Succinct
Well this changes everything!
They do?????????? Gee, they’ve been awfully quiet about it.
Anyway thank god we have huge corporations that make horrible cookies explaining the world to us.
Tip Jar
Well this changes everything!
They do?????????? Gee, they’ve been awfully quiet about it.
Anyway thank god we have huge corporations that make horrible cookies explaining the world to us.
But OREO cookies don’t.
Things That American Women Couldn’t Do Until the 1970s.
I wonder if there is a comparable list for trans?
Ah, but they don’t… People deny validation this causing them to stop existing.
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh shiiiiiiit I had no idea!
Yes, people exist who claim to be something they are not. That doesn’t make their claims true.
A golden statue of Trump holding a Tinkerbell wand also exists. :P
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Dqd2xHxBzNA
Clever how they sandwich a gooey theory on identity inside crispy claims on existence. Transgender people are, first and foremost, people . They have attributes and attitudes, talents and tribulations, stories and standards. Because they are uncomfortable with their own sex, and see themselves as the other, they’ll have whatever traumas or prejudices accompany that. They exist. They’re real.
And that isn’t challenged by anyone who’s unpersuaded that sex is something you identify into or out of. Oreo used to have an ad campaign about the different ways to eat an Oreo, and as I recall twisting it open to separate the frosting from the cookies was considered perfectly acceptable.
And, on the other side of the cookie:
‘So do misogynist drag queens, but you aren’t allowed to notice.’
Constantly declaring that “trans people exist” seems very defensive. No one is denying that trans people exist. I think all the talk about “Transwomen are women” and “transmen are men” and “transpeople exist” denies material reality.
I do not deny that trans people exist. What I want to see is a real discussion on how to protect trans people from discrimination but also protect the rights of other vulnerable groups, especially women.
@Amy Larimer:
1.)Trans people exist = trans people are who they say they are.
2.) Trans people are who they say they are = trans people are what they say they are.
3.) Trans people are what they say they are = trans women are women.
4.) Trans women are women = there is no separate group of women who need protection from women.
5.) There is no separate group of women who need protection from women = Shut up, TERF
See how simple it is when it’s spelled out like this?
6.) Shut up, TERF=trans women are MORE women than cis women are.
(Aside: if I were designing the world, Oreo cookies and single malt Scotch would be health food. As it is, I reluctantly avoid both for the most part.)
If trans women are women, full stop, then why even have a separate category? What is the distinguishing characteristic that sets trans women apart from “cis” women? Surely any naive person coming to the debate would say it’s what’s between their legs, but we’re not supposed to focus on that, right? I know, it’s all about the gender [sic] that was “assigned” at birth, but again, on what case was that gender [sic] “assigned”? Put another way: suppose the attending doctor hallucinates a penis when the baby is born, or a tired nurse carelessly jots down an “M” in the gender [sic] field, despite the fact that the baby is, by all external appearances, a girl. If that baby then grows up to identify as a woman, is she trans?
Was the singer of The Who’s “I’m A Boy” a trans man?
“They do exist!”
I recall a “woke” woman friend telling a drag queen that he is more woman than she is. The guy does not even identify as a woman, he has a “day job” in his male identity, but he is known in his female persona in activist circles, yet he is more woman than an actual woman is. Trans activists gloss over the distinction between a drag queen and a transwoman very often, it seems to me.
Doctors don’t assign gender at birth: they note and record sex, and are pretty darn accurate.
Gender is assigned by all the friends and family who come to the hospital bearing pink frilly ballerina teddy bears for girls and teddy bears dressed like badass football players for boys. And if that doesn’t fit Who They Really Are, when baby grows up she can play sports and he can take ballet.
Which is why I put “assigned” in scare quotes, and put a [sic] after gender.
@WaM
Oh, I know. I was agreeing with you, and expanding.
Sastra,
Got it, thanks.
Sastra (quoting the whole comment, because it is perfect):
Or, as was the case in the eighties when I naïvely thought that things would continue to get better, our sons and our daughters can play rugby and take ballet.
This is beautiful, it’s almost a short story or poem of life in its brilliant brevity. Tigger’s addition is also spot on.
Oh, now you’re just playing semantics. It is perfectly clear that this is one of those instances where gender iis referring to sex, and you are just rejecting the idea that sex is randomly assigned at birth. You are dismissing offhand the possibility that, by a statistically unlikely run of astronomical odds, it just happened that purely by chance, of all the babies that have ever been born, all of those with a penis were randomly assigned as boys, all those with a vulva were randomly assigned as girls.
I mean, who hasn’t predicted ‘heads or tails’ several billion times and been correct on every single toss?
On the website ‘Crooks & Liars’, there is an exchange in the Senate recorded between Rand Paul (a person whom in usual circumstances I cordially loathe) and Dr Rachel Levine, who is being proposed for the position of Asst. Secretary for Health at the Department of Health and Human Services and who is a trans-woman. Paul is asking a serious question about young people being given puberty blockers, having their breasts or penis & testicles removed, etc, but is brushed off twice by Levine. This is described by the people at the website as Rand Paul showing himself to be a jerk. But in this case at least he is not. His is not a ‘gotcha’ question, but a serious one.
One thing that surprised me when I first started acquainting myself with right-wing thought (or what passes for it) after George W. became president. (I might say that I have learned from conservative or right-wing thinkers, notably Carl Schmitt, Oakeshott, and the late C.H. Sisson, and have some respect for some of their positions.) Not only did one have to subscribe to the usual post Hayekian political ideas, one had to subscribe to the idea that global warming didn’t really exist, that Western European social democracy was indistinguishable from full-blown Communism, etc — that is, to a cluster of ideas whose relationships and relevance to one another was not at all clear. The same seems to be true of at least a strong strand of left-wing thought: there is the same refusal to look critically at issues singly and in their own terms; instead, to be a fully paid up member of the left, you have to accept a whole incoherent bundle of beliefs about this and that, just as you have to be if you like to see yourself on the right, and so you have to accept trans dogma not on its own merits, or lack of them, but as a badge of membership. It is not a good situation.
I feel that I could argue trans people’s existence on one basis: that they only exist as a means of understanding themselves. The category they occupy of “trans” exists only as words, and is untethered to any objective fact. Therefore any new or old means of describing the same people and the same phenomenon are equally valid, hence how indigenous societies in various places categorised such people as a “third gender”, although Western societies pretty much did not, which of course begs the question of how so many white westerners raised in white bread worlds came to decide they were Two Spirit.
I can’t remember where I read it, but someone wrote that trans people fight ontological erasure so hard because it is their only existence: otherwise they’d have to realise they’re just another part of the rich variety of human existence which is still captured entirely by male and female. Of course, they would go on existing as human males and females, but without this self defined extra essence of specialness.
You can also find, on Youtube, extracts from a podcast in which Andrew Sullivan interviewed Mara Keisling, who is a trans-woman. I recommend the extract on men and women in sport (I don’t think I want to listen to the rest of it.) I have seldom or never heard such a disingenuous and evasive manner of argumentation (from Keisling, not Sullivan). It needs to be heard to be believed.
More succinctly: trans is a social construct. Therefore trans only exists insofar as we invest in this social construct.