A star is born
“For all the hypersensitive whiny little cis women”
Summing up – “You know because womanhood, it doesn’t really have a meaning – you know it’s kind of what you want it to mean – it’s a social construct – I know that’s complicated for y’all”
[unrelated to this post]
Have all y’all seen this opinion piece at WaPo?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/05/01/transgender-biology-brain-science-freedom/
It’s quite amazing that stuff like this gets published by any major news outlet.
you know…it really is a nasty religion. the smugness. the absolute certainty. the faith in things is baden. the vagueness.
Only I much prefer the people at my favorite local coffee shop. Largely evangelicals. To these lefty activists.
is baden?
Classic Humpty Dumpty. Answered her own question. Anyone can play that game.
Smugness. That’s exactly it. It’s the same thing i experience with my students as they endeavor to explain why they, a youth just out of high school, can explain how things really happened to those older folks who got an education, apparently without learning anything. They, a kid who can’t write a coherent sentence, are going to give me my comeuppance, put me in my place. by informing me how the world really came into being. Or the student who stood, hands on his hips, and asked how I dared teach that the world is about 4.5 billion years old. Or the one who told me, no, he wasn’t a member of a church, because he knew they were all wrong. By the age of eighteen, he figured out what others spend their lives trying to figure out, and will smugly share his insights with the older generation who haven’t learned much in all their years.
My cat is also smug; I don’t mind that, because I came to grips with the reality that she really is superior to me, a mere human.
Okay, watched the video. She really is smug, isn’t she? She did a good job of defining what a woman is, though, even though she brought forward stupid questions to explain why that wasn’t what a woman was, or why we couldn’t know we were a woman through those things.
No one has answered the question in a way that makes sense to her, because her beliefs have already told her that womanhood includes men, as long as they say they are women. No other answer will “make sense” to her, because she has traded sense for nonsense.
John Reed – I have now. Thanks for the tip.
She really is immensely smug. I hate smug. Give me sputtering awkward indignation over smugness every day.
Who is Jennifer Finney Boylan?
S/he writes:
What does s/he mean, “never at ease with notr being female”? Is s/he not actually female? I.e., is s/he a trans identified male? If so, why does he get to say what a woman is? If she IS female, then WTF is she talking about, “never at ease with not being female”?
I don’t get it.
Thoughts going through my head, listening to this frenetic “Gish Gallop” of a rant:
She can’t distinguish between “what is a woman” and “how do you tell if someone is a woman” (and also “how do I personally know if I am a woman”). She appears to think that, if there is no single characteristic that can be used to identify all members of the class “women”, the class “women” doesn’t exist.
Definitely smug, too. And probably “hypersensitive” and “whiny”.
adult +
human +
female = woman
No matter how many times we give them the definition of what a woman is, they act like we never did it at all.
It’s a common argument, but it doesn’t do the job they think it does. They want it to demonstrate the malleability of the concept “woman”, but it doesn’t. It’s either a sophomoric Sorites argument that shows nothing, and ironically, it actually requires assuming the concept’s fixedness.
A Sorites argument is one that purports to break the definition of a term by proving that it applies always, never, or at the same time as an otherwise incompatible term. Classic examples are heaps, colors, beardedness, baldness, and approximates, but really it can be done for an infinite number of concepts.
The baldness Sorites works like this:
(i) Adding a hair to a bald pate yields a bald pate. (ii) S is bald. (iii) S has no hair on his head. [Pedantically making the inductive base case explicit.] (iv) If S grows one additional hair, S is still bald. (iv) Continuing inductively, S is bald even with an arbitrarily large amount of hair. (v) There's no such thing as a full head of hair. (vi) We then turn around and go in the opposite direction, removing hairs one at a time from a full head of hair until there are no hairs left, proving that everyone has a full head of hair. (vii) Therefore baldness is a meaningless concept.Now of course, baldness is not a meaningless concept, so there must be something wrong with the argument, but what? Both the deduction and induction already valid, so the problem must lie in the premises. The traditional analysis is that premise i is an unsound assumption. Its intuitive appeal relies on our tendency to think prototypically. When we hear the rule, we think of adding a hair to an unambiguously bald man. The trick here is that the argument is specifically about the ambiguous.The same structure applies to other concepts. As long as you can formulate a rule that minimizes difference and can be iteratively repeated, you can demonstrate that a word or concept is vacuous. Make a red thing almost imperceptibly less red and more blue, and it’s still red; so every shade from red and blue (inclusively) is red; and and every shade from blue to red is blue; therefore red and blue are vacuous. Take a grain of sand from a heap, and there’s still a heap. Taking a whisker from a beard leaves a beard. Adding or removing a nanosecond to a noonish time leaves a noonish time. It’s a trivially easy argument structure to master. It’s also considered a bad one.
That’s really all this childish rhetoric is.
(i) S is a woman. (ii) If S is deficient in one biological consequent of female development], then she is still a woman. (iii) Continued inductively, If S completely lacks every biological consequent of female development, then S is still a woman. (iv) Therefore, womanhood is an empty concept. (v) Therefore, we can use the word "woman" just whenever.Notice that the assumption in premise ii is, just like the analogous assumption in every other Sorites argument, an assumption of immutability. Uh oh, Spaghetti-Os! From premises i & ii, we can validly infer that no amount of “gender assuming care” can make S a man. That’s a rather spectacular own-goal, I think. It inescapably severs transition from reality.
Further, the whole purpose of a Sorites argument is to show either that something doesn’t exist or that two things don’t differ. So the Genderist argument here is either (A) that women don’t exist (because the term is vacuous), or (B) that there’s no difference between man and woman. In either case, the epistemic, ontological, and even phenomenological underpinnings of the entire Genderist framework fall apart. If there’s no difference, then trans people’s perceptions and experiences do not correspond to reality. If women don’t exist meaningfully, then there’s necessarily no meaning in the claim to be a woman.
How is it even possible to fail so hard that you can even use a fallacious argument and still contradict your own desired conclusion?
Sheesh, is she trans? Because I didn’t think you could be such a smug prick without actually having a prick (sorry, girlprick).