Necessary to secure fairness
Do what now?
Hormone-history categories???
We’re right back with “folks with vulvas” but even more ludicrous. Somehow it’s radioactive to call male people “men” and “boys” but it’s fine to call them…what…testosterone-history-havers? That’s an improvement how exactly?
Maybe this is all a way to deal with the approaching catastrophe. Never mind the metaphorical comet, just lose yourself in fantasies of being the other sex, a bird, a castle, the North Sea, chocolate, the library at Alexandria, music, a sunset, drunk, the sky…
Could just go crazy and make them categories defined by sex, not gender?
Yes several people made that point.
But we lost that ability decades ago, when “s*x” became a dirty word. So it got replaced with “gender”, and that plays right into the hands of people like Alice Dreger, Ph.D., M.A., B.A.
It must take some kind of severe overeducation to completely forget what males and females are. The old ‘too much university, not enough preschool’ problem? Sacrificing common sense for the sake of what, appeasing delusional feelz? Sheesh.
Getting plenty of attention though, isn’t she. :P
“All I ask is that you play along with my language game”. Sheesh. :P
twiliter, I don’t think it’s too much education. I actually have more degrees than she has, and I can tell the difference. I suspect it has a lot to do with what your degrees are in, your commitment to critical thinking, and how much you crave being accepted by the younger generation. I suspect it also has to do with that whole idea of oppressed minorities and the desire to stand for social justice.
And the straining of the language is because they can’t make the ideology coherent, so they torture the language into incoherence to accommodate their own cognitive dissonance.
I suspect Dreger is perfectly able to tell a woman from a man in most cases, even with people she’s meeting for the first time. She has to know that. So instead, change the language so it doesn’t mean what it did before (or anything at all, really).
Dreger thinks intersex & transgender “suffer from opposite problems for the same reason.” While DSD infants were given “normalizing” drugs and surgeries they don’t want or need, trans people are denied the drugs and surgery they DO want or need.
Her laudable experience with intersex activism seems to have warped her understanding AND attitude. First, that we can have control over sex. And second, that the individual has the first right to CHOOSE.
Nature doesn’t seem to be much of a factor in that little psychodrama.
ikn, you’re right of course, education should be an ongoing thing. She’s obviously agenda driven. As far as critical thinking goes, I don’t think a PhD should be awarded without it. It irritates me to see otherwise intelligent people go in for the trans ideology.
Agreed. I don’t actually think a bachelor’s degree should be awarded without at least some ability to think critically. Our educational systems are at war with each other. While the liberal arts go down the rabbit hole of woo thinking, the science departments try to promote critical thinking, but I can testify that what has come in that is appealing (the woo thinking) can override the critical thinking every time. My students will get it while they’re sitting in the room with me, then it disappears as soon as they get out their phone on the way out of class and interact with the rest of the internet.
Critical thinking isn’t valued in many circles anymore, though a lot of people give lip service to valuing it.
A man can certainly say that he’s a transwoman. It’s when that gets elided into the claim that transwomen are women that sex as a practical matter becomes an issue. A male who wants to have offspring isn’t going to have them with a transwoman no matter how much they may insist they’re female. Gender identity is not the same thing as sex when it comes to reproduction, and I would hope Dreger knows that you can’t fool Mother Nature that way.
Having just finished one of her books on critical thinking, the scientific method, and how social justice activism must be based on science and a willingness to follow the evidence wherever it may go — even if it disproves your pet theory — imo there’s nothing wrong with Dreger’s understanding or capacity for critical thinking. She practically obsesses over the possibility that she could be wrong. I would probably even pick her to teach a course in Critical Thinking.
That doesn’t make her immune to error. Obviously. I think she’s done a “This … is like THAT “ for trans & intersex. Reading her personal history, I think I see where she slipped into social justice when she should have lingered more on the science part, but, of course, I could be wrong.
I wonder what it would take to change her mind. She rejects the whole “innate gender identity” narrative. At one point, she talks about scientific evidence in brain studies for transgenderism and dismisses it as inadequate. As I recall, she asserts that they don’t NEED no stinkin’ evidence because THIS IS WHAT MAKES THEM HAPPY. Case closed. Mind shut. She’s working from the moral imperative “maximize happiness.”
Women who object are compared with people without insight wanting to control others.
Hormone history categories?
Nope. We don’t name categories in accordance with what theistic religions have to say about them, and the same ought hold true with respect to non-theistic religions; e.g., genderism or Scientology.
@Sastra: The “they don’t need evidence” thing is just like religious belief that claims only faith as justification. If someone says he or she believes because of faith, logic doesn’t enter into it. It’s untouchable, as the truth of the matter is irrelevant. So yeah, it works. However, it works only as long as (a) no evidentiary justification is offered, (b) it actually does make them happy, or rather increases their well being, and (c) does not impose on others, either conceptually or materially. Cross any one of those three lines, and logic gets its turn at the plate.
Sastra@11
Thanks for that, very interesting. I would add that people compartmentalize all the time. Even people adept at critical thinking will fail to apply it in certain cases.
Surely she can see that “maximize happiness” leads to conflicts and problems? That it might make someone happy to be treated as a six-year-old, but he won’t fit in child-size clothing and won’t get better with child-size doses of medicine? That someone might be happy to be called a woman, but might still threaten women in what’s supposed to be a single-sex space? Don’t those women have an opportunity to “maximize happiness”? That’s probably my biggest complaint against trans activists, that they simply do not care about women, it’s all about what makes the trans people happy, damn everybody else.
From the book:
Dreger believes
1.) there’s no such thing as an innate gender identity or “being in the wrong body”
2.) “trans kids” will probably just grow up to be gay if left alone
3.) Older transwomen are AGP, which is fine
4.) drastic experimental procedures for cosmetic reasons to fit gender stereotypes are wrong
She also believes
1.) people should be whatever gender makes them comfortable
2.) teens & adults should find it easy to get whatever gender-affirming medical care they want
3.) feminists who shun transgender women are “feminists”
4.) the medical establishment wants the right to determine people’s sex
Interesting woman.
Oh, one more thing. Alice Dreger also believes that transgenderism is a culturally-bound condition which wouldn’t exist if our society was more accepting of gender nonconformity, esp in children.
Very interesting.
Wow, I feel she is so, so close, but somehow in the middle there makes an illogical jump to the side and then back.
@Rob,
I think she’s heavily influenced by her time and effort spent trying to prevent doctors and parents from trying to “fix” babies and children with ambiguous genitalia or other conditions in order to make them look like one sex or the other. One’s sex isn’t necessarily one or the other, she argued. Leave them be. It wasn’t for her a matter of identity, but of comfort and happiness. She knew and worked with many people with DSDs who resented operations which caused them suffering. A good cause.
This work, and her later investigation into the persecution of Bailey, brought her into close contact with transgender people, some of whom became good friends. It was by getting to know them, she wrote, that she was really able to see and understand how important transition was, how changing sex/gender was vital to their well-being and comfort. I think she believes that the same people who wanted to cut off a little girl’s clitoris because it was “too long” are equally opposed to transwomen in the Woman’s Room: scared of difference and controlling. But again, once you get to know them, you can’t think of them as anything but women.
Her skin in the game then is probably not wanting to “betray” her friends. In her book she interviews academics, scientists, and researchers who told her that what hurt the most when their life and reputations were being unfairly dragged through the dirt and stamped on was when colleagues or professional organizations which should have been on their side, defending them, instead either stayed silent or, worse, joined in.She wouldn’t want to become like that. Again, good cause.
The problem though is that trans isn’t like gay or intersex, where people are prejudiced and uncomfortable primarily because they think they’re odd or unnatural. With gay and intersex, getting to know the Outsider personally made you realize that they weren’t so different, and just wanted to live their lives with the same dignity and acceptance as anyone else. They were “normal.” If you just look at the transgender issue in those same terms, it’s perfectly reasonable to be in favor of self-ID even if you do recognize that they’re men and women who are victims of circumstances, not birth and identity.
But it’s not perfectly reasonable to ignore the larger picture, which involves making drastic and sweeping assumptions and changes regarding sex, gender, science, and feminism. Those don’t go away because your friend Jessica really just seems like another woman to you. She is not seeing the forest for the trees.