A couple of days ago, in the Canadian shop teacher thread, this statement of mine about what the basic beliefs common to “TERFS” are was characterised as “lying”.
OK. Here’s a link to an actual gender critical campaigner, out with her “Mom: human female who protects her kids…” sign. She’s pretty typical of the TERFS I’ve been meeting out at protests and online … and by “TERF” I mean “person who’s going to get yelled at and called a TERF”
Feel free to find some hatred, bigotry or “policing of gender expression” there because I don’t see it.
I’m pretty comfortable being on the same political side as this woman. Bonus - I don’t have to be on the side that thinks it’s fine to beat up a 74-year-old gay man for asserting that sexual attraction is based on sex. Which is, frankly, something anyone old enough to have had a sexual relationship ought to have figured out by now.
I’ll take your word for it. The woman interviewed in the article does not explicitly advocate any restrictions on trans rights (there’s a transcript at the bottom of the page); however, the article leaves the elephant in the room unanswered - why are they protesting in front of a children’s hospital?
The interviewer did not ask if she opposed other people’s right obtain any particular medical procedures, and really this points to incompetence on the interviewer’s part as that is presumably the reason d’etre for the event. The interviewee’s answer to that line of questioning would probably be characterized as bigoted or hateful, not the pushover questions and answers actually given.
No way I’m visiting that thread. So can the OP explain to me what their definitions of sex and gender are in this context? I tend to treat the two terms as being synonymous when used like this but the OP is apparently seeing some significant distinction between them.
Sex is the unchangeable biological reality of what our bodies are like. Gender is the archetypes and stereotypes that are either:
typically considered to belong to the two groups on the basis of sex (“girls like barbies, boys like football”) or
may possibly actually different on average between the two sexes (“girls are more empathetic, boys are more assertive”)
The second point is speculative as to what extent those differences actually exist, and what they might be based on. Also, the words “on average” are very important there.
An attempt to divide people into men/women based on gender rather than sex basically devolves into entrenchment of stereotypes.
Well, for instance, I think this mother’s story of thinking her child trans - apparently incorrectly according to her now - is a case of entrenching stereotypes. She thought her son was trans because he wasn’t conforming to boy stereotypes. She decided she was wrong when her second son started to refer to himself as “she” despite actually conforming to boy stereotypes
One of the fundamental idiocies of terf rhetoric is the idea that trans people represent some sort of increased acceptance of gendered stereotypes, which is immediately recognizable nonsense to anyone who’s met at least two trans people.
Things that sex makes a difference to are basically the reproductive system and body structure. Modern medicine can’t actually make you a reproductive organ of the other sex, any more than it can make a kidney. It can make something that vaguely, visually looks the same.
In any case, if you don’t want to take part in activities differentiated by sex, you don’t have to. You can live a life in completely co-ed spaces if you like. But a person’s perceived gender is not objectively measurable in any way, so people (mostly women) who want to partake in single-sex spaces where that has traditionally been deemed necessary - sports, unclothed spaces, domestic violence support are the primary ones - should not be coerced into exchanging them for same-gender spaces. They don’t do the job.
How about the mom consistently misgendering her trans-son? I’m pretty fucking sure that lady is policing her child’s gender expression, by absolutely disregarding the fact that her child came out to her as a boy, and she is instead describing her child as a girl who likes short hair.
This trans hating mom thinks that all the other adults and people in her son’s life are in the wrong for not telling her son that maybe he’s just gay, or will outgrow it in a few years, you know, the trans hating bullshit that his parents are telling him.
So, from that article, would you agree that the following statements are true:
“We are told by leading politicians that if we do not dose children with an off-label cancer drug once used to chemically castrate sex offenders that we are harming them.”
" We are told by leading politicians, including the President of the United States of America, that treating the underlying comorbidities that virtually always accompany trans identification in young people — depression, anxiety, anorexia, cutting, sexual trauma from abuse — through psychotherapy, rather than immediately affirming them in their new gender identity is a form of “conversion therapy” that must be banned."
Do you agree that “risky, experimental treatments” were being “pushed on” that woman’s daughter?
Do you agree with her that “people have to tell the biological truth.”, and if so, what is that biological truth that “they” presumably aren’t telling?