Speaking of saying stupid things…
Oh the confidence of a man who knows nothing at all about it.
But how do women keep predatory men out of women’s change rooms when we’re not allowed to keep men out of women’s change rooms? They don’t show up with labels on you know.
The poor poor man, and the poor poor men who say they are trans – how terrible it is that all these witchy women won’t just shut up and do what we’re told.
He doesn’t actually support everybody’s right to live as they wish, and to be treated with dignity. He doesn’t support that for women.
And if we don’t “police” “safe space”, how will they be safe spaces? If everyone can walk into them, including predatory men, how are they safe spaces? And if they are “cis” predatory men, isn’t that one of the things we’re saying will happen? FFS, does this man even think?
Those predatory men entering locker rooms are not trans, but yet no man would “pretend to be trans” to gain access to women. Seems contradictory to me.
Elsewhere in his thread he claims that certain recent events such as the Wi Spa incident “do not happen, they never happened”. La la la fingers in ears.
“Trans women are not entering changing rooms, taking their clothes off in front of young girls and swinging dicks around.”
Let’s change the terminology. MEN are doing those things “Trans women” are completely indistinguishable from MEN (because they actually ARE men, but put that aside for the moment), so how are women and girls supposed to tell the difference between an “actual” man (who may claim “falsely” to be trans) and a “trans woman”? What possible mechanism can you suggest? For example, how do you “know” that the man who entered a women’s changing room, took his clothes off in front of young girls, and swung his dick around at the Wi Spa was not a “trans woman”?
Grrr.
This comment partly inspired by the post and partly by a stupid meme saying that men don’t pretend to be trans, because they hate being seen as girly, dont’cha know.
Pretty sure “Ruby” is a predatory cis man, or at least you’d think that via his mugshot…
“Ruby” is clearly a predatory (indicated by behavior) man (indicated by sex). Given that trans ideology says someone can be trans without making the slightest attempt to pass as a member of the opposite sex, we literally have no way of knowing whether “Ruby” is “truly trans” (if there is such a thing). He claims to be a woman, that’s all we know.
I would be inclined to suspect he doesn’t really consider himself a woman, but that’s also true of a subset of people who do try to pass.
I don’t have a twitter account. Did Mike P. Williams get any nasty tweets back beyond the ones that I saw which weren’t nasty but rather people asking him how to discern which self-ID’ing transwoman is a genuine transwoman with their junk waving in women’s faces and which are predatory men using an pretext to access women’s spaces?
Me:
As far as I can tell, the “vile abuse” he refers to is the tweet from Nick, above. I haven’t seen anything else that’s either vile or abusive. If he thinks that’s vile abuse, he hasn’t even seen my timeline, let alone someone like JKR’s.
I haven’t been paying very much attention, but it seems he’s now complaining because people are asking him how they can tell a benign trans penis from a predatory ‘cis’ one. Vile indeed. Abusive. Right.
For many men, though. having your tweets challenged IS abuse. Far more serious than a pipebomb, or rape, or death, or anything that a woman might receive! Why, it’s almost as bad as misgendering.
Seek shelter, Mike P. Seek shelter.
Strikes me as a nice bit of circular reasoning with a touch of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy thrown in for flavour:
Men are Evil and women are Good. Transwomen *are* women and so Good. Therefore any “transwoman” who does something nasty must be an Evil Man in disguise.
As has been pointed out it’s a tiny problem that you can’t tell a true from false transwoman until the latter give in to their vile lusts; but surely that’s a price worth paying (especially as I’m not going to be paying it) for the improvement of the gender. After all cis women are only women because of base material reality; whereas transwomen are women on a superior emotional and spiritual level.
He really ought to just tell it to the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter.
Mr Williams is becoming increasingly deranged. He’s claimed that:
To Arty Morty! That’s fightin’ talk!
I pointed Mike to this thread of Helen Staniland’s where she asks:
https://twitter.com/helenstaniland/status/1256883277610262528
And asked him to get back to me on the matter of men not exposing their genitals to girls.
I don’t think I’ll hold my breath.
If Transwomen were somehow immune to exhibiting male behavior despite having both male bodies and being brought up in a Patriarchal society, we would expect some well-designed studies in respectable journals which have established this as true. Instead, it’s assumptions and assertions. If I want to show a TRA any evidence of Transwomen being violent, I have to send them to websites created by individuals for that very purpose — and it just looks like fearmongering and propaganda.
Sackbut #2.
I run into that too. I think this argument highlights the difference between how effeminate men are bullied by sexist men and how women are bullied by sexist men. In the first case, predatory men attack men who seem girly because they hate it when guys are girly. They’d never want to seem that way to others.
. In the second case, the menwant access to women in states of vulnerability and don’t really care what they have to do to get it. If they have to put on a dress and sashay into a Woman’s Dressing Room, they’ll do it. Whatever works. It doesn’t count as “being girly” because they’re looking for pussy.
Beating up a drag queen and taking a camera into the toilets are both motivated by Patriarchy, but the goals are different and the rules are different. The fact that TIMs don’t understand this and think they’re making a killer point just shows they’ve no clue about what actual women go through.
1. If “cis woman” is a synonym for “biological female”, then talking about about “cis women” and “trans women” as different subsets the same group (which was, after all, the whole justification for why they belong in the same bathrooms, sporting events, domestic abuse shelters, prisons etc. in the first place) is just a bad pun (cf. fruit bats vs, baseball bats, bulldogs vs. hotdogs etc.).
2. They obviously can’t argue that both groups are the same by virtue of physical traits.
3. Their only remaining option is to argue that “cis women” are the same as “trans women” by virtue of certain common ways of thinking, feeling, behaving, “presenting” etc. best left unspecified, in which case “cis woman” can’t be synonymous with “biological female”. Hence, even if we accept that – by said criteria – “trans women” are the same as “cis women”, it still doesn’t follow that they are the same (and hence belong in the same spaces) as biological females.
4. However, since allowing TIMs to access all spaces reserved for biological females was the whole point, the solution is having it both ways and hoping that no one notices (cf. Daniel Dennett’s “Deepities”).
@Sastra #11
The only study I’ve heard about suggests exactly the opposite: Study suggests that transwomen exhibit a male pattern of criminality
@10: The following happened in my last conversation with a formerly close friend, who consequently cancelled me over my Gender Critical views:
She: Transwomen never are a threat or danger to other women in women’s spaces. Name one single time that that has happened.
I: There are whole websites devoted to documenting such incidents. I can show you.
She: Such websites are inherently transphobic!!!! [Implied: And I’m not going to look at transphobic websites, you transphobe!]
@8 This essay has been making the rounds of the terfosphere:
https://4w.pub/trans-substantiation-gender-ideology/
@Bjarte Foshaug:
You’re forgetting the critical factor against which all things are designed: gender identity. Their claim is that “the sense that you are a man, woman, both, or neither” is an evolved feature located in the brain and developed in the womb. Everyone has one, and in most cases the sex someone knows they are lines up with the associated physical attributes of that sex. But sometimes it doesn’t: those people are transgender. The “cis” are the first group.
That means transwomen and cis women share one significant thing: the same gender identity (they use the word “gender” but what they really mean is “sex, but not as we know it, Jim.”) This internal Way of Knowing is supposed to be free of both reproductive categories AND all the stereotypes about what’s “masculine” or “feminine.” The fact that a “gender identity” defined this way looks incoherent, indescribable, and devoid of content is a GOOD thing. It means it’s irreducibly subjective. When you know things at the core of yourself , you just know them. Gender Identity appears to be a bit like like qualia.
And thus it’s clearly more fundamental in deciding who is a man, or woman, or neither, or both, than a messy biology with intersex people in it.
Sastra, that is very coherent. Completely subjective and ridiculous, but internally coherent.
@GW #14
My sympathies; it sucks when it happens, and it’s so frustrating. I have similar stories, and I’m sure most or all of us here do as well. “This has never happened” ==> I’ve never heard of this happening. “Name one time when it happened” ==> If you do, I’ll be angry and I’ll ignore what you show me, so the previous statement remains true. “You’re claiming transwomen are dangerous!” ==> I’m extrapolating from your claim that transwomen are not less dangerous than other men.
I miss talking to a few people. They are nice people, and I cared about them and their families and their lives, and I think they cared about me and mine. But I know that they think extremely badly of me, and I don’t miss their badgering. Some connections are teetering on the brink, and may break soon, we’ll see.
Thank you.
Personally I’m just pissed that instead of my rejection of gender (which is what I thought would get me shunned) I got bullied out for “orcs are not racist”… is that better? I don’t know, but I’m a lot more insulted…
Sastra @16: Gender identity functions nearly identically to the sensus divinitatis, making it related to qualia in virtue of being the perceptual basis for a (claimed) properly basic belief. Ultimately, what gender ideology in general and gender identity-based trans ideology in particular amount to is a (putatively) secular mapping of an epistemological argument for the rationality of religious belief. Specifically, reformed epistemology.
One might observe that the objections to reformed epistemology are nearly identical to the objections to epistemological coherentism and standpoint epistemology. This is actually a key point in understanding the rhetorical mode adopted by the various “social justice” sects. Their aim is to “disrupt and dismantle” existing epistemology, which they view as oppressive, and replace it with something else that takes the ideology as its correctness criterion. If I were to give it a name, I’d call it Epistemological Lysenkoism.
Unfortunately, I’ve found that offering or providing evidence against someone’s view is not usually an effective means of getting them to change their mind, even when they literally ask for said evidence. Next time you have the opportunity in person, as online conversations are almost intrinsically shit, you might try a different tack. Instead of offering evidence, try to nail down what the person actually believes. (Ex: Is it really that no TWs are dangerous?) Once you’ve got that, you try to get them to come up with potential defeaters. You know, “Can you imagine any sort of information that would make you less confident in that?) If you can get that, then you again get them to think of what they and you could do to find that information.
It’s a tedious process, but it has a higher success rate than just saying, “Here’s the facts.”
Sastra #16
It’s very similar to the old “do you experience blue the way I experience red?” problem, isn’t it.
If this supposed knowledge about one’s own “gender” is so “irreducibly subjective”, how can they possibly know that they’re all talking about the same thing when using words like “man” and “woman”? Maybe one person’s experience of being a “woman” is the same as another person’s experience of being a “man”.
I categorically deny having a gender identity. I challenge anyone to prove me wrong.
And, once again, if self-identification is conclusive proof of a certain brain-type, what are the implications for detransitioners? Do they literally change to a different kind of brain?