More than a dozen
Open Democracy adds its lashes to the dead horse.
“When the trans community is discussed in the British media, there is a particular word that crops up again and again,” said Niamh Simpson, a trans illustrator and community organiser from Oxford. “That word is ‘debate’.”
A trans illustrator? So he identifies as an illustrator but actually can’t draw a recognizable stick figure?
“Trans people cannot simply exist. We must justify our existence in the public arena – in a format that is inherently dehumanising because it assumes that a fundamental aspect of our personhood is up for discussion.”
Ha no. “Trans people can’t simply exist” because they have to be always telling us about themselves. Trans people are the last people who want to “simply exist” and get on with their lives in peace – they want the rest of us to devote all our attention to them.
Simpson was one of more than a dozen speakers who addressed a crowd of trans people and allies outside the BBC’s London headquarters on Saturday (8 January), protesting against the broadcaster’s “agenda of hate and discrimination”.
What about the trans agenda of hate and discrimination? The activist wing of trans people is not exactly cuddly or eager to persuade.
2021 was the deadliest year on record for trans people: at least 375 trans, non-binary or gender nonconforming people were murdered worldwide, most of them trans women or transfeminine people of colour. At least 125 of these murders took place in Brazil…
…among trans women who worked in the sex trade. 375 worldwide is not a huge number.
There are several more paragraphs of the same stale flat reheated sludge. It’s almost as if they have nothing to say beyond “oh poor us, pay more attention to us, ignore those bleeding women over there, oh poor us.”
People may eventually get bored with it.
Trans people exist, that is not the issue. The issue is that men who claim to be women are men and belong in men’s spaces. Women who claim to be men are women and belong in women’s spaces. People who call themselves non-binary or whatever are still either men or women.
The debate is all about whether the make-believe that gender believers worship is binding on the rest of us and the answer if no, it is not. What the trans want is special rights and a special status given to them based on their religious belief in gender and that should never have been allowed to happen.
As you keep pointing out, they keep using “trans” on its own before other nouns — not transgender, not transsexual, but simply trans. And right now it occurs to me that that’s precisely because the whole thing makes no sense; they want to say that sex isn’t gender, and that sex is gender, and that gender isn’t sex, and that gender is sex, and what results is that they have to just say “trans”. And when they do that, that results in silly expressions like “trans illustrators”.
Of course, “trans” no longer works in the etymological sense, because they believe that trans people have gone from one side over to the other. When it was short for “transsexual”, it made some sense: someone who was formerly (say) a man then underwent surgeries and hormones to “become” a woman. So yeah, trans-sexu-al. But not they say that a “transwoman” is a woman, was always a woman, was never a man, so what’s the trans? What transitioned?
Re #1, I do think some of the issue is whether trans people exist, because of the problem noted in #2, there is no consistent agreed-upon definition for what “trans” means anymore. Also because “trans people exist” is coded language for “people who call themselves ‘trans’ are exactly what they say they are, and if you challenge any of their claims we’ll say you are denying their existence”. So, if per #2 we take “transwoman” to mean “a person with the mind of a woman but in the body of a man” (let’s just start there), then no, a “transwoman” doesn’t exist, but a person who claims (according to that definition) to be a “transwoman” does exist.
There were 19400 murders in the US alone in 2020, Brazil had over 50,000. A global total of 375 is a tiny number, and 125 of 50,000 is comparatively safe.
Assuming trans is .04% of the population there’s around 31,600,000 of them… 375 is fucking nothing.
I agree. Otherwise, the ‘discussion’ would be: “Poor me; look at me. Poor me; look at me. Poor me; look at me. Poor me; look at me. Poor me; look at me. Poor me; look at me. Poor me; look at me. Poor me; look at me….” Ad infinitum till the cows come home.
At some stage someone might say: ‘This is gettin’ monotonous.’
Sackbut #3
Especially when what’s implied is “I am what those people are (and must therefore be granted full access to all spaces previously reserved for them)”. As I keep saying, there’s no way to defend such a view without making a claim about other people as well. If I am what you are, then you are what I am. So, once again, TWAW boils down to “Women are whatever they have to be to make me one of them, and they don’t get a say in the matter”
“at least 375 trans, non-binary or gender nonconforming people were murdered worldwide”
These activists seem to know unconsciously that they will never win with statistics. First and most obvious symptom is the preference for absolute number rather than proportion; they never include the goddamn denominator. Second symptom is the padding of the number by broadening the category from just trans people to anyone that thinks themselves special enough that they need to declare themselves an enby / non-conformist.
I’ve seen claims that the modern ‘trans umbrella’ shelters 2-4% of the population. So how can it be said that they are being unfairly targetted for murder, when the murder rate is more like 0.2-0.4% of all murders? At that rate, they are considerably safer than any other demographic. Indeed, when a white man declares himself to be a woman, his risk of being murdered goes down.
See, you just murdered her two more times, by saying “himself … his”. If misgendering counts as literal murder, trans people have far more opportunities to be murdered than other people. A single person can be murdered 100 times a day!
GW, there have been days when I’ve murdered nine before breakfast.
Tiresome, self-serving, self-pitying dreck. Of course there’s a debate. The existence of detransitioners alone shows why there HAS to be a debate. The inability of TRA’s to define their terms means there has to be a debate.
Men are a potential threat to women. Transwomen are men who say/believe they’re women through the magic of “gender.” What does that mean for the issue of male violence? Everytime I start trying to summarize the debate the whole mass of incoherence and nonsense of TRA gender theory comes upon me like an avalanche. Some of these people deny that sex exists. Only gender exists. And gender means nothing. Because gender is fluid. And nothing but sheer chance can account for all the transwomen sex offenders in prison.
Daniel Dennett coined the word “deepity” to refer to statements which could be interpreted two different ways — one of them true, but trivial; one of them extraordinary, but false (a variation on the Motte & Bailey.) People would deliberately or unconsciously trade on the resemblance, jumping from one to the other as if they were saying the same thing. “Transwomen exist” is a deepity.
True but Trivial: there are people who call themselves transgender, mean something roughly similar when they use the term, and they exist.
Extraordinary but False: Transgender people explain everything about being transgender doctrine correctly because they are in a unique position to know.
Those are the same. Therefore, GC people want to kill us.
@GW #2:
Your points are all good, but I wonder if the tendency to use “trans” on its own might just be the usual sloppy way people truncate common terms coupled with some of the limitations of social media. I recently joined Twitter, almost always just use “trans,” and my first thought reading your comment was “but ‘transgender’ wastes 6 spaces.”
Sastra (and GW), whatever the cause of the evolution from “transwoman” to “trans woman”, it has now taken on a political valence; “trans” is claimed as just another adjective, like tall or Mexican or vivacious, and therefore should be separated from its noun like words of the latter class. To refuse to do so is taken as a dogwhistle for transphobia.
See the comments by TB Nichols here (fairly low down) to see how deranged the thinking on this grammatical point can get.
Thanks, I just read that thread. It just makes me angry. Not just the stuff about language. The stuff about how it’s a crime against humanity to force kids to go through a puberty that they don’t want. This is such horseshit. A high percentage of kids don’t want to go through any puberty at all. I didn’t. You don’t choose to be born. You don’t choose to live. You don’t choose what species you get to be. You don’t choose was sex you get to be. ARGHGHGH.
Upon rereading TB Nichols’ comments, what strikes me as especially galling is the position of his radical ideas as the overwhelming norm, and any deviation from them a pernicious and intentional aberration. As you say, GW, it is far from the finer points of grammatical theology that are at issue, but rather the notion that violence is done when nature is allowed to take its course in human development that so offends our base intuitions.
Of course, the naturalistic fallacy exists, and we cannot assert a thing’s goodness merely because it is the result of a natural process. But it nevertheless shocks the conscience to see it posited that hormonal and surgical interventions in young children should be the standard of care, based upon little more than a child’s self-reported reticence to embark upon a normal stage of human development. The way this view is presented, as the obviously, unquestionably correct one, is repugnant.