the universe, and that humans evolved from apes and are not the result of any sort of "special creation" by Jehovah:
You should absolutely have commented! You made a very good point. The genetics thing gets confusing when you're not talking about mammals. The genetics of sex is complicated in a lot of animals. There are even some animals that don't have any males at all (like some lizards), and some that have male-female sex but can still reproduce if there are no males around (like Komodo dragons). And then there's all that wacky stuff with invertebrates. Even the idea of producing eggs has some ambiguity because not all females can or do produce eggs. The problem is that the terms have to be clearly defined when making any of these claims. Some people try to drive the discussion down to the molecular level but that just changes the level of analysis. It doesn't clear anything up. There's always going to be some ambiguities in biological terms because words always have some ambiguity to them. The truth is that your comment was correct in spirit. There are just two human sexes... even those females with Turner's syndrome — just one X chromosome — who do not produce eggs are still female. You may have gotten a C in genetics, but your comment deserves an A+.
If you believe that privilege (and thus male privilege) is a thing, it is a potential wedge.
"i have spent half my life as a woman. the only male socialization i have left is"
This comment, for example, misunderstands and denies what male privilege even IS. Anyone who understands privilege knows that it doesn't work like THIS. Reckoning with male privilege is a life-long endeavor that you never truly finish; is it any wonder that so many of the worst misogynists out there are those that cease to even think that they need to do anything to deal with their privilege?
There's also this gem: "Plus, 20 years or 2 years makes very little difference here, experience one misogyny you've experienced them all."
I read that as: Let me belittle your experience and equate my 2 year narcissistic fantasy with your whole life long experience steeped in being socialized as a girl->woman.
I wish more handmaidens understood that trans identified men view their support with cynicism and contempt, rather than gratitude. Men are men are men. Their wants are needs, and our needs are irrelevant to them.
Creating divides between women with racism, classism, and internalized misogyny is one of the ways patriarchy has prevented women from joining together in solidarity. By keeping us apart, we're kept loyal to the men in our respective groups.
Suzanne from Asian Women for Equality speaks very eloquently about how racism in particular is used to keep women separate:
I was chatting with a transwoman collaborator on a project today, very nice person, I genuinely like them, but they are a man. A very gender-non-conforming man, and that’s absolutely fine with me, as are their choice of name and (at least before things got so crazy) using she/her pronouns.
But this is all too much. I don’t know how we’re going to back our way out of this. It will never be acceptable to me to be asked to treat males as women or girls in any situation where it matters. And the more adamant they are about it, the less inclined I am to think that it doesn’t matter in some situation.
The attack at the Alameda County Courthouse yesterday was very close to home. People have really lost their marbles over this.
There is no such thing as "honest transgender." See on the "Advocates" (.org I think, might be .com) platform where middle aged men who fathered their children use them as props, gloating on being called "Mom" and getting Mother's Day cards. Whether Neddy was entitled to be called some variant of mother was a very expensive section of our divorce proceedings (he'd already started, pretending his "ex" was male--in front of our 5 and 8 year old sons)
I just had a disturbing experience which is unrelated to this article, but will interest people here. An organization called Gays Against Groomers has identified TrevorSpace.org as a dating site which is hooking up teens as young as 13 with adults as old as their mid-twenties. TrevorSpace advertises itself as being for the LGBTQ community. So I signed up, pretending to be 22 years old, and I went into the Gender forum. On a thread in which a 13-year-old was questioning whether or not she was trans, someone told her the usual B.S. that if she thought she might be trans, then she WAS trans. I left a comment gently encouraging her to try to be happy as a girl, and to wait until she was older before taking any action. (I am recounting this to the best of my recollection since I can no longer access the thread.) For saying that, I have been banned from the site. So there is no doubt that there are social media organizations that are intentionally pushing transgender ideology and trying to get children to transition. Whatever I said was extremely mild and was simply common sense. I was very careful to sound sympathetic in all of the posts I made, which amounted to about six on six different threads.
They cannot know what it means to be a woman, just as women can't know what it means to be a man. They know that they want something they can never really have, and that this makes them more oppressed than the people who have what they want.
IMHO...this will stop when women (notice I didn't feel the need to use qualifiers) stand up and stop entertaining this BS. When you all say, "stop the stupid shit dude...you're not a woman, you're a guy"...then this will start to die, like a vine, that has been cut at it's base.
However, all of you have to adopt that elusive "solidarity", that seems to pop up easily, against any dog whistle dealing with misogyny, but strangely is silent when MEN, decide they want to replace you AS WOMEN...and happily flaunt that they are better women than you are...remember the college guy, who put on the girls swimsuit and then trounced the girls in the pool? Or how about men who now claim they can be pregnant...and then there's the AI womb, that is in development. Are you really going to stand for these bastardizations of you...and teach your daughters to do the same??
So, when you women decide you've had enough and put an end to it, then it will end.
My hope is that it happens soon. To be honest, it's been quite painful watching the fall of women and their capitulation, to a contrived social engineering agenda. You girls are so much better than that!!
These days I move from fear, to hate, to nausea, to disgust, to grief and back to fear seamlessly whenever the issue if trans ideology comes up. Honestly, I never in a million years imagined that girls and women's indoctrination into patriarchy could be so complete that most women simply cannot recognize their own erasure, not to mention the destruction of their children. It's surreal and terrifying to the point of contributing to PTSD in those of us who see all of this unfolding like an unending nightmare.
This is very well put. I agree with you completely.
OMG!! I couldn't agree more. I feel all of those things.
Weird how "trans women" are infinitely more oppressed despite having no notable differences in their experience
lol
Use their shedding their uterine lining as an excuse 😂😂😂
As someone shedding my uterine lining right now, that was really funny.
Gender ideology is never less than obvious. (https://dennisnoelkavanagh.substack.com/p/the-10-gender-commandments). This guy's period envy is hilarious, given what a pain menstruation genuinely is.
And as someone who identifies as lizard I find the whole thing highly insensitive. Those arrogant skin-shedders are not the only reptiles, you know
Setting aside that this feels like the start of total societal collapse, I'm fascinated by the men that make these kinds of statements. Are they all suffering from mental illness or have they just absorbed a steady stream of bad info to the point of believing it (not that those are mutually exclusive)? What would it take, from a clinical perspective, to reorient them to reality?
Consider this explanation:
https://everythingisbiology.substack.com/p/hallucinating-your-inner-trans-reptile
Very good essay Frederick. Four and a half stars out of five -- at least ... 😉🙂
Only quibble or qualification I might have is your apparent suggestion or implication that everything is subjective. Maybe we're all living in vats indulging in collective delusions. But even there, the vats are "real".
We can maybe delude ourselves for awhile, but brute facts tend to be trump; we're probably wiser to recognize that BEFORE burning ourselves on hot stoves.
ICYMI, my article on Wikipedia's Lysenkoism; of particular note is a quote of and link to Elizabeth Finne's rather brilliant article on the tyranny of the subjective:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/wikipedias-lysenkoism
Wow, for a half out of five stars, huh? I take that as a compliment from you, one of my most vigorous intellectual sparring partners! Thank you. Yes, I do think it's all subjective. But, as I said, that does not mean there is no reality out there. It just means we don't have any direct access to it. It's analogous to Plato's cave metaphor. Even the hot stove is a subjective experience. In absolute terms, the rate of molecular movement is what you would call the "reality". Our perceptions of heat may differ. Please don't confuse the neurobiology with Elizabeth's critique of "lived experience." They are two very different things, my friend! As always, I enjoyed the exchange.
🙂 Though hope you noticed that I gave you 4 1/2 out of 5 -- not just the half you suggest -- and the other half was pending a detailed look at your post ... 😉
But while I quite agree with "Plato's cave metaphor" -- a remarkably durable one over 2500 years -- and I agree that there IS a subjective experience of the hot stove, the question is whether there really is a hot stove there outside that cave. Or how closely those subjective experiences correspond to or reflect it.
That's why I think your "it's all subjective" is somewhat wide of the mark or inconsistent. If the hot stove is only a "subjective experience" then not sure how or why you wouldn't say the same thing about "the neurobiology".
Seems something of an important dichotomy there -- the subjective experience, and whatever it is "outside the cave" that produces that experience.
But kind of a fascinating topic; expect you've run across David Chalmers but in case you haven't, one of his essays, and a quote or two therefrom:
"Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. .... More likely, we will take experience itself as a fundamental feature of the world, alongside mass, charge, and space-time. If we take experience as fundamental, then we can go about the business of constructing a theory of experience. ..."
https://consc.net/papers/facing.html
Oh, my bad. I use dictation software and it misunderstood me. I did mean 4 and 1/2! Thank you, again. Yeah, there is a stove. And, I know Chalmers. We just don't want to confuse "subjective experience" with "arbitrary experience". Saying that we experience something differently does not mean that what we're experiencing isn't caused by something. Of course there is something out there. You just don't have direct access to it. Nor, do I. Is it a blue dress or a red dress? That's up to our brains. That does not mean that there is no dress "out there."
I'd suggest a bit of ECT -- Electro-convulsive shock therapy -- their "brains" clearly being in need of some major "rewiring" ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroconvulsive_therapy
Incredible bizarre phenomenon in so many ways. But fascinating in other ones -- I've often argued or suggested that part and parcel of the issue is imprinting, a fairly durable psychological concept:
"Lorenz demonstrated how incubator-hatched geese would imprint on the first suitable moving stimulus they saw within what he called a "critical period" between 13 and 16 hours shortly after hatching. For example, the goslings would imprint on Lorenz himself (to be more specific, on his wading boots), and he is often depicted being followed by a gaggle of geese who had imprinted on him."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprinting_(psychology)
You might also be interested in Woody Allen's Zelig - "The Chameleon Man" - as an amusing illustration of how people pickup and "ape" the behaviours of those around them. A very human thing to do but has some serious pathological manifestations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelig
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUW8JsLDsNo
The utter arrogance of these mentally ill and personality disordered men appalls me.
"We can bond over shared discrimination and things we experience in our present day..."
That's the crux of it for me. Women have been taught that some abstraction of solidarity has some sort of cultural impact. The proof that it doesn't is in the "trans women are women" mantra. A nothing-burger of feminism based only on ideas of oppression rather than actions, of women caring for women, remains a nothing-burger — albeit a sadder one — once that notion of solidarity is expanded to include some sorry-ass confused men.
And by "bond", they mean for us to become accessories to their delusional costume. They have no intention (or ability) to reciprocate. They are just typical men, wanting women to perform labor for them. We should start asking the women who simp for them whether they'd have a bumper sticker that said "Have you hugged your rapist today?" In their confusion and outrage, they might be made to understand that cheerleading for a pack of narcissistic predators who have ALREADY decimated the rights, safety, privacy, and dignity of women is pretty much the same thing.
To the 'commenter' who says that cis women (Ew!) don't share the same experiences as the four billion other women on the planet, so that's the same as their not sharing the same experiences as trans women like him. Fella, to trot out a stupid comment like that one, you know nothing and understand nothing. Not surprising since you're male.
Can someone help me find a connecting flight to the point here? I believe everyone deserves to be treated with love and respect. But, I am missing how life experiences make one female. I always thought that was the work of XX chromosomes. To quote a quip I read recently, Science doesn’t care what you believe.”
Technically, it's producing eggs that makes you a female not XX chromosomes (females of other species don't have XX chromosomes but produce eggs as well). I know it sounds like nit-picking but if we want to fight ignorance with science it's important to be precise. https://www.theparadoxinstitute.com/read/what-are-sexes
Thank you for the clarifying specificity. I will never pretend to be a scientist or scholar and I am always open to learning more.
MoominMamma: "... it's producing eggs that makes you a female not XX chromosomes ... but if we want to fight ignorance with science it's important to be precise."
Amen to all of that; agree 110% -- at least. 🙂
Quite a good essay there by Zach Elliott over at The Paradox Institute. ICYMI, evolutionary biologist Colin Wright reposted that one of Zach's, and one other one, on his Reality's Last Stand Substack:
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/what-are-sexes
"Engendered" some fairly extensive and thorough discussion.
However, while Zach does make several good points, I think he eventually, or fairly quickly into his essay, snatches defeat from the jaws of victory by putting feelings before facts. More particularly, he starts off well by quoting the "universal biological definitions" which come from the Glossary of an article in the Journal of Molecular Human Reproduction [MHR]:
"Biologically, the female sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the larger gametes in anisogamous systems.
Biologically, the male sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the smaller gametes in anisogamous systems.
Lehtonen & Parker (2014). Gamete competition, gamete limitation, and the evolution of two sexes. Molecular Human Reproduction, 20(12)."
https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990
Of maybe some related interest, it seems that that MHR essay is fairly popular on Twitter, being tweeted thither and yon by all and sundry -- to the general discomfiture and chagrin of various transgender ideologues:
https://oxfordjournals.altmetric.com/details/2802153/twitter
But where Zach drops the ball is going from those MHR definitions to a broader and totally unsupported extension of them:
Zach: "This is what sexes ultimately are: discrete reproductive strategies involving the production of two different gametes."
Those MHR definitions say absolutely diddly-squat about any "reproductive strategies". What's required to qualify as a member of the male and female sex categories is being an organism, of all sexually reproducing species, which "produces smaller gametes (sperm)" and "produces larger gametes (ova)". Period.
But that politically-motivated muddying of the waters is something that Wright -- and his co-conspirators, Heather Heying & Emma Hilton -- are equally guilty of, though maybe more overtly. From a letter they had had published in the UK Times -- hardly a peer-reviewed biological journal:
"Individuals that have developed anatomies for producing either small or large gametes, - regardless of their past, present, or future functionality - are referred to as 'males' and 'females', respectively."
https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1207663359589527554
Diddly-squat in those MHR definitions about "developed anatomies"; they're all about current function (producing gametes right now), not a past or future one.
Moot exactly why Elliott, Wright, and Company are so desperate to peddle and promote what is a profoundly unscientific if not an anti-scientific definition. But this tweet of Zach's suggests that he's less interested in scientific accuracy than in not "offending" those who would qualify as "sexless" on the basis of those MHR definitions:
"Discrimination is not eliminated, and true acceptance is not shown, by embracing the scientifically incorrect and morally problematic claims that people who differ from the norm are both or neither sexes."
https://twitter.com/zaelefty/status/1592711689438662656
They seem to "think" that our sexes -- our memberships in the male and female sex categories -- are "participation trophies", that everyone has to have one, rather than being labels denoting present reproductive abilities.
We go off the rails when we allow "morally problematic claims" and the prospect of being "offended" to trump scientific facts and theories. Zach and Colin might just as well endorse "teaching the controversy" because religious fundamentalists might be "offended" on being told that the Earth is older than 6000 years and not the center of the universe, and that humans evolved from apes and are not the result of any sort of "special creation" by Jehovah:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teach_the_controversy_(campaign)
Rather disappointed in Zach and Colin on that score, particularly Colin who should know better.
You are correct. In fact, all it takes is the absence of a Y chromosome.
I had a "C" in Genetics 30 years ago in college. I probably shouldn't even have commented:)
You should absolutely have commented! You made a very good point. The genetics thing gets confusing when you're not talking about mammals. The genetics of sex is complicated in a lot of animals. There are even some animals that don't have any males at all (like some lizards), and some that have male-female sex but can still reproduce if there are no males around (like Komodo dragons). And then there's all that wacky stuff with invertebrates. Even the idea of producing eggs has some ambiguity because not all females can or do produce eggs. The problem is that the terms have to be clearly defined when making any of these claims. Some people try to drive the discussion down to the molecular level but that just changes the level of analysis. It doesn't clear anything up. There's always going to be some ambiguities in biological terms because words always have some ambiguity to them. The truth is that your comment was correct in spirit. There are just two human sexes... even those females with Turner's syndrome — just one X chromosome — who do not produce eggs are still female. You may have gotten a C in genetics, but your comment deserves an A+.
If you believe that privilege (and thus male privilege) is a thing, it is a potential wedge.
"i have spent half my life as a woman. the only male socialization i have left is"
This comment, for example, misunderstands and denies what male privilege even IS. Anyone who understands privilege knows that it doesn't work like THIS. Reckoning with male privilege is a life-long endeavor that you never truly finish; is it any wonder that so many of the worst misogynists out there are those that cease to even think that they need to do anything to deal with their privilege?
There's also this gem: "Plus, 20 years or 2 years makes very little difference here, experience one misogyny you've experienced them all."
I read that as: Let me belittle your experience and equate my 2 year narcissistic fantasy with your whole life long experience steeped in being socialized as a girl->woman.
It's like if I said that if I missed lunch I experienced real hunger.
I wish more handmaidens understood that trans identified men view their support with cynicism and contempt, rather than gratitude. Men are men are men. Their wants are needs, and our needs are irrelevant to them.
Yes. The men-identifying-as-women are basically the greatest hits from a list titled, "The Worst Men Ever, Brogressive Bourgeoises Edition".
*bourgeoisie
Mobile is the worst, cmv, lol.
"Acting like cis women are some collective".
Creating divides between women with racism, classism, and internalized misogyny is one of the ways patriarchy has prevented women from joining together in solidarity. By keeping us apart, we're kept loyal to the men in our respective groups.
Suzanne from Asian Women for Equality speaks very eloquently about how racism in particular is used to keep women separate:
https://youtu.be/nEl4-AjZviA
I was chatting with a transwoman collaborator on a project today, very nice person, I genuinely like them, but they are a man. A very gender-non-conforming man, and that’s absolutely fine with me, as are their choice of name and (at least before things got so crazy) using she/her pronouns.
But this is all too much. I don’t know how we’re going to back our way out of this. It will never be acceptable to me to be asked to treat males as women or girls in any situation where it matters. And the more adamant they are about it, the less inclined I am to think that it doesn’t matter in some situation.
The attack at the Alameda County Courthouse yesterday was very close to home. People have really lost their marbles over this.
There is no such thing as "honest transgender." See on the "Advocates" (.org I think, might be .com) platform where middle aged men who fathered their children use them as props, gloating on being called "Mom" and getting Mother's Day cards. Whether Neddy was entitled to be called some variant of mother was a very expensive section of our divorce proceedings (he'd already started, pretending his "ex" was male--in front of our 5 and 8 year old sons)
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_Sgl9Vl8_bk (50 seconds of the gist of it for a trans widow)
I just had a disturbing experience which is unrelated to this article, but will interest people here. An organization called Gays Against Groomers has identified TrevorSpace.org as a dating site which is hooking up teens as young as 13 with adults as old as their mid-twenties. TrevorSpace advertises itself as being for the LGBTQ community. So I signed up, pretending to be 22 years old, and I went into the Gender forum. On a thread in which a 13-year-old was questioning whether or not she was trans, someone told her the usual B.S. that if she thought she might be trans, then she WAS trans. I left a comment gently encouraging her to try to be happy as a girl, and to wait until she was older before taking any action. (I am recounting this to the best of my recollection since I can no longer access the thread.) For saying that, I have been banned from the site. So there is no doubt that there are social media organizations that are intentionally pushing transgender ideology and trying to get children to transition. Whatever I said was extremely mild and was simply common sense. I was very careful to sound sympathetic in all of the posts I made, which amounted to about six on six different threads.
They cannot know what it means to be a woman, just as women can't know what it means to be a man. They know that they want something they can never really have, and that this makes them more oppressed than the people who have what they want.
IMHO...this will stop when women (notice I didn't feel the need to use qualifiers) stand up and stop entertaining this BS. When you all say, "stop the stupid shit dude...you're not a woman, you're a guy"...then this will start to die, like a vine, that has been cut at it's base.
However, all of you have to adopt that elusive "solidarity", that seems to pop up easily, against any dog whistle dealing with misogyny, but strangely is silent when MEN, decide they want to replace you AS WOMEN...and happily flaunt that they are better women than you are...remember the college guy, who put on the girls swimsuit and then trounced the girls in the pool? Or how about men who now claim they can be pregnant...and then there's the AI womb, that is in development. Are you really going to stand for these bastardizations of you...and teach your daughters to do the same??
So, when you women decide you've had enough and put an end to it, then it will end.
My hope is that it happens soon. To be honest, it's been quite painful watching the fall of women and their capitulation, to a contrived social engineering agenda. You girls are so much better than that!!