Lying to people isn't a kindness. Yhe pure & simple FACT is, of the 2 sexes in humans, only females can get pregnant. Full stop.
Pregnancy is a biological process done w/our material bodies, not w/one's oh-so-trendy "gender identity." We don't need additional, convoluted words that also mean the exact opposite to clarify that which ever has been & remains abundantly clear to the majority of humanity.
While some women wish they were not women & have decided to live the lie that they're something else, they're to be pitied not deceived. We don't lie to any other group of people about reality. We don't agree w/an anorexic, "Yes, darling. At 90 lbs you're very fat."
We don't talk to someone in the midst of a psychological delusion, "General Napoleon. Your troops are assembled in the garden."
Yet so many believe we should completely restructure public facilities, re-design women's Healthcare to feed the delusion that changing which gendered sexist stereotypes you adopt has, magically, changed your biological, nitty-gritty sex!
My next question is, how do you then propose we deal w/the people claiming to have "transitioned" into aliens, dragons, fish - or the latest 1 I saw - "human/bird hybrid" whose preferred pronouns are "er/ey/em"??
Women who claim the "gender" of "transman" or "non-binary" are choosing a gender, for whatever reason. Their sex remains female. In English, adult female humans are women. Female children are girls. Those are the only 2 who can get pregnant. Those are the only 2 words we need to defend their reproductive rights.
Y'all need to find something productive to do with your time. Volunteer at a DV shelter, animal shelter, take up gardening. Those will clue you in on biology but quick.
A trans woman will never know the pain and fear and desire we have to walk alone at midnight. This is but one of a dozen examples I can think of that makes the designation of biological woman necessary. To give this up is is to erase me. I firmly agree to disagree.
The “conservative myth” you talk about is not so mythical. Women (the sex class) deserve our own safe spaces away from males. No amount of gender feelings will change that.
Mixed sex bathrooms show increased danger for women:
More girls were killed in the last 50 years, precisely because they were girls, than men killed in all the wars in the 20th century. More girls are killed in this routine gendercide in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century.
The equivalent of 5 jumbo jets worth of women die in labor each day... life time risk of maternal death is 1,000x higher in a poor country than in the west. That should be an international scandal.
Source: Nicholas D. Kristof, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“women with infertility issues—who are not currently impregnable.” In my experience, this is not how infertility works. Many people who are struggling with infertility eventually end up pregnant, though, of course, many others don’t. For them, there is no accessible fact of the matter that will determine whether, in your terms, they fall in the class of people who can be affected by abortion laws, (because they don’t know whether they are impregnable). This makes your proposal problematic. By centering i’m pregnability the way you do, people struggling with infertility will be harmed. You’re saying, “abortion bans may target you but, don’t worry, they probably can’t “affect” you”. Try to imagine what that would feel like for someone who wants more than anything to be fertile. The most maddening aspect of infertility is feeling out of control…whatever you try, your body doesn’t cooperate. From the perspective of someone struggling with infertility, abortion bans exacerbate this already present lack of control—your body and now the state are conspiring determine your reproductive outcomes. The further limiting of one’s reproductive control is a real effect of these laws that these people will feel, whether or not it turns out that they are impregnable. Please consider how your particular way of achieving accuracy and inclusion—by saying all and only impregnable are affected—-comes across to people (of all gender identities) who are struggling with infertility.
"Impregnable people"...why don't we just jump straight to "baby-making machines" at this point? It seriously sounds like a bunch of powerless quasi-human-lumps just waiting to be impregnated (or not) by the people who can actually do things.
Great way to refer to the female half of the population. Do better and come up with a more dignified name. We hold up half the sky.
Well just tell me then, what is a woman? I would like to really know. It is not meant as a gotcha question.
And by the way, every time you make efforts to be inclusive like this in the middle of the abortion rights debates, you lose moderate people in the fight for rights to abortions. And that eventually will cause more rights to be lost. That's just what's happening. Maybe it shouldn't be happening but it is. You have to decide if that is worth it.
An excellent response! Thank you. I'm going to assign this (and many other "More to Hate" posts of yours) along with other publications of yours in my Controversies in Feminist Philosophy seminar this fall!
It seems to me that anyone walking alone and unarmed at night is potentially vulnerable to aggressive males or females. Some are more vulnerable than others, but predators look for weak prey, and that weakness could be sex, age, or disability based. Hate based assaults are of a different category, but clearly can apply to race, sexuality, religion, etc. Hate based assaults are heinous regardless of the particular category of prejudice. So I am not sure why the arguments go to who is more vulnerable to predators and hate crimes, women or trans persons.
Moreover, I find the terminology wars confusing. I understand and accept that gender is not binary and that there are more categories than our culture has acknowledged in the past. Perhaps we could adopt names from other languages that have recognized more genders. However, is it not clear that biologically, a trans woman is not the same as a cisgendered woman? If they were the same, there would be no need for the trans and cis distinctions. For centuries, woman has been the English word for a cis- gendered woman, for someone of the female sex. I have no problem recognizing and respecting a transgender man as male, or a transgender woman as female. I am a mentor to a young transgender male. However, if he were to decide to forgo hormone treatments in order to have children (if such a reversion is possible), wouldn’t he be temporarily giving up his male identity in order to use the female aspects of his anatomy to bear children - a female function for most, if not all, mammals? Is it wrong to conceive of him transitioning back and forth between male and female identities for purposes of child birth? Of course, not all biological females (women) are capable of childbearing, or desire it. But isn’t it true that no trans woman are capable of child bearing and/or nursing from their own bodies, only those who have traditionally been called women? I do not understand how it “erases” trans men to note that only women can bear children when trans men would have to resort to their female sex organs and hormones in order to have children. Is the argument that sex organs can be either male or female depending upon the individual’s perception of his or her gender at any particular point in time? If so, that could lead to very unsettling surprises for hetero and homo sexual people in intimate circumstances. Most people would want to know the sexual type of a person they wish to have intimate relations with because most people do have strong preferences. Is that statement now considered to be transphobic, and, if so, why? I am not trying to be provocative or obtuse, but just to understand the arguments. From my perspective, the word woman is the same as cis female, and distinct from trans woman, trans male, or male. All should be respected and treated fairly, but it is appropriate to draw distinctions in situation where biology compels a distinction. Why am I wrong?
I still want to know why lesbians—biological females—are assaulted for refusing to have sex with people with penises, and why the response of the CEO of the of the largest gay rights organization in the UK compares same sex attraction to racism. Are gay men attacked in this way?
---When asked to comment on this pattern of coercion and assault, Stonewall’s CEO compared same-sex attraction to racism. “Nobody should ever be pressured into dating, or pressured into dating people they aren’t attracted to,” Nancy Kelley told the BBC. “But if you find that when dating, you are writing off entire groups of people, like people of color, fat people, disabled people or trans people, then it’s worth considering how societal prejudices may have shaped your attractions.”
Stonewall was founded as a gay rights charity. Yet its most senior figure disregarded lesbian survivors and likened being gay to a form of bigotry. Kelley’s homophobic remarks raise serious questions about Stonewall’s claim to stand for “acceptance without exception.”---
Srinivasan: "The Right to Sex"
48. I find this reduction of sexual orientation to genitalia – what’s more, genitalia from birth – puzzling. Is anyone innately attracted to penises or vaginas? Or are we first attracted to ways of being in the world, including bodily ways, which we later learn to associate with certain specific parts of the body?
49. Consider the gay men who express delighted disgust at vaginas. Consider the idea of the ‘Platinum Star Gay’, the gay man who, birthed via a caesarean, never even made bodily contact with his mother’s vagina. Is this the expression of an innate, and thus permissible revulsion – or a learned and suspect misogyny?
Describe to me as a "philosopher", the distinction between a "permissible revulsion" and a "suspect misogyny".
Male homosexual misogyny is ubiquitous, but mandated bisexuality as a response is a bit much.
Andrea Long Chu, published On Liking Women: "The truth is, I have never been able to differentiate liking women from wanting to be like them."
Is any less suspect than philosemitism? Orientalism? The fantasy of the other? If Rachel Dolezal were the author of On Liking Black People would she be any more accepted?
Meanwhile Glamour Magazine's Woman of the Year 2015, who's opined that the "hardest thing about being a woman is deciding what to wear" defended the Texas abortion law.
“I am for a woman’s right to choose,” Jenner responded before trying to have it both ways. “I am also for a state having the ability to make their own laws. So I support Texas in that decision, that’s their decision."
I'll leave discussions of women's sports for another day but I'll end quoting myself.
"Men are the new women; Zionists are the new Palestinians; Rachel Dolezal is still a liar. As I said years ago, all that's clear is that blacks as a group get the benefit of a knee-jerk sympathy from liberals that women as a group do not."
Impregnable means the opposite of your proposed usage. We already have a word that denotes those able to get pregnant - fertile. That reproductive rights is a womens issue is obvious and incontravertible. Saying that it's transphobic unless women are erased is an entirley manufactured greivance. Moreover this claim of transphobia where there wasn't any is going to likely produce the very antipathy it claims to address.
Neither definition of "impregnable" means anything related to pregnancy. They're not even from the same root word. "Impregnable" comes from a French word, "pregnant" from Latin.
Only women can get pregnant. I support women's right to chose, and do whatever they like with their bodies, but I'm not calling a woman a man if she is pregnant. Accurate in our linguistic choices my arse!
"Impregnable" doesn't mean what you apparently think it means. You might was well retract your little essay on those grounds alone, not to mention the reasonable objections posted here.
Transgender person, with they/them pronouns is the most inclusive and accurate linguistic choice available. Anything else is supports patriarchy, gendercide. xenophobia, white supremacy, pedophilia and religious discrimination. Abortion bans are not exclusively misogynistic when you have woman at the forefront of the movement. Centering trans persons right to self-determination is inappropriate at best, disingenuous to add further, distracting to couple, and trauma inducing at the most. I am not with the tomfoolery.
Lying to people isn't a kindness. Yhe pure & simple FACT is, of the 2 sexes in humans, only females can get pregnant. Full stop.
Pregnancy is a biological process done w/our material bodies, not w/one's oh-so-trendy "gender identity." We don't need additional, convoluted words that also mean the exact opposite to clarify that which ever has been & remains abundantly clear to the majority of humanity.
While some women wish they were not women & have decided to live the lie that they're something else, they're to be pitied not deceived. We don't lie to any other group of people about reality. We don't agree w/an anorexic, "Yes, darling. At 90 lbs you're very fat."
We don't talk to someone in the midst of a psychological delusion, "General Napoleon. Your troops are assembled in the garden."
Yet so many believe we should completely restructure public facilities, re-design women's Healthcare to feed the delusion that changing which gendered sexist stereotypes you adopt has, magically, changed your biological, nitty-gritty sex!
My next question is, how do you then propose we deal w/the people claiming to have "transitioned" into aliens, dragons, fish - or the latest 1 I saw - "human/bird hybrid" whose preferred pronouns are "er/ey/em"??
Women who claim the "gender" of "transman" or "non-binary" are choosing a gender, for whatever reason. Their sex remains female. In English, adult female humans are women. Female children are girls. Those are the only 2 who can get pregnant. Those are the only 2 words we need to defend their reproductive rights.
Y'all need to find something productive to do with your time. Volunteer at a DV shelter, animal shelter, take up gardening. Those will clue you in on biology but quick.
A trans woman will never know the pain and fear and desire we have to walk alone at midnight. This is but one of a dozen examples I can think of that makes the designation of biological woman necessary. To give this up is is to erase me. I firmly agree to disagree.
The “conservative myth” you talk about is not so mythical. Women (the sex class) deserve our own safe spaces away from males. No amount of gender feelings will change that.
Mixed sex bathrooms show increased danger for women:
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/women/sexual-assault-unisex-changing-rooms-sunday-times-women-risk-a8519086.html
Trans identified males being violent towards women masterlist:
https://ophelias-revenge.tumblr.com/post/626273198416232448/deputy-shayy-cliteralviolence
Another masterlist of trans identified male violence against women:
https://blackswallowtailbutterfly.tumblr.com/post/644928666032390144/moosedread-illalwaysbehere-terfinesse
Why don’t women deserve to keep our words, our spaces? Why don’t we deserve safety from violent males?
Thank you. That stupid column was weighing on me; I needed someone smart to take it on.
On gendercide:
More girls were killed in the last 50 years, precisely because they were girls, than men killed in all the wars in the 20th century. More girls are killed in this routine gendercide in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century.
The equivalent of 5 jumbo jets worth of women die in labor each day... life time risk of maternal death is 1,000x higher in a poor country than in the west. That should be an international scandal.
Source: Nicholas D. Kristof, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“women with infertility issues—who are not currently impregnable.” In my experience, this is not how infertility works. Many people who are struggling with infertility eventually end up pregnant, though, of course, many others don’t. For them, there is no accessible fact of the matter that will determine whether, in your terms, they fall in the class of people who can be affected by abortion laws, (because they don’t know whether they are impregnable). This makes your proposal problematic. By centering i’m pregnability the way you do, people struggling with infertility will be harmed. You’re saying, “abortion bans may target you but, don’t worry, they probably can’t “affect” you”. Try to imagine what that would feel like for someone who wants more than anything to be fertile. The most maddening aspect of infertility is feeling out of control…whatever you try, your body doesn’t cooperate. From the perspective of someone struggling with infertility, abortion bans exacerbate this already present lack of control—your body and now the state are conspiring determine your reproductive outcomes. The further limiting of one’s reproductive control is a real effect of these laws that these people will feel, whether or not it turns out that they are impregnable. Please consider how your particular way of achieving accuracy and inclusion—by saying all and only impregnable are affected—-comes across to people (of all gender identities) who are struggling with infertility.
"Impregnable people"...why don't we just jump straight to "baby-making machines" at this point? It seriously sounds like a bunch of powerless quasi-human-lumps just waiting to be impregnated (or not) by the people who can actually do things.
Great way to refer to the female half of the population. Do better and come up with a more dignified name. We hold up half the sky.
Well just tell me then, what is a woman? I would like to really know. It is not meant as a gotcha question.
And by the way, every time you make efforts to be inclusive like this in the middle of the abortion rights debates, you lose moderate people in the fight for rights to abortions. And that eventually will cause more rights to be lost. That's just what's happening. Maybe it shouldn't be happening but it is. You have to decide if that is worth it.
An excellent response! Thank you. I'm going to assign this (and many other "More to Hate" posts of yours) along with other publications of yours in my Controversies in Feminist Philosophy seminar this fall!
It seems to me that anyone walking alone and unarmed at night is potentially vulnerable to aggressive males or females. Some are more vulnerable than others, but predators look for weak prey, and that weakness could be sex, age, or disability based. Hate based assaults are of a different category, but clearly can apply to race, sexuality, religion, etc. Hate based assaults are heinous regardless of the particular category of prejudice. So I am not sure why the arguments go to who is more vulnerable to predators and hate crimes, women or trans persons.
Moreover, I find the terminology wars confusing. I understand and accept that gender is not binary and that there are more categories than our culture has acknowledged in the past. Perhaps we could adopt names from other languages that have recognized more genders. However, is it not clear that biologically, a trans woman is not the same as a cisgendered woman? If they were the same, there would be no need for the trans and cis distinctions. For centuries, woman has been the English word for a cis- gendered woman, for someone of the female sex. I have no problem recognizing and respecting a transgender man as male, or a transgender woman as female. I am a mentor to a young transgender male. However, if he were to decide to forgo hormone treatments in order to have children (if such a reversion is possible), wouldn’t he be temporarily giving up his male identity in order to use the female aspects of his anatomy to bear children - a female function for most, if not all, mammals? Is it wrong to conceive of him transitioning back and forth between male and female identities for purposes of child birth? Of course, not all biological females (women) are capable of childbearing, or desire it. But isn’t it true that no trans woman are capable of child bearing and/or nursing from their own bodies, only those who have traditionally been called women? I do not understand how it “erases” trans men to note that only women can bear children when trans men would have to resort to their female sex organs and hormones in order to have children. Is the argument that sex organs can be either male or female depending upon the individual’s perception of his or her gender at any particular point in time? If so, that could lead to very unsettling surprises for hetero and homo sexual people in intimate circumstances. Most people would want to know the sexual type of a person they wish to have intimate relations with because most people do have strong preferences. Is that statement now considered to be transphobic, and, if so, why? I am not trying to be provocative or obtuse, but just to understand the arguments. From my perspective, the word woman is the same as cis female, and distinct from trans woman, trans male, or male. All should be respected and treated fairly, but it is appropriate to draw distinctions in situation where biology compels a distinction. Why am I wrong?
I still want to know why lesbians—biological females—are assaulted for refusing to have sex with people with penises, and why the response of the CEO of the of the largest gay rights organization in the UK compares same sex attraction to racism. Are gay men attacked in this way?
https://afterellen.com/backlash-against-lesbians-assaulted-by-transwomen/
---When asked to comment on this pattern of coercion and assault, Stonewall’s CEO compared same-sex attraction to racism. “Nobody should ever be pressured into dating, or pressured into dating people they aren’t attracted to,” Nancy Kelley told the BBC. “But if you find that when dating, you are writing off entire groups of people, like people of color, fat people, disabled people or trans people, then it’s worth considering how societal prejudices may have shaped your attractions.”
Stonewall was founded as a gay rights charity. Yet its most senior figure disregarded lesbian survivors and likened being gay to a form of bigotry. Kelley’s homophobic remarks raise serious questions about Stonewall’s claim to stand for “acceptance without exception.”---
Srinivasan: "The Right to Sex"
48. I find this reduction of sexual orientation to genitalia – what’s more, genitalia from birth – puzzling. Is anyone innately attracted to penises or vaginas? Or are we first attracted to ways of being in the world, including bodily ways, which we later learn to associate with certain specific parts of the body?
49. Consider the gay men who express delighted disgust at vaginas. Consider the idea of the ‘Platinum Star Gay’, the gay man who, birthed via a caesarean, never even made bodily contact with his mother’s vagina. Is this the expression of an innate, and thus permissible revulsion – or a learned and suspect misogyny?
Describe to me as a "philosopher", the distinction between a "permissible revulsion" and a "suspect misogyny".
Male homosexual misogyny is ubiquitous, but mandated bisexuality as a response is a bit much.
Andrea Long Chu, published On Liking Women: "The truth is, I have never been able to differentiate liking women from wanting to be like them."
Is any less suspect than philosemitism? Orientalism? The fantasy of the other? If Rachel Dolezal were the author of On Liking Black People would she be any more accepted?
Meanwhile Glamour Magazine's Woman of the Year 2015, who's opined that the "hardest thing about being a woman is deciding what to wear" defended the Texas abortion law.
“I am for a woman’s right to choose,” Jenner responded before trying to have it both ways. “I am also for a state having the ability to make their own laws. So I support Texas in that decision, that’s their decision."
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/571046-caitlyn-jenner-on-texas-abortion-law-i-support-texas-in-that-decision/
I'll leave discussions of women's sports for another day but I'll end quoting myself.
"Men are the new women; Zionists are the new Palestinians; Rachel Dolezal is still a liar. As I said years ago, all that's clear is that blacks as a group get the benefit of a knee-jerk sympathy from liberals that women as a group do not."
Impregnable means the opposite of your proposed usage. We already have a word that denotes those able to get pregnant - fertile. That reproductive rights is a womens issue is obvious and incontravertible. Saying that it's transphobic unless women are erased is an entirley manufactured greivance. Moreover this claim of transphobia where there wasn't any is going to likely produce the very antipathy it claims to address.
Neither definition of "impregnable" means anything related to pregnancy. They're not even from the same root word. "Impregnable" comes from a French word, "pregnant" from Latin.
Only women can get pregnant. I support women's right to chose, and do whatever they like with their bodies, but I'm not calling a woman a man if she is pregnant. Accurate in our linguistic choices my arse!
"Impregnable" doesn't mean what you apparently think it means. You might was well retract your little essay on those grounds alone, not to mention the reasonable objections posted here.
Transgender person, with they/them pronouns is the most inclusive and accurate linguistic choice available. Anything else is supports patriarchy, gendercide. xenophobia, white supremacy, pedophilia and religious discrimination. Abortion bans are not exclusively misogynistic when you have woman at the forefront of the movement. Centering trans persons right to self-determination is inappropriate at best, disingenuous to add further, distracting to couple, and trauma inducing at the most. I am not with the tomfoolery.