Supernatural confidence
Emma Kelly in the Independent (Ireland):
LGB (Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual) Alliance Ireland launched a Twitter account, claiming to fight for the rights of lesbian, gay and bisexual people in Ireland. For the casual social media user, this may seem pretty great. Of course we need people continuing the fight for lesbians, gay men and bisexuals. However, note that the T for transgender has been dropped.
What does that mean, “dropped”? Is there some law that says the T must always be yoked to the L and G? No there is not. Lesbians and gay men are allowed to talk about lesbian and gay issues; they are not required to include trans people whenever they do so. Also: take careful note: the two are not the same. In some ways they’re contradictory. Trans dogma as it is currently promulgated is often in tension with lesbian and gay rights – like for instance when it insists that attraction should be to “gender identity” rather than to sexed bodies.
The LGB Alliance Ireland, an offshoot of the LGB Alliance founded in the UK in 2019, wants to “draw a line against the imposition of gender identity theory, which prioritises subjective ‘gender’ over biological sex”, which they believe “undermines the rights of people whose sexual orientation is towards others of the same sex”.
What I’m saying. Straight women don’t necessarily want to have sex with trans men, and lesbians don’t necessarily want to have sex with trans women. None of us should be bullied for it.
Allegations of transphobia are batted away when someone tweets ‘men aren’t women’ or that trans women shouldn’t have access to women’s-only spaces, under the guise of wanting trans people to have rights, but for their rights not to infringe on women’s rights, or that they don’t want children being forced to transition.
Well, I’m here to inform you – trans women are women. Trans men are men. A trans woman being treated as the woman she is does not infringe on my rights as a cisgender woman (that is, I was assigned as female at birth and identify as such) or a queer woman.
She can “inform” us all she likes, but that doesn’t make her claims true. Trans women are in fact not women, but men who identify as women. It’s quite simple, and can’t be vanished out of existence by a mere “are.”
A trans woman being granted refuge in a women’s-only space is not of harm to cisgender women.
Unless it is.
Where these smug twerps get their confidence is beyond me. I guess Emma Kelly is confident enough that she’ll never need refuge in a women-only space to make such a fatuously sweeping claim, but lots of women don’t have that luxury. Emma Kelly doesn’t know that all trans women are safe around women, nor does she know that men won’t pretend to be trans for the sake of getting into women-only spaces. She can’t know that. Women’s safety isn’t hers to give away in that breezy fashion.
Even if we take the TWAW/TMAM catechism as true, why does an advocacy organisation concerned with homosexual men and women need to explicitly reference them? They they are indeed a woman / man, then they are included within the purview of the organisation if they are bi- or homosexual, and not if not, by virtue of that alone.
If you deny sex, then you deny same sex attraction and you deny me the right to identify as gay. You are erasing me, you are threatening me, and your words put me and the rest of the highly vulnerable gay community at risk of violence, murder, and suicide.
And you’re a homophobe.
Were T part of the organization to start with, and then asked t leave? No, they were not part of it (Excluded!!! HOROR!!! SHOCK!!!) at all. Think of all the billions of straight people excluded from this organization. Surely that’s worse, isn’t it? So in a conflict between a wife seeking outside interests and friends apart from her abusive husband, Kelly would take the side of the abusive husband? Good to know.
It’s not like this confidence is displayed in the face of some purely hypothetical situation. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say men are already pretending to be trans to access female-only spaces in order to assault women. It’s not an improbable guess, a bigoted hunch, or lurid supposition, it’s a behaviour that has a track record and is part of a pattern. It is gaslighting of the highest order to dismiss as “impossible” things that have already happened scores (hundreds?) of times.
Perhaps a better prefix instead of “trans” should be “wannabe” or “not”, ie. wannabewomen, notwomen.
I’m sure we all remember “Schrödinger’s Rapist”*, but to recapitulate: In the absence of telepathic powers there is no method for knowing in advance which men are rapists and which are not, so women are constantly engaged in a Bayesian-like analysis and assessing men’s behavior for cues to update their priors (which is never zero). E.g. if a woman on the subway is signalling that she just wants to be left alone (reading, having earphones on, looking away, giving short, unengaged answers etc.) and you still insist on starting a conversation, you are telling her something very important about yourself: That whatever she may or may not want is not going to stop you from going after what you want. In the Bayesian analysis you just became a bigger threat.
I bet you can see where this is going: If women don’t want biological males – regardless of what they prefer to call themselves (“woman”, “she” etc.) – in women only spaces, and a male still insists on entering, that in itself is a warning sign and a cue for women to adjust their priors upward.
* I always thought that was a terrible metaphor. A good metaphor explains something that’s hard to understand by analogy to something that’s easier to understand. This one does the opposite. Also the point of the Schrödingers’ Cat thought experiment isn’t simply that you can’t know whether the cat is alive or dead until you look. Instead the cat is in a superposition of both alive and dead until you observe it as one or the other. For the Schrödinger’s Rapist analogy to work, a man would have to be and not be a rapist at the same time until he is observed either being or not being (however that’s supposed to be “observed”?) a rapist.
Hella good point.
Is it really confidence in their own safety (e.g., certainty that they’ll never need to seek refuge in a women’s shelter) that allows women like this to make pronouncements like this? I’m not so sure. That suggests an implausible depth of thought.
More likely, their thought is fully terminated. Just as with the devout fundamentalist, the gender ideologue is simply incapable–due to memetic defense mechanisms–of thinking along certain lines. To do so, to entertain the non-approved perspective even in a detached and philosophical mode would constitute an act of immorality. Even beginning to consider the heretical position causes anxiety, an emotional and painful agitation that can only be alleviated by a kind of shutdown. And thus they return to the cliches: transwomen are women, transmen are men, nonbinary identities are valid. It’s a gris-gris, a charm, a chant that wards off the psychic discomfort.