What if you don’t know? You just know that looking at the data that biological males tend to be vitamin D deficient.
Is there no value to publishing a study like the one I linked to without knowing which factors are important? Would you not like to know that people with your sex class are prone to a vitamin deficiency so you can be diligent about it, even if scientists can’t explain exactly why?
If you were a doctor and one of your patients was a transwoman of a certain age, would you refrain from telling her about the results of this research? Or would you only tell your cismen clientele about it?
In a narrow discussion of the issues of menstruation, why would you object to the use of the most precise term? You claimed to be concerned principally with categorization for the purposes of academic research. A scientist would certainly choose the most precise term.
How are we logically to interpret your view other than seeking to equate womanhood with menstruation, which obviously implies a claim that people who do not menstruate are not women, and that all people who menstruate are women?
The social construct label that has historically described that group was wrong, just as historical social construct labels that historically sought to subdivide humans into meaningfully different biological races were wrong.
Maybe the ones with XY? Maybe the ones with testicles or testosterone? Maybe they’ll be smart enough to figure out if they should take note by the focus on cis men and trans women?
Point me towards a non binary person who would be offended by the phrase I suggested, and I’d be happy to have that conversation with them. I’d like to fully understand their concerns and viewpoint, by their own words.
Because the oppression comes from the gender class. If menstruators were almost exclusively male, there would be no challenges to them acquiring products they need.
Whenever I see an article on Reddit about schools providing free sanitary products or governments waiving taxes on sanitary products, there’s always a chorus of commentators (I’m gonna guess they are guys) who scream “ew” and complain about women making a big deal out of nothing. Why? Because men are programmed to think of “female problems” as nasty and stupid and thus unimportant. If they were male problems, it wouldn’t be like this. Tampons would be viewed as no different than toilet paper if menstruation wasn’t seen as a women thing. And the existence of a few male-identifying menstruators isn’t going to change that reality.
Like I said, I don’t have a big deal over “menstruators”. I find it a bit cringey, but I find “people of color” kind of cringey too. I don’t even have a problem with its usage in the article that JK Rowling cited. But her argument isn’t THAT crazy, is what I’m saying. I understand what she is saying and I do agree with her that we need to be careful that in our efforts to be all-inclusive, we don’t mask over realities which don’t magically disappear just because Westerners are “woke”.
I think much of what JKR wrote was fine. But some of it wasn’t - and I specifically noted those aspects in several earlier posts. And that’s mostly what she’s being criticized for, AFAICT.
But you clearly give more weight to one set of feelings than the other, as here you are advocating to use the terms they prefer, although some people find them inaccurate and insulting, and condemning Rowling for using the terms she prefers.
For this specific example, sure - JKR said something factually inaccurate and highly insulting, in response to a very specific and accurate descriptor (and the language of the article specifically used “women and girls”!). It was a dumb quip meant purely as a shot at trans women, and she ended up insulting older women, others without a uterus, and trans men, all at once, and for no reason at all.
All moral and ethical choices are in some sense superficially arbitrary. A white supremacist might have a personal preference to reserve the term “human” for white people , but I assume that you’d see no problem in condemning that. If an opinion amounts to bigotry, it’s not bigotry against a person who holds that view to reject the opinion.
And for every other example we’re asked you about in this thread, no matter how strained or awkward or inaccurate. You prefer ‘some non binary people’, to admitting we are talking about biological males, so clearly you are not so hung up on accuracy.
I’ll ask you again, why is it so important not to offend trans people, but cis women’s feelings don’t matter?
Do you think “marriage” is like this? SSM has certainly led to the term “traditional marriage” , apparently to refer to what it meant for most of human history - and what Jeebus intended - a union between a cis man who at least pretends to be straight and cis a woman who at least pretends to be straight. Other than among bigots who use “traditional marriage” as a code word like “family values”, do you think most people persist with this distinct concept for marriage?
It turns out that “gender” is something much more complex and diverse than most of us realized even a few years ago. And sure, finding appropriate terminology is sometimes difficult and confusing. None of us here have all the answers, and I have no doubt that the most radical leading edge of trans rights activism has some silly ideas about sensible terminology.
But the fact that the reality of gender is complex is no reason to go back to an era when we were simply ignorant and persecuted diversity, just because our grandparents’ simplistic model of gender was easier to grasp.
If gender and sex weren’t being used interchangeably even in contexts where their separation is important, “females” and “males” would be our go-to terms. But we cannot even agree on who gets to be “female” and “male” anymore. How can folks not see this as a problem? “Male” is a great way of describing people with a male anatomy and physiology. “Cismen, transwomen, and some nonbinary people” is sufficiently woke, but it doesn’t communicate effectively. It spares feelings, but it doesn’t communicate why those individuals are being grouped together in the first place.
I hadn’t really thought about it. This is really a hijack, but when SSM was being debated in the US I read some arguments for and against (and unlike on this subject I found all the arguments against unconvincing). One of the things I read was an article attempting to explain why some conservatives/religious people were so against it. According to this essay, most liberals see marriage as an equal partnership, with both partners having the same role. So for them (us) extending marriage to gay people doesn’t change the concept of marriage itself. Whereas for lots of conservatives, marriage is a union of two complementary parts, and in that paradigm gay marriage doesn’t make sense, so for them it would mean redefining the term. So perhaps for those people it does work the way I said. They needed a term for their old idea of marriage, and invented one. Or maybe they’re just bigots. I don’t know, this is the first time I ever heard the phrase as meaning ‘non-gay marriage’.
Re gender, I’m not saying it’s invalid because it’s complex, I’m saying it’s actually very simple, and if your paradigm is making it complex, that’s a problem with your paradigm.
