To the small group of cis women
Another “expert” lecturing us from a great height:
It never was. There was never a mythic world where “womanhood” was not “afforded to” people (or “bodies” but how can a “body” be “wealthy”?) who were white or rich or the rest of it to the exclusion of others. That’s just blather.
Mind you, it is true that bullies use that as one way to bully women, saying “you’re too ugly/fat/skinny/butch/black” to be female, but that doesn’t mean it was what all people really thought about women.
And of course it has nothing to do with saying that men are not women. It’s not “oppressive” to say that men are not women and vice versa, it’s just what the words mean.
I am amused by “The online trend of anti-trans hysteria is new.” It strikes me as a bit of projection. Actual men and actual women have always been around. What’s new is this bizarre cult of transgenderists. And most people in the world today rarely spare a thought for trans people, who have a bigger presence online because transgenderism is all about presentation, and social media is the optimal platform for such pretense.
Really? Transwomen have already seamlessly incorporated themselves into women-only spaces for years and years, with no one being the wiser, and no problems?
Why did they bother to tell us?
As with the “Otherkin” and the growing modern version of the American Nazi movement and all sorts of weird fetishes and beliefs and mythologies, so much of the modern discussion is enabled, even created by the internet.
Sastra, I guess what they mean is that men have been women for a long time, and we didn’t know or care. The problem with that is, even if true, they didn’t insert themselves into women’s spaces, demand we use “appropriate” pronouns or scream about literal violence.
And they do have a bad habit of claiming as trans any woman who ever dressed in men’s clothes or took a man’s name in order to be allowed to have a career.
But … All lives do matter. That is, in fact, the reason it is important to affirm that black lives matter. It’s the same reason it was (and is) important to say, “Stop hitting your wives.” Affirming the narrower calls attention to where people are violating the wider. This whole notion of vilifying the statement of the wider precept is utterly misguided and insidiously dangerous—and vice versa.
It strikes me that those who argue, as this Sally Rugg does, about “womanhood” and “real women” misunderstand language and logic in the same way as those who will only say one of “all” or “black” lives matter.
I’d argue that “no lives matter”, but that’s why the manufacturing the convenient lie that black lives do matter is for the best. People already believe the lie that “white lives matter” even if they never say it, or at least “rich lives matter”… gotta construct a better story for people to believe in.
A few years back, in the 1950s to be more precise, Sydney had a very well known and successful radio shock-jock by the name of Eric Baume. He was deliberately contrroversial, and his personal motto was ‘speak well of my name, speak ill of my name, but speak my name’ (My father knew him personally.)
Cut to today. This tiny, tiny minority of men with male sexual apparatus who wish they were women with womens’ sexual apparatus have got Baume’s trick down pat: Generate a ‘controversy’ and then maintain it. Anything controversial will do.
In this, they follow those who pioneered ‘creation science’ and ‘intelligent design theory’ in the teaching of biology to the youth.
There are two sexes, for reasons of chromosomes, and no matter how much some people wish it was all different. Two sexes; and as Hamlet said, “The rest is bullshit.”
(I’m pretty sure that was what the Bard had him say.)
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https://www.natlawreview.com/article/alternative-facts-classroom-creationist-educational-policy-and-trump-administration
I have some questions about reproduction in parts of the world without white people…
Catwhisperer: A few years ago, I read a mediocre fantasy book with a rather ridiculous society inhabiting one of its fictional nations. This society never learned that males impregnate females. How? They were all bisexual, polyamorous types who never kept any records and treated sex as something so trivial that asking them whom they had sex with two days ago would be like asking you how many times you went to the bathroom two days ago.
I suppose this is what the people who espouse the idea that sexual dimorphism is a product of white supremacy imagine the rest of the world was like before white Europeans came around and forced out other ways of knowing.
Nullius, that idea was also part of Jean Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear, the idea that Neandertal societies didn’t know what caused babies; even the early Homo Sap societies were unaware. It is a ludicrous idea. and insulting to early societies, because it posits them as “happy children” who can’t science like the rest of us.
I think I read Clan of the Cave Bear at some point, but I can’t remember for sure.
Seriously, though. Never mind being unable to science. It’s being unable to notice and to learn at all. It’s not just insulting to early societies, it is, as you say, ludicrous in that no such society would be able to survive. One has to notice that proximity to the orange things with black stripes is correlated with screaming and disappearance, and then learn not to go near them. One has to notice that the people who eat the red berries stop breathing the next day, and then learn not to eat them. Existence is noticing and learning, and human existence is noticing, learning, and passing on to others what has been noticed and learned.
Sometimes when doing something trivial, I’m struck by how much knowledge our species has acquired and retained—even and perhaps especially the pre-scientific sort. What we managed to learn before we understood causation and probability and gravity and germs and and and and and … To me, that’s the most insulting thing: the denigration, rejection, and annihilation of our species’ inheritance. We are supported by the suffering struggles of untold generations. Thinking about species-level history always puts me in a mythic frame of mind:
“Lo, there do I see my father. Lo, there do I see my mother and my sisters and my brothers. Lo, there do I see the line of my people—back to the beginning. Lo, they do call to me. They bid me take my place among them in the halls of Valhalla, where the brave may live forever.”
Catwhisperer @ 8 – On the ABC program “Philosopher’s Zone”, an interviewee recently relayed that Immanuel Kant believed that the indigenous people of the Americas spoke only rarely and, in relation to your comment, did not actually breed. Where they all came from remains a mystery.
Nullius, that is one of the things that always strikes me. I mean, our ancestors managed to invent bread without necessarily knowing what yeast actually was. They figured out that if you put certain things together, it made cake. They created wheat and corn (maize) without knowing about hox genes and hedgehog genes and all the operons. They learned to build houses without geometry. They were as smart as we are, even if there was information that wasn’t available. And it was because they had done all those things that later humans were free to discover the taxonomic classification of yeast, the theory of genetics, geometry, and even go to the moon.
It is just plain insulting to pretend they didn’t notice there were two different categories of people, one that produced sperm and the other eggs, and that it was only when these two categories of people got together did babies come. There are too many mating rituals and fertility goddesses to suggest they didn’t know what sexual dimorphism was.
“Feminism rejects oppressive definitions of women.”
No, it rejects oppressive treatment of women and girls (==> female humans).
“Over history, ideas of who is a Real Woman/who is not has been weaponised to justify slavery, forced sterilisation, rape, genocide.”
I don’t even understand what this is supposed to mean.
I do; it’s supposed to mean “I’m one of the cool kids.”
I consider my questions answered, albeit in a way that makes me screw up my face in bafflement and say things like “but – what do they – how is – uuh…?” but I don’t think that can be helped. Can’t explain nonsense.