Which twin has the view?
Trans philosopher Rachel Anne Williams wrote this piece a year ago but the opening move snagged my attention.
Gender critical feminism aka “radical feminism” is the view that womanhood is best defined by reducing the category of “woman” to essential biological properties shared by cisgender aka non-trans women.
No. One, radical feminism is not a synonym for gender-critical feminism. Two, saying that woman=adult human female is not a “view,” it’s just a definition. That’s how we use the word; that’s what the word means. (Notice Williams isn’t simultaneously trying to redefine “man”? Funny, that.) That’s what the word (and its equivalent in many many other languages) means and has always meant going back as far as we can peer. A little 21st century sect wants to change that, but little sects don’t get to change the meaning of words for all of us unless we agree to it. We don’t agree to it. I think you’ll find that it’s not only gender critical feminists or even radical feminists who see it that way.
Why do they define womanhood like this? Because it effectively excludes trans women from the class of women because trans women are not biologically identical to cis women.
But it’s not “they.” Everyone defines it that way – everyone except the small sect. It’s not that we define the word in a bizarre way that requires explanation, it’s that Williams & co do. Why do Williams & co define the word in a bizarre way? Because they have decided their happiness depends on universal validation of their internal “gender identity” and that depends on universal re-definition of the category “woman.”
That because is awfully strange. Radical feminists and/or gender-critical feminists don’t define women that way because doing so allows them to exclude transwomen. It’s not about transwomen. Does everthing really have to be about transwomen?
Yes. Next question?
No questions. No statements. No conclusions, and especially no hypotheses. Only recitations.
Kinda gives the game away, doesn’t it?
GC feminists are just mean girls who are trying to keep transwomen out of the clubhouse. Changing the rules, moving the goalposts out pure spite.
“Centering” transness turns the dictionary itself into a transphobic, TERF plot to deny the REAL Cool Girls their due rights. When you think the universe is supposed to revolve around you, any bits that don’t are by definition doing so just to piss you off.
Sorry, welcome to Earth. It revolves around the Sun, not you. That plot started 4.6 odd billion years ago. Sneaky Terfs to arrange the laws of physics and the origin of the solar system to deny your Centrality in All Things.
Look closely enough and no two humans are “biologically identical.” Nobody is biologically identical to me, but that doesn’t mean I’ve redefined things to keep 7 billion plus people out of the club of “me.” I didn’t redefine my DNA to become exclusionary. It’s just the way things are.
Being an adult human female is not a club, or a clique or a fashion, or a team, or a game. It’s not a role in a play. It’s not a state of mind. It’s a fact of the world, a part of material reality. Stamping your feet and holding your breath until you turn blue (or mutilating your body and pumping it full of hormones, or just putting on a dress) isn’t going to change that. To think you can is misguided and delusional. The rest of the world is under no obligation to aid and abet the pursuit of your impossible goal. That there are people who can’t or won’t accept that is a problem to the extent that they make it a problem for everyone else. Using an analogy I came across in a different context, you can make your world a more comfortable place to walk by covering it with leather, or you can wear shoes. When you throw people out of restaurants because they’re wearing t-shirts that might offend people who are wrong and misguided, you’re trtying to cover the world in leather. Don’t do that. Grow up. Wear shoes.
Surely the best solution for people who actually suffer from disphoria or dismorphia is the one that does the least harm. I’m thinking that gender “reassignment” surgery should be a last resort, not a first response. Surgery and drugs sound like the equivalent of a fad diet pill for “instant” weight loss, compared to following a long-term, sensible diet with excersize.
The issues involved would be much simpler if they were not compounded with the desires of the autogynephilic crowd (which, I believe, are different from the needs of the disphoric and dismorphic). Then there are those predators who would use self-ID to increase access to their victims. So the actual needs of suffering people (“true trans”, if you will) get hijacked by the desires of the needy, narcissistic, and predatory, who seem to be supplying the volume and firepower in the public airing of trans issues. Combine this with ad-hoc redefinition of terms, the conflation (or outright replacement) of “sex” with “gender,” the bad faith use of intersex and DSD conditions to argue against the 99% of cases where sex is one or the other configuration of an easily observed (not “assigned”) binary state, and you’ve got a good start on the recipe for the mess we’re in.
These goddamn cultists don’t even understand the most basic aspects of vernacular language. Word meanings, pronounciations and spellings are all determined by common use and only by common use. ‘Woman’ means ‘human adult female’ not because someone declared that to be the meaning, but because that is how it is used by 99% of people.
Dictionaries describe, they do not prescribe.
Naturally, they take that bit of information with extremely bad grace, but in my defense, I only point that sort of shit out to them because they act very much as if they did not know it. And then once it is pointed out to them… they go right on saying the same of incorrect crap.
Shit, Holms, are you saying I have to start considering my vulva a vagina? ‘Cause I know for sure most people use the word that way…
Not saying you’re wrong. Just pointing out one obvious problem.
Aw, give us a break iknklast. They both start with V, and they’re both lady parts Down There.
/s
If it’s not anti-trans bigotry, then how do you explain the fact that nobody ever defined women based on biology before the trans movement?
(At least I’m pretty sure that’s how it happened, since I don’t think Rachel Anne Williams would just make stuff up.)
snerk
[…] a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Which twin has the […]
Notice the work being done to minimize said biological differences (and others) by the word identical.
“Well, sure, we’re not female. We don’t belong to the class of people who can conceive, gestate, and give birth to children, who are mostly smaller than members of the other class, and for these reasons have been treated as inferior in most cultures for the past five millennia.
“Is that any reason to exclude us from your definition, you punctilious bigots?”
lol
This is not even wrong.
The etymological roots of woman (wif/wur/wo-man) and man (wer-man) have always indicated female and male humans. Not gender, sex. As in “possessing primary and secondary sexual characteristics”. And sex was biology until only very recently.
Sex and gender were inextricably linked until only recently. Trans ideologists are the ones redefining words.
Lady M., the problem with that definition is that some TRAs have seized on it to create a pathetic ‘gotcha’. I saw it in action at PZs a while ago. It was spread across a long thread, but to summarise: claim that TERF’s don’t believe that infertile women are women because they can’t conceive. Wait for denial of that claim, then declare that transwomen are also unable to conceive, therefore because infertile women are women then so are transwomen.
I’m sure they can make the same case for flat-chested women, what with women being the class of people having pronounced breasts; ditto tall women, women with large feet, women with visible facial hair, women with ‘masculine’ jaw-lines, women with deep voices…..there is nothing and nobody the TRAs will not appropriate if they can twist the facts to fit their cause.
AoS, the problem with that is that most infertile women (though probably not all) have the structures necessary to conceive, they just don’t operate that way. Or there are people like myself who once had those structures and they have been removed. Or there are people (also like myself, if I hadn’t had surgery) who simply grew older and their structures no longer worked. Transwomen did not and do not have what is required to nurture a baby inside their body and deliver it, working or otherwise. They do (or did) have the equipment to fertilize an egg using a sperm. These are definite biological functions that are accepted as indicators of male/female in EVERY OTHER SPECIES that has sexual reproduction. Even plants. I can refer to male plants and female plants, and nobody gets all hot and bothered that I misgendered a plant, even if the male plant happens to put on a beautiful pink flower.
Humans are, in every way, animals. We are sexually dimorphic animals, with male and female in different bodies (unlike many plants, the example I used above, which may have both male and female in the same flower). If we remove these descriptions, then the entire field of biology becomes chaotic and ludicrous, having male and female organs in plants, mushrooms, and every single sexually reproducing animal except humans because…reasons.
And the day PZ decides that his favorite spider, Vera, is male even though she is laying eggs, I will believe that he believes the shiite he is putting out. Until then, not so much. Male and female, woman and man, are words with meanings, and unless you are Humpty Dumpty, you don’t get to decide for yourself that it means something totally different than the rest of the world uses it.
#6 iknklast
No, because if we get into anatomical names then we are no longer talking about vernacular language, but technical jargon. In that regime, meanings are no longer determined by common use but by predetermined definitions… meaning all of those people confusing vagina for vulva are unequivocally wrong.
This is a common occurrence with professional terms seeping into conversational language, there are lots of items of jargon entering common use in an incorrect fashion, for example the word ‘theory’ in science [a comprehensive explanation of a phenomena backed by research] vs. general use [speculation, usually unverified].
Conversational use of jargon certainly muddies the waters, but we can still say for example “no, the existence of intersexed states does not mean male and female are a sliding scale; they still have well understood meanings.” Those people who enjoy pointing at the uncertain boundary conditions of words are about ~2,400 years late to the party – this conundrum was already well explored by the sorites paradox.
We might phrase it as follows. A person that is male or female has the anatomical / hormonal / genetic features from their respective list. If one of those traits is modified or missing, or replaced with an item from the opposite list, are they still male / female? It’s going to come down to the specific trait as to whether that person is perceived to be male or female (and is treated as such in those areas where the sexes are treated differently), and whether that person sees themselves as male or female, but whatever the perception / self-perception outcome may be, it remains that there are two. goddamn. sexes.
(not that I think you need to be told that stuff, your comment was just a convenient starting point for that tangent)
#11 Lady M
Yes! They’re framing it in a manner that implies we are just being sticklers, fussing over minute differences to divide people into camps. It is used in conjunction with so many bad faith arguments that I have to assume this framing is deliberate.
#15 iknklast
It’s funny that you should mention that, I remember lecturing them on vernacular vs technical jargon, and dictionaries being descriptive rather than prescriptive. I brought up dictionary meanings for woman and man as part of that explanation… and they accused me of being Humpty Dumpty!
Always turn it around and project it onto the accuser – I am rubber, you are glue. Since most people will have checked out long before then, in the technical jargon argument, the bulk of everyone will more likely remember you being Humpty Dumpty than the distinctions that were made.
It’s Trump’s technique, too.
Aka DARVO. It’s pervasive.
AoS,
Oh yes, I’ve seen that, um, reasoning.
You can forestall it by defining “adult female person” as, “someone who, barring disease or other physical impairment, can conceive, gestate, etc.”
That specious little objection goes hand-in-hand with the one about how we’re “reducing” women to their reproductive organs. To which I generally reply, “Golly, did you know that biologists class humans as vertebrates? That’s right, SCIENTISTS REDUCE US TO OUR SPINAL CORDS!”
Haven’t gotten a reply to that one yet.