What we will allow you to call yourselves under the new dispensation
Well, that’s…modest.
TERFs: If we admit trans women are women we'll have no away of referring to females!
Trans people: You could try the term "cis woman" or "AFAB" – we're cool with those
TERFs: NO! Those are bad! We must be able to refer to females!
Trans people: But…you can. We just told you how— Rachel Anne Williams (@transphilosophr) May 31, 2019
Of course the other half of that statement is… “or else what?”
There it is again. Women, the female ones, are the only group not permitted to define themselves.
How did “trans people” know what was meant by “females” in that interchange if “females” is not clear enough?
TERF: “So I should call myself ‘cis,’ as in ‘die cis scum’? Sure seems pejorative to me.”
Trans people: “Oh, we’re not saying all cis people are scum. We just use that phrase to distinguish between cis scum and cis non-scum, or non-cis scum. (Ha, just kidding, that last category doesn’t exist.)”
TERF: “So… kind of like saying ‘die black scum’ or ‘die gay scum’?”
I’m still not even sure what TRAs think a “woman” is. Besides “a person who is/identifies as a woman.”
Ben:
I think that’s because TRAs don’t have any clue what a woman is besides a person who identifies as a woman. They have a set of gender stereotypes and characteristics they have been raised to believe are ‘girly’. That’s woman to them. Or, maybe, woman is the opposite of man so if they feel like they aren’t like other men, then they must be woman.
Never mind that there is no such thing as feeling like a woman or feeling like a man. You feel like yourself. Other women feel differently. Other men feel differently Depends on genetics, environment, and anything else that goes into making us who we are.
Sackbut,
They want woman to be a gender word, while leaving female as a sex word (except when they want to claim that as gender too). Which means woman is simply as Ben noted: a person that claims to be a woman.
And if the only thing that members of a class have in common is their membership in the class, then in what sense is there even a class? I can say there’s a category of things called grombles, and it includes only walruses, unicycles, and grapefruit. But the only thing those objects have in common is that they’re all grombles. So how is gromble a meaningful category?
Apart from sitting within a category called “woman,” what do all women have in common, according to TRAs? It’s not biology, it’s not conformity to gender stereotypes, it’s not the shared experience of being raised, seen, or treated as women. Is it just that they all go by the same label? If that’s all they think “woman”’ means, what’s the point of identifying as one? And if that’s all a woman is, how could anyone know whether they were a woman, and why would anyone care?
Afab? Really? Nobody is going to call themselves an afab.
I do like the slip up that Sackbut pointed out, that they accidentally used “female” in its non-woke sense. I must respectfully disagree with Holmes that they’re making an intentional sex/gender distinction, since that wouldn’t fit with the afab (“assigned female at birth”) suggestion.
afab, then, includes trans men. Seems mighty intolerable for the trans women to be denying the existence of trans men that way.
I almost don’t want to say this for fear of giving the buggers ideas, but I’m quite surprised that they haven’t dropped the ‘trans’ modifier in favour of something that sounds less like a psychological need and more like something totally out of their control; something like ‘mamab woman/mafab man’, where the ‘m’ stands for ‘mistakenly’.
This is all too complicated. I propose two categories:
1) Men
2) Not men
See? Simple! And who could possibly object?
@Bruce
Well, we could argue all day about whether they are classes or categories.
Also it’s not a new proposal – the Green Party for instance proposed it last year. There you were thinking it was a joke but it’s not!
I’m trying to decide which is worse, that this “philosopher” thinks women are going to roll over and accept his dictate, or that he (and/or his allies) will be able to force women to accept it?