A genuine request for information
John Cleese seeks information.
It’s like this, see – is the experience of being a woman inextricably linked to biology? Or is it just totally random and arbitrary and unpredictable?
Well honestly – what can having the biology of a woman possibly have to do with the experience of being a woman? I ask you.
The trans cult has become over-confident, if they think that Andrew Marshall’s reply will convince anyone not already taken in that the whole trans idea isn’t totally bonkers.
I type as someone to whom it made perfect sense until far too recently. Marshall putting it bluntly like that makes it obvious how nuts it is that anyone might assert that a man is actually a woman, if he says so. They spent years trying (and eventually failing) to convince us that the biology of feelings was just as valid as the biology of primary sex characteristics. Without that long, convoluted and confusing discourse in the middle, the jump from:
to:
shows decisively which side is grounded in reality, and it’s not the trans activists.
Well said, tigger. All the years of sexual harassment, discrimination, and so forth, that I have endured, all the sexual assault, all the innuendos and double entendre, is not because I think I am a woman. It is because I have the biology of a woman. It is because I have (well, did when I was younger) periods every month. It is because I gave birth to a child. It is because when men look at me, all they can see are the large mammary glands, suited for feeding children, but which men seem to think exist only for their gaze. It is because my voice is higher, my muscles are weaker, and I have a rounder bottom. All that is biology, not “feeling like a woman”. It is bound up inextricably with being a woman, and with the sexist bullshit I must still endure, though the form has changed now that I am nearly 60, and no longer look like a “hot body”. It does not end.
“It’s a debate over whether the struggles and experience of being a person of colour are inextricably linked to having the skin colour of a person of colour. BLM and many people of colour think it is. Rachel Dolezal and Martina Big think it is not, and consider the notion transracialphobic.”
“It’s a debate over whether the struggles and experience of being an elephant, particularly an elephant’s bedtime, are inextricably linked to having the biology of an elephant. Parents and biologists think it is. Toddlers think it is not, and consider the notion tantrum-inducing.”
Supreme court’s ruling on Monday https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/17-1618_hfci.pdf seems to be closer to the dogma of trans activists. The court basically interprets the word “sex” in the civil rights act as “sex or sexual orientation or gender identity”.
Ironically, Judge Alito in his dissent highlighted the potential problems this may create. For example, he mentions about entry to bath rooms, locker rooms, women’s sports and even the appropriate use of pronouns.
Sony,
Actually, they use a quite narrow, biologically-based definition of “sex”:
(My bolding.) And they specify that the firing of the employee for being transgender depends necessarily on that employee’s sex, so defined:
(Note their use of “identified” rather than “assigned”.) In other words, if a transwoman is fired for behaving in ways that are acceptable in a woman, that transwoman was fired because biologically she’s a male, and the law expressly prohibits that.
Of course the court could go down the road Alito suggests in future rulings, but this ruling depends crucially on distinguishing between biological sex and self-identified gender.
If I’m reading this right, it ignores the question of what “transgender” means, but states you can’t fire a man for doing anything you’d let a woman do, say wearing a dress to work.
I would never have anticipated that this Supreme Court would strike a blow for liberation from sexual norms.
What’s next? Letting boys have hair over their collars at prep school?
When Cleese reposted his video I had wondered if the JKR affair was part of the reason… Good to see it confirmed.
Papito,
That’s my take, too. But IANAL, of course.
If nothing else, this explanation highlights the overblown and inappropriate use of the term “phobia” in this situation. A phobia is supposed to signify an irrational fear or hatred, a neurotic reaction often steeped in disgust and/or conspiracy thinking. By focusing clearly on the actual disagreement, it’s clear that there’s no necessary connection between believing the struggles and experiences of being a woman are linked to the biological state of being a woman, and having any kind of irrational phobia.
Sony #4 wrote:
I interpreted the ruling as being more on the gender critical side, in that both sexual orientation and gender identity were considered to be traits or actions which potentially violate gender norms. The court ruled that gender norms don’t matter, that being gender nonconforming is a sex-based right.
Gorsuch wrote “An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex.”
That would also apply to transvestites. I would think that any legal interpretation which places being transgender and being a transvestite in the same category is not going to give the TRAs what they want.
What is stunning about the replies to his tweets is how there are no threats and very little abusive language to MISTER Cleese. Almost like the people replying to him know that a real man is to be treated with more respect and is less likely to be bullied than a real woman.
And this is just after I come from Jezebel where the TIMs and their toadies actually demand to know how we real women can possibly tell a man from a woman unless we personally inspect their genitals. Heck, if you changed Rowling’s name to Smith and Cleese’s name to Jones, I could tell from the replies to the exact same tweet from Smith and Jones which one was male and which one was female (as long as the tweet upset the trans cult).
Funny how that works, isn’t it.
Thanks, southwest, I was about to ask that, and you had already answered. Preemptive information. I like that. Since I don’t do Twitter, I wasn’t sure how to find out.
I just took a look at a Jezebel post on Rowling from June 10, and a few of the comments. It was all…dreck. Just shouty abuse, with no quarter given, no pause to try to see her point, no anything but shouty abuse. Very Pharyngula-like.
I tried a genuine request from a woman who wants to be a man.
I posted, in part
Gender dysphoria is discomfort, unhappiness, or distress due to one’s gender or physical sex. The current edition (DSM-5) of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders uses the term “gender dysphoria” where it previously referred to “gender identity disorder”, making it clear that they no longer consider the gender identity to be disordered, but rather the emotional state of distress which results from the gender identity.
It is an illness to be treated, not a choice to be validated.
Is there any difference between a person with gender dysphoria, or this man who suffers from Body Integrity Identity Disorder? Should we validate his choice? If he is denied the amputation he seeks, are we erasing his identity?
A top surgeon has asked medical ethics experts for advice on amputating a Sydney man’s perfectly healthy arm because the man finds his limb distressing.
Associate Professor Peter Haertsch, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon who specialises in gender reassignment, said the man, a father in his 30s, has an extremely rare condition called Body Integrity Identity Disorder, where his brain did not recognise the fully functioning arm as part of his body.
“He was referred to me with a psychiatric letter and he is a perfectly normal guy, he has had a plaster cast on his left arm and he has had it hidden from his view since his early teens,” Dr Haertsch said.
“He has been to see numerous psychiatrists and he wants the limb removed and he hasn’t found anyone prepared to do it.
https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/body-integrity-identity-disorder-sydney-man-wants-healthy-arm-amputated/news-story/9d06c898114df7bdb41451c9ceb72111
The response I received was:
When cis dudes get gynecomastia, surgical removal of their boobs is a cosmetic procedure. It’s not like those boobs were cancerous or would kill a dude. It’s not like cis dudes couldn’t survive while having bodies with boobs. Theoretically, they might also happily live with boobs and choose not to surgically remove them. Nonetheless, some cis men choose to get surgeries, because they hate how their boobs look like. It’s no different from trans dudes getting the same surgeries for the same reason, namely disliking how their boobs look like.
Which I followed up with:
I fully understand that. The bit I don’t get though, is that both the CIS man getting a “boob job” and you getting breasts removed, is no different to the man in my #12 above. All three, it seems to me, suffer from Body Integrity Identity Disorder.
If I am wrong, please help me understand the difference(s).
Since then (crickets)
I feel sorrow for the man who has already had a leg amputated, and now wants an arm amputated, but I am not going to support his choices. Am I now an ampuphobe?
I am a biologist. I’ve asked several TRAs multiple times what terminology would be acceptable to use instead of “male” and “female”, and been met with the same crickets.
Better than being met with vitriol, I suppose? The TRAs’ silence in the face of genuine query is deafening.
It’s slightly more insidious than that. For GID, the causal locus of suffering is internal; for GD, external. For GID, it is something about you, seeing the sex of your body as wrong, that causes suffering. For GD, it is society, treating you as one sex and not the other, that causes suffering.
Subtle, but you can see how it informs the animus toward gender skeptics.
What a Maroon #5
The court took the civil rights act that outlawed discrimination based on sex as a starting point. It then extended the same protections to gay and transgender individuals. In 1964, when the civil rights act was passed, sex meant only biological sex (male or female). The ideas on sexual orientation and gender identity have evolved recently. Now the question is how was the court able to justify extending the same protections to gays and trans people?
https://www.familyequality.org/resources/lgbtq-title-vii-employment-discrimination-cases-supreme-court/
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/15/politics/supreme-court-lgbtq-employment-case/index.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-court-just-teed-up-lgbtq-protections-for-so-much-more-than-employment/2020/06/18/725f7832-b0dc-11ea-8f56-63f38c990077_story.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-lgbt-rights-discrimination-rules-title-vii/
The text that you quote from the ruling is just the beginning of the argument between the majority and the minority of the court about if the extension can be justified and if so how.
Nullius, I don’t think the DMS-5 claims the locus of the patient’s suffering is external. Trans activists and their Woke allies claim that.
I think the DSM changed the name in order to avoid the stigma associated with the word “disorder”, no doubt at the prompting of activists.