Mind-blowing revelation ahead:
Screaming at reality for not conforming to the diagrams and categories you learned when you were ten is not *pro-science*…okay?
— M. A. Melby (@MAMelby) July 10, 2017
-Shiv
Against the Grain
How many intersections can you cram in one feminist?
I learned Pluto was a planet and that there were big long-necked dinosaurs called “brontosaurus” and that the US was winning a war in Vietnam and that supply-side economics worked and a whole buncha stuff.
I also learned that gender is more complicated than your DNA or what’s between your legs.
None of those changes bothered me as much as learning the The Monkees were not really musicians. I hated them but I thought they could at least play their shit. It’s crazy what learning experiences one life can encompass!
The folks who acknowledge that trans ppl exist are not the science-deniers
Who doesn’t acknowledge the existence of trans people?
@Marcus Ranum
#1
I also learned that gender is more complicated than your DNA or what’s between your legs.
Radfems believe that gender is a tool of patriarchal oppression of women. Is that complicated enough?
colinday @ # 2 – Alex Jones: Being transgender a ‘mental illness’:
@Pierce Butler
#4
But he is saying that there are trans people.
Perhaps M. A. Melby meant respect the existence of trans people?
colinday @ # 5 – No, Jones claims people who assert transgenderedness are delusional.
He concedes only the existence of what he calls “crazy” people.
His standards for the use of that adjective flex >360° daily, perhaps even hourly.
And he has millions of followers, including a president now playing golf in New Jersey.
Would he claim that people who accept Islam are delusional so there’s no such people as Muslims?
colinday @ # 8 – Quite possibly, though the next day he’d say something much the opposite.
Back to the original point: we have a large segment of the US population (and no doubt smaller proportions elsewhere) quite happy to deny reality whenever anyone they see as any sort of liberal/leftist asserts it, or one of their own authority figures tells them to.
This makes life much more difficult for the wide spectrum of people we call “transgender”, among others.
@colinday says
Probably meant something like “the existence of people who actually are transgender: they actually are the gender they say they are rather than the one assigned to them at birth etc.” which is not the same as just “the existence of people who call themselves trans: they claim to be the gender they say they are rather than the one assigned to them at birth etc.”. Difference between “a claim exists” and “what is claimed to exist actually exists as claimed”.
Brian Pansky @10:
Since the only real evidence of being trans is the trans person’s own feelings about themself, I don’t think there’s as much of a distinction as you think. How would you determine that someone is lying about feeling they are trans?
@11, Allison says
Basically the same way you determine any insincerity on any other topic (topics such as: beliefs, values, intentions, emotions, experience, and so on).
If you want to learn about what counts as evidence or not (you probably should, because you’ll need to discover the truth of things many times throughout your life) learn to use Bayesian Reasoning, here’s an article by Sean Carroll about that.
Brian Pansky @13:
If this is supposed to refer to the distinction you made in @11, then you’d have to figure out how many people who “claim to be the gender they say they are” (in the sense that they mean it) but are not “actually … the gender they say they are”, (again, in the sense in which they mean being that gender.)
How, again, would you determine that someone falls into that category? What sort of evidence are you thinking of?
Because, so far, all the “evidence” I’ve seen proffered has been either claims that actually being trans is a priori impossible and thus trans people are delusional, or claims based on misinterpreted or refuted research. See genderanalysis.net for refutations of pretty much all claims, (except maybe Janice Raymond’s.)
I read the linked article; it seems to only describe what you’d do once you had your questions and evidence set up.
@13, Allison
Ah, you seem to be in agreement with Zinnia Jones. When I read your previous comment, I thought you had the opposite views!
Well: surely you don’t think that lying about being trans is a priori impossible, right? And surely you’re familiar with trolls who make such lies, right? Those are the obvious examples I would think of. I don’t have a ton of experience spotting them, but I could probably list clues to consider, such as whether they seem to strawman the positions they claim to hold.
Of course I can see how your imagination might not have gone there, because I was initially responding to a thing about people who (as you say) probably believe that being trans is just a priori impossible. But…your first comment focused on feelings, not on the a priori possibility of trans people, so that’s what I made my response to you about.
I hope we’ve sorted things out!
Also, that Bayesian Reasoning article I posted wasn’t really the greatest example I guess. He didn’t even clearly say that the competing hypotheses need to be put into the calculation too. Maybe this video by Julia Galef is better.
But anyways, for something to “count as evidence” it has to make one hypothesis become more likely than it was before. And since hypotheses are always in competition, this means it must make the competing hypotheses less likely than they were before. If the piece of data (“evidence”) doesn’t favor one over the other, it doesn’t really “count as evidence” for anything. It’s then irrelevant, and useless as evidence.
Going back to my clues for spotting trolls, trolls make themselves look like self-contradictory strawmen a lot of the time, while sincere people might accidentally strawman themselves a bit, but far less often. So that means that kind of behavior is evidence of the person being a troll (especially if they do it a lot, and really extremely, which is even more rare among sincere people). That’s not the end of the calculation, but it’s enough to determine how that one piece of data is going to influence the result, and thus what that one piece of data is evidence in favor of.
@3 colinday
I would say it is more accurate to describe TERF (not “radfem”) belief systems as focusing exclusively on the impact of gender roles to the denial of the other meanings and applications of gender. I identified no less than six uses of the word “gender,” and the refusal to specify which meaning is meant is one of many tools TERF use to obscure their actual meaning. Your academic-sounding jargon isn’t fooling this trans feminist–you’re just looking for an easy excuse to bash trans women (and occasionally trans men or enbies) without straight-up saying “I want to bash trans women.” The progenitors of radical feminist thought argued for the abolishment of sex as a class, something trans people embody, and something which they all acknowledged–see how Dworkin, MacKinnon, or Wittig disavowed sex essentialist themes in second wave feminism and even explicitly acknowledged their support of trans folk at some point in their work.
Conflating TERFs with radical feminists and invoking tired old talking points is two strikes against you.