People’s authentic stories
Another Rachel steps up to defend Rachel MacKinnon.
I support @rachelvmckinnon as a trans athlete. She just set a world record in cycling and TERFs are giving her shit about it. But I know Rachel. I've seen how hard she's worked for this. How dedicated she's been. Hitting the gym. Practicing. Working with coaches. She deserved it.
— Rachel Anne Williams (@transphilosophr) October 13, 2018
But the issue isn’t working hard and dedication and hitting the gym and practicing and working with coaches. The issue is doing all that with a huge physical advantage over all your competitors – the issue is doing it while competing against women while having a male body, and quite a large-framed male body at that. MacKinnon doesn’t “deserve” a world record in women’s cycling because MacKinnon has a male body. Also: the fact that MacKinnon hit the gym does not mean that the women competing did not, so it’s pretty much beside the point. MacKinnon trained; yes; presumably they all trained, but only MacKinnon had the large male body.
Anyway, I read a few other tweets by transphilosophr (not for the first time) and found other peculiar “philosophy.” In particular:
On Medium some TERF responded to one of my articles calling me a "transgender extremist" for having the gall to suggest we should trust trans people about who we say we are. Yup. So extreme. Listening to people's authentic stories and believing them. So radical.
— Rachel Anne Williams (@transphilosophr) October 12, 2018
I keep coming back to this. It’s probably tedious that I keep coming back to it, but it still amazes me that so many people treat that claim as not just reasonable but downright binding, if you want to avoid being labeled a “TERF.” It’s doubly or triply amazing in someone who Identifies As a philosopher. No, there is no broad rule that we should trust people about who they say they are. On the contrary. If it were that simple there would be no such thing as civil service exams or medical degrees or exams in engineering or security clearances or CVs or passports…you get the idea.
In practice, we mostly do trust people in the sense of believing what they tell us about themselves as long as there’s nothing in particular at stake. But when there is something at stake? Then we may want more than simple belief or trust.
Also, we mostly do trust people in the sense of believing what they tell us about themselves as long as there’s nothing in particular at stake and what they tell us about themselves isn’t magical or supernatural. If people tell us they’re aliens from another galaxy, we don’t necessarily believe what they tell us about themselves, and if we do we’re credulous chumps. The things trans people tell us about themselves vary wildly, which is another reason we can’t undertake to believe all of it no matter what, but is also why we can’t even know what it is we’re agreeing to believe. Rachel Anne Williams might tell us one thing about herself while Rachel MacKinnon might tell us something quite different (and in tension with what Rachel Anne Williams told us). Calling both “authentic stories” is not a magic way to make them cohere.
This is simply childish. Of course we can’t just believe whatever people tell us about themselves sight unseen just like that. There is no such rule, so Williams’s implication that there is is kind of extreme, especially coming from someone who tells us she’s a philosopher.
Maybe we should redefine “women’s sports”. As trans activists keep on insisting that we shouldn’t talk about “pregnant women” because not only women can become pregnant and instead refer to “pregnant people”, and other similar linguistic reformulations, maybe we should refer to “sports for low-testosterone people” because not only women can have the bodies that didn’t/don’t have that difference in development.
After all, the distinctions for women’s sports classifications weren’t created due to some intrinsic property of female identity that required that they be separated from people who identified as male. They were created due to the developmental differences that arose from the largely dimorphic split between which hormones people had in their bodies from puberty through early adulthood. The fact that those sports groups were labelled “men” and “women” is exactly the same historic linguistic shortcut that led to centers for pregnant people to label themselves as being “for women” – erroneously so, so we are now told.
If that is the case, and it is now imperative that we refer to people with and without wombs as people with and without wombs, rather than as women or men, then surely we should similarly refer to sports classifications for people with and without high levels of testosterone as such, to ensure full inclusivity, so that women with high levels of testosterone can play with people like them, whether those other people are men or women.
…you know, if that didn’t involve furthering the erasure of “women” from all the discourse, yet again.
Does that mean I now have to take a position on the opposite side of the spectrum, since I no longer have that particular organ? And if so, does that mean I get all the benefits of those who are born wombless? (I know the answer to that – no way in hell). Of course, it appears many of these trans-activists hate older women with a passion, so the fact that I reached a point in my life where I had to have that particular organ removed may simply come down to the fact for them that I am old, and since I am old, I am obviously a second wave feminist (guilty as charged) and therefore I can be dismissed as existing anywhere on the human spectrum.
On another note, if someone authentically believes themselves to be a stable genius, does that mean we need to accept that they are, indeed, a stable genius, and validate their identity?
Well, there’s the question of how ‘authentic’ any particular ‘story’ really is. Certain Persons have ‘said they are’ very stable geniuses.