Powerful argument from Tatchell:
Oh well then. If Peter T says so, and puts the “not” in capital letters, it has to be true. If Peter T says gender identities are a fact of life, then they must be a fact of life. If Peter T says we all have one he can’t possibly be wrong. If he says he has a gender identity then there must be a gender identity for him to have.
Ignore that little voice in your head that keeps telling you it’s all mere assertion.
Comments
15 responses to “Not ideology, no no, not at all”
What makes a gender identity male or female?
Gender identity isn’t saying “I’m male and I recognize that I’m male” though, which is what most of us do. It’s an assertion that one innately “feels” something or other about their imagined gender, hence all the various flavors of gender identity, aka various flavors of sexuality. Basically, gender identity is an ideological project aimed at queering existing sexual norms. That this objectively harms one sex more than the other is a problem when one’s actual sex matters, like in sport.
I’d be a lot more accepting of said gender ideology if it didn’t deliberately ignore the existence of actual sex, but then I suppose if it did it would vanish in a puff of smoke.
That’s a lie from start to finish. It’s simply not true that the majority of British people want the cult nonsense taught in schools; for a start, ‘gender identity’ would have to have a real-world definition, on which everyone could agree. Next, it would have to have evidence for its existence, and a body of knowledge explaining the evidence.
When I was in school, even plate tectonics was only just being talked about, in general terms only, because the evidence wasn’t yet sufficient to make it part of the core geography curriculum. And there was plenty of evidence by that time, the hypothesis had been tested and not broken, and there was no competing hypothesis with as much evidence.
We have several thousand million examples of people getting on perfectly well without a putative ‘gender identity’, and a mere handful of those who believe in it, but can’t define it, point to where it is, demonstrate it, or even agree on what it is. Schools should never have allowed themselves to be infiltrated by activists, and certainly shouldn’t have allowed them access to the curriculum or the children.
Ah yes, the naked assertion of an article taken on faith. A style of argument only the already-faithful find convincing. Reminds me of the common christian ploy to win over non-believers: quotes from the Bible, a book only the faithful want to adhere to.
Sorry, I should be clear that I’m talking about PT’s stupid assertions, and not any of the comments which appeared while I was laboriously typing.
I do agree with his first claim. The gender identity is not the ideology. The gender identity is a result of belief in the ideology in the same way that a Christian identity is a result of belief in Christian ideology.
Hmm. Not really the same way, because “gender identity” is the core of gender ideology, while the core of Christian ideology is all that god n jesus stuff.
I’d like a non-circular definition of ‘gender identity’, please. Nobody I argue with online can provide one. It’s all handwaving, Cartesian dualism, and circularity.
“What is gender identity, anyway?”
“It’s your sense of your own gender.”
“What’s gender?”
“It’s what your gender identity is based on.”
I? No. No, I do not. I don’t respect any “identities”. I don’t even know what it means to respect an identity.
I don’t have a gender identity. How does Tatchell propose to prove otherwise?
If gender is not an ideological position but rather brute fact, that means that gender isn’t socially constructed, which means that the core idea that makes trans and non-binary even a thing doesn’t work.
I… don’t think Tatchell thought this one through.
That’s probably the place where we’re supposed to insert “and then a miracle occurred.”
Bruce: I don’t think that line of critique really works. What the Woke perspective fails to acknowledge is that there are socially constructed facts. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding where social construction becomes synonymous with non-binding and non-real. Everything socially constructed can, in their view, be ignored and modified on the whim of an individual at any moment. Fortunately for everyone, this is not actually the case, otherwise society would collapse.
Gender identities are
NOTENTIRELY ideology.Fixed.
Like Screechy @#10, I don’t have a “gender identity.”. I reject “gender” out of hand as socially made-up nonsense meant to put people in boxes. People don’t belong in boxes.
Now sex, on the other hand, is a brute fact of my life. I’ve been unhappy about it, in one way or another, as far back as I can remember. Part of the unhappiness about my sex is the recognition that there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it. It’s an existential fact. It isn’t always important, and I can forget about it, briefly, from time to time. But I’m a living organism with a brain. My existence is dependent upon the ugly inconveniences of animal biology. That’s the only way I have a “me” to be aware of or to experience anything with. The messy parts are integral to my existence; I don’t get to have an existence without them. So I have to put up with the nasty bits to have any of the nice bits.