Then you won’t mind when I note that transwomen are men, that they’re male, and so it is wrong for them to compete in sports against women because they aren’t women. After all, I am using those terms in a manner you surely understand - indeed, in their most commonly understood meaning. Or is that not acceptable because you “Don’t like the way (I’m) using it?”
It’s a different issue, but as to this topic, I am continually reminded here of the current BLM movement and civil unrest, and the odd comparison so many white people (I’m white, btw) are inclined to make between today’s movement and that of Dr. King, he is cited as a counterexample of someone who knew how to protest right and so had everyone’s respect, and he is cast, in this role, as having been really nice.
But, in fact, King was immensely disliked by white Americans. Not that he didn’t have supporters, but by the last few years of his life he might actually have been, amongst white Americans, the single most disliked American. He was immensely controversial, in part because while he was a man of peace, he had little truck with “be kind.” Martin Luther King would get in your face, and he would say things that made people uncomfortable, and he wanted to inconvenience people. That’s how he got shit done.
Actually that’s not exactly right. King did want to be kind. However, what King understood is that kindness is not a simple thing to live up to, it’s actually very complex and requires a lot of ethical judgments, insight, and wisdom. I’m all for kindness and as much as it might surprise the folks calling me a stupid transphobic bigot, in real life I’m almost ludicrously kind and generous and I would no more harass a person for being trans, or anything else, than I would grow a new foot out of my forehead. But being kind is not always a virtue, especially when it involves real dishonesty. It is NOT kind to tell your friend that getting into a pyramid scheme is a great career path because you don’t want to hurt their feelings in the moment - and then later watch as they lose their shirt. It is not kind to give your child whatever they want because it gives them pleasure when you do so - and then fail as a parent. It is not kind to enforce no expectations in a workplace so everyone always thinks you’re the cool boss - and then watch the company fall apart and people lose their jobs.
(Now, of course, the TWAWers are going to say they’re on the side of Dr. King in this fight and I’m the one opposed to a civil rights movement. But, of course, I want trans people to have civil rights like anyone else, and if their civil rights are violated - if, for instance, the government of the day were to take away their right to avoid discrimination in housing - their methods of protesting that don’t have to be nice. Shouldn’t be, really. But as others have said, personal identity validation isn’t a right, and shouldn’t be.)
This TWAWer mantra of “just be kind” reduces kindness to acquiescence. (It also often doesn’t apparently apply to women who argue with them.) Kindness is not just telling people what they want to hear and giving them whatever the hell they want.
It is also important to remember that there have always been women who have enabled male entitlement. I just watched the PBS series on the women’s suffrage movement. Incredibly, women were instrumental in blocking franchisement for women. They were the “cool chicks” of their day–telling fellow women that they were being “hysterical” by resisting the program. Did those cool chicks think they were being anti-women? No. They thought they were actually protecting women. Cool chicks throughout history have told women to say “yes” to their own oppression for their own good. Cool chicks don’t have a problem with sexual harassment. They think women should just say “fuck you” to harassers and keep it moving, since they imagine that’s how men do it. They think women who get raped or domestically abused must have been asking for it somehow; maybe they should learn to fight and it won’t happen again. Most of us are well-equated with at least one woman who thinks other women should adopt the norms and outlook of men to get ahead and stop with the “girl power” stuff. And I see women like this in the trans movement. Most of them are young and don’t know how hard women have fought to get where they are today. These women are the first ones to brag about how much they “aren’t like other girls”–because they have internalized misogyny. They take their cues from men because they think men’s outlook on the world represents the ideal. So they think to themselves, if men aren’t bothered by transmen being in their spaces, why should women be bothered by transwomen? Well, if transwomen wasn’t a meaningless category, maybe I would agree with them! But it is a category open to any and all males! So I can’t hang with women who are willing to throw everything our group has fought for just so any and all males will get exactly what they want. Feminine, skirt-wearing males are still males. Masculine males who think wearing eyeshadow marks them as women are still males. They can go back to being men whenever the hell they want. We can treat them like one of us socially without being in favor of making them one of us legally. And we shouldn’t be vilified for this! I would expect any minority group (Native Americans, black Americans, gays and lesbians, etc.) to do whatever they can to safeguard their brand. Why shouldn’t women be empowered to do the same damn thing?
First, you do not get to tell others what they are allowed to find offensive. Not unless you want to forfeit moral high ground.
Second, there is no reason the sentence above couldn’t be written in a less awkward and objectifying way:
- Significant amounts of time and resources go into managing menstruation; this is a burden that is exclusively carried by female people of child-bearing age.
The sentence you wrote is actually inaccurate from the POV of a pedant. Not every “menstruator” needs to devote a lot of time and money to their periods. I’m a good example this. Since getting on the IUD, my periods are barely a drop on single-ply tissue paper. It’s only when discussing the female reproductive burden in the aggregate that generalizations become workable. Having language that allows us to do this without turning people into objects is extremely important.
Was that directed to me? Not what I was attempting to do. Apologies if I came across that way.
ISTM that JKR using the word “menstruators” was inarticulate but her meaning in context was clear in that she was talking about the common definition of female (XX), i.e. people who may or may not be menstruating due to various factors related to age or health conditions but who are not alien to the biological process as part of their physiological/biological sex. That we’re still talking about this 3700+ posts into the thread is puzzling to me. So I’m curious why Kimstu brought it up again.
No I screwed up the quote function. Sorry for confusion.
I agree with this so much, @RickJay. I will be kind to someone when there’s no obvious cost and when I care more about having a good relationship with them than being right. But when it comes to policy decisions and the management of society, I don’t want kindness to be the guiding principle. I want us to be directed by logic, reason, and fairness for everyone. And not just the the everyone living right now, but the everyone of the future. I don’t want to modify existing policy under the assumption that it will always be just a small number of people deserving some “kindness”. Because there’s no good reason to think it will always be a small number of people. I want to only modify existing policy when there is a critical need to do so and when there are safeguards in place to handle the concerns expressed from all the stakeholders. Concerns like how do we protect women prison’s from being overrun by males, while still being considerate of males suffering from gender dysphoria? If kindness means “do whatever a person says will make them happy”, then kindness is definitely not going to be help us solve this particular problem. We need to be prepared to not take every claim over “denied humanity” seriously and tell some people “no”. That is not kind, but it is rational and just.
I think black people in the US commit all types of violent offenses more often than white people, including rape. This means that, analogously to your own argument based on women only spaces, many white men should reasonable feel entitled to white male only spaces, like in prisons.
The claim that societal economic hardship or inequality doesn’t increase the instance of rape is patently false. Severe economic hardship creates environments where sexual abuse and trauma are more likely, which in turn will create individuals that are more likely to commit such crimes, since people who are abused are more likely to abuse others.
It’s not just white males who get their own spaces. Prisons are often segregated into groups to prevent violence. This often means by race, gang affiliation, type of offense, etc. It’s not really correct to say that white people get their own space. Everyone gets their own space as necessary to reasonably minimize violence. Some people even have their own solitary space because the risk is so high. This makes sense in prisons because the risk of violence is so high. Is there a place in the general public where white people are at a great risk of assault and would need their own space to mitigate that? I don’t think so.
I would think that globally allowing cismen unrestricted access to women’s spaces would have a similarly high risk of harassment and assault, which is why we have them segregated.
I see a lot of gender critical feminists referring to women like this as handmaids. But I really wish they didn’t because that’s not actually fair to handmaids, at least those from Margaret Atwood’s book. Most if not all of the handmaids knew they were being oppressed, they were just too beaten down to fight against it. The resistance came from the handmaids.
Aunt Lydias are a better term for women who knowingly or unknowingly abet those trampling on women’s rights. Aunt Lydias see themselves as instruments of good because they are true believers in the Gilead ideology. Their faith in the system makes them see their own actions in the purest light. If women scream as though they are in pain, Aunt Lydia just cracks the whip harder, because only sinners refuse to get with the program, right? So they don’t see themselves as agents of oppression. In fact, they seem themselves as nice and kind.
Language is powerful. Having a word to represent a class of historically oppressed people is powerful. Thus, conceding our sex-specific language means giving up power. Women don’t have enough power to be giving up jack shit.
I’ve been following this thread but I think I’ll take my leave here. You take offense at being labeled misandrist or bigoted but you’ve just characterized trans ally women as being like the women who opposed universal suffrage. That is deeply offensive, and false, and reeks of No True Feminist. I’ve been working my ass off to make this world a safer place for all women for years. I just happen to have a broader definition of woman than you do.
To expand even further, what is “right” is a highly complex thing. For instance, if my friend’s six-year-old is telling me how awesome Santa Claus is, it would be wrong of me to tell the child Santa Claus does not exist. While truth is almost always the right thing to do, in that case, it is not; the correct thing to do is to lie and agree that Santa rocks. Maintaining the Santa Claus myth in that situation is the kind and decent thing to do. Sometimes the right thing to do is not to lie, but not to tell the truth - for instance, when planning some sort of birthday surprise.
But sometimes trying to be kind is actually terribly unkind. I mean, how often have we heard that the worst thing you can do to an addict is enable them? Countless addicts have seen their addictions and misery go on far longer than they needed to, maybe even killing them, because those close to them were “kind” in the moment. Here’s a loan. Here’s another loan. I’ll forgive this outrage. I’ll forgive another outrage. Another. Another. Here’s some more money. Sure, I’ll co-sign your car. Another favor, another, another. Each act seems kind at the time, but the true kindness would have been to be firm.
Transwomen are not women in any meaningful sense of that word, but if I met a transwoman at work it would be appalling to just blurt out “you’re not a woman.” That is not only pointlessly mean, it’s colossally unprofessional and almost certainly unethical. On the other hand, in the context of a nuanced discussion of the issue on a message board, I’m going to say it, because here the value of truth and openness is paramount and it’s not at all kind to lie.
Kindness is situational, and it’s hard to get right. Whole books have been written about it. Hell, careers in philosophy have centred around this issue.
And here being trans is directly compared to believing in Santa Claus, or being a drug addict. I wonder if it occurs to you that some trans people (and allies) might find this highly offensive and demeaning?
No it’s not. I was providing illustrations of nuance in honesty and kindness in other situations, and did not suggest gender dysphoria was comparable to believing in Santa Claus. In fact, I then went on to provide a separate illustration of the distinction between two different situations regarding transgender people. It’s not necessary to read offense in to everything, and your efforts to make me shut up by telling me everything I say is “offensive and demeaning,” even when it obviously is not, aren’t going to work.
For someone who insists that people accept words mean what you want them to mean even if they’re uncomfortable with it, you’re very inconsistent to say the least, because it feels to me like your retort to people who disagree with you on this issue is to keep telling them
- You are a bad person.
- Shut up.
Do you call women who want to retain single-sex spaces as transphobic bigots? Do you cast judgement on them for not wanting to entitle males to female safe spaces with zero safeguarding assurances?
Do you castigate them as TERFs simply because they don’t want sexual offenders to exploit loopholes that would allow them to claim space in women’s prisons and other settings?
Do you defend those who insist on referring to women with terms such as “menstruator“, even though women have expressed a great deal of concern with this objectifying speech?
If no, then there is no reason to think any fingers are being pointed at you. You are not attacking women’s right to self-define and have their concerns taken seriously the way female anti-suffragettes did.
Apologies, I don’t want you or anyone to “shut up”. I’m simply trying to illustrate how your words are coming across to someone who disagrees with your premise and assumptions.
If you’re not interested in this, I’ll try and stop responding to you.
Are you disagreeing that living a life of kindness is a complex and difficult thing to do right, involving thousands of judgments balancing many variables? Because that was the point I was really clearly making those last few posts.
Personally, I don’t like being likened to a bigot just because I think safe spaces for females should be preserved. If you don’t want to be likened to a Aunt Lydia, then try not to liken me to a bigot. Or alternatively, maybe we need to just let these kinds of words wash over us without taking them too personally, given the nature of the subject matter.
I agree with that point. But that’s only relevant if we’re dealing with factual definitions of words that are written in stone, and that’s not how language works. Even accepting some different usages of words like “woman” doesn’t invalidate or eliminate your original and preferred understanding of the definition. And continuing to use this language as if only this original definition matters, when millions of people are already using the word in a different way, can be insulting and maybe even gaslighting.
The battle for definitions is over. “Women”, by common usage, has multiple meanings and some of them include trans women. That’s a fact, and continuing to pretend that it’s not a fact is obnoxious and even gaslighting. Language is very flexible and will survive. It’s entirely possible to protect the concerns, rights, and safety of cis women without burying your head in the sand and pretending that the language hasn’t changed.
Can it be OK to preserve the meaning of “female”? As I’ve said since the beginning of thread, I’m OK with negotiating “woman”. I get how “woman” is a social construct. But I really do think it is important to keep the concreteness of “female” and not turn it into a “whatever makes people happy” designation.
I don’t know how we protect the concerns, rights, and safety of cis women if we allow “female” to be equated with a self-identified mental state. Folks are telling me that we’d be protected, but I just can’t see how this would happen if “female” no longer has a concrete meaning.