Ad absurdum
I wonder what the future will be like for them. Maybe global warming will make it all irrelevant, but maybe it will make it even worse. The Telegraph’s summary to refresh our memory:
Women Talk Back hosted women-only meetings at Bristol University to discuss male violence against females, and argued the presence of men could make attendees fearful to speak out.
The students refused entry to male-born transgender people who self-identify as women, classed as men under equality laws unless they have changed their legal sex.
Now Bristol Students’ Union has ordered the society’s president, Raquel Rosario-Sanchez, to stand down and banned her from union leadership posts for two years.
And committee members must complete an “equality, diversity and inclusion” course.”
“The society was told that Bristol SU defines women as “all who self-define as women, including (if they wish) those with complex gender identities that include ‘woman’, and those who experience oppression as women”.
I wonder what Bristol SU would do if every single male student self-defined as women.
Nothing. They would do absolutely nothing.
Attendees at such a course might there suggest that we need four categories of humans: 1. men, 2. women, 3. men who identify as women, 4. women who identify as men.
Or possibly some might prefer: 2. men, 1. women, 4. men who identify as women, 3. women who identify as men.
Or perhaps some other possibility.
Global warming may indeed make it all irrelevant. Then again. Wikipedia says that the next ice age will begin in 1,500 years time, perhaps making even global warming irrelevant. And perhaps, all the rest of it too.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age#:~:text=Researchers%20used%20data%20on%20Earth’s,usually%20begin%20within%201%2C500%20years.
Or, perhaps more to the point, if none of the female students did. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, these are the points I think need to be hammered home at every opportunity and in every possible way:
• Redefining “woman” in terms of thoughts and feeling to make it tautologically true that “trans women are women” makes it no longer true that biological females who fail to think or feel in the proper “female”/”feminine” manner are women.
• Even if we were to accept that – according to their own definition (if they had one) – TIMs are “women” it still doesn’t imply that they belong in the same spaces as biological females, because then there is no longer any justification for saying that the latter are “women” in any relevant sense of the word (the flying mammals vs. clubs for hitting baseballs distinction again). As Daniel Dennett put it in a different context, it’s all “just a bad pun”. Indeed if you have what it takes to detect a pun when you hear one, you know pretty much everything you need to know to debunk all of gender ideology.
• What the trans lobby is advocating is not taking the circle that already includes the biological females and expanding it to also include the TIMs, but replacing the circle entirely.
• The old circle included roughly half the world’s population. It’s far from clear that the new one includes anyone but the TIMs, so who is really being most “exclusionary” here?
• What exactly are the ways of thinking and feeling required to qualify a “woman” anyway (circular logic doesn’t count), and how do we make sure that only people who really do think / feel in the ways required are allowed into “women only” spaces?
• Any “gendering” what so ever is misgendering, and any bathroom, sporting event, domestic abuse shelter, prison etc. that’s “gendered” in any way is gender-inappropriate in my case.
• If trans men are men, then I’m not. If TIM’s are women, they are the only “women” as far as I’m concerned.
One further advantage of this approach is that there is nothing the TAs can object to without totally giving the lie to the idea that this is all about trans people’s right to define “who they are”. There is no way to claim access to the spaces of biological females without defining who the latter are as well. If I am what you are, then you are what I am. So ultimately what they are saying is: “Biological females are whatever they have to be to make me one of them, and they don’t get a saying in the matter”.
This is a great articulation of the problem.
Bjarte:
TIMs are “women” and women are “women” because that’s what “women” has always meant. It’s just that our transphobic society has denied that. So when we look at existing instances of the word “women”, we should understand that it refers and always referred to females and TIMs. TIMs belong in the same spaces as biological females because they’ve always belonged in those spaces. Those spaces were set up for them.
Also, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
[…] a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Ad […]
Here’s more realistic scenario. One student announces that they self-identify as the university president, and demands use of the president’s office on that basis.
This demand will, of course, be denied but then the question is why? On what grounds? If self-identification is dispositive, then why can the president defend his office against a student who identifies as president, but women can not defend a meeting room against men who identify as women? Keep in mind that these are academics, who should be able to give a principled answer to a principled question.
It won’t be me–I don’t have that kind of brass. But someone might do it.
Nullius in Verba #5
And not only that, but the modern cultural invention called “biological sex” has only ever taken root in white, Western, racist cultures. In non-western cultures the idea that being a “man” or “woman” respectively was about anything other than an “inner sense of self” has never occurred to anyone to this very day, which is why TAs, no matter how white or Western, are justified in claiming all non-whites for themselves.