Saying the word “woman”
Let’s look at the Pregnant People bit.
Emma Barnett: There are guests who come on this show who talk about “pregnant people.” What should I do, live in the moment – should I get them to clarify themselves because only biological women can be pregnant?
Long, telling pause
Rhodri Talfan Davies: Well, “pregnant people” isn’t inaccurate, it’s clearly one way of framing the statement
Me, interrupting: Now wait just a damn minute. Accuracy isn’t the only relevant quality here, and anyway it could be called inaccurate in some senses. It’s not the usual, familiar, standard, unsurprising way of saying it. Don’t go pretending not to know that. And because it’s not the standard way of saying it, and because the BBC is a news organization (and news organizations mostly don’t say things in eccentric ways), and because it drops the word that refers to the subordinated (and childbearing) half of humanity, and because it pisses off a hell of a lot of women, it is a highly tendentious “way of framing it.” His tone of voice is all “as you know perfectly well, why are you even mentioning this” but he’s the one who is pretending not to know what he does know perfectly well. The BBC doesn’t normally say “people” when it means “women” because in general that would be inaccurate from a reporting point of view.
And this move to erase women whenever the word “pregnant” appears is beyond inaccurate, it’s intensely insulting and misogynist. So don’t give us that “one way of framing” shit.
Emma Barnett comes back with yes but I’m asking you, as representing the BBC, what is the BBC’s line on that?
Davies: Forgive me, you’re asking me, in an instant, on a live radio programme, to make complex –
All of which I tell you so that you’ll understand this commentary.
“Pregnant mammals” isn’t inaccurate either. Or why not just “pregnant entities,” for all those who identify as chairs?
Hey, what if I identify as a non-entity?
It’s all just too damn specific. What’s wrong with “phenomenon possessing a quality”?
As you quoted, Barnett specifically framed her question as “What should I do, live in the moment…” That’s not an unreasonable hypothetical; as an on-air journalist, she has to deal with issues like that as they come up, and if she gets it “wrong,” she is potentially in trouble with her employer. And yet Davies, who I gather is supposed to be advising BBC employees on these issues, professes to be incapable of making such an assessment on the spot. Well, what the hell are people like Barnett supposed to do? And what the hell are people like Davies for?
“CRT is not taught in K-12 schools” (true)
Same deal: We *shan’t* allow you to talk about what is real and will play word games to make that impossible.
Turtles all the way down.
The reluctance/inability to define “woman” feels very familiar to me. Back in my IRC days the conservative theists who ventured into religious debate chat rooms always promptly trotted out their definition of God when asked (or even unprompted!) It was filled with holes and contradictions— o those Omnis — but we all had at least a reasonable idea of where they were coming from.
Not so the liberal theists. “God” wasn’t a Being, it was Being but not in the sense that it had any positive characteristics, mind you. We can only say what God isn’t (“it’s not what YOU think it is”) or maybe we’ll describe it so it sounds like atheism on poetry. The fact that It couldn’t be articulated was a feature, because what use is a God that humans find comprehensible? Or that atheists can critically analyze and find wanting?
Not quite like TRAs and their inability to speak with clarity on the topic, but reminiscent.
Karen Armstrong-Madeleine Bunting type of thing. They drove me nuts.
I first encountered apophatic Christianity in the old Friendly Atheist forum. A religious member of the forum would declare what God isn’t, and chastise others for daring to restrict God in some manner. It was irritating. We’ve had discussions here where some of the TRA definitions or descriptions of trans-ness struck me similarly as a sort of apophatic transgenderism.
“Hey, what if I identify as a non-entity?”
A woman, you mean?
We used to talk about apophatic Christianity a lot in the old days, too.
New apophatic just like the old apophatic.
Oooh, I like that one! This, for a time, is what my own position probably sounded like.
Apoplectic Christianity is a big thing too. Come to think of it, so is apoplectic trans ideology.
That is the character of Christianity, isn’t it? A curious amalgam of a supposedly historical event (the incarnation) with philosophy filched from the Greeks. And they really do not fit together. The first (the incarnation) is the event that is absolutely central – C.S. Lewis was right in that, at least. The via negativa ends in a large ‘?’. I prefer the God presented in the Book of Job, bullying & furious.
#8 Sackbut
I don’t suppose you recall the name of that person as Heddle…? He peddled basically what you describe on one of those blogs, possibly Dispatches, some years ago.
Sastra #6
Indeed. At least you will never be caught saying anything wrong if you haven’t said anything at all.
To be fair, asking a question live and wanting an instant answer is not fair. “The questions must be pre-submitted to the Committee in triplicate for inclusion in a tape-delayed broadcast with me as the final editor in case I get tripped up on my inability to provide a firm answer.”
“Apophatic” brings back flashbacks to the days when at least the atheists had the idea that we were all on the same page when it came to skepticism; but then so many things happened to bring out issues that we daren’t be skeptical about including “lived experience.” My lived experience of the ecstasy of speaking in tongues, which turned out to be the same ecstasy of dancing in a wiccan drawing down circle, is what led me to atheism. Now, lived experience is given the same weight as a peer-reviewed study that’s been replicated (unless it’s the lived experience of lesbians. Then we need to have a peer-reviewed study that’s been replicated before it can be mentioned by the BBC.)