In all their diversidee
There’s a UK organization called ELECT HER.
We work to motivate, support and equip women in all their diversity to stand for political office in Britain.
Good stuff.
Do you include trans women in your work?
Yes. We are a fully inclusive organisation. All women are welcome to register to access our activities. We acknowledge that non-binary people do not fit into the binary categories of women and men, but we recognise that some non-binary people’s experiences or identities intersect with women’s and if you feel you would benefit from accessing a women-centred space, we want to welcome you.
Oh. So it’s not for women in all their diversity, it’s for women and men who call themselves women.
Why don’t you support men?
There are many barriers faced by women who are politically active that are not faced by men – we exist to change this. We adhere to our belief that our workshops are best delivered as women-only spaces where women can come together to share, collaborate, and support one another.
Except that they’re not women-only spaces, because you include men who claim to be women and people who claim to be “non-binary.”
The same rude joke told over and over and over…
A woman in my life who is “trans-inclusive” was telling me about how it feels to have men creeping on her, and that a man could never understand how a woman feels about anything. So, I asked her how a man can “feel like a woman” and she said “You know I don’t like to talk about that with you.”
And women who refuse to acknowledge they are women. In all this inclusiveness, women get lost.
Gah. How a woman can both say “a man could never understand how a woman feels about anything” and be “trans-inclusive” is beyond me. Light years beyond me.
TWAW comes to the rescue again…
Mike, compartmentalisation is a common thought blockage for people. That’s a really good example. Another was a classmate of mine back when I was studying chemistry a lifetime ago. Wendy [not her real name] was top of the class – by miles. She was also a member of a very fundamentalist christian sect that was affiliated to some group in the US that was itself considered way out there. She was telling me one day about an upcoming visit from the leader of this US sect and how he would be giving them the proof that the earth was only ~4000 years old. We’d just recently done a unit on radioactive decay and how it could be used for dating purposes. Wendy, as usual had aced it. I asked how she reconciled the two and she stared at me, initially blankly, and then with a look of panic. We barely spoke again for the next two years. Another example. Back during Gulf War II a friend’s US wife was extolling how exceptional and good the US was. I made a fairly innocuous comment about dubious US involvement in foreign wars. She just said ‘I can’t be having this conversation’ and walked away. We all have blindspots, the real trick is can we face them when it’s pointed out. Most people can’t.
Yeah, 4000 years. Doesn’t this illustrate the limits of natural thought and memory? I mean we can’t solidly think of anything as immense as billions of years in anything other than abstract terms. You can say, “Oh, a car costs 30,000 dollars” which is a number we can relate to, so four thousand doesn’t sound so outrageous. Simple terms are simple, and therfore easy to understand. But dollars are not years. If you have lived many decades like I have, you can imagine 100 or 200 years ago, or what it was like 50 years ago — I have some keen recollections of the 70s, but 2000 years? A million? Elon has billions of dollars and we can count it, we have an idea of the purchasing power, the concreteness of it, but time requires a very different kind of accounting. I think the Christian accounting of time promotes a simplistic worldview that is condecending to people’s capacity for imagination. In fact, the whole enterprise of religion in general is a failure of imagination.
So in conclusion, TWAW means that there are men who want desperately to conform to female stereotypes — and aren’t female stereotypes the very thing that feminism opposes? So it’s also a major failure of imagination.
twiliter, not just money or time, either. The idea of a population that is over 8 billion was something my students never wrapped their mind around. Population to them was the city of 25,000 we lived in; the rest was sort of ‘out there’, like the stars. I think when numbers are too big for us to handle, we just shove a lot of them off into the ozone, and deal only with the things we see in our immediate environment. We know about Elon’s billions, but at the same time, money is what we deal with in our checkbook; it’s just Elon has more zeros in his.
Once things get into six figures, it seems people shut down.
Yes exactly, it’s hard to grasp the absractness of it (unless yo’re a math genius of course, of which I am not). It’s very true that we deal with knowns, and are susceptible to things explained on those terms, which make us vulnerable and manipulable, lest we guard ourselves against it. Once we are bombarded with metaphysical hype and rhetoric, it becomes so easy to get sucked in. Abstract concepts require mental effort that a lot of people don’t have the energy or patience for
Of course if you take the TWAW claim seriously, there is no conflict between the idea that men cannot know how a woman feels about anything and the idea that, say, ”India” Willoughby, ”Veronica” Ivy, ”Lia” Thomas, or Eddie Izzard can. These are all women and always have been, so what’s the problem?
Once again, rather than substituting the Genderspeak meanings of ”man”, ”woman” etc. for the standard English ones (easily dismissed as strawmanning, misrepresentations, not ”getting it” etc. They’re not taking about ”men”, remember. They’re talking about a kind of ”women”), I wish ”gender critical” people would do a much better job of taking the TRAs at their word and pointing out the glaring internal problems of Gender Ideology itself, e.g.
What did we ever need words like “man” and “woman” for in the first place?
If words like “man” and “woman” don’t say anything about a person’s physical traits, what do they say anything about?
Exactly what are you saying about a person by calling her a “woman”?
Exactly how does a person have to think / feel / identify / “present” to qualify as a “woman”?
What test can we do to make sure only those people who really do think / feel / identify / “present” in the ways required are allowed into “women’s” sports, toilets, showers, changing rooms, domestic abuse and rape shelters, jails etc.?
Which toilets, showers, changing rooms etc. are those of us who don’t think / feel / identify / “present” in any of the ways required to qualify as either “men” or “women” allowed to use?
When you say you “know yourself to be a ‘woman’”, how can you be sure that what you know yourself to be is the same as what other people who call themselves by the same name know themselves to be if the only thing that can be said about whatever it is you’re all talking about is that it’s called “woman”?
How can talking about a person’s sex be “misgendering” if sex and gender are completely separate things?
Why would anyone need any surgery or hormone therapy to make their body “align” with their “gender identity” if bodies are completely irrelevant to gender, and no body type is any more or less “aligned” with being a “woman” than any other?
Etc. etc.
It’s endless infinite etcetera etcetera isn’t it.
Re: visualizing billions.
I find the metric system helpful.
Think about meter. There are 1000 mm in a meter.
There are 1 million square mm in a square meter.
There are 1 billion cubic mm in a cubic meter.
So to fill a cubic meter box with sand grains each about 1 mm across would take 1 billion sand grains.
To get to a trillion sand grains make a cube 10 m on a edge & fill that with sand grains.
Jim Baerg, I did something similar, but asked them where they were a billion seconds ago. They usually would say something like ‘in this class’. ‘sleeping’, or ‘having lunch’. Once in a while there would be a savvy student (or one that was good at guessing) who would say ‘I wasn’t born yet.’ It blew their minds to realize that something as short as a second would require more than 31 years to get to a billion.
This is a point I’ve made to trans advocates and men who imagine they are women. It does as much good as anything else, which is to say, no good at all. They ‘just know’, and will often follow by ‘just like you ‘just know’.
Except I don’t just know. My body is shaped like a woman, I have the reproductive structure of a woman, and I once pushed a baby out of my body. It isn’t about a feeling I have; it’s about reality. I am a woman, I don’t ‘just know’ I am a woman. It’s written not only in my DNA but in my morphology.