Freckles
Well, no………………
It’s true enough that nothing about a girl’s body makes her more or less of a girl…but the point here is to claim that nothing about a boy’s body makes him less of a girl [if he identifies as a girl]. That’s just dumb. Why do people fall over like ninepins at all this dumb? Girls have lots of different types of body, true, but they don’t have boys’ bodies, because if they have those then they’re boys, not girls. Freckles, cheekbones, tall, short – none of those determine what sex you are, but that doesn’t mean that nothing about your body determines what sex you are.
Enough with the dumb already!
I’m not sure the faceless nudes are anatomically correct. Aren’t some of the “girls” supposed to have willies?
None of those things – tall, short, freckles, defined cheekbones – is an identity. Those are matters of fact. One cannot merely identify as someone tall and make it so. Ditto “girl”. One can identify as a “trans girl”, I suppose, but only if one is actually not a girl.
(There was a dustup a while back involving a woman who identified as a trans woman and got a lot of brushback for it. I could not determine if she was serious.)
But then how do you know if you’re a girl?
How do I know if I’m a girl? I can’t tell by looking at my body. I can’t tell by the things I do.
It’s no answer to say “it’s what you identify as,” because that just restates the question — how do I know if I identify as a girl?
A girl can have any kind of body — but she definitely has the kind that belongs in a girl’s locker room. And a girls’ rugby game. And if you are a girl attracted to girls, you must therefore be attracted to any kind of body, or else you’re a bigot.
Every motorcycle is different. Some have 6-cylinder motors, some 4, 2, even just 1-cylinder. Some are built for off-road riding, some for comfort on long rides, some for racing, some for town and city riding. Some are incredibly fast, some really slow. Some are heavy, some are light. Some are powered by petrol, some by electricity.
Therefore, my washing machine is a motorbike.
We can all play this stupid game.
Papito, if any of those girls had a “girl dick”, it would give the game away. Trans girls are not girls, they are boys. It would show everyone who doesn’t stop to think about it that they are claiming that boy bodies can be girl bodies. Most of us have known better for a long time.
Aside from the purely logical problems with this shite, which previous comments do quite well, the image’s conclusion is in itself offensive. Being a girl (or woman, by induction) is nothing more nor less than an identity. It’s purely a matter of self-conception. Living as a human female carries no distinct features, nothing to differentiate it from living as a male human, as a whale of either sex, or as AoS’s washing machine—er, motorcycle. Everything that actually might make up some phenomenological thing that we would call being “girl” or being “woman”? Gone. Every failure, success, concern, shame, joy, and pride that women have had or will have? Annihilated. In the view of this image’s creator, “girl” doesn’t exist. There is only a literally and precisely content-free identification with “girl”. To say that one is a girl is everything that it means to be a girl.
Off topic: You ever have one of those moments where a simple, common word looks incorrect to you? I’m having one of those right now with girl. My brain keeps going, “No, you’re misspelling that. How’s it supposed to be spelled? Hell if I know. You’re the one with the dictionary. Look it up!”
Once again it’s useful to spell out just exactly what it is we are talking about. So which item on the list below doesn’t belong with the rest?
• Tall young people with a strong preponderance of innate physical traits more representative of mothers than fathers?
• Short young people with a strong preponderance of innate physical traits more representative of mothers than fathers?
• Young people with a strong preponderance of innate physical traits more representative of mothers than fathers who have freckles?
• Young people with a strong preponderance of innate physical traits more representative of mothers than fathers who have defined cheekbones?
• Young people with a strong preponderance of innate physical traits more representative of mothers than fathers with a strong preponderance of innate physical traits more representative of fathers than mothers?
Tough one, I know…
I’ve made a logically correct version of the above. It didn’t take much; just the insertion of ‘not’ in the first paragraph, changing the second ‘girl’ to ‘boy’ in the last, and inverted commas around ‘trans’ & ‘girl’ in the first paragraph and ‘transgender’ & ‘girl’ in the last.
If you’d like to see it, Ophelia, I shall be posting it in the usual place.
Being a trans woman is sucking in your cheeks and chomping them so you appear to have a skeleton face on a balloon head, I guess?
Actually, that ‘nothing a girl does’ is in effect denying the claim that a trans-x is an x.
If nothing a girl does makes her more or less of a girl then it follows that nothing a boy does makes him more or less of a boy. So, a boy who declares he’s a girl is, by that logic, still no more or less a boy, and a girl who claims she’s a boy is still a girl, no more and no less.
The TAs like to categorise trans-girls/trans-women with cis(vomit)women, and trans-boys/trans-men with cis(vomitagain)men as equal sub-categories of categories ‘female’, and ‘male’ respectively, but this is clearly a category error. In reality, category ‘male’ encompasses all boys and men, with trans-girls/trans-women as a sub-category, and category ‘female’ encompasses all girls and women with trans-boys/trans-men as a sub-category.
Note that those sub-categories do not mean that that a trans-x is any less a y, they are just y’s that hold a particular idea about themselves that they believe differentiates them from their own sex category and puts them in the other.
What bugs me about this is that it’s naive, or perhaps disingenuous, about how language works, and specifically how modifiers work. One (wrong) way to think of the meaning of a modifier (say, tall) plus a noun (say, girls) is that it represents the union of tall things with the union of girls. But you can’t understand what the phrase “tall girls” means without knowing something about girls in the real world. A tall girl might not be considered tall if she were a giraffe, or a woman, or even an older girl.
Moreover, there are modifiers like “fake”, “pretend”, “ersatz”, and so on that explicitly negate membership in a category, and others that place the thing in question partially outside the category (e.g. “quasi”).
I’m willing to accept that “trans” is such a modifier. I think of it somewhat analogous to “adoptive (or step-) mother” vs. “birth mother”, where we accept that the person referred to shows some, but not all, of the prototypical characteristics of a mother. Most of the time those differences aren’t relevant, and it’s perfectly acceptable to just say “mother”, but other times the distinction is important: if you want to know if a person is susceptible to a genetic disease, you look to the birth mother, not the adoptive mother.
But from what I’ve seen, saying that makes me a TERF.
A ‘tall girl’ is a female non-adult human that is taller than the average for female non-adult humans. A ‘short girl’ is a female non-adult human that is shorter than that average. A ‘girl with freckles’ is a female non-adult human with little spots of melanin contrasting against her dominant skin tone. A ‘girl with defined cheekbones’ is a female non-adult human with – wait for it! – clearly defined cheekbones.
A trans girl is a female non-adult human that is not female, and therefore is not a girl. God, I’m sick of this ‘trans is just another descriptor’ line of argument.
I could agree that “nothing a girl does makes her more or less of a girl” (you can drive a truck, get tattooed, join the Libertarians) and I’d add in thoughts and feelings. Being a girl is a biological category.
But I don’t think gender identity theory could add that “ nothing a girl thinks or feels makes her more or less of a girl,” because a girl thinking or feeling that she’s a boy has to remove her from the category. It would work the same for boys. So the entire framework of If You’re A Girl Then You Get To Be Different falls apart. You have to think and feel the right thing.
And yes, putting “identity” in with “freckles” and “height” is disingenuous. I hear that Sesame Street song about “One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other” going through my head …
My modified version starts
and then is the same as the original until the last paragraph, which says
And I added to the bottom…
I find interesting the work being done by “identity” in the original. There is an implication that “freckles”, “short”, “tall”, etc. are all “identity”, and that “trans” is similarly “identity”. It’s, what, a merging of reality with “identity”? An assertion that facts are all subjective, and that all facts about oneself are all part of “identity”? An assertion that “identity” is just as factual as anything else? Some combination?
What a Maroon:
(Forgive me. I’m feeling pedantic today.) I believe you mean intersection, not union. The union T⋃G would contain all girls and all tall things. The intersection T⋂G would contain only tall things that are also girls.
But yes, aside from that pedantic quibble, you are absolutely correct in pointing out the naïveté in the trans rhetoric regarding modifiers. Not all [modifier][modified] pairs function the same way, and to argue as though they do requires either extreme linguistic ignorance or pure mendacity. While I’m sure there’s some quantity of the latter, the vast majority is more likely the former.
Sackbut:
From what I gather, the answer depends on the particular version of post-modern nonsense we’re talking about. For some subset thereof, all authentication of facts/knowledge is social, and thus there is no epistemologically significant difference between any types of claim. For some other subset, there is straight up no external reality, and internal identity/perception is all there is. Yet another subset is the hardest of hard social constructivists, and what makes something objectively true or false is whether it is subjectively determined to be so by social construction.
And it’s all so bonkers that every time I summarize it, people refuse to accept my characterization on the grounds that no one could actually believe it. But they do.
Nullius,
Mama always told me not to argue with a pedant*. Yes, you’re right, I meant intersection, not union.
*That’s a lie. My mother never said that. Also, I would never refer to her as “mama”.