Since Miller didn’t reply to my earlier post. To everyone here: is there room for a view that is somewhere in between transphobe who supports bathroom bills and TRA who claims there is no such thing as biological sex? Because if not this discussion is kind of pointless.
Yeah, biology. It’s not reductive to point out that some people are female and some are male. You don’t seem to know what “reductive” means. (And if it’s wrong to say a person is male or female based on their physical sex, just what DOES make them male or female?)
It would be reductive to say that the only thing that matters about a person is their sex organs. It is not reductive to say a person’s sex organs has something to do with their sex. The former statement reduces. The latter classifies.
As is my wont, I checked myself with the representatives of the female half of the species that I personally know, and shared your takes in this thread.
It was unanimous horror.
This isn’t GD, or I would certainly not be sharing an anecdote. I know that 3000+ posts in, you are beating the same drum, and are unlikely to reflect on whether it’s the RIGHT drum… But hopefully you understand that you don’t speak for (I would venture to guess) even close to a majority of women.
No it isn’t. You are unquestionably human. No one here is doubting that, nor suggesting you are less important as a human being than anyone else, or less deserving of contentment in life. You should have all the same civil rights that I do. Nonetheless, I am not obliged to deny reality in the service of other people’s demands, and telling the truth isn’t dehumanizing.
It’s your insistence that your view is “the truth”, rather than just your view and preference for language, that makes you indistinguishable from the “gay marriage isn’t really marriage” crowd for this issue.
Language has changed.
An irrelevance. Again; you can change the word, but you cannot change the concept.
So you get “Women” and “men” to mean “nothing in particular.” Fine; there’s all kinds of silliness with that decision, but suppose you get what you want. People will stop using those words. Male adults and female adults, by whatever new words you want to use - male and females, cismen and ciswomen, it doesn’t matter - will simply start being referred to by those words. After all, we haven’t always called then men and women, the words used to be different in Old English; IIRC, male and female adults were waepmen and wifmen, respectively. That changed to men and women, but the concept didn’t change. The concept is the same in every other language, all of which use different words. The concept won’t change if you insist on abandoning “men” and “women,” and new words will be chosen.
You can change the meaning of, say, marriage, because marriage is a legal and sociological construct. It is whatever we want it to be. Of course, it wasn’t change much. It’s still basically the same. If you decided, as you want to do with “women,” that the word “marriage” should mean nothing, then what would absolutely, positively, inevitably happen is that people would shrug, stop using “marriage,” and use some other word to refer to the formal joining of two adults into a single socially recognized unit. Maybe we’d borrow some other word, or maybe invent a whole new one, but it’d still be the same basic concept. You cannot get away from the simple fact that some people are male and some female. That has been true as long as there have been human beings, and it will keep being true, and you can’t do anything about that. People will come up with new words and if you insist on making them meaningless, too, they’ll come up with more new ones.
You can’t alter that any more than you can change the existence of water by using the word “water” to mean “any substance.” People would just find a new word for H2O.
Try and justify all you want, but it doesn’t change the fact that language can and does change. There’s nothing special about words for gender and sex that renders them immune from the evolution of language. Usage defines definition, whether you like it or not.
Cool. None of that contradicts what I wrote.
Use any justification you want to try to excuse your bigotry, I’m not going to let you define me based on your biases. I am a woman, deal with it.
No fair! I invented “none of that contradicts what I wrote”!
They clearly don’t understand this.
She tells you she feels dehumanized and you tell her she’s wrong. It doesn’t work that way. You don’t get to dictate how she feels.
I’m telling y’all I’m afraid of men exploiting TWAW for nefarious purposes and your side doesn’t seem to have a problem telling me I’m wrong. I’m telling y’all that being dismissed like this makes me feel oppressed and subjugated and your side doesn’t seem to have a problem telling me I’m wrong about this.
Feelings. The whole discussion is about feelings. Not science, not facts, not figures. No analyses of whether the costs are worth the benefits. No discussion of what failed implementation looks like, what kinds of things would trigger a course-correction, and how we would go about doing that. It’s all just about feelings. It’s hard for me to wrap my head around a movement that seeks to indulge a small group’s feelings above everything else. I must be a cold stone bitch or something because I don’t think I’ll ever get it.
How is that any different from any other minority rights movement? It’s right there in the word “minority”.
How about TRAs who acknowledge biological sex but are aware it’s not a simple binary?
Tyranny of the minority is a thing, you know.
No, I had no idea such a thing was possible…
So is tyranny of the majority.
Depends if they are pretending there are no differences between men and women or not. Many people here seem to think words have a magical power to change reality. I’m not keen to live in a world where it’s taboo to mention sex differences but we continue to suffer because of them.
We’re not talking about either of those things. A person’s feelings aren’t more or less valid because there are many or few similar such people. How the heck does that make any sense?
We’re talking about how the rights of one group impact on the rights of another, which is a pretty common occurrence.
There are only two types of gametes. Sperm and egg. That is the basis for saying sex is binary. Male reproductive anatomy is associated with the former; female the latter.
Contrary to the insistence of gender ideologues, developmental abnormalities do not constitute evidence of additional sex classes.
None of this has anything to do with whether members of the sperm-producing class who identify as members of the ova-producing class should be entitled to receive the protections reserved for the latter. Gender has nothing to do with biology and that’s what we mean when we say TRAs are invested in conflating these two things.
I haven’t seen anyone here doing that. I’ve only seen disagreement about whether trans people belong in one category or the other.