Not a feminist
Never mind Karens, it’s the Lavernes we need to worry about.
“I just believe as a non-essentialist intersectional feminist that womanhood is constituted beyond bodies, chromosomes and reproduction. Insisting trans women are always and only “males” as you say is getting us killed and denied equal protection under the law here in the States”
That “just” – it’s not a “just.” There is no “just” there. There would be no “just” to my saying “I just believe as a non-essentialist intersectional anti-racist that blackness is constituted beyond bodies, chromosomes and skin, and thus that I’m black too, like you, because I say I am, because I identify as black, because I feel black.” That would be seen as an outrageous claim, and rightly so. It’s not some little trifle that can be introduced with a “just.”
Next, “believe” – it doesn’t matter what he “believes,” or says he believes. Anyone can “believe” anything, or claim to. It’s a stupid thing to believe. Lots of things are stupid to believe, and that men can be women by saying so is one of them.
Next, “feminist” – he is not a feminist, and he doesn’t get to pretend to be a feminist to help him pretend to be a woman, and then bully and coerce us into agreeing with him that he’s a woman, and a better smarter more feminist and “intersectional” woman than we are. All of that is an obvious con game.
Next, how womanhood is constituted. It is exactly through bodies, and nothing else. It’s not a club, a mood, a state of mind, a set of clothes, a hairdo, a pronoun. It’s the body. You have a female body? You’re a woman. You have the other kind? You’re a man.
Next, “getting us killed” – no it isn’t. Murder rates for trans people are lower than the overall average, and they’re tied to sex work, not gender critical feminism.
Last, “equal protection under the law” – nonsense. Nothing we say has anything to do with denying trans people equal protection under the law.
Men who claim to be feminist women need to stop trying to bully women into agreeing with them.
Perhaps that tweet can be tarted up a bit, to make it more of a ‘twart.’ Here goes, anyway:
I “just” “believe” “as” a “non-essentialist” “intersectional” feminist that “womanhood” is “constituted” “beyond” bodies, chromosomes and reproduction. Insisting “trans women” are “always” and “only” “males” as you “say” is getting us “killed” and “denied” “equal” “protection” “under” the “law” here in the States.
Every word in parentheses in that passage can be subject to hours of debate as to its ‘meaning’, (whatever ‘meaning’ might actually ‘mean.’)
Note that bodies, chromosomes, feminist and reproduction have pretty standard scientific definitions, and thus have been left free of parentheses.
That’s a pack of lies. Every single “point” is a lie. They can’t do anything except lie.
Lies, and the lying liars who tell them. [/Al Franken]
I’m going to disagree with you here, in that I’d say that being a “woman” is a biological classification and means the same as “female,” but “womanhood” is the socially constructed ideal. I’d stick it with “gender.”
So sure, I’ll grant them “womanhood” with its palaver of attributes related to femininity. Some women fail to measure up — and some men do, putting on the stereotypical trappings of their culture and thereby exemplifying “the qualities considered to be natural or characteristic of a woman.” They can then wax as eloquent as they please. They’re men in the country of Womanhood. Not women.
I heard that homo sapiens first appeared in Africa. So it’s entirely possible for a non-Black-looking person to be Black. Recessive genes and all that. It’s valid. Besides, “race” isn’t biologically real. It’s a social construct. And there’s a spectrum. Just look at how the so-called “races” blend into each other!
I might not get harassed by the police or discriminated against as a job applicant as much as some Black people do, but that’s hardly my fault.
Welllll I think that’s a deliberate ambiguity on LC’s part. Yes womanhood can mean that, and he wants us to see that meaning, but he also means and wants us to understand him as meaning just the literal state of being a woman.
Putting on woman face does not make you a woman, any more than my being a scientist makes me a man. I wear a dress about once a year, because I feel like feeling the swish of the skirt around my calves, but I am not a woman on that day and a not-woman on the rest of the days. I don’t wear make-up; that doesn’t make me a man. I wear earrings; that doesn’t make me a woman. My hair is long and my patience is short; woman? Man? I fail to be nurturing; that doesn’t make me a man. And I doubt that many of these TAs are nurturing, caring people, either, even though they often proclaim themselves to be. I don’t cry; that doesn’t make me a man. I do not have a uterus; that does not make me a man, it just makes me a woman who doesn’t have a uterus.
Woman is a biological, reproductive category. The word was created to describe people who have certain biological, reproductive features. Gender was larded on later as men worked to control women’s reproductive capacity and guarantee sexual access to women.
When I go in the bathroom and the person who was last there left the toilet seat up, it is a pretty good bet it was not a woman, regardless of the sign on the bathroom door. Does not wearing a triangle make me less woman?
The history in the US of hypodescent (One Drop Rule) did indeed declare as Black many people with light skin. (One insignificant but telling anecdote is about a woman who was not allowed to list her race as “white” on a passport application because she had a Black ancestor something like eight generations back.) Hypodescent does not, however, mean that anyone who wishes to declare themselves Black can do so. Typically it was used the other way around, to require that people be listed as Black, no matter how much they didn’t want to be.
iknklast:
Be that as it may, but ‘gender’ I think is a word best kept for use by grammarians and applied exclusively to words. I cannot recall a single recent discussion, particularly around here, in which as used it could not be replaced by the word ‘sex’. Except for the fact that in the languages I know anything about, ‘gender’ can take up to THREE forms: masculine, feminine and neuter. Perhaps that is the attraction of ‘gender’ as applied to people. Neuter is neither masculine nor feminine and so can serve as a handy way-station for those undertaking a pilgrimage from one of the two sexes to the other of the two sexes.
Some may say that ‘sex’ pertains to the body and ‘gender’ to the mind, however defined. Except that human ‘gender studies’ commonly involve as subjects people born with male genitalia who wish said genitalia were female, or less commonly vice versa.
Omar, I have no problem applying it only to language. The characteristics applied to each sex are limiting, stunting, and oppressive. I see being a gender critical feminist as being supportive of the idea of removing gender as a descriptor. Of course, I don’t like the idea of gendered language, either, unless it is a word that genuinely only applies to one sex. Why should warm things be male and cold female? Why should weather events (like El Nino and La Nina) be gendered? Why should there be actors and actresses, waiters and waitresses, students and coeds, or anything else that doesn’t need a gender? Mother and Father need a sex, but actors don’t (though you do want to cast the role correctly if that’s essential, they don’t need to call the people performing the role by other names; actor will do fine).
“Gender” comes from a root meaning “type”, and it’s cognate with “genre” and “genus”. In linguistics grammatical gender is a way of classifying nouns that can trigger agreement in adjectives, articles, pronouns, and even verbs. In Indo-European and Semitic languages it’s common to have a gender system based on real-world sex, in the sense that one set of endings is associated with people of one sex, while another is associated with people of the other sex. Those get labeled “feminine” and “masculine”. There may also be a third gender that isn’t normally associated with people of either sex; that gets labeled “neuter”.
Of course most of the things we talk about aren’t sexed, but still they tend to fall into one of the categories rather arbitrarily (for example, in Spanish “sun” is masculine and “moon” is feminine; in German it’s the other way around).
But gender doesn’t have to be sex-based; there are languages that have gender systems based on a human/non-human distinction, or an animate/non-animate distinction. And most languages don’t even bother with gender.
The word “sex” came into English sometime around the late 14th C, and for a long time it referred only to the distinction between males and females. But sometime in the early 20th C it began to be used to refer to the sexual act, and so began to be a bit of a “dirty” word. So sometime around the ’50s overly-fastidious speakers began to use “gender” for the “male/female” distinction, and then in the ’60s feminists began to use it to refer to the social roles that attach to the sexes, but that’s a different use of the word. TRAs, perhaps intentionally, blur the distinction between the use of “gender” as a grammatical category, “gender” as a synonym for “sex”, and “gender” as a social role.
(As an aside, when I was learning about this as an undergraduate back in the dark ages, at least some linguists made a point of distinguishing “gender” and “sex”. English, in that telling, isn’t gendered for the most part, because for the most part we choose the different forms of the third-person singular pronouns based on natural sex–“she” for human (and sometimes animal) females, “he” for human (and sometimes animal) males, and “it” for everything else. It’s only when we do things like referring to nations as “she” that gender comes into play. Words like “actress” or “widower” aren’t gendered, they’re sexed.)
I want to underline one point that became clear to me as I was writing all that mess above: “gender” has at least a three-way polysemy that I think the TRAs are blurring, to everyone’s great confusion:
1. Grammatical gender–a way that some languages classify nouns, often, though not necessarily, loosely based on real-world sex differences.
2. “Gender” as a euphemism for “sex”.
3. “Gender” as the stereotypical social roles that are associated with the sexes.
Omar, “neuter” as a gender was never meant to be applied to humans, but to inanimate objects.
Re #11
Kathleen Stock identifies a fourth: “gender” = ”gender identity”, an internal feeling based on but not identical to associations with the social expectations of men and women. This is the one that has effectively infinite variations.
Sackbut:
That’s right. I could identify as a transgender giraffe, but only on Mondays and Thursdays. Others may prefer other days and arrangements. And so on forever; a whole zoo, and to infinity.
One of the biggest frustrations I have in all this is the general failure by media and the commetariat on most social media to comprehend that this really is a three-way fight:
Socio-Religious Conservatives teach “Gender follows Sex”–if you’re a woman, you must be ‘feminine’, and if you’re a man, you must be ‘masculine’ (the latter terms defined according to patriarchal and generally misogynist beliefs that undergird their entire philosophy).
Trans Rights Activists teach “Sex follows Gender”–if you’re ‘feminine’, you must be a woman, and if you’re ‘masculine’, you must be a man. The fact that virtually all of their definitions of the gender-terms are based on the SRC definitions doesn’t even seem to get noticed, let alone discussed.
Gender-Critical Feminists, of course, teach “Sex is sex, and gender can go to hell”. The entire categories of ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ are stinking piles of bullshit used to reinforce patriarchal norms, and serve no real purpose. Let men wear dresses and women curse, it’s all good.
What a Maroon #11, Freemage #14
As problematic as those gender stereotypes and traditional notions of “masculinity” vs. “femininity” are, I’m increasingly skeptical that they’re that central to this particular issue. As I keep saying, the last thing (the TERF-bashing kind of) TRAs can be accused of is displaying too little toxic masculinity, too little aggression, not enough raging entitlement, insufficient need for dominance, or, for that matter, being too nurturing, caring, sensitive, modest, selfless etc. If the most toxic stereotypes of masculinity apply to anyone, then surely they apply to these guys. They’re like the guy shouting “Who the fuck are you looking at?!” to random strangers on the street just to give himself a pretext to beat the crap out of someone.
As Helen Joyce points out, one major source of confusion in these debates is that we keep using the word “trans” as if it meant one thing, when the difference between a “girly” boy who likes dolls and dresses (previously likely to grow up gay), a teenage girl with no prior history of gender dysphoria who comes to see herself as a boy (or non-binary) through social contagion from friends and online influencers, and a porn-crazed straight man who gets aroused by imagining himself as a woman couldn’t be more glaring. If sissies and tomboys were in charge of contemporary trans activism, it would probably rank very low on my list of concerns, but that’s not the TRA movement we have now. What we do have is in all relevant senses a men’s rights movement with all the entitlement of “Incels” and all the toxicity of the Slyme Pit crowd, and driven by the exact same motives.
Re #12
“Neuter” does apply to humans in some situations and languages. The German word for girl, “das Mädchen”, is neuter; the diminutive ending “chen” makes the noun neuter. It’s not an insult, it’s just grammar.
iknklast @# 9:
I have a motto in life which has served me well to date in many diverse situations: ‘Maximise flexibility.’ It seems that others do as well, consciously or unconsciously. Generations of English-speaking sailors have used gendered language to describle the ships they put to sea on as female. “Steady as she goes.” is a traditional and familiar command uttered by generations of captains, officers and other crew in various situations. And inclining to be a superstitious lot, they would possibly find reasons to react unfavourably to an order of ‘steady as HE goes.’ Likewise, motorists in my experience use the same rule when referring to their cars. If a car is to be ‘gendered’ it will most likely be female, as for a ship.
Similarly, I was taught from childhood to use ‘actress’ for females of the thespian persuasion, and ‘actor’ for male ones. I remember in high school we studied Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 1, largely I suspect for the scenes in the Boar’s Head Tavern involving interaction between Prince Hal and Falstaff. In the course of our studies, our teacher read out a caustic review of a performance by Beerbohm Tree as Falstaff. The reviewer (a cheeky young up-and-coming bloke by the name of George Bernard Shaw) had written something like: “If Beerbohm Tree wants to succeed in comedy, he should either be born again or play Juliet.”
The sex of the thespian board-treader who lands the Juliet part is an important factor, IMHO, and ‘actress’ is thus a term with validity. On the other hand, female scientists, biologists, chemists, mathematicians, physicists, have never been referred to as ‘scientistesses’, ‘biologistesses,’ ‘chemistesses,’ ‘mathematicianesses,’ ‘physicistesses’ or any such gendered, but awkward terms. Even though their fields were largely pioneered by men, such expressions do not add much in the way of relevant information in most situations, and I suggest this as the reason they have not been coined.
Barb @# 12 & Sackbut @# 17: Grammar was never my forte, so I’ll take your word for it.