The Trump administration would like to pretend that global climate change is not real, defying the evidence of an entire planet, so what’s it matter that they have merely decided to overrule biology? So let’s simplify the complexity of gender by legal fiat.
“Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth,” the department [of Health and Human Services] proposed in the memo, which was drafted and has been circulating since last spring. “The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”
The new definition would essentially eradicate federal recognition of the estimated 1.4 million Americans who have opted to recognize themselves — surgically or otherwise — as a gender other than the one they were born into.
All this nonsense is coming from Roger Severino, the director of the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services, who wants to deny civil rights to transgender individuals. Who is Roger Severino?
Mr. Severino, while serving as the head of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation,…
Holy fuck, just stop right there. Let that sink in.
…was among the conservatives who blanched at the Obama administration’s expansion of sex to include gender identity, which he called “radical gender ideology.”
The opposition is building, but look…Trump has packed high offices in government with ignorant ideologues. They’re planning to steamroll all rational opposition.
Harper Jean Tobin, the policy director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, an advocacy group, called the maneuvering “an extremely aggressive legal position that is inconsistent with dozens of federal court decisions.”
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t care about court decisions — I’m more concerned that this is in defiance of human biological reality. But then the one thing we know about Republicans is that they believe they make their own reality.
I do wonder if any TERFs will stop and think and realize that siding with Trump and the religious right is a sign that they might be wrong.
Nah. There’s no silver lining to this stormcloud of stupidity. Just keep waiting for the next memo to leak, the one supporting the categorization of people into humans and subhumans on the basis of skin color or ancestry.
PZ. Please stop using that vile misogynistic term to refer to women who you don’t agree with. It is unbecoming of you,
So, we’re completely neglecting intersex people or those whose karyotype is atypical for their sex? There are cis-gendered XY women.
JScarry @1:
What? TERF? Next you’ll be saying AntiFa is a Fascist organization.
Wow, just posted and realized the time of my comment may have seemed like I don’t care about actual trans people. To clarify, I do, and this shit is infuriating for that reason as well.
» women who you don’t agree with«?
Like Graham Lineham? Or this Severino person?
TERF- trans-exclusionary radical feminist. It’s not a slur, it is an accurate description of beliefs. The language itself is actually incredibly neutral.
Are they not feminists? Do they not exclude trans women from their group? Then are they not trans-exclusionary radical feminists?
It’s weird how they object to an accurately descriptive term.
Seems an apt moment to link – “Christian right and some UK feminists ‘unlikely allies’ against trans rights”:
TERFs haven’t had any issues with finding themselves o the same side as the Christian Right up until now, so I don’t see why they’d suddenly start thinking about it.
This comment makes me curious as to your opinion of the TPP. Are you in favour of it purely as a result of Trump opposing it?
Roger Severino, the director of the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services
A little like making Al Capone the Drug Tzar?
I’ve long come to expect something routine. Microsoft losing a case in a court of law has long been the norm, ranging from theft and distribution of intellectual properties not belonging to them to antitrust actions.
Anything involving Trumplestiltskin losing in court.
Both, immutable laws of physics, as immutable as the laws of thermodynamics.
Because, court decisions do matter. When they suddenly don’t, beware, for we no longer have a government, we have a civil war.
Much silliness happening here!
Nina Paley explains “TERF” better than most:
http://blog.ninapaley.com/2017/03/22/the-terfening-online-silencing-campaign/
Nina Paley also does a marvellous job of explaining what is at stake here: the real concern how “false positive” misdiagnosis could unnecessarily destroy countless lives is a cogent concern. (Think frontal lobototomies a generation ago)
Check out this blogpost, again by Nina Paley
http://blog.ninapaley.com/2017/03/23/the-banality-of-stupid/comment-page-1/
I admire P Z Myers’ command of science! … his command of politics, less so!
Politics MUST NEVER become entangled with politics: neither politics of the right, nor the Left.
P Z Myers just committed the very same error as those he wishes to disparage
Final Word; When an argument resorts to “Guilt by Association” as its primary premise, that argument, by definition, fails.
From now on, please let’s refrain from cheap shots; and stick with the science.
You first.
By the way, what does this gibberish mean?
Nina Paley of the “transjenner song”? I’ll pass.
majorpriapus @13: The second Paley article you linked to certainly was a fine example of banal stupidity. There were some pretty good comments though. E.g.
Sex is about biology. Gender is about psychology. Not the same thing.
@2gmacs
Taken into account by the “The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”
@18, chris 61
“The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued” routinely neglects intersex people. That line right there is where this whole thing goes off the rails, where not only is sex immutable at birth (which might well be true) but something that we can not only detect perfectly but can detect using the heuristics of birth certificates, which can be literally summarized as “at a glance” (which is horse shit).
Even aside from how gender and sex are clearly conflated when used as legal classification terms as opposed to scientific terms, and even aside from how the intent and practical effect of this bill is obvious harm to trans* people this is just bad science.
@19 Knabb
Intersex people are less than 1% of the population and their special circumstances are accommodated by the statement “The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”
Hey, @1/JScarry, from your local cisgender womyn-born-womyn gold star lesbian…blow it out your ass. TERF is a perfectly appropriate acronym. It stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist.” They are feminists. They are, presumably, radical feminists, though I question how much the word radical can apply to much of the Third Wave. They exclude transpeople. Like, what’s the problem here?
Telling people not to call something by what it exactly is, to the word, without a single insult either expressed or implied, is the kind of Orwellian doublespeak that actual misogynists use against us. TERFs are the YECs (see what I did there?) of gender politics. Are you going to tell me “YEC” is a slur too and I ought to be referring to them as “radio-critical Christians?”
If TERF is an insult I fine with calling them TEF…the only possible objection I can see is applying radical. Trans exclusion feminists are description of what they are doing.
@ majorpriapus, #13
From the first link you posted:
Must people who enthusiastically whip up howling mobs into reactionary hate-fests always whine about how persecuted they are? I mean, I know why they do it, but that shit was ancient when writing was invented.
Also from the first link you posted:
Oh joy, the writer is not only a TERF, but a freeze-peacher as well. I have better things to do with my Sunday than pick through the garbage.
But I will say this:
If you’re going to insist on SCIENCE ONLY, maybe don’t post links to whiny, misgendering ideologue. There is no “science” in the comment Paley shares, only assertions without a shred of support. It’s Paley saying: “You are this because I say so, and if I hate you it’s for this reason, not for the one you gave, so I can’t be a bigot.”
“Everybody knows” is not science. It’s not wisdom, either. It’s an excuse people give for not thinking.
As someone, somewhere pointed out, TERFs aren’t very good at being feminists, what with all the transmisogyny and so on. They suggested “feminism-appropriating reactionary transphopes” would be more appropriate.
The “unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence” is not much of a comfort anyway. It might help for some things. But we already know that XX & XY not only aren’t the only possibilities but don’t map directly to sex or gender.
So I’m going with Knabb, it’s bad science that is not actually a useful accommodation. And why are we even creating the need for an accommodation in the first place?
I read more of that than I really should have, but now I get it.
Nina, it’s not that you’re a person, it’s that you’re a woman. And what women do is come complaining to men about how oppressed they are and how much they are suffering, to get what they want from them. And men are socialised to ostensibly put women’s feelings above their own need to dominate women.
Fortunately, we don’t have to listen to your feelings and lived experiences; we can just tell you your place. You lack a penis. You’re a hysterical female.That’s why your opinion and your feelings count for nothing with us, despite all your whining. I’m all in favour of gender nonconformity: you can read your bluestocking books and so on, but please don’t try to think that you females are actually the equal of men, because you’re not. You don’t get a vote in how the world works.
Biologically you are what you are, and that’s the way the world is. And we’ll pass some laws to make sure the world remains so. I’m glad you’re with us on that.
(And now I’m going to go throw up.)
I have one criticism on TERF: The F. How can you be a feminist when you do not speak for all women? But that is a minor gripe and I will use TERF as long as they hate it.
And to all the worms* that crawled out of the mud for this threat? A hardy FUCK YOU* to you. How about you crawl back?
Especially if your “arguments” are so embarrassingly old and bad. Talking about science when it is science that recognizes and ACCEPTS trans people and intersex people since more than A HUNDRED YEARS. That’s how bad your “arguments” are: They can be refuted with sciences from 100 years ago. Don’t believe me? Read a book, any of many Books by Magnus Hirschfeld on that matter. They even have the honorably distinction of once getting burned by Nazis, which alone makes them good books and also shows where you stand with your awfulness.
Sciences only got more accepting. By now, it’s as reasonable to deny trans or intersex existence as it is to deny climate change. Make no mistake, by implying that trans people, binary or not, are anything else but the gender the chose, you are denying them as humans, which is the worst things you can do to a human.
So, not for the last time: FUCK YOU.
*And if you want to tone troll me on that: I called you personally a worm. You just called millions and millions of people liars, ill, not worthy or simply not real. So fuck you again, you whiny hypocrite.
One day some guy’ll show up with two dicks, and he’ll automatically be made King of the Republicans. The next week, someone with three will appear on the scene, and it will set off the nastiest arms race the world has yet seen.
It won’t be pretty.
Ah fuck. I made a big mistake and wrote “gender they chose”. That should of course have been “gender they are” or at least “gender they identify with”.
Using trans phobic language in that post was horrible.
Shit.
I thought the R was supposed to stand for “reactionary”? I wasn’t aware it was supposed to be “radical”.
FARTs allying themselves with the religious right is absolutely nothing new, many of the founding TERFs were more than willing to work with republicans in the 70’s and 80’s to deny transgender people civil rights and public assistance.
It’s just more evidence that under their supposedly progressive and radical veneer, they’re a bunch of reactionary fascists who want to go out of their way to hurt one of the most vulnerable minority groups by the numbers.
The cruelty of conservatism is the point of conservatism. It’s easier to knock other people down than to build yourself up, and conservatives constantly need to feel better about themselves. So every “other” they can think of needs to perpetually be knocked down further and further. The end goal of the contemporary Republican party is nothing short of a return to slavery, a return to a time when white men could rape women without consequence, and a holocaust so complete it would put Hitler’s to shame. They have not exactly been shy about this, either.
@Vucodlack:
I read that entire link and twigged on the same phrase. I’ve also met Nina Paley a few times at conferences, though this was years ago, and we had a perfectly delightful conversation or three. It’s disappointing to see that she’s gone down this rabbit hole (or is that insulting to rabbits?).
@cartomancer:
I, too, think reactionary is a better fit. I’ve also seen it used to mean “reactionary”, though not for some time now. The vast majority of times the acronym is spelled out by someone using it, they seem to drop in “radical”, so I treat radical as the default interpretation (and have for some time now).
But yeah, there’s good reason to replace radical with reactionary (or re-replace, I guess?), but I’m not really fussed about it too much. When used in the abstract, if you’re not actually trans-exclusionary and you’re not actually radical and you’re not actually feminist, then the acronym doesn’t refer to you – why worry about it? If the only problem specific folks have when the acronym is used to refer to them personally (e.g. Crip Dyke is such a TERF) is with the use of the term “radical”, appropriate measures can be taken at that point to get the acronym (and any criticisms) correct.
PZ Myers @ # 7:
Feminists and trans-exclusionary, agreed. I still see no justification for calling them “radical” in anything except trans-exclusionism.
To use “an accurately descriptive term”, we should call them TEFs. Or maybe RTEFs.
Wow! The comments are becoming almost as amusing as they are incoherent.
Not mention: a marvellous and hilarious nexus of Poe’s Law with Godwin’s Law
Turi1337 accidentally stumbled across the very bit where Trump’s admin gets it right ( I love the sound of progressive heads exploding at the very hint that Trump could ever get anything right, as if they had and infallible lock on Truth)
Herein lies the rub: How can someone claim to have an innate gender identity if gender is socially constructed?
So we arrive at the crux of the matter: either gender is a subjective construct (careful now: here be dragons) or gender can be objectively determined (the alternative which should appeal to the scientifically inclined)
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180524112351.htm
As Nina Paley correctly pointed out (and Canada’s Kenneth Zucker confirmed: the issue of false positives is a real concern
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/transgender-kids-who-decides/article33638814/
Meanwhile I remain bemused by piffle spewed by Social Justice Warriors who persist in proclaiming how Gender is non-binary only to scream outrage at TERFs who accept them at their word, and follow that premise to a common sense and logical conclusion
Like I already said: the nexus of Poe’s Law and Godwin’s Law with a good mix of Murphy’s Law thrown in for good measure
AFAIK, the term “TERF” was coined by the anti-trans tendency within radical feminism themselves. Much like the “Chill Girls” of the Slymepit (remember them?), they only started objecting to it once it became used by people not in their in-group to highlight their loathsome opinions.
Nope. they’re happily working together, accepting funding and aid. In Ireland they sided with the “no” campaign to keep the 8th amendment because the “Yes” campaign was also supported by trans women and trans inclusive feminists. No ideology that defines women solely by their reproductive system can be really pro woman.
This is btw also why I stopped using “TERF”. Not because it hurts their poor transphobic feefees, but because they’re usually neither radical nor feminist.
They are full of anti-sex worker attitudes and femphobia (because nothing is more feminist than decrying everything deemed feminine as inferior). In short, good riddance.
Oh dear, not again. “Sex” and “gender” are actually the written representation of a collection of sounds (the signifier, to use good old structuralist terms). Those sounds are connected to a concept, the “signified”. That godsdamn concept, be it “sex” or “gender” is a socially constructed concept, one we mutually more or less agree on. many languages don’t even split those terms any more than they split flesh and meat.
Judith Butler (who personally greatly disappointed me but whose writing is still kick ass) argues that sex and gender are actually not different things, that we like to split them nicely for this kind of discussion, but that as soon as you try to draw a sharp line things get muddy anyway.
I still think that they are handy terms in this kind of discussion, yet too often they’re used to indicate that “sex” is real because it’s biology, how do you argue with biology, but gender is not.
BTW
This is a sciency sounding definition (sex is biology!), yet if you think about it, which “immutable trait identifiable at birth” should that be?
I was born with a uterus and ovaries, yet they were not identifiable at birth. I was born with a vagina, but that’s hardly immutable as trans men show. Nobody ever did a gene test on my and I’m pretty sure the thin g most people use to identify me as “female” is the massive set of tits that certainly wasn’t present at my birth.
majorpriapus
Now, I clicked that one link and the lady was not actually very coherent. Lots of screencaps, little argument.
The above is, of course, pretty bullshit anyway.
I know transphobes love the narrative that nowadays “gender non-conforming children” (I hate that term) are called trans and then rushed into medical transition that forever damages them. For one, they don’t have a shred of evidence. Yes, finally some trans kids are getting treatment, yet even with supportive families that’s still often a struggle. Second, nobody “diagnoses” being trans because they like things that are “stereotypical” of another gender. Funny enough, trans girls and trans women who do like stereotypically female stuff get accused of misogyny and appropriating womanhood, while those who prefer to be more “butch” are simply called male. Heads I win, tails you lose.
And from a former “tomboy” (another term I hate): Bullshit. I knew exactly I was a girl as assigned at birth because I absolutely hated it when people misgendered me and begged my parents to let me have my ears pierced so people would see I was a girl (yeah, funny those biological traits, ain’t they?). You aren’t going to tell a cis kid they#re trans any more than it works telling a trans kid they are cis.
Oh, and since wer’re at it, natal puberty is not a neutral or benign thing. It is also irrevocable change that has already destroyed countless lives.
Christ, FARTs are just like cockroaches, you think you got rid of them and then you flip a rock and they all come scuttling out again. What an annoying little tagnut we appear to have acquired.
Actually, no, that’s not fair. Cockroaches have an undeserved reputation for being unclean and don’t do anything through conscious malice. Comparing FARTs to cockroaches unjustly maligns cockroaches.
Is it? Do you really think these people will be perfectly okay with designating a person with androgen insensitivity syndrome as male? Stop pretending. We all know that isn’t true. This is nothing but bullshit rhetoric to justify demonizing anyone who doesn’t fit into their neat, little boxes.
We need to get real. The people we’re up against find our very existence to be an affront to them. There’s no compromise to be reached; no reasonable accommodation possible. The only reason they haven’t killed us already is because they don’t have the power to do so.
Yet.
Stop caricaturizing what was said by the Dept of Health & Human Services
Their stand is common sense!
@Pierce R. Butler:
Historically the critiques used by TERFs are most solidly founded in Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire a highly influential book. Raymond was and is a radical feminist. Raymond’s mentor was Mary Daly, also a radical feminist. As weird as it may seem to those who’ve read a good deal of Daly (as I have) with all of her gyn/ecological word-twisting and LSD-based reasoning, the movement/s we now call TERF or gender critical feminism have deep roots in a larger set of movements properly called radical feminism.
If you’re having trouble seeing the “radical” it may very well be because you’re not paying attention to the radical feminism that they espouse and enact when they’re not distracted by their need to tell everyone how fucked up and wrong trans* advocacy is. If you only discuss their trans-exclusionary thoughts and practices, and if you don’t understand where such thoughts and practices originated, it would be easy to miss how much of their thought and practice still harmonizes with what we know as radical feminism.
“Radical feminist” is generally seen as a self-claimed label, however, so if someone rejects it I usually wouldn’t want to continue using it for that person. I don’t generally see people reject that in the context of TERF, however. Either they think the entire acronym is “offensive” and must be jettisoned without regard to whether or not it’s accurate, or they object to being described as “trans* exclusionary”, in which case, I’m just all, “B’wuh?” in the face of the clear evidence that they’re excluding trans people. If last night I insisted that I am not a pasta eater at the same moment I was shoving forkfuls of soba into my delighted mouth, I would hope that people wouldn’t take my objection seriously. When the evidence of their own statements and actions show someone to be obviously trans* exclusionary in theory and praxis, I don’t take, “But I’m not trans* exclusionary!” statements any more seriously.
So, generally I don’t stop using TERF when someone asks.
I also sometimes use ERF (for existentialist radical feminist) not because there’s only one way to be an existentialist radical feminist and that this inevitably entails trans* exclusion, but because one way to be existentialist in your radical feminism leads to a search for a universal woman stand-in. In turn, this requires smoothing out all the differences between women so that women can be “united” in feminism. In the past this has been the source of a fuck of a lot of racist feminism, because “universalizing” woman – smoothing out the differences – has required ignoring race for the purpose of determining feminist theory, then only belatedly (and oft times grudgingly) reincorporating a bit of the realities of racialization in the process of deriving an appropriate praxis.
In using ERF, I’m recognizing that the same dynamics that were critiqued in radical feminism 50 years ago still exist in radical feminism today. Where before it was insisted that we have to ignore racialization to create a universal feminism, today the focus for a certain segment of feminists is on ignoring the processes of gender assignment, gender attribution, and gender identification. But as best I can tell, the reasoning and motivations are very similar. For me, then, using ERF is both accurate and a reminder that this hard work has been done before. My job in working for a better feminism is easier because Mitsue Yamada and Maxine Hong Kingston and Tillie Black Bear and Audre Lorde and Kimberle Crenshaw have done similar work already.
And yes, they were – mostly – radical feminists. And yes, they critiqued radical feminism. I feel no need to insist that these folks have no connection to radical feminism in order to critique their present thoughts and practices. Neither radical feminism nor feminism generally ever claimed to be beyond criticism. Neither radical feminists not feminists generally have ever stopped critiquing their movements from within.
So I have no problem with the idea that these folks might be “radical feminists”. And since the actual evidence tracing the historical roots of these arguments goes back to radical feminists making arguments that they thought were crucial and inevitable extensions of their own version of radical feminism, I think it would be weird to claim – without a specific disclaimer from a specific person – that the gender critical feminism movement is not a radical feminist movement.
Assertion made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Either show us you know the scientific literature, or just stuff your assertions where they belong, like in the nearest dumpster.
“Common Sense” is a meaningless wiggle word, especially on a topic that is notable specifically for being highly controversial.
Can’t say I’m surprised that the easy button response for every other kind of crank is brought up by FARTs as well.
Troll clean-up at comment 41 PZ.
Is it really necessary to someone seriously when their screen name is MajorPriapus aka BigDick?
If you want to take certain ideas seriously – like Giliell did with the division of sex and gender into realms biological and psychological*1 – then take the ideas seriously. But quoting and referencing BigDick is more credit than BigDick deserves. BigDick should receive no serious engagement at all.
=====================================
*1 with which I mostly agree and it seems Giliell mostly does not, so fuck the hive-mind myth, I love Giliell regardless of how close together or far apart on this one.
LoL
I know, you think that is very clever when in reality you sound exactly like a creationist going “if humans come from apes, why are there still apes?”
Yes, gender is socially constructed. So is the river Mississippi. You can still drown in it.
Giliell @ 37:
☝ Fucking. This. ☝
It was an act of pure classism. They basically came out and said, “It’s no skin off our noses if there’s abortion in Ireland or not because we’re wealthy enough to travel to the UK to get an abortion if we need one. We’re gonna vote “no” because we hate [insert your favourite trans slur here] that much”. In other words, they were willing to throw underprivileged cis women under the bus in the furtherance of their vicious and quixotic crusade against trans women. That’s the extent of their “solidarity” with other women (even those they accept as “real women” by their own definition).
The evidence is on Twitter if you want to go trawling back through the repealthe8th hashtag.
This is horrible. We have friends whose child first tried to commit suicide at the age of eight years. The child was diagnosed as bipolar and had a chaotic childhood. It was only after age eighteen that one big reason for the problems was that the gender identity at birth was a total lie.
So their daughter is now the person she needs to be and is doing much better. Still has some impacts from the bipolar, but that is being managed (one parent is also bipolar, and it was a happy day when they finally got medication that worked). I would not have any problem with their daughter in the pool changing room.
This administration’s idiocy is literally a death sentence to the transgender population.
The Department of Health and Human Services seems to be agreeing with almost everyone here!
At least the repeated citation of Magnus Hischfeld would seem to suggest so. Hirschfeld was an avowed Biological Determinist who subscribed to objective and scientifically verifiable underpinnings to “alternative” expressions of gender expression/identity & sexual orientation
Reread what the DHH actually said: the status of sex/gender “assignment” at birth will stand unchanged UNLESS a strong scientific basis can be provided to change the status
Sounds good to me. That plan would actually work for the vast majority of the time.
ITMT, casual “Self-identification” is not good enough for obvious reasons, which are becoming more and more apparent
Men (self-identifying as women) are ending up in women’s penetentaries as only just one particularly egregious example. These non-binary individuals are being reclassified on a binary basis (when it suits them) whereupon women in penal institutions are subjected to rape.
Does my outrage, ipso facto make me a TERF? … or a FART (still not clear what that means)
Please read BOTH of Nina Paley’s posts in their entirety before commenting
ITMT Confused children having difficulty coming to terms with a flood of contradictory urges and impulses are in no position to declare themselves trans, except for a very small minority of cases
Prudence combined with common sense is praiseworthy Godamit!
Why is this so hard d to understand!?
Is everyone in America suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome!?
Just read the original notification, take a Valium and calm down.
Americans are still living in the best country on the planet
Yawn, troll is boring. And doesn’t understand science. Just like creobots.
To be clear here
The DHH DID ALLOW for changes to gender/sex identity when objectively confirmed
So what are we arguing about again?
Nerd of Redhead has the memory and attention span of a Goldfish
Do I need to repost the science citations?
What an annoying FART. Do us a favor and go die in a fire.
News FLASH
TRANS Gender identity is NOT a social construct but objectively real in scientific terms
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-05/esoe-tba051818.php?fbclid=IwAR2qVM-ff3258Wn-i3VBhM7sgRrMVDtVcNZLzN-jOvdRL8uNTLP7CGK9Ksg
News FLASH
the non binary status of individual sex identity or orientation is also NOT a social construct
http://www.pnas.org/content/110/38/E3567.long?fbclid=IwAR2Sp3Wu2Y-Xj3ftW7l5B5nkCrTZBy4wet7m9R_PWuj0SXjCq3ic83F6Txw
OK OK… sex ROLES are a social construct: “Daddy goes to work and Mommy stays at home with children” would be an example of a social construct.
But that is not what we are discussing here!
Much confusion and gibberish clogging the bandwidth here
ITT – Reactionary idiot fails to understand basic concepts
You’d do significantly more social good walking into traffic than posting here, fyi
News FLASH
The Dept of Health & Human Services was correct to take Magnus Hirschfeld at his word
Sex & Gender status are not subjective social constructs but instead objectively verifiable in scientific terms
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-17352-8?fbclid=IwAR3grMo_3l4g7D32jB1QGAVK51tK-_3_pwTvALFAspk20NIIX29qUwR-m_U
Christ, it’s like a five-year-old trying to GOTCHA!!! a physicist.
Is there an EvoDevo expert in the house?
We need to slay some superstitious Shibboleths and return to an unemotional discussion of the science.
Uhmmm
That’s funny! That’s just what the DHHS just said!
http://www.readcube.com/articles/10.1038/nn.3988?shared_access_token=Pvr8tlPgF7go467Fb9s90dRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0O5Sa17PwxeSdPz2qBv6vanmX2nTVr2gXbA6IzxvUYg7IXAZVmDtsaQdmC2dMaibDReS8xuk9y5b9m-O3C1u_5KdBNvYa07sR5r2Rjvcvzm-LZrL9tpe8Z186P4yU1y6Y5BkkUlDxZc5oiatiguF5tMLhIrwQraW1zdjaa3N9McAQ%3D%3D&fbclid=IwAR1XFgOP3zfL2Ie7DVlVjkM2qgM2hanB9scOU7j70zLEpxjNq8jtd5k8Kqo
Porivil Sorrens @ 55:
This is not helping. I am concerned with the poster’s screen name, “majorpirapus”. Perhaps he (assuming he) is suffering from priapism, a painful and sustained engorgement of the penis. If this is the case, we should perhaps be encouraging the seeking of medical help rather than suggesting self-immolation (Halloween being over a week away and all, it may be a long wait before a convenient fire presents itself)
This link (see? I can post sciency links too!) suggests priapism may be linked with excessive crack cocaine use. How about it, majorpirapus? Have you been hitting the pipe a little hard of late? I strongly suggest seeing a doctor before “partial penectomy for infected, gangrenous, distal penile tissue” is indicated, rather than hanging around here.
Sorry troll, op ed opinions are not science. Nor does our present government respect science,. Quit lying.
The fact that this FART thinks that “objectively verifiable” and “socially constructed” are mutually exclusive already shows that they’re too stupid for a conversation.
That said, I don’t really support having this conversation with FARTs in the first place. Better to line them up and give them the wall.
Is it just me or is it just really difficult to know what transphobes actually mean by “man” “woman” and “non-binary people”.
News Flash: all concepts are socially constructed. Unless you want to argue that they are handed down by god?
I really do appreciate the clever humor underpinning the noms de guerres present here
I remain perplexed how the validity of my contributions could be questioned by remarking on my relatively milder moniker
That all said
One of my detractors with a far more risible pseodonym than mine remarked as follows:
“Assertion made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Either show us you know the scientific literature, or just stuff your assertions where they belong, like in the nearest dumpster.”
Considering my most recent contributions to a reasoned and nonemotionally charged exchange of views, I can now only retort:
Backatchya
Nothing like a BigDick who can’t even HTML explaining science, government, gender, and liberation to a bunch of women, trans* folks & queerbos on a science blog.
Please, dear Priapus, save us from your followers…
Also, the fuck is with this idea that prison rape is somehow on the shoulders of normal law-abiding trans people and not an indictment of the prison system that sees inmate rape as a feature, not a bug.
Corollary – interesting that they never bring up the fact that a trans person in prison is exceedingly likely to be the victim of prison rape and violence.
Giliel
I think you may need a refresher in the scientific method before discussing epistemological nuances of can can be ascertained to be objectively verifiable vs subjective
I am guessing you probably subscribe to the silly notion that Cultural Marxism can trump Science
I do not
So let’s not waste any more of each other’s time
Tfw you’re totally on the good side of things, despite the fact that you agree with Trump and repeat Nazi propaganda.
Crip Dyke @ 67:
Priapus: ancient Greek god of male fertility, gardening and defender of livestock
majorpriapus: probably not allowed near livestock
To quote an old Tom Lehrer skit, “he majored in animal husbandry… until they caught him at it one day”
Cultural Marxism. !Bingo!
@Giliell, #65:
It’s not just you.
Boring troll continues to get more boring.
Crap Dyke ya da ya da
Without a doubt, you have the best online pseudonym I have had the pleasure to behold
Je vous tire mon chapeau!
Mental midgets such as Porivil are cluttering to board with ignoratio elenchi and non sequiturs, so it’s exit stage right for me
So long and play nicely children
See ya, hope you take my advice to heart!
Buh-bye.
Be sure to get that penis checked out.
That still doesn’t get you around the issue that concepts are socially constructed.
I am indeed unaware of the epistemological nuances of Can Can, but I was never much of a dancer.
See, BigDick, I would make the, to be fair very little, effort to refute your points. But Giliell and other commenters already did a good job of that.
Which leaves me with the fun part, telling you to go fuck yourself.
Go fuck yourself.
To make this comment slightly more substantial: I only can recommend following youtube video by Philosophy Tube. While it does less deal with the outright transphobia shown by BigDick at. all, it does a good job showing the harm coming from the “Trans are ok, but …” folk. Really worth a watch.
Oh, dear, the chew toy discovered that yelling “Science!” in a blog full of scientists doesn’t lead to the desired result and declared victory and ran away before I got here. Schade.
Re the term TERF: I agree that a movement that identifies what it is to be a man or woman totally with genitalia or genes is hardly likely to merit the name “feminist”.
And doctors perform those tests on every newborn infant, to ensure they properly assign birth sex, right? No? Then it follows that they must assign someone the incorrect sex from time to time, as that test is not genetic.
Ergo you are incorrect when you state “the DHH actually said: the status of sex/gender “assignment” at birth will stand unchanged UNLESS a strong scientific basis can be provided to change the status” and when you state “The DHH DID ALLOW for changes to gender/sex identity when objectively confirmed.”
@dianne, #80:
You mean just in today’s context? Or would you extend that to Elizabeth Cady Stanton?
So sorry Gilielle
That was a typo
I meant to say
“… epistemological nuances of WHAT can…
Your last attempted riposte missed the mark because frankly, you have no idea of what you are talking about!
I offer you some reading material which would be of great benefit to some others present as well
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-objectivity/
I heard chugging windex is a great way to fight Cultural Marxism.
The Roman god Priapus was an absolute hoot. This poor imitation is a bit embarrassing really.
There is a famous wall painting from Pompeii which shows Priapus trying to weigh his massive member on a set of balances, with the other pan full of gold coins. He’s trying to see how much his pride and joy is worth, it would seem, though the weighing operation is rather tricky, given how a huge erection tends to behave.
If anyone here has a few copper pennies lying round then our disappointing visitor might well be able to ascertain their own worth in like fashion.
Mind you, given that they said (quite unironically it would appear) that “Americans are living in the best country on the planet”, we would probably need some kind of specialist laboratory balance to weigh out values small enough.
Who’s that?
You keep claiming everybody else is ignorant, yet all you do is post links you seem not to have read either, so let’s try something different: Can you define “social construct”, please?
Are there terms that are not socially constructed and if so, how are they constructed?
Crip Dyke… @ # 42 – Thanks for the history backgrounder – most helpful.
… it would be weird to claim – without a specific disclaimer from a specific person – that the gender critical feminism movement is not a radical feminist movement.
Springing from an official Radical® Feminist™ school, in many ways they do have a right to claim that label. In the etymological sense of going to the root of issues, less so. In the sense of extremism, I doubt they overlap much with the violent transphobes who go out bashin’ on Saturday nights. For “radical” as deep, I haven’t seen it; as incisive, a few good one-liners but little that penetrates far.
Given the reminders above about their active opposition to LGBTQ&c rights, I agree with those who spell the R with an eactionary.
Is “gender critical feminism movement” what TE(R)Fs call TE(R)Fism? You can’t apply criticism to gender without wearing their lodge pin?
Gillell
Re: “Can you define “social construct”, please?”
Been there done that. Even provided an example
.
Please stop wasting my time
I feel like priapus would understand our position a lot more if they knew about BOFA.
majorpriapus, I thought you were going away.
Looking over the thread, you only provided an example (#57), not a definition. Please correct me, if I’m wrong.
TERFs by definition cannot be hostile to LGBTQ, because many in their ranks have themselves suffered discrimination and violence as Ls and Bs while joining ranks with Gs all the while extending compassionate and helping hands in solidarity to Ts & Qs
TERFs are misunderstood , especially by rational wiki
TERFs agree that gender identity can be non binary and that there is nothing wrong with that. Therein lies the problem many here seem to have difficulty grasping
TERFs do NOT self-identify as “Non-binary” in terms of gender-identity
For those too obtuse to follow: that was a grammatically and syntactically correct formulation of a double negative
The logical implications of that double-negative are profound!
TERFs do not represent a cabal of atavistic troglodytes with no sense of social justice
They claim to be “women” in “a” sense of the word that Trans-women can not
That leaves open the logical possibility that TERFs denigrate the status of trans-women in disparaging terms as inferior.
Yes that could be a logical possibility. But (and this is the important bit) that contingent possibility is not a priori or necessarily true.
Examine the facts!
It happens that TERFs are NOT reactionary as suggested above
I offer some hard data for your perusal
https://youtu.be/kDcTt0emXhE
Snicker, why troll are you trying to tell someone like myself, a 40 year veteran who retired as “Senior Scientist”, about science when you are obviously ignorant and full of shit about real science…..
CripDyke@82: I don’t know enough about the 19th century feminists to make an intelligent response to your question. Sorry! So I suppose I was thinking in the modern context only, but should get more into the history if only to see what the roots of the modern division are.
BTW, the usual abbreviation for the Department of Health and Human Services is HHS, not DHH. It’s not terribly important, but I keep reading “DHH” as “DHS”, which is something different altogether. At least, it used to be, but this thread is fraught enough without getting into the whole holding children hostage for terrorist purposes thing.
Using this argument, one cannot say that Ted Haggard or Lindsey Graham is hostile to gay men. Oops!
Also, too, who the fuck is arguing that TERFs are hostile to bisexual women?
Also, too, too, wasn’t BigDick going away?
==========
@Pierce R. Butler
Yeah, I think of them as radical feminists in the same way I think of birds as dinosaurs. It’s definitely true when you use one definition, even if it seems obviously wrong when using another.
yeah, when referencing this bit, I tend to think “reactionary” applies better – but even reactionary carries connotations I don’t always want to communicate. It can be more than a bit tricky coming up with the best wording.
But given that the best wording is highly arguable, I tend not to argue with anyone’s use of TERF.
@dianne –
I wasn’t looking for a specific answer about Cady Stanton so much as I was using that example to help us figure out whether we’re using your test for categorizing things as “feminist” is a test designed to be applied to the modern context. I thought it probably was, and now we’ve clarified things. I hope it didn’t feel like a “gotcha” because it wasn’t meant to be.
Damn you Crip Dyke you beat me to “MajorPriapus aka BigDick”! On trans issues I mostly lurk to soak it all in as I am not competent to form a well informed opinion. I think sex and gender are somewhat separate. Sex is deeper but isn’t quite binary. And biology can also play a role in brain sexualization which at some point feeds gender identity. Gender is more socially constructed and definitely not binary. It is no less real. The cis- vs -trans thing is apt. There are also asexuals and other stuff I am not familiar with.
I am inclined to support trans rights from the get-go. In general trans people should not be discriminated against and should be protected from hate crimes and bigoted employers.
I have read some dissenting stuff, for example from someone who used to blog here, to see what the oppositional fuss is all about. I perceive at least two sticking points- bathroom privileges and competitive sports- and these two points of contention seem to be driving the resistance as major talking points. Myself as a cis-dude wouldn’t get upset with a trans-man or trans-woman using a restroom while I am in it. An interesting personal anecdote was when a friend and I got hammered and went to a fair hosted by a local Catholic church. Needless to say others had been drinking heavily too and the main binary restrooms were in the bingo hall. Social order broke down. There seems to be more a tendency for women’s restrooms to get bottlenecked because stalls, where cis-guys can use urinals (too much detail?). I noticed women were queued in the men’s line to use our stalls. The abomination adjacent to a house of worship. But as far as I know nothing untoward happened. Even drunk adults are mature enough to handle such exigencies. Moral is that we are way too hung up on who uses restrooms. But if I had wandered into the women’s room to use a stall the story could be different.
The competitive sports issue is above my pay grade. It is a reality that shouldn’t be used as a talking point to pontificate about trans rights in general. It doesn’t affect me as a noncompetitive man who watches sports so I am more interested in protection of people who identify as trans than some trivial nuance such as that. Worst case a high school girls soccer coach gets a windfall of transwomen athletes and they win state and cis-women are unfairly (?) excluded. Is that outcome a legitimate concern?
I am more interested in how transpeople deal with legal identification issues. I imagine name changes are a PITA but workable so a driver license may reflect their preferred name. Does that tend to be a problem? Do trans people have troublesome situations with signing deeds and contracts because born name and present name differ? Is it any worse than what women deal with already with maiden versus married vs divorced names? Given anti-trans attitudes I imagine reform of such issues or finding sympathetic officials to be a problem.
Apologies for being a bull in a china shop.
Chortle
“Argumentum ad hominem” combined with an “Appeal to Authority” compounded by the Fallacy of “Guilt by Association”
I accept Refhead’s tacit concession of defeat
ITMT
Much has happened since the 19th Century… we are already into Feminism’s “Forth Wave”
majorpriapus @93:
It is a single negative. :)
—
The more you seek to seem clever and erudite, the more you expose your actual cleverness and erudition. It’s kinda cringy to behold.
@Crip Dyke: It didn’t come across as a gotcha, just as having exposed a hole in my knowledge which I will attempt to fill. So many of those, alas!
In spite of my age I remain constantly amazed at the determination of evangelicals to control other people’s sexuality.
@ John Morales
You are incorrect: the statement you refer to was indeed a double negative when employing the symbolism of Symbolic Logic
http://www.philosophy-index.com/logic/symbolic/
What I find most bemusing:
If gender identity is a subjective construct, why then should TERFs be denied their own self-identity when in all respects their politics and viewpoints are most enlightened?
@ Dianne
I am tapping on a cell phone
Thank you for pointing out my typos
HHS it is
Flounce failed to be stuck to. I may yet see a hammering. Perhaps I should make popcorn?
@105: TERF is a gender identity?
Can somebody who is good at maths calculate when majorpriapus should get the right combination of letters by chance?
You gave an example of a social convention or a gender role (while, of course, many people would claim that this is indeed biologically mandated). That is of course not what is meant when we talk about something being socially constructed.
Tbh the only thing TERFs shouldn’t be denied is a healthy serving of ligma.
majorpriapus @104, ∀x∈T(x):¬N(x)
(heh)
@32 kome “The end goal of the contemporary Republican party is nothing short of a return to slavery, a return to a time when white men could rape women without consequence, and a holocaust so complete it would put Hitler’s to shame.
Really? Slavery? Rape? Holocaust? Please explain .
TERFs are feminist. Lets not “no true scotsmen” this shit.
@122
Idk the literal concentration camps we have on US soil, repeatedly attacking the bodily autonomy of women, supporting the mass incarceration (and subsequent economic exploitation) of people of color, pretty much every Republican policy from the last four or five decades.
Also the way MajorDick uses certain words reminds me of psuedointellectuals who string along fancy words in the correct order technically but never actually understand the depth of it.
The case could be made.
@111
If you understand symbolic logic, why did you mistranslate my statement?
Repairing your attempt renders:
∀x∈T(x):¬¬B(x)
How else to render “… not non-binary”?
I prefer the old fashioned way of expressing this for beginners when discussing A, E , I , O statements
~(∃x) (Tx & ~B)
To remind you:
Any negation of an O-sentence is equivalent to its corresponding A-sentence.
Meanwhile: P::~~P
or if you prefer ~~P::P
QED
;-)
That was a fun momentary diversion from marking
Back to work
I will leave you with some light reading material
http://wps.prenhall.com/wps/media/objects/5909/6050951/MyLogicLab_ebook/MLL_Copi_13e_Ch08/0136141390_Ch08_03.pdf
@ 108
Do not conflate “gender identity” with “gender expression” or “sex” or “sexual orientation”
ITMT this yer minology is in flux due to exigent external pressures from politically correct corners requiring rephrasing
I leave the following delightful gem in gleeful anticipation of progressive heads all exploding in unison
I hope everyone can bear with the video long enough to watch it to the end
https://youtu.be/kVk9a5Jcd1k
Oh yeah, I’m sure Boghossian’s bullshit is really going to blow our minds, and we haven’t been mocking it for literal weeks.
@ majorpriapus, #35
As far as I’m concerned, anyone who invokes “Godwin’s Law” to silence dissent in this day and age, when politicians using actual fucking Nazi rhetoric, tactics, and agendas are rising to power around the world, is outing themselves as at the very least utterly ignorant or, more likely, a deliberate liar. Scratch that; they’re always both.
@ majorpriapus, #51
People who are trans are people, as in human beings. They possess the same range of qualities and capabilities as any other sub-grouping of humans. People who are trans are FAR more likely to be victims of sexual assault than they are to commit sexual assault; this does not mean that no person who is trans ever commits a sexual assault.
Also from #51:
Your highly selective outrage makes you a dishonest, bigoted troll. You have a clear and ugly agenda here, despite your claims that you’re just ‘sharing facts.’
Still #51:
You know, I keep hoping to read to an original argument from transphobes, or any other bigot. I can’t imagine that I’d be swayed by their bilge, but at least it wouldn’t be so godsdamned boring as having to read the same tired hate over and over again.
Paley says nothing new, and neither do you. I’m disappointed again, but not surprised.
@ majorpriapus, #66
Sad.
Same fool as the rest, #69
Whines about Godwin’s Law. Proceeds to use Nazi-propagandist terminology.
Once again, nihil sub sole novum. Or should that be “there is nothing new under the swastika?”
Go away. You’re boring.
Amusing how some fellow-traveller of a political party who has been telling the American people for nigh on four decades that government is good for nothing (“The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”) is now telling us that am American government department is the ultimate arbiter of a person’s gender…
As it is, a privative term representing a category denoted by a compound term.
You are confusing its lexical form for its logical form.
But the predicate at hand is their identification with something, not with that something, so your rendering loses that aspect. Now it is become “TERFs are NOT not binary”.
You sure your “correction” correctly expresses your intended meaning?
That was informative.
The fact that someone defending FARTs uses the exact same “lol im gonna trigger the libs you’re all cultural marxists” terminology as your standard MAGA chud just goes to demonstrate the crossover appeal.
@ 122
You are correct
My attempted repair of your translation did not work
Go back to my original and then review A E I O statements
The negation of an O statement (i.e. a double negative) is equivalent to the corresponding A statement
It really doesn’t get more elementarybthan that
@ 37 Giliell
I will agree that gender, as currently defined, is a social concept. But you are conflating the concept of sex with the language used to describe it. Mammals can be classified as male or female without any language at all. Because here’s the thing Giliell … scientists who bred animals for experiments have no difficulty distinguishing males from females. They don’t randomly put animals together and hope for the best: they select a male (based on his physical characteristics) and put him together with one (or sometimes more) females (based on their physical characteristics. More than 99% of the time they get it right.
As mammals, humans can be distinguished greater than 99% of the time too … unless you are arguing that humans aren’t mammals?
@125
It’s true, you can hypothetically separate the language and connotation from the underlying concept, but you can’t do that when we are literally talking about the sex field on birth certificates, which exist in the real world where the word “sex” has connotations and is conflated with gender, and that tangibly affect how this policy affects the world at large.
Like, this doesn’t exist in a vacuum, this policy is being rolled out at the same time as a push to use birth certificates to determine who can use certain bathrooms or access certain services.
& @120
Typical Leftard self-righteous Claptrap
Why, pray-tell, do you presume I am insensitive to the plight of both bona fide and “false positive” trans individuals?
You do not even know me, who my friends or colleagues are, where my job takes me; nothing!
Here is another question for you based on that ONE egregious example I mentioned of placing self-identified trans “females” in a female penitentiary
Why do you NOT agree with me; that a BINARY solution for a NON BINARY problem is always going to prove a bad idea?
ITMT Why do you PRESUME I have no similar feelings of empathy for the suffering of trans individuals?
What entitles you to be so superior and self-righteous?
Oh yeah! I forgot: you did not vote for Trump and that one fact alone, somehow makes you my moral and intellectual superior!
Well guess what! I didn’t vote for Trump either. As a matter of fact I am a Bernie Sanders fan. Is he the last politician in America who is blessed with common sense?
But unlike you: I do not suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome
At least I can acknowledge the two times a day a broken clock is correct
Read the original announcement P Z M referred to in the OP
It really boils down to common sense embracing good science
The rule rule will work well more than 99% of the time and REAL exceptions to the rule will be accommodated
So why the palaver?
You SJWs are just as pathetic as the alt-right. Moreso actually. More close-minded and violent for sure.
Godwin’s Law? Yeah, imagine how my views and Nazism coincide.
What really worries me?
You actually believe that bull crap
America is fucked: not because of Trump. Trump is a symptom of what ails America. You assholes epitomize the underlying pathology of the systemic disease bringing America to its knees
I have had fun mocking PZ M’s fanboys in the past. It’s not fun any more. Cultural Marxists like yoursel ( who have nothing in common with Bernie Sanders) are dangerous and should not be allowed to breed!
@126
okay, so let’s look at that. Why do we restrict bathrooms and certain services to one sex or the other?
@128
No idea, given that limiting bathrooms by birth certificate sex field wouldn’t actually ensure comfort, safety, or any of the other reasonings provided for such a thing.
Lmao oh man, two for two on the nazi buzzwords, keep it coming. Maybe throw in a “degenerate” or “untermensch” while you’re at it?
@128
Read the newspapers
Women and children are being attacked in bathrooms
Not as often as Trans individuals are being attacked outside of bathrooms perhaps. That too is another problem screaming for remedy as well
Focussing for the moment on Bathrooms: binary solutions to non binary problems do not succeed!
It’s not rocket surgery
You know, I’m trying to work out what this “Cultural Marxism” nonsense is supposed to mean. That theatre companies ought to be worker-cooperatives? That artists ought to own and manage their means of production? That authors and poets ought to be free from the contradictions of the Capitalist mode of organization?
As an actual economic Marxist it amuses me greatly when ignorant Americans try to use the name of Marx as a term of abuse. I suppose the cold war never finished for some people. Sad really. Then again, what can one expect of transphobic bigots whose understanding of gender is several thousand years out of date?
The cultural marxism meme has always been funny to me.
Like lmao, I fucking wish there was a legitimate sociaist mass movement capable of infiltrating and manipulating institutions.
Unfortunately, it’s actually just repurposed Nazi “Kulturbolschewismus” with the serial numbers filed off.
@129
So instead of arguing that transwomen should be entitled to use women’s washrooms (and transmen entitled to use men’s washrooms), why not just argue for getting rid of single sex bathrooms?
@hotspurphd:
Obviously I can’t speak for anyone else, and you weren’t responding to my comment, but while I think that “wanting slavery” is a dramatically unfair distortion if “Republicans” means “anyone who is registered to vote as a Republican”, it’s also equally clear that there are many politically active republicans in elected or appointed roles who openly advocate for banning large subsets of minority voters from casting ballots and effectively advocating policies that are designed to keep republicans in power through the suppression of votes rather than persuasion of the voters.
Combine that with the open advocacy of ever increasing criminalization, the open advocacy of private corporations owning & running prisons, and the exact nature of the 13th amendment (which only prohibits slavery when a person has not been convicted of a crime) and you get a persistent, slow rise in the ability of corporations to force work from a large, stigmatized subset of persons who are not allowed to refuse to work, and whose work provides income to the corporations that force that labor on the stigmatized persons.
Moreover, it’s not like this trend has not been compared to slavery. It’s not as if Republicans (and some Democrats) are creating this policies in ignorance. There are explicit and emetic negotiations between private prison companies and the states regarding how much of the income from prisoners’ labor the companies get to keep above their contracts with the state for housing prisoners and how much will offset the states’ payments to those corporations.
Finally, the contracts are structured in such a way as to guarantee the private prison companies a certain, minimum number of prisoner-days per year. The people who write the laws and determine the enforcement of the laws both negotiate these minimums and then are held accountable for meeting these minimums by shipping off a minimum number of persons to those prisons.
It’s hard to get away from the fact that Republican party is taking positive action to cement and to slowly expand literal corporate slavery in the US.
Every once in a while it becomes obvious even to those who don’t want to pay attention that this is happening and that those in power are fully aware of what’s happening.
@134
Long term goals vs Short term goals.
It’s easier to change who gets access to already existing bathrooms than to push for retrofitting bathrooms into single-occupant gender neutral bathrooms, but the latter is the end goal.
Gotta work incrementally, yo.
Cultural Marxism is the Opium of the Intellectuals
https://fee.org/articles/cultural-marxism-is-the-main-source-of-modern-confusion-and-its-spreading/
I have had to applaud PZM when he pilloried Jordan Peterson, when Peterson got his Biology all wrong
That said, Peterson is spot on regarding the menace of Cultural Marxism
The current self-destruction of the EU debacle would be a case in point
Oh my god, a TERF lobster? This troll is the best we’ve had in a while.
@ Crip Dyke
If anything, you have understated the evil of felony disenfranchisement I n America
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement
Nice to agree with somebody on this board
Well almost. Your embrace of identity politics is worrisome. There is no questions the Democrats have benefitted by blatant abuse of bogus voter rolls
Why can’t everyone just agree to play by a fair and just rule book?
@136
It’d be easier yet to just let everyone use whatever bathroom is handiest. Requires no retrofitting whatsoever.
@140
Women and children who have been victimized in bathrooms would be quick to disagree
See 131
@140
It’d be easier to let that happen, but I think it would be a harder sell than “letting people use the bathroom they identify with”, which has been going on for decades and is the norm in significant chunks of America.
@141
Clean your room bucko
Actually, the reason we have so many segregated public toilets is because we are carrying over bigoted Victorian ideas of gender-segregated privacy and propriety. Before the 19th Century public toilets tended to be entirely unrestricted. Roman public toilets, Medieval public toilets – no evidence of gender-segregation at all. It’s only Victorian prudishness, which happened to coincide with industrialisation and the need for toilets in large communal workplaces, that set the standard. There is no rational reason for it at all. It’s certainly nothing to do with the twisted fantasies of American bigots about sexual assaults in toilets.
In fact, there is a well-documented history of bigoted rhetoric surrounding the sharing of toilets and the imagined potentiality for rape in the US. First it was black people and other ethnic minorities who were presumed to be dangerous and unsanitary. Then it was gay people. Now its trans people. It’s the same bigoted “oh, think of the women and children” rhetoric, but the victim group is new. There tends to be far less of this nonsense elsewhere in the world, and when it does get imported it doesn’t tend to convince, because the US has been uniquely primed for these unfounded fears by centuries of racism, homophobia and cultural bigotry using such tired old tropes.
No, none of this is about safety in toilets. It’s about degrading and humiliating trans people by denying them the fundamental right to be accepted for who they are.
Well, Trump administration’s Office for Civil Rights cancels civil rights is par for the course.
Not that much to be said, really. One more in a well-established pattern of malfeasance.
High Dudgeon Dude is entertaining, but.
—
Speak for yourself.
(Hey, how’s your symbolic rendering of your own statement going? Found a formulation that allows for a double negation yet?
Premature QEDification can’t be fun)
Um…because that’s what you’re expressing right here in your numerous posts?
A question you might well ask yourself.
@141
That’s probably true but are there really significant numbers of women and children who’ve been victimized in bathrooms? I mean I’ve been using public restrooms for decades and have never been attacked. Or seen or known anyone whose been attacked. And assuming that women and children have been victimized in bathrooms how does segregating bathrooms keep them from being attacked by other women?
@142
If just letting people “use the bathroom they identify with” is such an easy sell then why is it proving so hard to sell it?
@ cartomancer
I had no idea! I remain in your debt, thank you.
http://theconversation.com/how-did-public-bathrooms-get-to-be-separated-by-sex-in-the-first-place-59575
Every household I know has a shared loo. Weird, huh?
@147
Because we allow socially regressive flyover states to have more political say than population-dense city centers that swing more progressive.
@147
Point well taken
I was thinking about unisex change rooms in Europe, which are not comparable
On the subject of Europe doing things differently: retrofitting American toilets to European standards of privacy may provide the answer
I think voyeurism is probably a greater concern than attacks
And of course dignity (for all) should be a greater concern than misplaced ideology
https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/26620/why-do-public-toilets-in-the-us-have-large-gaps-no-privacy
But the original OP was not focussed on Toilets
@127
So you are a BernieBro dumb ass. Whoopdy doo.
@BigDickhead
Oh and to quote Albert Einstein “Common sense is a series of prejudices acquired by the time you become 18.”
Real science lovers don’t give a fuck about common sense.
In 2017 <href=”https://www.theolympian.com/news/local/crime/article138696093.html”>a woman was attacked in a Seattle bathroom. Her story was used by proponents of Initiative 1552 in their campaign to overturn the Washington state law allowing people to use the bathroom designated for the gender they identify with. The woman objected and eventually I-1552 proponents removed the relevant items from their site and apologized. At least some women who were attacked in restrooms do not object to letting transgender people decide which bathroom is more appropriate for themselves.
BTW I-1552 failed to gather sufficient signatures to appear on the 2017 ballot. This year there was no campaign for any bathroom initiative in Washington. I don’t know if they gave up or just don’t see the point of trying in a likely blue wave year. By the time they try again (if they ever do) Washingtonians will have several years of experience with the current law and the knowledge that the sky has yet to fall (drizzle doesn’t count).
chris61, @147:
It seems to be a rather easy sell in Washington. That has been the legal situation since about the beginning of 2016. Objectors have tried twice to overturn the law by ballot initiatives, but have failed to gather the required number of signatures. This year, no bathroom initiatives.
Yikes, messes up the link in 154.
Woman assaulted in Seattle park feels victimized twice after story used in political campaign
Quick survey of the European Press indicates an uptick in the number of victims attacked in public restrooms by asylum seekers, especially in France and Germany
This should be less of a concern given Trump’s prescient banning of the migrants causing problems in Europe
157 con’t
In public restrooms I meant to add
Troll still pretending to have points? Dismissed. as fuckwitted assholery.
@151 “Point well taken”
@148 “I remain in your debt”
@127 “Why, pray-tell,”
@127 “a female penitentiary”
Seriously, what is it with trolls that they always have to put on these airs and graces like they’re channelling some dude from the 18th century?
Dude (because it’s always a dude), it’s okay. It’s a blog. Just talk like a normal person. You’re not Rumpole addressing the bench at the Old Bailey. If you mean prison, say prison. If you want to say thanks, just say thanks. If you want to ask a question, just ask a fucking question, you don’t need the pray fucking tell.
Given that you seem to agree with like 90% of Trump’s policies and reference the same batshit conspiracy theories as his followers, I’m not really buying the idea that you’re actually totally a Strident Sanders Supporter, lmao.
https://neoskosmos.com/en/122778/medecins-sans-frontieres-confirms-rape-cases-at-moria-migrant-camp/
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-migrants-germany-pool/german-town-bars-asylum-seekers-from-pool-after-harassment-complaints-idUSKCN0UT1VL
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/637466/migrant-sex-attack-refugee-crisis-Freiburg-Germany-White-Rabbit-club-harassment-women
America is very fortunate to have Trump setting immigration policy
Europe is beginning to wish it had Trump in charge
Even assuming that’s true, what does it have to do with allowing people to use the bathroom of their choice? Do these people who carry out attacks on women in public restrooms identify as women?
@SilentBob:
Curiously, though the language isn’t entirely uncommon amongst a particular type of troll, you’re right that the airs here are just too hauntingly familiar. Though I’m not at all certain – i’d put the odds at maybe 3:7 if forced – BigDick sounds enough like the long-banned Steersman that it’s a real possibility that this is just another Steersman sock puppet.
I remember quite some time ago when a troll showed up under the nym “oaring about” or something close to that. I declared my belief that it was possible – not at all certain, but possible – that oaring about was a Steersman sock puppet. Oaring about was outraged – outraged – that someone would make such a comparison. A couple hours later PZ showed up to say that IP address evidence showed oaring about to be posting from the same computer as Steersman, and that oaring about was being likewise banned as a now well-established sock-puppet of Steersman.
So while I’m not certain (as I’ve said before), don’t be surprised if when the ban hammer hits BigDick if PZ mentions IP overlap with Steersman and his other socks.
@162, Dude, you’re just rambling now. Such desperation!
Can you even remember the topic at hand?
Chris61
First of all, the reports are true. German swimming pools are shutting down, even during the hottest summer on record
My rejoinder was a rebuttal to the suggestion of Unisex public restrooms as a proposed solution
Coming back to Republicans advocating slavery, it took me a bit, but I found the case I talked about on my blog where a Republican literally advocated keeping people in prison not to increase justice or provide more time for rehabilitation, but simply because they wanted more forced labor:
[paraphrase]While I wouldn’t want prisons in a perfect world, some people are just bad. But since we’ve got prisons anyway, why are they releasing good people from prisons when I could use them for free labor? Why? It’s just horrible! [/paraphrase]
That’s the kind of person who really deserves to never, ever have any power over any other person in any context, ever.
Chortle
Argumentum ad hominem
Guilt by Association
Post hoc, propter hoc
Ignorachio elenchi abound!
Ask to check my address
I am neither of the two you just mentioned
When will y’all start to address the argument directly and refrain from casting aspersions at your gainsayers?
Chris61 seems to manage quite well. Why don’t the rest of you scum-suckers try to rise to his level?
@167
WTF!?
America, we have a problem!
Agreed, that sheriff should never be in any position of power, not even as dog-catcher
Hey majorpriapus, any idiot can shout ‘insert logical fallacy here’. Prove* it. Accusing someone of committing a fallacy is a positive claim. Show your evidence.
Also did it ever occurred to you that we have all already seen every single one of your bullshit arguments posted on this blog in the past and no one will address it because we are all sick of doing so? Thats why you are being called boring.
*yea yea yea I know you cant prove anything other than mathematics. Adding this here so you dont play dumb.
@168:
You’ve hereby cast an aspersion on your gainsayers, O hypocrite.
Why don’t you start?
And, to the extent you have an argument, it’s that it’s fine by you if transgender people get no official recognition on the basis that, for you, it’s scientific. Or something, hard to say when you skitter between feminism and lobsterism and TERFism and immigrants and bathrooms and supposed double negatives.
—
What I know is that you’ve yet to address the post’s theme: “Trump has packed high offices in government with ignorant ideologues.”
(The Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services in this case)
Well let’s leave it on a positive note
Not everyone will need to choose a public restroom when a bush will do
That should take some of the pressure off a complete revamping of toilet infrastructure
https://youtu.be/IZbUzAfxC2s
To be committing a fallacy, one would have to be having an argument.
Curiously, BigDick hasn’t actually made an argument.
BigDick asks. But which fucking argument is this supposed to reference? We don’t know! But we can go through and find post after post by BigDick that contains no argumentation at all.
Just start with comments #13 & 14, BigDick’s first contributions here. Is there an argument? Nope. There are a couple of opinions. There’s a link to Nina Paley talking about how getting banned from a particular subreddit while having the run of the entire rest of Reddit is proof of trans* initiated institutional misogyny, despite the fact that Reddit clearly identified the rule breach as doxxing, not harboring or sharing feminist or anti-trans opinions. Logic was apparently on LSD the day Paley wrote that.
But there’s no real or coherent argument anywhere. There’s nothing of the form
Just random sniping. The fact that BigDick is so intellectually challenged as to think that formal fallacies are at all relevant in relation to words that make no formal argument, well that’s just cute. It’s like a puppy enraged that that stupid tail keeps chasing him around in a circle and won’t leave him alone, only if the puppy hired a lawyer to file a restraining order against the tail, because isn’t that the law, after all?
Dismissing sniping because one gives evidence – even through one’s choice of name – that one is trolling is not the commission of an ad hominem fallacy. It’s not even a genetic fallacy. Dismissing sniping is appropriate because it’s sniping, not argument. Pointing out that we shouldn’t expect the content to get any better because the trollish behavior makes the name BigDick impossible to read as anything but an intentional provocation, well, that’s just plain reasonable.
Now @BigDick
As for your IP address, BigDick, a different computer + a new router and change of address or going online from a friend’s house, a proxy service – tons of things can change your IP address. Since Steersman is known to lie about whether or not his sock puppets are his sock puppets, there’s no reason to take your protestations of innocence as evidence either for the idea that you are a unique commenter or for the idea that you are a sock puppet account.
And I don’t actually care that much. I didn’t bring up the fact that your language is oddly similar to that of other trolls, I merely voiced my thoughts once the topic had been brought up by another.
The long and short of it is that you’re commenting repeatedly and have yet to make any contribution that’s remotely substantive or on point. Even your links to others rarely support your assertions. The fact that one attack happens doesn’t mean that there’s a trend in attacks happening. The fact that one attack was by a migrant doesn’t mean that migrants are more likely to attack people.
For someone who likes to proclaim the value of science, you seem entirely unable to process the fact that anecdotes are not science – and that’s a serious failing whether you come by that defect independent of Steersman, who was flawed in exactly the same way, or not.
Jeez. I step away from the blog for a day, and what happens? A TERF goes on a comment spree. I had to ban him just to shut him up.
Anyway, CripDyke, I don’t think he’s that particular slymepitter. That asshole would ramble on pompously for whole clotted paragraphs of tendentious tedium. This guy is barely capable of posting a line at a time.
Also he’s been here before. He didn’t like my aggressive atheism, and he didn’t like my criticism of Pat Robertson, way back in 2011. MajorPriapus seems to come in little spurts of dribble, and then has an extraordinarily long refractory period of about 7 years.
He’s done now. Maybe he’ll try to come back in 2025? I’ll be quicker on the banhammer then, I hope.
@172: No, it’s not about toilets. Nor am I going to bother clicking on your lazily-pasted URL. It’s utterly irrelevant.
It’s about officially and dogmatically holding that birth sex assignment forever determines one’s gender, and the purported science is that gender is the same as sex.
Something with which you supposedly concur, even though your desultory efforts at justifying your concurrence were at best vague and unconvincing.
(And you can’t find a way to ex post facto justify your bombast about that purported double negative, can you?)
It’s probably been said already but I think bears repeating: The claim that acceptance of transgender people threatens cisgender people has been studied and fact-checked and consistently found to be false.
Transphobes will seek out the one example they can find of a trans person committing a crime, and extrapolate from that to the whole population. But the question is not, “are there any examples of bad trans people” – of course there are, as there are for any other marginalized group. The question is, “does the acceptance of trans people lead to more assaults”, and we know the answer. (Spoiler:)
No.
Good point.
also?
:giggle:
#117 @youknowwho
Plastic furniture covers really are a godsend.
JScarry
You TERFs even argue like right wingers, using euphemisms like “people you disagree with” to sanitize bigotry.
Go spend your Tory cash and leave trans people alone TERF.
@ majorpriapus, #127
Aw. Did I touch a nerve?
I’m not a scientist, nor am I particularly intelligent. However, I know words. I know rhetoric and propaganda. You think you can throw around words like “Cultural Marxism” and “Leftard,” and not shine like a beacon? Everyone here can see right through you. Your choice of words speaks volumes.
Don’t want people to call you a Nazi? Well then, don’t talk like a fucking Nazi.
Voting for Clinton in November 2016 was an act of absolute bargain-basement human decency. It’s worth nothing now. There are other actions I could and should have taken- that I know this and did not behave accordingly leaves me with no right to claim moral superiority over anyone. True, I’m not a Nazi, but that’s also dead-simple human decency.
Guess what! I don’t give a fuck.
When Azathoth flails, it smites both the righteous and the wicked, though not because it has any understanding of what it does. And (this is the important part, so pay attention!) it destroys everything in the end, so any accidental good it would do would be fleeting in the extreme. This paragraph has been a metaphor, in case you’re confused- I’m saying this administration will kill us all in the end, if they aren’t prevented from doing so.
Not that that is relevant here, because the topic of this discussion is a deliberate evil the administration is committing, one which people like you are abetting.
You brought it up, sunshine, and it doesn’t take much imagination when you’re spitting out phrases like Cultural
BolshevismMarxism. It’s right there on the screen for everyone to see.Classic. Way to convince people you’re not a Nazi.
I’ll say this for you: your #127 was almost entertaining. All those caps, dropped letters, the whole unhinged rant… were you hopping up and down as you typed that? Was steam billowing out of your ears? Were you whistling like a tea kettle?
You want to know how I know I’m really not superior? Easy; I enjoyed watching you blow your top here. I kinda want to do it again and again and again, until I get banned. Now, I could pretend that I’d being do it here because when you’re ranting at me you’re not saying quite so many hateful things about trans people, but that’s a just post hoc justification. I’d be doing it because I like it.
I’m baaad person, but I am not wholly bereft of restraint. Have a lovely night, weepy pee-pee, who is definitely not a Nazi.
@ PZ Myers, #174
Oops, that’s what I get for not finishing reading the thread before I post. Sorry; I read slow and write slower.
@vucodlak:
Don’t apologize. Your comment provided amusement whether or not BigDick can reply to it – and since comment bans don’t prevent a person from reading, you may even still get your message across to a frustrated and impotent BigDick.
A bit late but, @vucodlak (120), the eponymous Mike Godwin is right with you.
I am a bit peeved that the attitude of the current administration and that particular troll can cause actual death among the trans community, starting when they are children.
It also happens to those who have actual medical mental heath diagnosis like bipolar or autism. But it is what it is. Ignoring them is just ablest, and that is not helpful. These trolls are just plain dangerous.
If you are citizen a of the United States of America, please vote next month.
Alas poor BigDick. He wanted to argue so long and hard, but could never manage anything beyond limp trickles.
Hell, please vote now
In many states you have early voting. In Oregon, all voting is by mail and you’re free to mail in your ballot as soon as you get it, which is usually 20 days before the election. If you’ve asked for an absentee ballot you’re probably also free to vote right now as in the majority of states absentee ballots are mailed 21 or more days before the election.
If you can vote in this US election, please do! I still regret that I can only vote for the federal elections as an out-of-country-long-term-but-still-citizen ex-pat. Oregon (where I’m registered for federal purposes) or any number of other states could really use my vote this November on gubernatorial and other races.
I’m not normally given to slippery slope thinking. But with this repulsive administration, I’m convinced this is a “wedge” issue. First it’s gender is determined by baby genitals.
Then it’s marriage is between one man and one woman.
Then it’s “sodomy” is a crime.
Then it’s homosexuality is a mental illness.
Then it’s personhood begins at conception (Oh dear, so abortion is murder!).
Then it’s women should keep their legs closed so ban contraceptives.
Etc., etc.
The agenda is to reassert patriarchy.
So thanks TERFs for normalizing blatant, open, and unapologeitic transphobia, calling it “feminism”, and priming the way for this shit. I’m a white guy. Doesn’t affect me. But even us white guys have loved ones, women and LGBT, who will be affected. So once again, from the bottom of my heart, fuck you very much.
Nobody has yet addressed our esteemed guest’s barely-concealed racism, vis-a-vis refugees to Germany. I suppose it is utterly beneath contempt, but I don’t like to see bigotry go unchallenged. Particularly bigotry against the most vulnerable in society.
So there have been some cases of crimes committed in Germany by Middle-Eastern refugees and asylum seekers? Yes, and? Refugees and asylum seekers are human beings, and human being commit crimes sometimes. Do they, as a group, commit more crimes than other segments of the German population who live in comparably precarious conditions? No, no they do not. If there even are other segments of the population who live in comparably precarious conditions. Despite the country’s admirable willingness to take in more vulnerable people than just about anywhere else in Europe, there is still a strong undercurrent of bigotry and racism in Germany. Particularly towards people from that part of the world, who have been the most visible cohort of low-paid migrant workers in Germany for over thirty years.
Earlier this week I found myself having to teach a PSHE lesson to a class of 11-12 year olds about diversity, differences and inclusion. This was a salutary and worrying experience all at once – salutary because for the most part they were absolutely lovely, worrying because a good number of them seem to have inherited horrific prejudices from their wealthy, middle-class, home-counties parents about the Travelling community. “They have no respect for people and their property or the law” came the protests, out of the mouths of small children. This guy on here reminded me a lot of these children, actually. I tried to explain to them that our society is not very well set up for itinerant peoples, and maybe if they felt isolated and rejected and attacked by the people around them they might have a less than deferent attitude towards law and authority too. I think I got through to some of them. One hopes our troll might also learn the lesson.
To conclude – virtually nobody in Europe wants a leader anything like Trump. We were in the habit of smugly writing off American leaders as morons and bigots before he came on the scene, and his arrival has just confirmed all our prejudices that you really are an immature country that cannot run itself effectively and places no value of culture, decency or the common good. These are unworthy prejudices, perhaps, but with that bloated orange philistine in charge over there, rather difficult ones to rebut right now.
If two groups of gender-critical feminists get into a fight, is that a TERF war?
Yeah, the amount of open, unapologetic bigotry still directed towards the Travelling community is appalling, especially when you consider it in conjunction with the legislative assault they’ve been under since the ’50s that has made their traditional way of life effectively illegal. You could make a pretty solid argument that they’ve been subjected to a form of genocide.
And then people complain about all the Eastern Europeans that have been brought in to do the seasonal agricultural work they used to do…
cartomancer@187,
I’m glad you pointed out our recent troll’s racism (which I’d describe as blatant rather than barely-concealed), and fully agree that virulent anti-Roma/Traveller bigotry is alarmingly common in Europe. But:
is excessively optimistic, at least if you’re talking about Trump’s ideological stances and willingness to lie without restraint or concern for consistency, to be overtly racist in word and deed, and to demean and assault women, rather than his flagrant financial corruption, laziness, and inability to complete a coherent sentence without an autocue. There are already proto-fascist racists if not worse in power in Italy, Hungary and Poland, and taking a junior role in government in Austria – and in practical rather than formal terms, in the UK, given the “D”UP’s stranglehold over May. In many other countries, they have gained significant vote share.
On another point, both the troll – who I take to be a 400-pound Latinist punster with the given name Richard – and Holms@10 criticized (in the latter case, by implication) PZ’s:
while ignoring the careful way it was phrased. Of course finding yourself on the same side of a dispute as some repulsive individual or group does not prove that you are wrong. But it is indeed “a sign that you might be wrong” (emphasis mine), and certainly a prompt to reflect on the grounds for your stance, and to make sure anyone you are talking to knows you do not share other views or characteristics with that repulsive individual or group. To give an example – I am very much opposed toi Brexit, and favour a new referendum once we know the terms on which the government intends we should leave the EU. This places me, on this issue, on the same side as the vile war criminal Tony Blair, among others. But of course those on the British left who favour Brexit find themselves ranged alongside Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, and practically every fascist in Europe. It is quite legitimate for both sides to point out who their opponents find themselves in company with, but it is not a conclusive argument for either.
As a transgender woman TERF is a very kind term for the transphobes. The term currently in use to more accurately describe the ridiculousness of TERFs is FART. Feminism Appropriating Reactionary Transphobe.
Not really a lot different on many subjects from alt-right boot party supporting trumpers but that is their choice.
@187 Thank you cartomancer. I woke up this morning, read this thread and when the links to Germany came i nearly exploded out of rage.
BigDick also marked him self as a fascist. These kinds of out of context, selective reporting of crimes is one of the hallmarks of our new fascist/Nazi party AfD. I do not know if BigDick himself is German or if this is just a case of fascist minds think a like, but the similarities are uncanny.
Shouldn’t that be the Office against Civil Rights at the Department that denies Health and Human Services?
If I had a nickle for every time someone referred to sexism, ableism, racism or flat-out fascism as a mere opinion I do not agree with, I’d be a gazillionaire by now.
logicalcat I don’t think this is a No True Scotsman. TERFs are like meat eating vegetarians. We should drop the F.
So, I agree with what Turi1337 . said at #27.
Crip Dyke #185
Doing my part to get out the vote. I have a transport for ElderCare today, and I planned on voting early after the transport. Asked the client if she would like to vote early before being returned home. An enthusiastic yes. So two early voters here in Lake County.
Crip Dyke @ #42:
Wait, what? Do you mean essentialist rather than existentialist? Is this an autocorrect issue? Because what you describe is the opposite of existentialist feminism!
I wrote a bit about this back in 2015:
“James Baldwin’s existentialist critique of gender, misogyny, and homophobia and its value today, Part 1.”
“James Baldwin’s existentialist critique of gender, misogyny, and homophobia and its value today, Part 2.”
hemidactylus @ #99:
I’ve been blown away the past few years learning about the immense problems trans people face in this context. Some of the issues related to “administrative violence” are covered in this book by Dean Spade, but I’ve also been reading people’s stories on Twitter and realizing how the ability or inability to obtain identification affects every aspect of people’s lives – driving, traveling (especially internationally), accessing healthcare and welfare services, everything. If women’s name changes related to marriage are a PITA, what trans people face is a system that in many cases prevents them from living their lives.
cartomancer @ #144:
Call me a Victorian, then, because…do not want.
And now I’ll have this stuck in my head all day, so thanks, everyone. :)
Roughly half the children in the equation are actually boys using the men’s restroom…
Thank goodness nobody told us Germans, because we kept extending the opening times for the outdoor pools to record lengths
You know, your shit of some single, often factually incorrect articles about how Germany is overrun by hordes of sexually assaulting refugees might fly with the average trump voter who doesn’t care about the truth anyway, but it’s a bit hard to sell on a blog with an international community which includes, you know, Germans.
Have there been incidents with violence against women perpetrated by refugees? Yep. Just as there are a damn lot of incidents involving German guys.
Are we suddenly living in fear of our lives, no longer daring to leave the house? No. Though I must say, we do have to “thank” the men who carried out a mass assault in Cologne some years ago, some of whom were migrants. Because thanks to them, grabbing women’s butts, tits and pussies without our consent is finally actually a crime. Before that it was perfectly legal if a man did that.
++++
I want bathrooms segregated into people who sit down and people who don’t. I’m not willing to share with folks who splatter their urine around like dogs.
+++
cartomancer
The resident German first needed to sleep and then to work ;)
@193
Sorry but I dont see it. They believe in everything we do. The patriarchy, the fact that women are disenfranchised and under represented in positions of power, wage-gaps, the existence of rape culture. They would be with us 100% were it not for the fact that they exclude trans-women from the discussion. Kinda like how feminists from the suffragette era were very racist towards black women, and yet no one would disagree with me if I called those racists feminists. These feminists are not feminists in the way that CHristina Hoff Summers is, who is a fake feminist. They are just shit feminists, but feminists nonetheless.
SC, 198. Holy hell, that video is so much of its time that it filled me with a very particular anxiety that I haven’t felt in almost 30 years. For a few moments I was 19 again, floundering under the weight of depression and a nuclear nihilism that wouldn’t begin to abate until the events in Berlin, 1990.
And as much as I’m given to hyperbole, in this case I’m not exaggerating. What a strange reaction to such a silly, innocuous video…brains are weird. :)
Fossilfishy @ #201 – Sorry! I had no idea it would provoke those sorts of ’80s flashbacks!
It’s alright SC. It was weird and intense, but short lived.
That said, that video might just be peak 80’s. The hair, the clothes, the dancing, the music (composition and sounds) and the video toaster effects all scream it’s time and place.
@200 Giliell
That’s, uh, a surprisingly culturally insensitive statement coming from you Giliell.
chris61, #205
You know she’s talking about not wanting to sit on or have to clean people’s urine.
Either that or you are aware of a culture where they use sitting toilets but are perfectly fine with sitting on other people’s urine.
Oh, come off it — it’s never killed anyone to wipe a bit of pee off the seat!
logicalcat @201:
They say that’s what they believe in, but when they go ahead and support conservative politicians who want to do away with access to abortion or protect rape culture just because those politicians are also opposed to transgender rights, it becomes difficult to believe them.
Literally every single transphobe I’ve ever met possessed both of the following characteristics:
1) They believe that there’s only two separate human sexes;* and that whoever claims otherwise is wrong and shouldn’t be listened to.
2) They believe that people’s sex must** be determined by using a specific “true” method; and that whoever uses a different method to determine people’s sex (for ex. by asking for their gender identity) is wrong and shouldn’t be listened to.
3) They believe that said method involves looking at specific, measurable and objective sex-determining characteristics.***
*: Many transphobes admit that there can be exceptions to that rule, but will argue that said exceptions are so few in number, that they can be safely ignored.
**: Not “should” – MUST. As evidenced by how aggressively transphobes go after trans people to “correctly” categorize their sex.
***: WHICH specific characteristics qualify as “sex-determining” varies from transphobe to transphobe. However, all insist that those characteristics are objective and measurable – and that whoever uses characteristics that AREN’t objectively measurable is wrong and shouldn’t be listened to.
Literally every single transphobe I’ve ever met belongs to at least one of the following categories (and, as a result, their own bullshit opinion ended up invalidating itself):
1) Transphobes whose method to divide people by sex does NOT support the “only two separate human sexes” theory – there’s too many exceptions that break the rule. Their belief states that, if you use a method to divide people by sex that does NOT support the “only two separate human sexes” theory, then you’re wrong and shouldn’t be listened to; therefore, according to these specific transphobes’ own beliefs, these specific transphobes are wrong, and shouldn’t be listened to.
2) Transphobes who consistently classify people as “male” or “female” using a DIFFERENT method than what they declared to be the “true” one. Their belief states that, if you use a method to divide people by sex that is different than the “true” one, then you’re wrong and shouldn’t be listened to; therefore, according to these specific transphobes’ own beliefs, these specific transphobes are wrong, and shouldn’t be listened to.
cartomancer @ 144
Apart from the fact that this handily avoids engaging with the question of how the rest of the world handled and continues to handle the matter of public privies, no, this is fundamentally incorrect. Women’s toilets came into existence when women of all stations were allowed out in public and at the workhouse. Access to such facilities is still lacking in parts of the world, where single-occupancy and communal toilets both are male-only. You’re extrapolating from a small community’s experience–upper middling class non-working women being granted a variety of safe spaces, including rooms of rest and rooms for powdering, for patriarchal reasons disguised as “protection” and similar to the justifications that kept women’s wages and hours perilously and disproportionately low–and assuming it was the same for everyone else.
Yes, women’s toilets gave rise, in some nations, to the near-abolishment of single-occupancy toilets. But the notion that these were unrestricted is not supported by evidence dug up by historians of hygiene and public spaces.
Ah yes, people can be neatly put into boxes because of the genitals they were born with and of course this is all about biological sex and not gender, or gender expression, or just being yourself, really
Chris
I know you love trying to play gotcha, but seriously, you’re not good at it.
I am fully aware that there are cultures where stand up toilets are the norm. I am also fully aware that there are incidents ranging from damn hilarious to outright dangerous when people used to one sort of toilets have to use the other sort which is why some international airports indeed offer different toilets.
But don’t pretend that you didn’t understand what I said and that there is some culture where spraying everything in urine is an important cultural ritual.
WMDKitty
In which case the person who left it there should do it.
It may be that your nose is dead, but it stinks.
Yeah, what’s problematic with demanding that people who are in their overwhelming majority women wipe off the urine of people who are overwhelmingly male?
I showed my mother a study called “A Crisis of Hate,” which showed that gender and sexual nonconformist approval had sharply decreased ever since Trump took power. It also showed that hate crimes had dramatically risen in 2017 alone.
She refuses to believe it, and I have all but practically disowned her from my life.
@211 Giliell
Times must have changed. Many years ago in college I lived in a co-ed dorm where by virtue of its location, the women’s bathroom was effectively co-ed. I don’t remember ever having to clean pee off the toilet seats. The guys might get drunk and hold pissing contests outdoors but indoors they behaved no more like ‘dogs’ than the women did. Nowadays I would say I wipe pee off the seats maybe once or twice a week, either at work or at the gym. In both locations the washrooms are strictly women only. The source of the pee is not men but germaphobic cis-women who crouch rather than sit.
Women who fight for women`s rights should be on the side of transgender-people. If not for any other reason that they share the same enemy: “male supremacists” (atheists, but mainly religious, “traditionalist” men). They oppose women who dare to live outside their “natural” or “God given role” as (sole) mothers and wives as well as any man who (in their opinion) rejects their quasi-sacred masculinity, e.g. by being gay, to “feminine” or even transgender. They are gender essentialists, rejecting everybody who does not fit into a clear gender binary.
So, dear TERFs, give up this silly fight! All you do is strengthen your enemies!
@Microraptor
Okay good point. Still not convinced tho. I think what seperates them from a fake feminists like Hoff Summers is that they believe it, and are letting their bigotry lead them to make stupid decisions. Fake feminists are just lying about what they believe period. Maybe there are some terfs who are pretending to be feminist and using it as an outlet, but I think most are true believers, but are just shit. Or blinded by bigotry, or just plain dumb. I remember some ppl saying on these boards that terf sometimes say stupid things like “all sex is rape” and what not.