Social media companies have willingly provided a platform for fascists. That alone should be enough reason to dissolve them. But that won’t happen.
So the best thing to do is to deprive them of eyeballs, which will dry up their cash flow.
Delete your accounts and ban their domains from your home networks.
cartomancersays
I would disagree that you’re not the person to be talking about this. Not the only person, obviously, but since there is a significant biology component to the “discussion” (i.e. slapping down the bigots’ dishonest mischaracterisation of everything) I think it benefits everyone to have a developmental biologist’s perspective. Particularly one familiar with the tactics of other pseudoscientific grifters like the creationists.
Susan Montgomerysays
@3 you sound like the libertarian who thinks that his “Going Galt” is going to bring Petsmart to it’s knees.
Maybe I’m wrong, but very few armies have won battles by leaving the battlefield…
=8)-DXsays
@gijoel #2 Throughout the years I’ve blocked most of the terfs, trolls and brands and studiosly use the chronological “Latest Tweets”, so my timeline is mostly cats, rabbits and lefties sharing selfies and occasionally, Leftist Takes and Drama.
Oh, also videosgame. Mostly harmless fun, hanging around with firends making jokes and a little education.
=8)-DX
leszekuksays
It’s almost as though we gays have dropped off the reactionary radar, so they hound transfolk instead, mostly transwomen. Why can’t they find something more productive to do? The mind really boggles. I did take the time to register my disappointment with Dawkins on his Twitter feed. He must be losing his marbles.
sprocketsays
@5 I like how you think and silence only elevates oppressors. But is social media really analogous to a battlefield? While I agree with McLuhan’s critics about the nature of a medium to convey information, I’m not convinced the nuance that science demands is shouting-into-a-vortex-friendly. The winners are usually the ones who shout the loudest.
And yet, we’re stuck with this since no one reads letters to the editors or newspapers anymore. Or that system is broken. Maybe I’m wrong too but what I do know is I’m angry AF.
A friend taught me a new word today. “SWERF”. It’s like TERF, but they exclude sex workers. Knowing is half the battle.
Silentbobsays
@9 Ray Ceeya
That’s an old term. TERFs have always been extremely anti-porn, anti-sex work, anti-kink, anti-surrogacy, anti just about anything except sex to make your own baby in missionary position with the lights out while thinking of England if you absolutely must.
I would think SWERF was coined very soon after TERF.
Recently, they got in a lather about an insurance company ad that showed a little boy in a dress with makeup dancing around the house pretending to be a pop star. You see, the kid was being “sexualized”. *rolls eyes*
A Sloth named Sparklessays
I still don’t understand why certain renowned atheists like Dawkins still double down on their transphobia. In their godlessness and complete opposition to religion, do Dawkins & his gang see as a threat to their atheism?
Silentbobsays
I agree it’s weird. I remember in God Delusion Dawkins wrote about how horribly Turing was treated for being gay, and I know he’s a big fan of Stephen Fry (also gay). I don’t think for one second he’d accept a “biological” argument that gay people shouldn’t exist.
But if the target is trans people it’s fine. Even though the bigotry and arguments are basically the same. :-/
I love how they propose definitions like “ova producer” as defining sex, and sex combined with adulthood as the two defining characteristics of “woman” (or “man” in the case of sperm production/maleness), but for some reason shy away from limiting bathroom use to producers of ova.
I mean, what the hell, are you being honest about what you believe or not?
Narrator: It was, of course, obvious to all that they were not honest about what they believed, often not even to themselves
PZ, when you and I first discussed this topic, this is what you did
1: Start to participate in the conversation
2: End participation
3: Create a blog
4: Don’t reply to comments
I brought the subject up with you again recently, and so far you have repeated steps 1 to 3 – I am hoping you do not repeat step 4.
My response to the points in your video are
1 min: “I wonder how PZ Myers is going to take this?”
Dawkins has gone public with his position, and I know it contradicts your own. I wondered how you were going to take that. Not because Dawkins is your god or anything, but because I am confident you think he is an intellectual, a debater, and a biologist.
I posted it in order to get your attention, because I wanted you to engage, I did not ask it in order to anger or wound you. I can’t imagine how it possibly could have either of those affects on you. I didn’t think it would “make [you] quake and reconsider [your] position” – I hoped it would make you engage.
For the record, I did not sign this manifesto. I disagreed with the part about banning research into wombs for males, I felt it was very “Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve!” – I stopped reading it at that point.
2 min: “And then declare victory”
Victory for me would be discussing it with you and understanding your position, even if I still don’t agree with it. I honestly cannot fathom it out, and perhaps it isn’t exactly what I think it is and maybe that is why it makes no sense to me. You blocking me is counter my goal, and also disappointing because there is information I do not have.
2 min 10 s: “trans-women, yikes, hyphenated even”
Yes. I was under the impression is was a hyphenated word like “year-old”. Someone pointed out to me that it is poor etiquette, so I have started to use a space now that I am aware it is not a single word. I’ve consciously double-checked this comment to ensure I haven’t typed it out of habit (I had, twice)
2 min 30 s: “female refers to individuals that produce ova”
“Females” are people who as a whole produce ova, the definitions we find for “Female” use the word “individual” not to mean that she must be able to reproduce, it means they are a single individual of the group “Females”. You know that being infertile does not stop someone from being female, and you also know it doesn’t stop us from identifying them as a female.
That is why I don’t think your response was an honest one.
“It’s not a term I am comfortable applying to people, because it’s extremely reductive”. Socially, this may be a problem for you, but if you were a specialist in human reproduction you would absolutely need to know the sex of the person you were trying to help. There are other circumstances in society that also require us to know this distinction, which I will get to later.
It’s only reductive if you reduce their value/purpose only to their sex. Being able to classify my wife and I as female and male is not reducing us to our reproductive organs, because it doesn’t say that we are not worth anything more.
“We also don’t use it (their reproductive status) to make statements about their humanity”
A complete strawman argument. At no point would I ever dehumanise someone based on their sex, sexuality, gender identity, or anything else. I judge every individual on whether or not they are nice – until I learn enough about them to decide I assume that they are.
3 min 20 s: “By the technical definition, many cis women are not female”
I disagree, I believe the technical definition includes the inidivual females you think that it excludes. You know this too (you say you know it at 4 min 27 secs), but you present it as an argument tool rather than discussing facts.
4 min 11 s: “I am identifying my objection of identifying people by their mode of reproduction”.
In social circles, it is fine to object. However, when defining privileges/laws it is essential that we use sex as a classification system. Some examples are
Same-sex marriage is now legal. If we run a simple analysis of the sexes of those married and group the numbers by person (or place) performing the ceremony, it can give us a picture of whether or not someone appears to be discriminating against same-sex marriages.
Males have had massive advantages over females for a very long time. In order to determine whether or not anti-discrimination laws are being broken (or are even effective) we need to know people’s sex. For example, if a specific company with 10 thousand employees has only 3 female employees, this needs to be investigated. This data could be used in a tribunal if a case is brought against the employer.
The same for equality of pay. In mostly male industries it is possible for even a single male identifying as a woman to make average pay of males vs females seem more fair than they are.
This also applies to things like scholarships. These scholarships are in place to help females get into certain areas (e.g. IT) dominated by males, and from which they have been discriminated against – typically because they have historically been reduced to not being worth anything more than their ability to provide children, and not because of how they express/identify. They have no been discriminated against due to identify, females have never been able to identify out of sexual discrimination!
Considering scholarship applications from males who identify as women is circumventing the intention. I’m not saying this happens, or has ever happened, I am just giving examples of when it is necessary to categorise people by their biological sex.
3: Males are a higher risk to females.
I really hate that this is true, but it is. I am a male, and as a member of the male sex I should be considered a higher risk to females. I would readily risk my life to prevent a sexual assault, but I have to accept that nobody can tell the different between myself and an offender. The problem is not that all males are offenders, it’s that any one of us could be!
Opportunist rapists require opportunities. This is a very good reason to keep communal facilities separated by male/female. By allowing males into female-only spaces we ARE giving those opportunities. When the rules of society make rape easier, that’s rape culture.
This was ultimately the purpose of my question “Are trans women female?”
The answer of course is “no”, not a single trans woman is a female. So the question is, why should we allow males into spaces restricted specifically to females?
The answer is usually something along the lines of “because trans women are women, and they are far more likely to get attacked in a male facility than females are to be attached by trans women”.
Which falsely posits the choice as having only only two options for this choice.
Preventing all males from entering female-only spaces does not mean “forcing trans women into male spaces”. There are alternatives. You could demand the following laws
Trans people should be allowed to use single-occupancy spaces (parent & child, disabled).
If non are available and the staff facilities are single-occupancy, they should be able to demand access to those.
People should be able to use venue’s single-occupancy facilities even if they are not a customer (i.e. the place next door does not have them).
All new buildings must have provision for single-occupancy spaces before being granted building permissions, this has been the case in the UK since 2011.
I have put my physical well-being at risk by defending a trans woman in a club who was having objects thrown at her by a group of about 4 or 5 lads. I stepped in front of her and very sternly told them to stop what they were doing. Thankfully, they didn’t want to take it further, because I’d have lost that fight :)
So, I am not some Trans Hating “TERF” (as you keep labelling me). I am just someone who is interested in
Understanding other people’s positions
Getting society to do the least amount of harm possible.
KGsays
“Females” are people who as a whole produce ova – Peter Morris@14
Well “rugby players”, “vegetarians”, “Bolivians” are also “people who as a whole produce ova” – i.e., there are rugby players, vegetarians and Bolivians (even, I dare say, rugby-playing vegetarian Bolivians) who produce ova. So what?
So the question is, why should we allow males into spaces restricted specifically to females?
When my (AMAB, cisgender) son was small and out with my wife, she sometimes took him into women’s public toilets. Was he not male? Besides which, your question is a dishonest one, because it assumes that women’s public toilets are “restricted specifically to females”. They are not, in general signposted as for “females” but for “women”.
Preventing all males from entering female-only spaces does not mean “forcing trans women into male spaces”. There are alternatives. You could demand the following laws…
Meanwhile, trans women just have to cross their legs according to you.
I have put my physical well-being at risk by defending a trans woman in a club who was having objects thrown at her by a group of about 4 or 5 lads. I stepped in front of her and very sternly told them to stop what they were doing.
And we should believe you because…?
Silentbobsays
It’s so fucking tiresome. The same arguments that were debunked 20 or 30 years ago trotted out yet again by some dude who just learned trans people exist and wants a “debate”.
KGsays
Incidentally, Peter Morris@14, all your examples of when “it is essential that we use sex as a classification system” are ludicrous. In the cases of scholarships, equal pay, statistics of marriages etc., the small number of trans women is going to make a negligible difference. In the case of the supposed enhanced threat from trans women to cis women, refusing to allow the former into women-only spaces is not going to stop predatory men or predatory trans women from gaining access to such spaces by presenting themselves as women. Or do you and your fellow-transphobes plan to demand genital inspections (or karyotyping? measurement of testosterone levels? Presence of ovaries? What criterion of femaleness are you using? Because these four, among others, do not always give the same answer.) That you can’t see this for yourself is clear evidence of your transphobia.
Aoife_bsays
@14
You cannot claim to defend trans people when your own statements put the lie to it. Lads throw things at trans women because there’s a base level of prejudice set up by statements like “trans women are male”, “trans women are dangerous”, “we need to distinguish between trans women and cis women for reasons”
Nothing you are saying here is reasonable. Moreover, you KNOW that. I’m just going to comment on the specifically most dishonest and tiresome aspect: part 3.
Transphobes like you enjoy pushing this narrative and happily pretend nobody can tell that the whole goddamn thing is begging the question. You use “Males commit more crimes” (and similar) as justification for evicting trans women (again, nothing about trans men, funny how you only demonize the one group, innit) from women’s spaces.
Except, this can only make sense as an argument if you accept the premise that there is no difference between cis men and trans women. Your statistics (assuming they’re accurate) are from sources that were themselves institutionally transphobic and don’t make any distinction about how they divide up trans people into their statistics. So you and all the other deliberately dishonest TERFy types just ASSUME that, because you decided to define trans women as not female, you can happily apply “male” statistics to them, deciding that means there’s no difference. But this is specifically the claim being argued! Trans women are not cis men, are not like cis men. You cannot use arguments assuming they are in order to prove they are.
Show statistics that separate out trans and cis men and women. Show, with good sourcing, that trans women actually present the same kind of risk as cis men. Your sources don’t do that, and they only seem to do that when you start by twisting your weird claims about reproductive definitions involving ova into somehow proving that statistics gathered in a way NOT involving the science of biology somehow prove that (at least) four groups of people are correctly represented by your two groups of statistics.
Tell me, did ANY of the papers you prefer to use even say how they placed trans people? Do they actually tell you that trans women were included in ‘males’, since criminology is a social science and does not therefore generally rely on gametes and chromosomes? Even before we address the unproven assumption that all the sub-groups in a group have the same proportions of behaviors as the gestalt, do you even actually know where 100% of the trans people you’re trying to smear were included? Can you say with absolute certainty that there were no trans men in the sample labelled “male” and no trans women in the sample labelled “female”?
Of course you can’t. But that’s the nature of statistics being twisted to bigotry. You choose sources and groupings that push your hate narrative, and the truth can get fucked.
By allowing males into female-only spaces we ARE giving those opportunities. When the rules of society make rape easier, that’s rape culture.
Do you really think an actual rapist would bother announcing “I identify as a woman” before entering a women’s restroom to rape someone? Of course not — that would waste time, alert everyone to his presence, and blow the element of surprise. (And no, most cis men would not do ANYTHING to invite the whole world to question their masculinity.) A rapist would simply barge in and do what he wants without announcing anything. Just like rapists have already been doing.
At no point would I ever dehumanise someone based on their sex, sexuality, gender identity, or anything else.
Forcing people into segregated facilities, based on unfounded fears of things they might, or might not, actually be doing, is dehumanizing.
I’m not saying this happens, or has ever happened, I am just giving examples of when it is necessary to categorise people by their biological sex.
Yeah, right…you don’t really know if trans people are doing any of those bad things you imagine, but you’re still advocating a new set of Jim Crow laws anyway, just in case. Got it.
…by signing on to a “declaration” that openly demands that transwomen be denied all manner of legal protections, and forced apart from cis women, while offering them absolutely NOTHING to replace those services they need.
John Moralessays
Peter Morris:
Dawkins has gone public with his position, and I know it contradicts your own. I wondered how you were going to take that.
If you were actually interested in responses to your assertions, you could easily find them. The internet is a big place and PZ among many, many others has responded to all that crap before.
We respond to you as if your “concerns” are somewhere between disingenuous and outrageously malicious because you present yourself as information seeking, but you don’t actually seek out information. We know this because you have nothing more than PRATTs and yet cannot even acknowledge that previous responses exist, much less specify why past responses have been inadequate and require further discussion.
Catch up to the conversation that’s already happened before you attempt to assert that you are seeking information. To do anything else paints you in an immoderately mendacious hue.
Chakat Firepawsays
@rsmith #20
It’s more like “stop feeding the trolls” (and their enablers, the social media companies).
The problem with that standard advice is that it only applies to people that are actually trolls. That is, people who are posting specifically to get a reaction.
It does not apply to those seeking to silence people or mission posters who want to spew their bile wherever they can.
Silentbobsays
Okay, I had to go to bed after my last comment, but now it’s time to play Go back to the nineties and argue for trans people’s already established rights all over again for the sake of some guy who’s been asleep for thirty years. What fun! Let’s go…
@ 14 Peter Morris
Dawkins has gone public with his position, and I know it contradicts your own. I wondered how you were going to take that. Not because Dawkins is your god or anything, but because I am confident you think he is an intellectual, a debater, and a biologist.
The schoolboy in me wants to say mass debater, but look: I’ve nothing against Prof Dawkins particularly, but he is notorious even in atheist circles for saying clueless and offensive things when it comes to social issues. The response of most people to Dawkins transphobia wasn’t surprise, but, “FFS, not again”.
You know that being infertile does not stop someone from being female, and you also know it doesn’t stop us from identifying them as a female.
You are appealing to essentialism – the philosophical proposition that some people have a female essence and some don’t. I know you wouldn’t put it that way, but that’s the stance you’re taking when you talk of “knowing” someone is “female”. Nature, if you want to get anthropomorphic, knows no such thing as “female” or “male” – nature only knows sexually differentiated physical attributes. Humans come along and sort things into categories by attributes and label these categories they’ve just invented things like “female”. There’s no such thing as “knowing” someone is “female” there is only the question, “is applying the label ‘female’ to this person a useful system of categorisation, or are there other ways of categorisation that have greater utility?”.
if you were a specialist in human reproduction you would absolutely need to know the sex of the person you were trying to help.
You’d need to know more than that, wouldn’t you, if “sex” includes infertility? Anyway, yes, categorisation by reproduction is appropriate in reproductive contexts, duh.
Being able to classify my wife and I as female and male is not reducing us to our reproductive organs, because it doesn’t say that we are not worth anything more.
Is that so? So, say if your wife won an award, and she’s at a ceremony to get the award, and she gets the award, and it’s time for her acceptance speech, and the MC gets up and says, “and now, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce… a Female!”, that wouldn’t strike you as dehumanising at all?
At no point would I ever dehumanise someone based on their sex, sexuality, gender identity, or anything else.
Objectification is when you treat someone as an insensible collection of body parts, rather than a thinking center, with a mind and agency and an identity their own. The reason the award ceremony example is dehumanising is that the MC should refer to your wife by name, respecting her identity, and talk about her accomplishments, not treat her as a type of object. It’s when we only acknowledge bodies and not minds that we’re getting into dehumanisation territory. Are you sure you don’t do that?
In social circles, it is fine to object. However, when defining privileges/laws it is essential that we use sex as a classification system.
Privileges and laws are social things, not biological. This quote is internally contradictory.
Same-sex marriage is now legal. If we run a simple analysis of the sexes of those married and group the numbers by person (or place) performing the ceremony, it can give us a picture of whether or not someone appears to be discriminating against same-sex marriages.
You have to be kidding, right? This is absurd. Are you seriously saying this couple here won’t be discriminated against because one of them is trans and therefore it wouldn’t be a “same-sex marriage”? You’re living in a fantasy land. Gay couples that include a trans person experience the same homophobia as cis only couples.
Continued in part 2….
crimsonsagesays
Look its pretty simple, all the TERFs need to keep discussing this stuff extremely loudly and without our input, because otherwise we might get the silly idea that we are fully human people deserving of rights like everyone else. This would just not do! Next thing you know other “people” might start asking for fair treatment too.
Thanks for going to bat for us PZ, you actually have the wrong of it though. I appreciate when someone with some privilege and expertise speaks up for us, it’s exhausting to have to constantly litigate your basic existence all the time.
Silentbobsays
@ 14 Peter Morris
Males have had massive advantages over females for a very long time.
You mean cisgender heterosexual men have had advantages over women. I thought you didn’t dehumanise people?
For example, if a specific company with 10 thousand employees has only 3 female employees, this needs to be investigated. This data could be used in a tribunal if a case is brought against the employer.
Women. The word is women. Employers don’t know a person’s “sex”, they know their gender from which they may infer their sex.
The same for equality of pay. In mostly male industries it is possible for even a single male identifying as a woman to make average pay of males vs females seem more fair than they are.
What planet are you on?! Down here on Earth, the statistics are that one in three employers flat out admit they would not employ a trans woman. Trans women have difficulty even getting jobs, and in your fantasy land they’re well remunerated?! This is an inversion of reality. For example, if we had an office that employed say, 4 sales staff, and by chance it’s one cis women, one trans woman, one cis man, and one trans man; then if the company paid women 70 cents on the dollar compared to men – and we measured things by sex assigned at birth – the pay gap would be completely invisible. It’s a contrived example but you get the point. It’s no good measuring things by what baby genitals people had decades ago – what matters is how they are seen and treated in society in the here and now.
Also, if you say, “male identifying as a woman” one more time, steam is going to come out of my ears. The term is transgender women. People who were assigned male, but could not live with that label, rejected it, transitioned, and are now of female gender. Calling them “male” is just gratuitously insulting. If you need to note they were assigned male, that’s in the word “transgender”. “Transgender women” is all you ever need to say.
These scholarships are in place to help females get into certain areas (e.g. IT) dominated by males, and from which they have been discriminated against – typically because they have historically been reduced to not being worth anything more than their ability to provide children, and not because of how they express/identify.
Hang on, I thought you started by telling us it’s not reductive to be classified by reproductive ability only? But leaving that aside, again – you live in a fantasy land! You seriously think infertile women are immune from sexism, don’t get fewer promotions, don’t get talked over, don’t get to speak less often in meetings, etc.?! Of course they are discriminated against by the way they “express/identify” whether they have intact wombs or not. Your claim is ridiculous. How would their employer even know if they can get pregnant? Clairvoyance?
females have never been able to identify out of sexual discrimination!
This is true but not they way you think it is. It’s true because you can’t choose your identity. Cis people can’t just choose to be trans. But if you mean, “no one assigned female has escaped sexism because of their identity”, that’s utterly, ludicrously false. Trans men, you lunkhead. Trans men are assigned female, transition to male, and experienced male privilege – being seen and treated as men by everyone around them.
Considering scholarship applications from males who identify as women is circumventing the intention.
TRANSGENDER WOMEN! Grrr. And if the intention is affirmative action to counter societal prejudice, then of course trans women should be included. They experience all the discrimination of cis women, often with transphobia to boot.
Males are a higher risk to females.
I believe you are trying to say, “cisgender heterosexual men are by far the major demographic likely to sexually assault women, whether those women are cis or trans”, Mr “I never dehumanise people”. Yes, correct. Women, cis or trans, need spaces away from men to get a break from the relentless sexualization. I saw a tweet from a trans women just the other day saying that when she’s out with her brother nobody bothers her, but on a short walk alone, four different men came on to her.
By allowing males into female-only spaces we ARE giving those opportunities. When the rules of society make rape easier, that’s rape culture.
Well good thing nobody’s talking about letting males in then, isn’t it? As for laws protecting trans women’s rights to use spaces appropriate to their gender, study after study, fact-check after fact-check, has found that leads to no increase at all in rates of sexual assault.
The answer of course is “no”, not a single trans woman is a female.
Go fuck yourself. Since the days when trans women were called “MTF” (male to female), and trans men “FTM” in the scientific literature it has been recognised that it’s far more appropriate and socially useful to categorise trans people by how they actually live than by some reductive bioessentialist ideology. Were not throwing away decades of social progress because some bigoted and clueless cis bloke says so.
So the question is, why should we allow males into spaces restricted specifically to females?
Listen goofball – nobody has a policy or is promoting a policy to allow “males” into women’s spaces. Trans women, by contrast, have been using women’s space your entire life. Where the fuck do you think Christine Jorgensen or April Ashley went to piss? Rocked up to the urinals in the gents? There aren’t any new laws being proposed to “allow” trans people anywhere. There’s been legislation protecting trans people since the nineties. What is new is a reactionary conservative movement to try to strip trans people of those rights. That’s what the declaration signed by Dawkins is about. Taking decades old rights away from trans people.
Preventing all males from entering female-only spaces does not mean “forcing trans women into male spaces”. There are alternatives.
Oh fuck here we go. Let me guess – Jim Crow Transphobia Edition, right?
Trans people should be allowed to use single-occupancy spaces (parent & child, disabled).
You mean “forced”. You mean fuck disable people, nobody important is using their toilets. You’re an outrageous bigot. And being trans is not a disability, asshole.
If non[e] are available and the staff facilities are single-occupancy, they should be able to demand access to those.
Again, you mean “forced to use those”. Have the courage of your convictions. Trans people don’t want “access to those” – they are perfectly happy right now using the same facilities as everyone else. Why should the whole world be reorganised around your bigotry?
I have put my physical well-being at risk by defending a trans woman in a club who was having objects thrown at her by a group of about 4 or 5 lads. I stepped in front of her and very sternly told them to stop what they were doing.
Well done. Sincerely. But you realise, “I didn’t stand by and let an innocent person get bashed”, is nothing to boast about right? That’s like minimum entry conditions to participation in the human race. Will you stand by while an innocent demographic are stripped of their rights and protections by the hate group that wrote the manifesto Dawkins signed? Or will you do what’s right and fight it tooth and nail?
I am just someone who is interested… Getting society to do the least amount of harm possible.
Cool. It’s very simple. 99.4% of people are cisgender and it makes no difference to them whether you classify them by sex or gender. That’s what cisgender means. The other tiny 0.6% are transgender and we have a mountain of scientific evidence that they are happier and healthier being classified by their gender in non-medical contexts (and even then are typically physiologically different to cis people). So there’s a simple choice: We can reject these people and ostracise them causing distress, dysphoria, depression, anxiety, self-harming, discrimination, violence, and suicidal ideation. Or we can accept them as equal human beings worthy of the same dignity, recognition and rights and everyone else. Guess which one does the least harm.
He doesn’t say he wants help/company. What he says is, “Look! I commented!”
Even in the bizarro world where “policing women’s looks to determine which ones can use supposedly public restrooms” is a feminist position, what he’s doing is running to those who qualify as that world’s feminists and saying that he deserves a cookie for being a man doing 10 minutes of feminism.
Look! Look! See what I did? Now do I get a cookie?
No. No cookies. Sorry/not sorry.
Aoife_bsays
Christ, what an asshole
Silentbobsays
Peter Morris:
“Hello, hello, HQ do you read me? Come in HQ!
I’m pinned down by an enemy that’s being thinking about this stuff longer than last Thursday. None of the rote bullshit you equipped me with is working. Not sure I can hold out. Everyone here knows what they’re talking about, and knows more than me about everything. Can you send reinforcements? Hello? Over?”
Hahahaha.
John Moralessays
Obviously, he’s Petered out after the one comment.
Peter Morris@34,
If your ludicrous “arguments” were intended for PZ alone, why send them to a blog where others are (of course) going to answer them? Clearly, you have no adequate responses to the critiques others have made of them, but you’re too much of a moral coward to admit it.
Peter Morris: So you just admitted you’re still here, and thus still able to see our responses to your comment. And you’re perfectly capable of responding to us. Your refusal to do so strongly implies you can’t muster any sort of rebuttal to our points, or a defense of yours. I find that pathetic, but not at all surprising.
Ah – just scrolled up. Didn’t realize “mass debaters” was a thing. Anyway, I like puns.
Also…
Being able to classify my wife and I as female and male
My wife and me. Helpful tip: In these situations, eliminate the other object of the verb. Here, that would be “my wife.” So you would say “Being able to classify me…” and not “Being able to classify I…”
snarkratessays
SC@40, and while we are being grammar police, a little diatribe about hyphenation. The phrase trans woman is not even remotely like the phrase year old. Trans woman–adjective/noun. The phrase year old cannot even be classified, as it could be used in too many ways. The only way it would be hyphenated would be when used as an adjective–e.g. the year-old colt. It would not be hyphenated when used as an adjectival phrase–e.g. the child is a year old. I have difficulty even imagining how “trans woman” and “year old” would even be used as the same part of speech.
In general, a compound adjective will be hyphenated when it precedes the noun it modifies (e.g. year-old colt), but not when it is used as an adjectival phrase (e.g. the colt is a year old)
Question: Why is it that TERFS tend to be ignorant of the language?
Bonus question: Is their ignorance of the language the reason why they cannot express themselves concisely, or is it that their silly-assed, convoluted arguments and distinctions preclude concise or eloquent presentation.
I noticed #14’s 1-4 are totally uncited. I guess we just have to take it on faith?
So reproductive specialists need the word “female” to make sure they are dealing with a person who produces a specific cell type? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Don’t go see those specialists. They are dependent on cultural symbols to do their work. You don’t even need “ova producing”. This person is irrationally substituting their personal need for the words for professional need, without the courage to make their case.
And I guess #34 means they depend on challenging a perceived authority figure in politics instead of their arguments having the value. It just looks like fear-soaked historical narratives to me.
As a further answer to Snarkrates’s excellent questions, the ignorance of TERFs is also a studied, fake ignorance. They pretend to unawareness that they are using a deliberate obfuscation and offensive type of language; since if they admitted that ‘trans women’ is an adjective+noun construction, it would infer that trans women are a subset of all women – an state of affairs that they cannot allow to stand. Instead they have to use this hyphenated term (or just run the two words together without a space), which they imagine creates new nouns which are unrelated to the term ‘women’.
Boringly massive dishonesty or ignorance? In the words of the meme, why not both?
Given that this video came about because PZ had replied to a transphobic tweet by Dawkins and was then set on by TERven, I hate to say it but Dawkins has been at it again. In the olden days he would air transphobic views relatively infrequently, but now it’s down to a week. Last Friday he was praising Kathleen Stock’s book, today it’s Abigail Shrier’s (with a link to Jerry Coyne’s website blog, which I will not be reading).
As expected, PZ simply rallied the troops and then buggered off. Never willing to put his beliefs up to scrutiny, presumably because they won’t stand up to it.
John Moralessays
Um, Peter, as I noted in my #23, PZ pre-emptively held his beliefs up to scrutiny.
To which you have offered neither response nor acknowledgement.
(lest it be held up to scrutiny)
—
So, you dare not essay a retort to his response to that upon which you supposedly yet wonder.
IOW: The identity of the cowardly and evasive party is pretty obvious.
Peter Morris: Do you really think that buggering off, then coming back to accuse someone else of buggering off before buggering off again, then coming back to do the same thing again, makes you sound at all credible? You do understand that our refutation of your bigoted nonsense (and your non-response to same) is still up here for all to see, right, RIGHT?!
As expected, PZ simply rallied the troops and then buggered off. Never willing to put his beliefs up to scrutiny, presumably because they won’t stand up to it.
I didn’t “rally” any troops, I ignored him. I don’t reply to every comment, especially not when I’m in the midst of finals week.
If PZ answers, then I will respond to his points.
PZ answers: FUCK OFF. I don’t argue with people who think it is reasonable to deny trans rights.
OMG that’s ridiculous…as most of the comments agree…
of course, banning trans women from toilets will at least stop cis men disguising themselves as, wait, hang on
I took a quick look at that dude‘s account, and he apparently is OBSESSIVELY looking up trans porn. Which… You know, I don’t like to make those speculations for a variety of reasons, but sometimes it’s staring you right in the face.
He’s also a neo-Nazi who has been suspended dozen of times already. Very popular with “GC” crowd though.
There was some sound distortion in the last sentence. Was it “TERFs can just jerk off” or words to that effect?
Yet another example that Twitter is a cesspit of scum and villainy. I don’t know why people stay on that platform.
Social media companies have willingly provided a platform for fascists.
That alone should be enough reason to dissolve them. But that won’t happen.
So the best thing to do is to deprive them of eyeballs, which will dry up their cash flow.
Delete your accounts and ban their domains from your home networks.
I would disagree that you’re not the person to be talking about this. Not the only person, obviously, but since there is a significant biology component to the “discussion” (i.e. slapping down the bigots’ dishonest mischaracterisation of everything) I think it benefits everyone to have a developmental biologist’s perspective. Particularly one familiar with the tactics of other pseudoscientific grifters like the creationists.
@3 you sound like the libertarian who thinks that his “Going Galt” is going to bring Petsmart to it’s knees.
Maybe I’m wrong, but very few armies have won battles by leaving the battlefield…
@gijoel #2 Throughout the years I’ve blocked most of the terfs, trolls and brands and studiosly use the chronological “Latest Tweets”, so my timeline is mostly cats, rabbits and lefties sharing selfies and occasionally, Leftist Takes and Drama.
Oh, also videosgame. Mostly harmless fun, hanging around with firends making jokes and a little education.
=8)-DX
It’s almost as though we gays have dropped off the reactionary radar, so they hound transfolk instead, mostly transwomen. Why can’t they find something more productive to do? The mind really boggles. I did take the time to register my disappointment with Dawkins on his Twitter feed. He must be losing his marbles.
@5 I like how you think and silence only elevates oppressors. But is social media really analogous to a battlefield? While I agree with McLuhan’s critics about the nature of a medium to convey information, I’m not convinced the nuance that science demands is shouting-into-a-vortex-friendly. The winners are usually the ones who shout the loudest.
And yet, we’re stuck with this since no one reads letters to the editors or newspapers anymore. Or that system is broken. Maybe I’m wrong too but what I do know is I’m angry AF.
A friend taught me a new word today. “SWERF”. It’s like TERF, but they exclude sex workers. Knowing is half the battle.
@9 Ray Ceeya
That’s an old term. TERFs have always been extremely anti-porn, anti-sex work, anti-kink, anti-surrogacy, anti just about anything except sex to make your own baby in missionary position with the lights out while thinking of England if you absolutely must.
I would think SWERF was coined very soon after TERF.
Recently, they got in a lather about an insurance company ad that showed a little boy in a dress with makeup dancing around the house pretending to be a pop star. You see, the kid was being “sexualized”. *rolls eyes*
I still don’t understand why certain renowned atheists like Dawkins still double down on their transphobia. In their godlessness and complete opposition to religion, do Dawkins & his gang see as a threat to their atheism?
I agree it’s weird. I remember in God Delusion Dawkins wrote about how horribly Turing was treated for being gay, and I know he’s a big fan of Stephen Fry (also gay). I don’t think for one second he’d accept a “biological” argument that gay people shouldn’t exist.
But if the target is trans people it’s fine. Even though the bigotry and arguments are basically the same. :-/
I love how they propose definitions like “ova producer” as defining sex, and sex combined with adulthood as the two defining characteristics of “woman” (or “man” in the case of sperm production/maleness), but for some reason shy away from limiting bathroom use to producers of ova.
I mean, what the hell, are you being honest about what you believe or not?
PZ, when you and I first discussed this topic, this is what you did
1: Start to participate in the conversation
2: End participation
3: Create a blog
4: Don’t reply to comments
I brought the subject up with you again recently, and so far you have repeated steps 1 to 3 – I am hoping you do not repeat step 4.
My response to the points in your video are
1 min: “I wonder how PZ Myers is going to take this?”
Dawkins has gone public with his position, and I know it contradicts your own. I wondered how you were going to take that. Not because Dawkins is your god or anything, but because I am confident you think he is an intellectual, a debater, and a biologist.
I posted it in order to get your attention, because I wanted you to engage, I did not ask it in order to anger or wound you. I can’t imagine how it possibly could have either of those affects on you. I didn’t think it would “make [you] quake and reconsider [your] position” – I hoped it would make you engage.
For the record, I did not sign this manifesto. I disagreed with the part about banning research into wombs for males, I felt it was very “Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve!” – I stopped reading it at that point.
2 min: “And then declare victory”
Victory for me would be discussing it with you and understanding your position, even if I still don’t agree with it. I honestly cannot fathom it out, and perhaps it isn’t exactly what I think it is and maybe that is why it makes no sense to me. You blocking me is counter my goal, and also disappointing because there is information I do not have.
2 min 10 s: “trans-women, yikes, hyphenated even”
Yes. I was under the impression is was a hyphenated word like “year-old”. Someone pointed out to me that it is poor etiquette, so I have started to use a space now that I am aware it is not a single word. I’ve consciously double-checked this comment to ensure I haven’t typed it out of habit (I had, twice)
2 min 30 s: “female refers to individuals that produce ova”
“Females” are people who as a whole produce ova, the definitions we find for “Female” use the word “individual” not to mean that she must be able to reproduce, it means they are a single individual of the group “Females”. You know that being infertile does not stop someone from being female, and you also know it doesn’t stop us from identifying them as a female.
That is why I don’t think your response was an honest one.
“It’s not a term I am comfortable applying to people, because it’s extremely reductive”. Socially, this may be a problem for you, but if you were a specialist in human reproduction you would absolutely need to know the sex of the person you were trying to help. There are other circumstances in society that also require us to know this distinction, which I will get to later.
It’s only reductive if you reduce their value/purpose only to their sex. Being able to classify my wife and I as female and male is not reducing us to our reproductive organs, because it doesn’t say that we are not worth anything more.
“We also don’t use it (their reproductive status) to make statements about their humanity”
A complete strawman argument. At no point would I ever dehumanise someone based on their sex, sexuality, gender identity, or anything else. I judge every individual on whether or not they are nice – until I learn enough about them to decide I assume that they are.
3 min 20 s: “By the technical definition, many cis women are not female”
I disagree, I believe the technical definition includes the inidivual females you think that it excludes. You know this too (you say you know it at 4 min 27 secs), but you present it as an argument tool rather than discussing facts.
4 min 11 s: “I am identifying my objection of identifying people by their mode of reproduction”.
In social circles, it is fine to object. However, when defining privileges/laws it is essential that we use sex as a classification system. Some examples are
Same-sex marriage is now legal. If we run a simple analysis of the sexes of those married and group the numbers by person (or place) performing the ceremony, it can give us a picture of whether or not someone appears to be discriminating against same-sex marriages.
Males have had massive advantages over females for a very long time. In order to determine whether or not anti-discrimination laws are being broken (or are even effective) we need to know people’s sex. For example, if a specific company with 10 thousand employees has only 3 female employees, this needs to be investigated. This data could be used in a tribunal if a case is brought against the employer.
The same for equality of pay. In mostly male industries it is possible for even a single male identifying as a woman to make average pay of males vs females seem more fair than they are.
This also applies to things like scholarships. These scholarships are in place to help females get into certain areas (e.g. IT) dominated by males, and from which they have been discriminated against – typically because they have historically been reduced to not being worth anything more than their ability to provide children, and not because of how they express/identify. They have no been discriminated against due to identify, females have never been able to identify out of sexual discrimination!
Considering scholarship applications from males who identify as women is circumventing the intention. I’m not saying this happens, or has ever happened, I am just giving examples of when it is necessary to categorise people by their biological sex.
3: Males are a higher risk to females.
I really hate that this is true, but it is. I am a male, and as a member of the male sex I should be considered a higher risk to females. I would readily risk my life to prevent a sexual assault, but I have to accept that nobody can tell the different between myself and an offender. The problem is not that all males are offenders, it’s that any one of us could be!
Opportunist rapists require opportunities. This is a very good reason to keep communal facilities separated by male/female. By allowing males into female-only spaces we ARE giving those opportunities. When the rules of society make rape easier, that’s rape culture.
This was ultimately the purpose of my question “Are trans women female?”
The answer of course is “no”, not a single trans woman is a female. So the question is, why should we allow males into spaces restricted specifically to females?
The answer is usually something along the lines of “because trans women are women, and they are far more likely to get attacked in a male facility than females are to be attached by trans women”.
Which falsely posits the choice as having only only two options for this choice.
Preventing all males from entering female-only spaces does not mean “forcing trans women into male spaces”. There are alternatives. You could demand the following laws
Trans people should be allowed to use single-occupancy spaces (parent & child, disabled).
If non are available and the staff facilities are single-occupancy, they should be able to demand access to those.
People should be able to use venue’s single-occupancy facilities even if they are not a customer (i.e. the place next door does not have them).
All new buildings must have provision for single-occupancy spaces before being granted building permissions, this has been the case in the UK since 2011.
I have put my physical well-being at risk by defending a trans woman in a club who was having objects thrown at her by a group of about 4 or 5 lads. I stepped in front of her and very sternly told them to stop what they were doing. Thankfully, they didn’t want to take it further, because I’d have lost that fight :)
So, I am not some Trans Hating “TERF” (as you keep labelling me). I am just someone who is interested in
Understanding other people’s positions
Getting society to do the least amount of harm possible.
“Females” are people who as a whole produce ova – Peter Morris@14
Well “rugby players”, “vegetarians”, “Bolivians” are also “people who as a whole produce ova” – i.e., there are rugby players, vegetarians and Bolivians (even, I dare say, rugby-playing vegetarian Bolivians) who produce ova. So what?
When my (AMAB, cisgender) son was small and out with my wife, she sometimes took him into women’s public toilets. Was he not male? Besides which, your question is a dishonest one, because it assumes that women’s public toilets are “restricted specifically to females”. They are not, in general signposted as for “females” but for “women”.
Meanwhile, trans women just have to cross their legs according to you.
And we should believe you because…?
It’s so fucking tiresome. The same arguments that were debunked 20 or 30 years ago trotted out yet again by some dude who just learned trans people exist and wants a “debate”.
Incidentally, Peter Morris@14, all your examples of when “it is essential that we use sex as a classification system” are ludicrous. In the cases of scholarships, equal pay, statistics of marriages etc., the small number of trans women is going to make a negligible difference. In the case of the supposed enhanced threat from trans women to cis women, refusing to allow the former into women-only spaces is not going to stop predatory men or predatory trans women from gaining access to such spaces by presenting themselves as women. Or do you and your fellow-transphobes plan to demand genital inspections (or karyotyping? measurement of testosterone levels? Presence of ovaries? What criterion of femaleness are you using? Because these four, among others, do not always give the same answer.) That you can’t see this for yourself is clear evidence of your transphobia.
@14
You cannot claim to defend trans people when your own statements put the lie to it. Lads throw things at trans women because there’s a base level of prejudice set up by statements like “trans women are male”, “trans women are dangerous”, “we need to distinguish between trans women and cis women for reasons”
@14 Peter Morris the dishonest transphobe
Nothing you are saying here is reasonable. Moreover, you KNOW that. I’m just going to comment on the specifically most dishonest and tiresome aspect: part 3.
Transphobes like you enjoy pushing this narrative and happily pretend nobody can tell that the whole goddamn thing is begging the question. You use “Males commit more crimes” (and similar) as justification for evicting trans women (again, nothing about trans men, funny how you only demonize the one group, innit) from women’s spaces.
Except, this can only make sense as an argument if you accept the premise that there is no difference between cis men and trans women. Your statistics (assuming they’re accurate) are from sources that were themselves institutionally transphobic and don’t make any distinction about how they divide up trans people into their statistics. So you and all the other deliberately dishonest TERFy types just ASSUME that, because you decided to define trans women as not female, you can happily apply “male” statistics to them, deciding that means there’s no difference. But this is specifically the claim being argued! Trans women are not cis men, are not like cis men. You cannot use arguments assuming they are in order to prove they are.
Show statistics that separate out trans and cis men and women. Show, with good sourcing, that trans women actually present the same kind of risk as cis men. Your sources don’t do that, and they only seem to do that when you start by twisting your weird claims about reproductive definitions involving ova into somehow proving that statistics gathered in a way NOT involving the science of biology somehow prove that (at least) four groups of people are correctly represented by your two groups of statistics.
Tell me, did ANY of the papers you prefer to use even say how they placed trans people? Do they actually tell you that trans women were included in ‘males’, since criminology is a social science and does not therefore generally rely on gametes and chromosomes? Even before we address the unproven assumption that all the sub-groups in a group have the same proportions of behaviors as the gestalt, do you even actually know where 100% of the trans people you’re trying to smear were included? Can you say with absolute certainty that there were no trans men in the sample labelled “male” and no trans women in the sample labelled “female”?
Of course you can’t. But that’s the nature of statistics being twisted to bigotry. You choose sources and groupings that push your hate narrative, and the truth can get fucked.
Susan Montgomery@5
It’s more like “stop feeding the trolls” (and their enablers, the social media companies).
By allowing males into female-only spaces we ARE giving those opportunities. When the rules of society make rape easier, that’s rape culture.
Do you really think an actual rapist would bother announcing “I identify as a woman” before entering a women’s restroom to rape someone? Of course not — that would waste time, alert everyone to his presence, and blow the element of surprise. (And no, most cis men would not do ANYTHING to invite the whole world to question their masculinity.) A rapist would simply barge in and do what he wants without announcing anything. Just like rapists have already been doing.
At no point would I ever dehumanise someone based on their sex, sexuality, gender identity, or anything else.
Forcing people into segregated facilities, based on unfounded fears of things they might, or might not, actually be doing, is dehumanizing.
I’m not saying this happens, or has ever happened, I am just giving examples of when it is necessary to categorise people by their biological sex.
Yeah, right…you don’t really know if trans people are doing any of those bad things you imagine, but you’re still advocating a new set of Jim Crow laws anyway, just in case. Got it.
Dawkins has gone public with his position…
…by signing on to a “declaration” that openly demands that transwomen be denied all manner of legal protections, and forced apart from cis women, while offering them absolutely NOTHING to replace those services they need.
Peter Morris:
Your google-fu is weak; here:
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2021/11/01/the-dawkins-ennui/
Peter Morris:
If you were actually interested in responses to your assertions, you could easily find them. The internet is a big place and PZ among many, many others has responded to all that crap before.
We respond to you as if your “concerns” are somewhere between disingenuous and outrageously malicious because you present yourself as information seeking, but you don’t actually seek out information. We know this because you have nothing more than PRATTs and yet cannot even acknowledge that previous responses exist, much less specify why past responses have been inadequate and require further discussion.
Catch up to the conversation that’s already happened before you attempt to assert that you are seeking information. To do anything else paints you in an immoderately mendacious hue.
@rsmith #20
The problem with that standard advice is that it only applies to people that are actually trolls. That is, people who are posting specifically to get a reaction.
It does not apply to those seeking to silence people or mission posters who want to spew their bile wherever they can.
Okay, I had to go to bed after my last comment, but now it’s time to play Go back to the nineties and argue for trans people’s already established rights all over again for the sake of some guy who’s been asleep for thirty years. What fun! Let’s go…
@ 14 Peter Morris
The schoolboy in me wants to say mass debater, but look: I’ve nothing against Prof Dawkins particularly, but he is notorious even in atheist circles for saying clueless and offensive things when it comes to social issues. The response of most people to Dawkins transphobia wasn’t surprise, but, “FFS, not again”.
You are appealing to essentialism – the philosophical proposition that some people have a female essence and some don’t. I know you wouldn’t put it that way, but that’s the stance you’re taking when you talk of “knowing” someone is “female”. Nature, if you want to get anthropomorphic, knows no such thing as “female” or “male” – nature only knows sexually differentiated physical attributes. Humans come along and sort things into categories by attributes and label these categories they’ve just invented things like “female”. There’s no such thing as “knowing” someone is “female” there is only the question, “is applying the label ‘female’ to this person a useful system of categorisation, or are there other ways of categorisation that have greater utility?”.
You’d need to know more than that, wouldn’t you, if “sex” includes infertility? Anyway, yes, categorisation by reproduction is appropriate in reproductive contexts, duh.
Is that so? So, say if your wife won an award, and she’s at a ceremony to get the award, and she gets the award, and it’s time for her acceptance speech, and the MC gets up and says, “and now, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce… a Female!”, that wouldn’t strike you as dehumanising at all?
Objectification is when you treat someone as an insensible collection of body parts, rather than a thinking center, with a mind and agency and an identity their own. The reason the award ceremony example is dehumanising is that the MC should refer to your wife by name, respecting her identity, and talk about her accomplishments, not treat her as a type of object. It’s when we only acknowledge bodies and not minds that we’re getting into dehumanisation territory. Are you sure you don’t do that?
Privileges and laws are social things, not biological. This quote is internally contradictory.
You have to be kidding, right? This is absurd. Are you seriously saying this couple here won’t be discriminated against because one of them is trans and therefore it wouldn’t be a “same-sex marriage”? You’re living in a fantasy land. Gay couples that include a trans person experience the same homophobia as cis only couples.
Continued in part 2….
Look its pretty simple, all the TERFs need to keep discussing this stuff extremely loudly and without our input, because otherwise we might get the silly idea that we are fully human people deserving of rights like everyone else. This would just not do! Next thing you know other “people” might start asking for fair treatment too.
Thanks for going to bat for us PZ, you actually have the wrong of it though. I appreciate when someone with some privilege and expertise speaks up for us, it’s exhausting to have to constantly litigate your basic existence all the time.
@ 14 Peter Morris
You mean cisgender heterosexual men have had advantages over women. I thought you didn’t dehumanise people?
Women. The word is women. Employers don’t know a person’s “sex”, they know their gender from which they may infer their sex.
What planet are you on?! Down here on Earth, the statistics are that one in three employers flat out admit they would not employ a trans woman. Trans women have difficulty even getting jobs, and in your fantasy land they’re well remunerated?! This is an inversion of reality. For example, if we had an office that employed say, 4 sales staff, and by chance it’s one cis women, one trans woman, one cis man, and one trans man; then if the company paid women 70 cents on the dollar compared to men – and we measured things by sex assigned at birth – the pay gap would be completely invisible. It’s a contrived example but you get the point. It’s no good measuring things by what baby genitals people had decades ago – what matters is how they are seen and treated in society in the here and now.
Also, if you say, “male identifying as a woman” one more time, steam is going to come out of my ears. The term is transgender women. People who were assigned male, but could not live with that label, rejected it, transitioned, and are now of female gender. Calling them “male” is just gratuitously insulting. If you need to note they were assigned male, that’s in the word “transgender”. “Transgender women” is all you ever need to say.
Hang on, I thought you started by telling us it’s not reductive to be classified by reproductive ability only? But leaving that aside, again – you live in a fantasy land! You seriously think infertile women are immune from sexism, don’t get fewer promotions, don’t get talked over, don’t get to speak less often in meetings, etc.?! Of course they are discriminated against by the way they “express/identify” whether they have intact wombs or not. Your claim is ridiculous. How would their employer even know if they can get pregnant? Clairvoyance?
This is true but not they way you think it is. It’s true because you can’t choose your identity. Cis people can’t just choose to be trans. But if you mean, “no one assigned female has escaped sexism because of their identity”, that’s utterly, ludicrously false. Trans men, you lunkhead. Trans men are assigned female, transition to male, and experienced male privilege – being seen and treated as men by everyone around them.
TRANSGENDER WOMEN! Grrr. And if the intention is affirmative action to counter societal prejudice, then of course trans women should be included. They experience all the discrimination of cis women, often with transphobia to boot.
I believe you are trying to say, “cisgender heterosexual men are by far the major demographic likely to sexually assault women, whether those women are cis or trans”, Mr “I never dehumanise people”. Yes, correct. Women, cis or trans, need spaces away from men to get a break from the relentless sexualization. I saw a tweet from a trans women just the other day saying that when she’s out with her brother nobody bothers her, but on a short walk alone, four different men came on to her.
Well good thing nobody’s talking about letting males in then, isn’t it? As for laws protecting trans women’s rights to use spaces appropriate to their gender, study after study, fact-check after fact-check, has found that leads to no increase at all in rates of sexual assault.
Go fuck yourself. Since the days when trans women were called “MTF” (male to female), and trans men “FTM” in the scientific literature it has been recognised that it’s far more appropriate and socially useful to categorise trans people by how they actually live than by some reductive bioessentialist ideology. Were not throwing away decades of social progress because some bigoted and clueless cis bloke says so.
Listen goofball – nobody has a policy or is promoting a policy to allow “males” into women’s spaces. Trans women, by contrast, have been using women’s space your entire life. Where the fuck do you think Christine Jorgensen or April Ashley went to piss? Rocked up to the urinals in the gents? There aren’t any new laws being proposed to “allow” trans people anywhere. There’s been legislation protecting trans people since the nineties. What is new is a reactionary conservative movement to try to strip trans people of those rights. That’s what the declaration signed by Dawkins is about. Taking decades old rights away from trans people.
Oh fuck here we go. Let me guess – Jim Crow Transphobia Edition, right?
You mean “forced”. You mean fuck disable people, nobody important is using their toilets. You’re an outrageous bigot. And being trans is not a disability, asshole.
Again, you mean “forced to use those”. Have the courage of your convictions. Trans people don’t want “access to those” – they are perfectly happy right now using the same facilities as everyone else. Why should the whole world be reorganised around your bigotry?
Well done. Sincerely. But you realise, “I didn’t stand by and let an innocent person get bashed”, is nothing to boast about right? That’s like minimum entry conditions to participation in the human race. Will you stand by while an innocent demographic are stripped of their rights and protections by the hate group that wrote the manifesto Dawkins signed? Or will you do what’s right and fight it tooth and nail?
Cool. It’s very simple. 99.4% of people are cisgender and it makes no difference to them whether you classify them by sex or gender. That’s what cisgender means. The other tiny 0.6% are transgender and we have a mountain of scientific evidence that they are happier and healthier being classified by their gender in non-medical contexts (and even then are typically physiologically different to cis people). So there’s a simple choice: We can reject these people and ostracise them causing distress, dysphoria, depression, anxiety, self-harming, discrimination, violence, and suicidal ideation. Or we can accept them as equal human beings worthy of the same dignity, recognition and rights and everyone else. Guess which one does the least harm.
Hahahah. Peter Morris put up the transphobic bat-signal. Must be feeling lonely.
He doesn’t say he wants help/company. What he says is, “Look! I commented!”
Even in the bizarro world where “policing women’s looks to determine which ones can use supposedly public restrooms” is a feminist position, what he’s doing is running to those who qualify as that world’s feminists and saying that he deserves a cookie for being a man doing 10 minutes of feminism.
No. No cookies. Sorry/not sorry.
Christ, what an asshole
Peter Morris:
“Hello, hello, HQ do you read me? Come in HQ!
I’m pinned down by an enemy that’s being thinking about this stuff longer than last Thursday. None of the rote bullshit you equipped me with is working. Not sure I can hold out. Everyone here knows what they’re talking about, and knows more than me about everything. Can you send reinforcements? Hello? Over?”
Hahahaha.
Obviously, he’s Petered out after the one comment.
(Bit of a fizzer)
I am here, but I didn’t come here to mass-debate.
If PZ answers, then I will respond to his points.
Peter Morris@34,
If your ludicrous “arguments” were intended for PZ alone, why send them to a blog where others are (of course) going to answer them? Clearly, you have no adequate responses to the critiques others have made of them, but you’re too much of a moral coward to admit it.
Peter Morris: So you just admitted you’re still here, and thus still able to see our responses to your comment. And you’re perfectly capable of responding to us. Your refusal to do so strongly implies you can’t muster any sort of rebuttal to our points, or a defense of yours. I find that pathetic, but not at all surprising.
@34
Very dishonest behavior there, chief. A bit more blatant even than we usually expect from trolls who show up here to JAQ off with their bigotry.
Peter Morris:
If?
I refer you to my #23.
PZ “responded” pre-emptively, about a month before your request.
(You evidently have no response you dare venture, do ya?)
—
Obviously not.
You came here to masturbate.
LOL.
Ah – just scrolled up. Didn’t realize “mass debaters” was a thing. Anyway, I like puns.
Also…
My wife and me. Helpful tip: In these situations, eliminate the other object of the verb. Here, that would be “my wife.” So you would say “Being able to classify me…” and not “Being able to classify I…”
SC@40, and while we are being grammar police, a little diatribe about hyphenation. The phrase trans woman is not even remotely like the phrase year old. Trans woman–adjective/noun. The phrase year old cannot even be classified, as it could be used in too many ways. The only way it would be hyphenated would be when used as an adjective–e.g. the year-old colt. It would not be hyphenated when used as an adjectival phrase–e.g. the child is a year old. I have difficulty even imagining how “trans woman” and “year old” would even be used as the same part of speech.
In general, a compound adjective will be hyphenated when it precedes the noun it modifies (e.g. year-old colt), but not when it is used as an adjectival phrase (e.g. the colt is a year old)
Question: Why is it that TERFS tend to be ignorant of the language?
Bonus question: Is their ignorance of the language the reason why they cannot express themselves concisely, or is it that their silly-assed, convoluted arguments and distinctions preclude concise or eloquent presentation.
Snarkrates @41 — Well, they’re ignorant of so much else, why not include language?
(Bonus: BOTH. It’s both.)
I noticed #14’s 1-4 are totally uncited. I guess we just have to take it on faith?
So reproductive specialists need the word “female” to make sure they are dealing with a person who produces a specific cell type? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Don’t go see those specialists. They are dependent on cultural symbols to do their work. You don’t even need “ova producing”. This person is irrationally substituting their personal need for the words for professional need, without the courage to make their case.
And I guess #34 means they depend on challenging a perceived authority figure in politics instead of their arguments having the value. It just looks like fear-soaked historical narratives to me.
As a further answer to Snarkrates’s excellent questions, the ignorance of TERFs is also a studied, fake ignorance. They pretend to unawareness that they are using a deliberate obfuscation and offensive type of language; since if they admitted that ‘trans women’ is an adjective+noun construction, it would infer that trans women are a subset of all women – an state of affairs that they cannot allow to stand. Instead they have to use this hyphenated term (or just run the two words together without a space), which they imagine creates new nouns which are unrelated to the term ‘women’.
Boringly massive dishonesty or ignorance? In the words of the meme, why not both?
Given that this video came about because PZ had replied to a transphobic tweet by Dawkins and was then set on by TERven, I hate to say it but Dawkins has been at it again. In the olden days he would air transphobic views relatively infrequently, but now it’s down to a week. Last Friday he was praising Kathleen Stock’s book, today it’s Abigail Shrier’s (with a link to Jerry Coyne’s
websiteblog, which I will not be reading).As expected, PZ simply rallied the troops and then buggered off. Never willing to put his beliefs up to scrutiny, presumably because they won’t stand up to it.
Um, Peter, as I noted in my #23, PZ pre-emptively held his beliefs up to scrutiny.
To which you have offered neither response nor acknowledgement.
(lest it be held up to scrutiny)
—
So, you dare not essay a retort to his response to that upon which you supposedly yet wonder.
IOW: The identity of the cowardly and evasive party is pretty obvious.
(Run, run, run away!)
Peter Morris: Do you really think that buggering off, then coming back to accuse someone else of buggering off before buggering off again, then coming back to do the same thing again, makes you sound at all credible? You do understand that our refutation of your bigoted nonsense (and your non-response to same) is still up here for all to see, right, RIGHT?!
He did the same thing he did on Twitter!
I didn’t “rally” any troops, I ignored him. I don’t reply to every comment, especially not when I’m in the midst of finals week.
PZ answers: FUCK OFF. I don’t argue with people who think it is reasonable to deny trans rights.
So he now has his answer, though I’m sure it will be insufficient. It always is for these bigoted people.
Thanks PZ.
Yeah, it’s not like he stuck around waiting for PZ to tell him to fuck off…
YIKES
OMG that’s ridiculous…as most of the comments agree…
of course, banning trans women from toilets will at least stop cis men disguising themselves as, wait, hang on
I took a quick look at that dude‘s account, and he apparently is OBSESSIVELY looking up trans porn. Which… You know, I don’t like to make those speculations for a variety of reasons, but sometimes it’s staring you right in the face.
He’s also a neo-Nazi who has been suspended dozen of times already. Very popular with “GC” crowd though.