So, they can’t make up their collective mind whether a man’s mind/brain and a woman’s mind/brain are essentially different or not, and they consider that all people are created equal and should be treated equally regardless of externally-imposed social label, but at the same time reckon that other people should accept externally-imposed labelling when it happens to come from them. Probably believe that they have the right to tell people what our own name is, too.
Doesn’t give me much of a positive impression about their global mental ability.
As far as I can tell, WoLF dates back to about 2014. While I don’t doubt their members’ personal bona fides with regard to issues like reproductive healthcare, equal pay, etc, I can’t call the organization “incidentally and secondarily anti-trans”. All of their court filings deal with gender identity, as do 95% of their blog posts. Interestingly, I see no posts about the anti-abortion legislation in Georgia, or the IAAF Caster Semenya ruling, or really anything other than trans stuff.
Also: not something that actually happens. It’s a phantom fear that simply does not happen.
How many olympic athletes have been transwomen since the IOC allowed transwomen to participate in 2004? How many olympic athletes have been transwomen since the IOC loosened those restrictions again in 2015?
The answer is zero and zero, respectively. Out of tens of thousands, there isn’t a single one represented.
Transwomen are actually drastically underrepresented in elite sport. There are a handful of standout cases… which is exactly what you would expect given that transwomen are something like 1% of the population - eventually, someone’s going to do something noteworthy. The idea that post-transition transwomen have any kind of innate advantage in any sport is, to date, utterly unsupported by any available evidence.
It’s worth noting that RealClearPolitics is not exactly a “middle-of-the-road” rag. They’re pretty firmly conservative - better than Fox News, but you’re going to end up with framing like this, as though “feminist” and “conservative” are mutually exclusive and WoLF is a legitimate feminist group. Both of those things cannot be true, given that WoLF is a conservative astroturf (or should I say AstroTERF, ha ha) organization bankrolled by conservative groups that exists solely to attack LGBT rights. In fact, many such TERF individuals and groups are explicitly being bankrolled by homophobic and transphobic conservative groups - here’s the Heritage Foundation hosting a panel of them.
Needless to say, I think the whole lot of them are both terrible feminists (and, more generally, terrible human beings). When you hate trans people so much you’ll ally yourself with the fucking Heritage Foundation, you are not a feminist. You’re a bigoted fuckstick who doesn’t give two shits about women’s rights, otherwise you wouldn’t be allying yourself with a group that opposes women’s rights at every fucking turn.
There’s no divide here. These aren’t “different groups coming together to oppose a bill”. It’s conservative transphobic bigots allying with and bankrolling other conservative transphobic bigots to make their conservative transphobic bigotry look less conservative and bigoted. But make no mistake - it is both conservative and bigoted.
Like, let’s be clear here.
Here’s a line from the article the OP links:
What the author is telling us here is that transwomen are men.
Pull this kind of transphobic, bigoted bullshit here, and from what I’ve seen you’ll eat a well-deserved warning and thread ban.
The whole article is pretty much just this kind of disgusting transphobic horseshit from top to bottom. I’m kind of curious what Velocity wanted to achieve by posting it. Dude, did you not read past the headline? Or do you actually agree with this lukewarm gorilla shit?
Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists are better described as Feminism-Appropriating Reactionary Transphobes. The acronym fits their general demeanor and attitude better, too.
“Baptists and Bootleggers”. Penny Nance’s previous article on RealClearPolitics is “When Will the Rising Tide of Bias Against Christians Stop?” which is exactly the kind of insipid “WAAAH PEOPLE ARE MEAN TO ME BECAUSE I’M A HOMOPHOBIC BIGOT” whining you’d expect given the title. Natasha Chart writes for the fucking Federalist. Really just Baptists and more Baptists.
Most feminists want equality. They are not asking for special rules or privileges. So, one would suppose that equality would extend to anyone and everyone.
Of course. And I am free to characterize those who dispute it in a hateful fashion as hateful and bigoted. If someone thinks that marriage does not include the possibility of interracial unions, or same-sex unions, then they hold a bigoted and hateful view, whether or not they see it that way. If someone doesn’t think that trans women are women, then they hold a bigoted and hateful view, regardless of how they see it. Same if someone thinks “human” doesn’t include Jews, or black people, etc.
“Woman” and the concept of gender (as opposed to biological sex) in general are sociocultural phenomena, not objective statements. They will never be anything other than how culture sees them, any more than “computer” is what society defines as a computer.
All of this is discussion about how society should treat and view people. Such discussions aren’t based on hard and objective facts, any more than discussions about whether gay people should be allowed to be married.
I’m opposed to the law because it means that women can go around pretending to be men, avoiding glass ceilings, getting higher salaries and all the best jobs. And worst of all, getting the benefit of a shorter line for the men’s toilets in bars, stadiums etc. This is unacceptable.
There are a handful of standout cases… which is exactly what you would expect given that transwomen are something like 1% of the population - eventually, someone’s going to do something noteworthy. The idea that post-transition transwomen have any kind of innate advantage in any sport is, to date, utterly unsupported by any available evidence.
It’s an individual ancedote of a woman currently undergoing HRT, who has been on hormones for less than half the length of time mandated by the IOC. It’s not representative of most transwomen competing in sports, or the regulations those women face.
But even so, hey, guess what - the fact that a transwoman can win an event or even break records in her class is not proof of what you’re claiming. How do we know that Mary Gregory isn’t just a really good powerlifter? How do we know it’s because of her gender? We know that HRT has significant effects on a person’s physiology, effects that are extremely negative for extreme sports. She’s only been on it for about a year, but to completely discount her as an athlete because of that is… well, fucking gross.
Seriously, this line of argumentation is infuriating. It’s like hearing a woman competing with Rachel McKinnon complaining that it was an unfair competition when she lost, even though she beat McKinnon in 11 out of 13 races they both participated in. Yes, this is literally something that happened. To quote McKinnon:
This is what the double-bind for trans women athletes looks like: when we win, it’s because we’re transgender and it’s unfair; when we lose, no one notices (and it’s because we’re just not that good anyway). Even when it’s the SAME racer. That’s what transphobia looks like.
(Bolding mine.)
If you allow transwomen to compete, then even if there are no advantages from being trans (hell, even if there are, on average, physical disadvantages to being trans), sooner or later by sheer law of averages a transwoman is going to win an event, or break a record, or do something significant. But at the moment, whenever that happens, the response is not to celebrate a spectacular athlete, it’s to point and say, “SEE? SEE? TRANSWOMEN REALLY DO HAVE AN UNFAIR ADVANTAGE!” Regardless of how little sense that makes.
Do we know that Mary Gregory broke that record because she’s a transwoman? No. Instead, you just point to a transwoman doing something significant, and act like that, in and of itself, is proof that transwomen have an advantage. But the evidence just isn’t there yet. In fact, if you look at the IOC, they’d say the evidence just straight-up doesn’t exist; that’s why their ruling is what it is. If I were in a charitable mood, I would say that Gregory should have waited the IOC’s recommended 2 years on HRT to compete as a woman. But I’m not. So can you prove that the reason Gregory did so well was because she’s a transwoman? If not, stop assuming that she’s a lesser athlete without any goddamn evidence. That’s some transphobic bullshit, right there.
This is also partially a Rachel Dolezal question. Why isn’t Rachel Dolezal black? She said she’s black, she ostensibly believed she was black, she acted in ways in which a black person would act, she changed her appearance cosmetically to appear to be black, she seems to say that she identified as black not out of some sort of choice, but rather as an expression of her ‘true nature.’ The bottom-line though is that Rachel Dolezal was not able to be black because she did not live the life of oppression and have the experience that was necessary to be considered black.
It’s a similar argument from feminists over transgender rights. They certainly live a life with their own struggles, but they are not the same struggles that women have to go through. They can always choose to return to/pass as/whatever-you-want-to-call-it to their birth gender and escape the inherent oppression of being a woman. The fight that they have may sometimes intersect with the fight of biological women, but they are not the same and sometimes they are at odds, particularly when you start to get into the realm of ‘self-identification.’ If there is a scholarship for ‘Women in Science’ and someone who claims to be transgendered applies and is awarded this scholarship, is that really helping women? I think that many would argue it is not. If a company is found to be sexist in their hiring practices and has to hire more women, but hires biological males claiming to be transgendered women, are they now less sexist? Have opportunities actually been created for women? I think that’s where a lot of the feminist concern comes from. It may or may not be ill-founded concern, but I think that it’s legitimate concern.
It’s hard to quote just a single 3-paragraph segment from this tour de force response by ZinniaJones to this particular argument, but if I had to choose, I think I’d go with this one:
There’s another element of dissimilarity that’s especially striking to me. Trans people have reached what might be called a “critical mass” of awareness. Our visible presence has reached a point where emerging trans people have the means to recognize themselves in us, helping each of them to develop a better understanding of their gender and what’s best for them in their life. I’ve received hundreds of messages from viewers who’ve said that my work led them to realize that they’re trans, but this has been occurring for decades – after Christine Jorgensen publicly transitioned in 1952, hospitals received thousands of requests from trans people who also wanted to transition (Meyerowitz, 2002).
Yet in the wake of Rachel Dolezal’s real-life example, we see nothing of the sort. There aren’t thousands of people emerging to say that her life reflects their own experiences, or that they feel more affirmed in themselves now as a result of her visibility. She is not an instance of a latent yet widespread phenomenon that’s now rising to public awareness – she is one individual, with a particular set of personal issues, who has made a very unique series of poor choices in her life.
Bolding mine. It’s a toss-up between this and the bit at the start where she rakes you over the coals for even making such an absurd comparison to begin with. Rachel Dolezal is not comparable to LGBT people. And grounding the discussion in terms of flighty notions about “what is race” or “what is gender” misses how completely these comparisons fall apart when comparing Rachel’s life to the life of the average trans person, or “transracialism” to “transgenderism” in aggregate.
Seriously, read the article, then don’t make this awful comparison again, please.
If you’ve spoken to a single transwoman you’ll hear that, alongside concepts like transmisogyny, transwomen suffer from much of the same misogny cis women do. When it comes to sexism, if it’s not explicitly biological (like abortion), transwomen almost always suffer alongside ciswomen. Their struggle doesn’t simply intersect with that of biological women, it overlaps to an extreme degree.
This is a bit like saying, “Hey, if you’re sick of homophobia, you could always just go back into the closet and marry someone of the opposite sex”. I mean, trans people don’t go on hormones with quite unpleasant side-effects, get invasive surgery, change their entire outward appearance, and out themselves as one of the most hated and discriminated-against minorities in the world for no reason. They do it because gender dysphoria fucking sucks.
The idea that “if you don’t like misogyny, you can always detransition” is just…
…What? The actual? Fuck?
Transwomen are women. If a scholarship for “women in science” goes to a transwoman, it is helping women, because that woman…
(See if you can figure out where I’m going with this…)
…is a woman.
A slight aside. Lemme take a stab in the dark, here - well, not that dark, given your previous reference to Rachel Dolezal and the way you say “claims to be transgendered”.
There’s an assumption here that these people are pretending, isn’t there? That they’re really guys, just pretending to be women - presumably for all the advantages that come in our society from being transwomen (if you read that sentence without catching the joke, try again).
Now, maybe that never crossed your mind. Maybe it’s also not subconsciously underpinning anything you’re saying here. If so: good, because it’s bullshit. It doesn’t happen. Transwomen generally transition because they identify as women. It’s not a prank, it’s not a trick - they feel like they are women, they identify as women, they are often dysphoric because their bodies are not feminine, and this is why they put up with all the shit society throws at them - because the alternative is virtually unthinkable.
Anyone who knows the kind of abuse transwomen put up with on a day-to-day basis just for being trans would consider this idea somewhere between laughable, embarrassing, and dangerously misguided. This shit does not happen.
Now, as said, maybe you didn’t actually think that. Maybe your phrasing is bad and your examples are bad and it doesn’t, consciously or subconsciously, come down to this particular chestnut. But if so: what is this?
And today, in “things that definitely happen, no really guys, stop laughing”: “A company with sexist hiring practices would rather hire transwomen than women”. Yeah. Sure. That’s definitely a thing that’s ever happened ever.
That’s one of the weirdest arguments I’ve ever seen- if these cis women think a trans woman deciding to ‘pass’ as male is going to escape the ‘inherent oppression of being a woman’, what’s stopping them doing it themselves? Gender identity? The same thing they’re denying in others?
And no two cis women have the same struggles growing up; a girl brought up by a sexist asshole father who expected her to be an uneducated housewife is going to have had totally different experiences to one brought up by, say, a feminist lesbian couple, but no-one thinks that means one is somehow less female than the other. The concept of ‘feminists’ who try to demand that all women have to have had one set of experiences to count as women, hence worthy of equality, would be laughable if it wasn’t being used to affect real people.
If there starts being a wave of men who claim to identify as women simply to gain access to female spaces, then ways to prevent that would be worth considering.
There isn’t.
Using a theoretical possibility that someone could be victimised in the future to justify present victimisation (especially of a group that already tends to get plenty of that) is just not a good argument.
Her argument largely seems to be - there are lots of people identifying as transgender people and very few identifying as ‘transracial’ people. Obviously, this is a fallacious argument. If I were in the say 1880s, there would be very few transgendered people. We simply have no way of knowing how many transracial people there are. The opprobrium that Ms. Dolezal received - losing her job, losing her friends, national mockery, family exclusion (all things faced by transgendered people at one time)- obviously would suppress the number of people who would identify as such. There may be tens of thousands of them who are closeted because of societal expectations, we have no way of knowing. We do know that she is not unique. There have been others as well who have ‘come out’ as it were. We also know that racial ‘passing’ has existed for an extremely long time. We don’t know whether those ‘passing’ felt themselves to be the ‘non-biological’ race or not, but it has been a common behavior throughout history.
Her second counter-point is that ‘she didn’t blend in very well.’ Basically, she led the NAACP chapter (very well from all accounts) and ‘made a spectacle of herself.’ Really? That’s a criticism? She wasn’t particularly good at being black? So then if a transgender person tries to lead a women’s group or ‘makes a spectacle of themselves’ that transgenderism and transracialism are the same thing? Because I’m fairly certain that somewhere I could find such a person.
If you talk to Rachel Dolezal, she will certainly be able to tell you how she too has suffered from her position. To be honest, she has had to endure extreme suffering for being ‘whatever it is she is.’ She’s a subject of public scorn, she lost her job, she was unable to find anyone to hire her. She has suffered abuse for her ‘race’ as others have.
Besides, this is disingenuous. Yes, there are transgendered people who suffer as women, but there are those who don’t. Caitlyn Jenner as an example, enjoyed 50-ish years of identifying as a cis-gendered male before transitioning. She was able to partake of all of the benefits of being a white male until in her 60s when she was then able to enjoy all the benefits of being a minority spokesperson. This is nothing against Ms. Jenner, but saying that transgendered people suffer the same as biological women is misleading at best and frequently false. Yes, they have their own types of oppression, but it is NOT the same as the oppression faced by women.
The idea is that you CAN do that, while biological females CANNOT. It’s an option that is available to you that is closed off to the rest of females. Now certainly, you can say that such a choice is difficult or that ‘they’ve gone to far.’ but the fact is that that is an option available regardless of its difficulty that is closed off to biological females.
Apparently, these feminists would disagree with you. If every female scholarship in the country were to magically go to trans women, would the plight of biological women be better off? Obviously not. Would the plight of women as a whole be better off? I think that that’s arguable and many would say that it would not.
I think I would claim that if the benefits to being transgendered became great enough, there would be people that would fake it. I work with admissions at a large university and I know that right now racially people fake it constantly. They feel it gives them an advantage and we frequently have people that mark every racial minority checkbox hoping that one of them will get them scholarships or give them an admissions advantage. They know that there is no DNA test and that race is simply self-described, so they take advantage. If the benefits of being transgendered get high enough, I think it is nearly a guarantee that people would fake it to take advantage. I think that feminist groups are worried about that scenario coming into play and wish to prevent it.
The problem comes with self-identification. In our company argument, the issue is not that they would be hiring transgendered people, but rather, they would be hiring men and telling them to check the transgendered box on their application. Their medical records are protected, so a company can claim that they have no idea whether the individual is transitioning or not. In a fraud case, you would have to prove that the individual(s) were not transgendered and how exactly do you do that? It becomes a route that could be used to potentially exclude women from positions of power - which is what these feminist groups are afraid of.
Radical feminists usually hold that female and male brains aren’t different, but that patriarchal society, culture, education, social pressure, etc, etc… result in differences in behavior, preferences, etc…Basically that the differences between men and women are 100% nurture and 0% nature. I’m not sure how what I said was contradictory and if it is, it comes from me expressing it poorly rather than from them.
Hmmm…I’m not sure I follow. And again maybe I poorly expressed myself. Let’s take the same kind of views applied to racism. That would be : there isn’t objectively such a thing as a human race, but there’s a real social construct classifying people into races, and a real experience of, say, being black, so you can’t just decide to call yourself black if you’re born white and as a result don’t really share this experience. You’re just a white person playing at being black/pretending to be black for what isn’t likely to be benevolent reasons and there’s no reason to welcome you as part of the black community. The position of Radfems with regard to gender would be basically the same. Does it make more sense?
I never said that Radfems were nice people. I’m saying that they’re authentically feminists, and even at the core of the feminist movement, not extraordinarily rare people pretending to be feminists so that they’ll be able to bash trans. Disputing that Radfems are feminists is just a denial of reality intended to preserve a nice black and white view where feminists and trans activists are both always the “good guys” fighting the good fight for good reasons. And radfems views and arguments are generally happily accepted without much critical thought by the “progressive” left as long as they don’t gore another of their sacred cow.
Of course it’s relevant. If the same lift is a world record in the women’s class but unremarkable in the men’s class, then competing in the women’s class is a large advantage to those who want to win and set world records.
If transgender status doesn’t make any difference, then why aren’t there any FtM transgender athletes winning at the same level? Because, on average, biological maleness confers an advantage in sports in which males and females compete under the same rules.
What’s the alternative? Show your genitals at the door and/or take a genetic test before you’re allowed to use the bathroom or locker room? Something tells me women of all political stripes, not just trans-exclusionary feminists, will dislike that.
Or keep doing it the way we’ve done it for millennia, and just go by what gender people say they are and how they present themselves? I know which one I would choose.