My dog does this weird thing where he backs up to a bush or rock to take a dump.
No, what you did was post a silly quote without context or debate in a debate forum. The purpose of this forum is to state a position on an issue and then defend that position. That’s why it’s called “Great Debates”. It’s not the purpose of this forum to post some gibberish that you’ve been spamming other sites with and then ask everyone to explain it to you because you don’t understand it.
To take the OP at its word …
There isn’t all that much to refute in the quote (which I’m going to presume ends after ‘Kardashian Brand’ and doesn’t keep going on forever). Beginning and ending with over the top personal attacks/ad hominems does nothing to help give the reader an understanding of the larger point being made, and certainly had the effect here of making everybody annoyed and combative. So lose those parts completely.
There is a lot of opinion supported by unnamed facts in the next couple of paragraphs, along with a lot of tortured syntax. The point about bathrooms being separate along the lines of ‘sexuality’ is wrong and does not add anything to the argument - there is also probably a word better than ‘paradox’ to use about bisexuals.
The semantic argument is weak, because using linguistics to critique (let alone define) social issues is a form of magical thinking, that gives a power to words that they don’t deserve outside of Harry Potter novels. I would question somebody who claimed to have a degree in linguistics and writes something like “Other languages such as French assign gender to random objects like lamps and chairs.” Not only is it a horribly written sentence, it shows a complete lack of understanding of the structure of languages, and also gives more attention to the fact that the term ‘gender’ is used in a different context than human identity than it deserves. The point made about different cultures having different uses of gender in their language might tell us something about human gender identity if the author had included some examples of how there is a different understanding of it in French speaking countries. (This might in fact be the case, and would be a fascinating subject to explore, but there’s nothing in this quote that supports this.)
The next paragraph goes back to conflating opinion and fact, in a fairly unconvincing way. Even a couple of facts thrown in would have added a lot to the discussion, but at the moment, it’s just a series of assertions. Most centrally, there is no attempt to define ‘transgender’ in a way that can be discussed - the reader is provided with a bunch of examples of what it ‘is’ and what it ‘is not’, but there is no obvious logical basis for us to extrapolate anything meaningful from these examples. “It doesn’t affect me and or really anything important” is a sloppy way to finish any argument, and as a reader it made me wonder why I had bothered to read it in the first place.
Overall, this piece contains the seed of an argument, but needs to be tightened up significantly if it is going to be persuasive or give readers something substantial to take away with them.
Mark: C.
I’ll give you a little feedback, what the hell.
That pair of sentences is a bit confusing. Feminists have not been overwhelmingly supportive of transgender experiences and perspective on gender. Some have been, but go check the name Jan Raymond. While you’re at it look at Mary Daly and Sheila Jeffries and poke around some, google up pages with the combination of “transgender” and “TERF”. Discover what a “trans exclusive radical feminist” is.
I say this as a person with a high appreciation for radical feminism and as a supporter of transgender rights. I’m differently gendered myself. I’m just saying that the author of your little screed seems to be equivocating between feminists and transgender rights supporters and it strikes me as uninformed and weird to be doing so.
And here, meanwhile, you seem to be conflating biological sex (male and female) with gender (manhood and womanhood), which is admittedly very common but sure isn’t helping as far as clarity.
I myself am not comfortable with the rush to accept and embrace “built in physiological differences in the brain explains transgender people”. I do think there is a pattern in which male-bodied people tend, in general to exhibit more of the constellation of characteristic we call “masculine” than female-bodied people in general, but each sex has a wide range of expression and there’s a huge overlap. And whenever you’ve got that kind of diversity with overlap, you do, by definition, have some individuals who are male-bodied but less masculine than most other male folks and many female-bodied folks; and likewise female-bodied people who are more masculine than most other female people and many male-bodied persons. Saying there are “little to no cognitive differences” seems to be denying the generalization, but it’s an entrenched one, so even if it does not manifest, the social belief that it does certainly exists, and the scatterplot I’ve described also exists. So you have male-bodied people who (in social terms, if not biological ones) would be experienced as feminine, and female-bodied people who would be experienced as masculine. We exist and we find it useful to speak of our experiences, and hence we need some terms.
I don’t understand what you (or the author of the quoted diatribe in the OP) have against the term “cisgender” or why you wish to drag Caitlyn Jenner into this. What point are you attempting to make?
Are you (and/or the author) attempting to deny that trans people exist, that being trans is a phenomenon? Or arguing against neurological models of causation? Or taking exception to something Caitlin Jenner said or did? Or something else entirely?
The quote in the OP is pretty good, actually. I can see how ‘anti-truscum’ no-dysphoria-required Tumblrinas, TERFs, and people who believe there is really solid brain science behind non-anatomical gender identity (three groups who generally yell and scream at each other) will all be offended, but it’s pretty fair for a layman’s opinion, and I don’t find it disagreeable myself.
I analyzed the quote. It’s someone’s stated opinion. I don’t know what to refute unless the OP believes it is not the opinion of whoever stated it.
There definitely are differences between male and females at birth last time I checked, look between their legs.
Seriously though there are differences in brain structures between male and females and also the way the parts of the brain communicate with one another. Males in general are exposed to much more testosterone in the womb and this has effects on the body and the brain.
As far as I know, feminists hate transgenders because feminists like to believe we’re all floating brains without gender and transgender people are all about female and male brains.
Oh, well, if someone on the web said it, then it must be true.
Welcome to the Dope. It shouldn’t be surprising we’ll point the fuck out of it. Check the name.
“confessed” <> “claimed”
Actually, what you did was repost a question that you(?) already posted in another forum that was,itself, a repost from a different forum with the trailing questions omitted.
Lacking a link to the original quotation, demonstrating neither the author or the quotation’s provenance, your post was reported as either a copyright violation, (quotation marks do not eliminate the need to respect fair usage) or (based on the vitriol in the quotation), trolling.
I can see why you do not understand the quoted text, based on its incoherence; I fail to see why you would care, (based on its incoherence).
For now, I will leave this thread open. Some context would help this discussion.
[ /Moderating ]
I can’t link the source because Zodiac the creator and a facebook user (that is where I found his comments) but the whole purpose of the thread was if the whole argument of the quote held any water and what words were used out of context.
I have another quote that I can also paste that is part of the same subject as well as a quote of Zodiac refuting a friend of mine.
That’s not it at all.
Just quoting stuff from elsewhere isn’t what we’re about. Bring up a subject, take a stand on it, defend YOUR position.
This thread is closed. If you want to start a new one, use the approach above and you’ll get a better discussion going.