Really BASIC
How did we get here?
How did we get to a place where grown-ass adults in government are playing Let’s Pretend and forcing everyone else to play Let’s Pretend too?
It’s not insulting to say that men are not women.
“To be quite frank I think we just need to be more inclusive and more understanding of trans women and the discrimination they face, and the hostility,” she says passionately.
How about the hostility women face for not believing that men are women? Why does her face not contort in anguish about them?
“I just want to see them included and made to feel comfortable and welcome.”
“But,” Tom Swarbrick asks, “why would you include a biological man in a women’s institute?”
“Well I think that that’s a really basic and to be quite frank insulting way to regard trans women, to keep harping back to calling them biological men, and I think it’s really really discriminat’ry and really toxic to try to break everything down to people’s body parts.”
And this is a Tory. The poison is everywhere.
I cannot stand that slang term “basic”.
Dictionary dot com defines “basic” as:
It’s “unoriginal”, “unexceptional”, and “mainstream” to use a correct word to refer to a person’s sex? No kidding. It’s standard English, used so that people can understand it. We have to be “original” in our terminology?
You can see from the context in the definition, and from other references, that “basic” is primarily applied to women. This Buzzfeed article claims that “basic” is a shortened form of “basic bitch”, and that the use of the term betrays a class anxiety. Must distance oneself from those lower-class women. Can’t even use English that they might understand, apparently.
It could be worse; I’m convinced that if the T didn’t parasitize the gay rights movement it would be Republicans pushing it… Fits neatly into the “health freedom” movement mold and Iran’s position solves their gay and GNC youth problem neatly…
@Blood Knight;
It also fits neatly into the idea that men & women have different gendered souls, so that God is a man despite fitting into no biological reproductive class. The disinclination to describe what “feeling like a woman” entails hurts the case for trans identities, but the liberals are squeamish about saying sexist things. A religious conservative would have no such hindrance.
Speaking of inclusion and exclusion, I’m still waiting for a TRA to provide an answer to the question, “What objective characteristic, exactly, does a trans woman possess that excludes them from being categorized as a man?”
Of course, I’ll never get an answer because there is no reasonable response to that question other than, “There aren’t any.”
One of the many simultaneously amusing and frustrating aspects of this contrary ideology is that there are men all over Twitter telling women that only men can be transwomen. Any woman who describes herself as ‘AFAB transwoman’ gets piled on by men, often pretending to be women themselves, telling her that there is no such thing; and yet they are, at the same time, claiming that ‘transwomen are women’.
It’s gobbledegook. No wonder they don’t want to debate.
Last year, one female-impersonating bloke in NZ actually gave it a go* – he was trying to explain why Jordan Peterson was too dangerous to be allowed in – and got roundly roasted by the same interviewer who more recently recognised what was happening to Kellie-Jay Keen was extremely unfair, and gave her supporters a platform.
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8dMBGkjyG4
Sackbut: I normally wouldn’t quibble, but I think the distinction is potentially relevant. It’s primarily middle class women who are the prototype for what constitutes “basic”, more specifically white, middle class women. It’s relevant in that it’s consistent with the wider pattern of category guilt or shame. Guilt about one’s race and class; shame about one’s sex.
And of course, these sentiments and the associated slang play right into the hands of Queer Theory and its relentless semantic nihilism.
I missed that Nokes was using the word that way. I was a bit puzzled about how she was using it.
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