MP
Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has struck back after critics mocked her for using the phrase “menstruating person.”
In a CNN interview regarding Texas’ new anti-abortion law, Ms Ocasio-Cortez had carefully used the phrase to include trans men, non-binary Americans, and others who menstruate in addition to women. Some conservatives ridiculed her choice of words, but AOC fiercely defended it.
She “used the phrase” in talking to Anderson Cooper, and what she said is that she thinks Texas Governor Abbot “doesn’t understand a menstruating person’s body.” This isn’t a matter for ridicule but for outrage. Governor Abbot is ruining the lives of women; he’s waging war on women; he’s using state power to grind women into the dirt. It matters who is doing what to whom. The people harmed by Texas’s vile law are women, and everyone needs to be able to say that. Ocasio-Cortez is betraying women by not doing that.
Ms Ocasio-Cortez had used the phrase on Tuesday during an interview with Anderson Cooper, who asked her about some recent comments by Texas governor Greg Abbott. When a reporter accused the state’s new abortion restrictions of forcing rape victims to bear their rapist’s children, Mr Abbott said the law doesn’t do that.
“It doesn’t require that at all, because obviously it provides at least six weeks for a person to be able to get an abortion,” the governor said.
Where does he get that “at least”? There’s no “at least.” It’s six weeks, and after that it sucks to be you, bitch. And of course as thousands of people have pointed out, many women don’t even know they’re pregnant at six weeks. AOC made that point but she also obscured it, which is not a clever thing to do.
“I don’t know if he is familiar with a menstruating person’s body,” Ms Ocasio-Cortez said, referring to Mr Abbott. “In fact, I do know that he’s not familiar with a woman – with a female or menstruating person’s body, because if he did, he would know that you don’t have six weeks.”
She almost said “woman” the second time but she corrected herself.
Bad move.
Among other problems “menstruating person” sounds like someone currently menstruating, which doesn’t describe all, or really any, of the pregnant women are talking about here.
(“People who menstruate” is better in that regard but still terrible in all the other ways.)
WARNING: CONTENT MAY SHOCK SOME READERS.
A ‘menstruating’ man set up at birth with male genitalia, can only ‘mensruate’ with great difficulty; by taking to his donger with a sharp implement. I was once at an anthropological screening which showed an Australian Aborigine carrying out a subincision on himself, in which the urethra is cut open along its length; usually the full distance, using a sharp stick or a stone or steel knife..
The women in the audience were fascinated. The men were all squirming in their seats and covering their eyes. For many if not most of the latter, it was clearly the worst horror film they had ever seen.
Ophelia, a group you should be aware of, and hopefully spread the word about: Aid Access.
International group, they use telemed to prescribe abortion pills online and then ship them. And since they have no assets in Texas, the Texas law can officially go fuck itself.
It’s sad that such a group is needed, but it’s a good thing someone rose to the challenge.
It all comes down to that one question with which PZ’s thoughtless thugs hounded you until you left his foetid little corner of the internet. What is a woman? And if the category really has been wrongly delimited throughout most of time and space, what implications does that have for the category formerly known as woman?
On the one side, the answer is obvious, and primal. A woman is a human female (or, when the dialectic wishes to delineate women from girls, an adult human female). All further questions flow from there; all of the complicated notions of what a woman *is*, the social reality of a woman, which is to say *womanhood*, begins with the base reality of female homo sapiens being the substrate upon which the entire edifice of womanhood is built.
The other side is unmoored from this substrate; for them, the question “What is a woman?” is *entirely* in how women are expected to behave, what they value, what they do for a living, how they dress and talk and interact. Therefore anyone who finds themself compelled to perform womanhood in some significant number of ways *is* a woman, whatever that actually means.
But pesky reality still obtains, and the same people-formerly-known-as-women continue to have similar concerns specifically related around their biological reproductive capacity, and wider society’s interest in controlling said capacity through those who possess it.
Therefore, having been colonised by the brain virus that convinces them that “woman is, at root, simply the performance of womanhood”, one is forced into ever-more-ridiculous contortions to account for that group of people who generally possess the reproductive capacity of the species, where “woman” used to do nicely.
Someday, someone will have to finally admit that in order to actually perform “womanhood” one must actually be a woman. Otherwise it’s just appropriation. For now, it’s okay to appropriate women’s roles, I realize. But, someday. Someday.
For all her strengths elsewhere, AOC has leaned in to the woke element of the left. It’s goddamn tragic.
Seth #4 wrote:
This perhaps was, at one point, how the pro-gender group described their view, but, not being stupid, they noticed that by defining “woman” this way they were shoring up the “bad” definition of “gender,” the sexist one which stuck people into traditional conservative pigeon holes. They only think of gender this way when they’re not reminded that they’re thinking of gender this way.
Other times, “gender” means sex, though not, once again,when it’s pointed out to them. Sex as a category is only useful in very limited ways.
The preferred definition of “gender” therefore is undefinable. It’s apparently a vague but passionate inner state of knowledge that one is a man, woman, both, or neither. Which brings us right back to “What is a Woman?”
Answer: “It’s an inner state of Being.” Sort of like qualia, only it’s gendered. Yep.
Sastra, I’m not sure about the “not being stupid” bit. I think on this subject they are stupid, or “stupid” – willfully stupid, stupid in the sense of determinedly saying stupid things and screaming at people who refuse to say the stupid things.
@Ophelia:
“Stupidity” is a spectrum.
I don’t think I’m more charitable than you; I just have a darker view of where it can go.
Heh. Point taken.
Set #4, it’s now got to the point where there is no need to “perform” womanhood. One can maintain all of one’s glorious maleness, with all the privilege that comes with it, and demand everyone call him she or he’ll hit them with a barbed wire wrapped baseball bat. Some of them go to the point of wearing lipstick or long hair, but some of them don’t even bother with that. And we are told we must accept this obviously male person as a woman for no better reason than that he says he is.
So if I say I am Lithuanian, do the Lithuanians have to accept me as such? No, they do not, and the TAs realize this, so they made up some stupid thing about gender being different, not appropriation, and being “real” and “innate” as opposed to race or nationality or other things which were arbitrarily delineated. But sex is not arbitrarily delineated, it is something that is real and innate. Gender is a construct, and they are trying to reverse that whole notion. So now imposing racial characteristics on a person with a particular nationality or color of skin is rightfully recognized as wrong and wrongheaded, but imposing gender characteristics on people with a certain sex is not. And somehow they can tie themselves in enough pretzel knots to keep up the belief (or illusion of belief if they are just mouthing ‘safe’ words).