Gary the Plumber wrote: ↑Wed Aug 17, 2022 11:39 pm
Come on guys, you shouldn’t be fighting with each other, you should be fighting the angry army men together. This is why the left will never win anything.
Woah I’m not fighting any army men, I’m just being heavily sarcastic at them in the misguided hope that nobody reveals personal details about me to them
I'm going to have one go at answering at least reasonably sensibly for old times sake.
Arguing with you is tedious in the extreme, you don't want to discuss or listen to someone else's view, you just want to prove you're right. Just like almost every other argument on the internet it revolves around picking a sentence the opponent said, saying 'Aha, you said this bur i think you'll find (insertt FACTS you've just hastily checked via Google to make sure you're right). I did the same 15-20 years ago but as a well and truly middle aged man I can no longer be arsed with that or many other things I did then.
As well as picking a sentence I've posted and forensically pulling it apart you also just make things up and attribute them to me and write 500 words on why that view is wrong. I really can't be arsed to spend 5 minutes saying what my view actually is when I know there's another couple of pages being fired back a minute later.
Your typing speed is truly impressive, but I generally use a phone and one finger, I literally can't keep up. For example, I have never said there is no biological difference between someone who has chosen to live in a gender and someone born in that gender, merely that generally I just don't care about that. I have never said female elite sports should be open to trans women, just that there is no need to disrespect trans women who want to compete.
In response to the actual question about what I meant by someone presenting as a woman. I agree with you there is no way I can define a behaviour as being female, yet I know one when I see one. That is what I meant, at no point have I ever felt she haa any confusion or lack of clarity about her gender, at no point have I ever done anything but instinctively think of her as female, she just is. Most importantly she was clear she felt and wanted to be treated as a female, and means and does no one any harm by that choice.
As I've said before, believing people are free to do as they choose as long as they don't harm anyone else is fundamental to me, it doesn't need intellectual debate, and anyone who thinks it is negotiable is in my experience quite often heading for unpleasant ground. Who else are you going to convince yourself can be disrespected, or their views about themselves dismissed because your intellect means you know better than anyone else? Disagreeing with that is actually about the extent of my 'activism'.
You regularly use specious arguments which either try and generalise from one unusual and particularly sensitive case or quote some lone wingnut as if they are an agreed authority on the subject, you'd recognise yourself why it was nonsense if someone used those arguments to justify racism or homophobia, but you say I'm intellectually dishonest.
I have absolutely no time for anyone who thinks it's OK to disrespect someone by calling them by a name they no longer choose to use in order to make a point. It puts you in the same category as people who think it's clever to refer to Muhammad Ali as Cassius Clay in my opinion- obnoxious dicks. That's without even getting into referring tovtheir preferred gender.
There are of course many complex and sensitive issues around supporting children with hormone therapy, protecting women's spaces appropriately, but guess what? I think they need to be dealt with sensitively and on a case by case basis rather than by two blokes arguing on the internet.
Feel free to carry on explaining why you're right but I really don't think there's much else to say on why I'll be sticking to the occasional snide comment rather than engaging.
Mick McQuaid wrote: ↑Thu Aug 18, 2022 8:05 am
I agree with you there is no way I can define a behaviour as being female, yet I know one when I see one.
You believe nobody is harmed when spaces for women are opened up to transwomen but i think 'terfs' would disagree. If a woman is uncomfortable with it, who are you to dismiss that?
"She just is" is a pretty lame argument.
"there is no need to disrespect trans women who want to compete." Competition has to be fair. You cant allow people to have a significant biological advantage just because it would hurt their feelings to exclude them.
Your misunderstanding here is that I don’t Google to check I’m right - I just only maintain a position against disagreement if I know my stuff well enough to be able to articulate my objections - when something doesn’t make sense to me, I try to understand it better.
Your issue, and where you’re demonstrably wrong, is in being a heterosexual straight man who thinks “it doesn’t affect me when another member of my sex believes he’s a woman”, and then casually extrapolating that to “it shouldn’t matter to anyone”, without ever assuming a good faith basis (those “daft” questions) for it to matter to others. It also makes no odds to me personally whether a gender non conforming male, who suffers distress with his sexed body, frames that experience as “alleviating distress by living according to what I feel I need to do, and thinking of myself as a woman” or whether he thinks “I am literally a woman and women who don’t see it are privileged bigots” - my opinions on this are based on understanding where treating some male people as being, for all intents and purposes, female people, has an impact on people who are actually female.
I’m glad you now recognise the complex issues around supporting children with hormone therapy (spoiler - it’ll be banned within three years) - you talk of my arguing style, yet what I’ve pulled you up on was your sniffy “I THINK you’ll find that gender clinics know what they’re doing” comments, two years before the said gender clinic was forced to shut down after an independent review was started, and accounts of whistleblowers taken seriously.
You say “there’s no way I can define a behaviour as being female, yet I know one of I see one”, in the same post you accuse me of specious argument? ballsy move, for sure. But again, as the debate itself isn’t actually about your or my right to perceive those we know and care about as we choose to, but about a rights movement seeking to change law and public policy, the point remains that there is actually *no* non-sexist way for there to be a behaviour that a male can do that can convincingly demonstrate that that male is female.
Despite your many posts on the subject, and despite actually having been shown many implications, your contributions here on this subject are myopic in the extreme - your right to see a male as a woman isn’t in question, yet all you can focus on is the fact that you consider it impolite to not adopt correct pronouns. Since I posted in the trans rights thread, my focus has been on policy, law, and scrutiny of how scalable an individual belief that their trans friend should legally be seen as a member of the opposite sex on demand. These are live questions, where it’s trans activism seeking to change the law, and where Stonewall is getting ahead of the law, and where people like you seek to make scrutiny of that activism impossible by actively avoiding the big questions while urging politeness. I maintain that your belief that your trans friend’s femininity is good enough for you to believe that there’s no place in maleness for them, is shortsighted, sexist, and absolutely open to scrutiny and ridicule. I recognise that all trans women are members of the same sex as me, and as such it should be for male people to support transwomen to be protected from abusive males who don’t tolerate gender non-conformity, and to not go along with the regressive idea that a distressed, gender non-conforming male brought up in a sexist society is actually literally female, and so female people should move up a bit.
In all seriousness, you’re about five years behind on this. I know you won’t admit to it, but I’d suggest that you actually think about what happens when your beliefs are scaled up to become expected beliefs that represent the law, and what that would do to what you finally admitted are “complex questions”
(And if they are complex, why have you refused up to now to discuss the complex bits on the trans thread, instead dismissing any points made by anyone about policy issues as bad faith?)
You can do all the snide comments you like - it’s how you started it, and snidiness without insight isn’t really a concern. You’ve outlined a belief you have, and I am intrigued as to whether you recognise that the fact that you get a similar feel from having your belief interrogated as you got when you saw me taking issue with religious beliefs, says something about the material foundation of your belief that “a man is a woman if she says she is a woman. But also a woman is a person who says she’s a woman. And it’s not based on femininity, though I can know it when I see it”
I don’t accept that my position is “disrespectful”. Disrespect would be lying about my position for what would be an easier experience of discourse among those with whom I share most other political positions. I haven’t heard a good argument as to why some males should be re-categorised as females despite many female people objecting and having sound reasons for their objection. I don’t think my position “transwomen are male people who believe themselves to be women, and the balancing of their obvious right to live free from harm, with the obvious right of female people to have some spaces free from male people, needs to be done carefully and it needs to be discussed openly” is at all disrespectful. I think that the idea that “woman” can be a feeling in a man’s head and women should shut up is misogynistic, though.
Last edited by CEB on Thu Aug 18, 2022 9:34 am, edited 3 times in total.
The Trans debate is of fringe interest at best to the vast majority. Why spend time debating this when there are so many infinitely more important issues - the energy crisis, global warming and a hundred others.
Trans is fashionable at the mo. Even the dumbarse Tory leadership candidates decided they needed a stance on the topic. I suppose that’s easier than attempting to tackle the real issues of the day….
Of course, before discussing a thing, it should be the case that the majority of people have an interest in it. Says man on a message board about a league two football club
CEB wrote: ↑Thu Aug 18, 2022 11:03 am
Of course, before discussing a thing, it should be the case that the majority of people have an interest in it. Says man on a message board about a league two football club
Maybe it's a minority interest topic best discussed with people who share the obsession and not one where the "debate" is furthered on a Div4 MB.
Whilst on I can report that the Postie stood with her colleagues in solidarity on the picket line during the strike.
This is a thread about “wokeness”. There’s also a thread specifically about the trans debate. I started neither thread. Are you suggesting they aren’t the appropriate place to engage with those issues?
A pretty interesting argument that aligns with what CEB is saying eh?
Being a woman is more than skin deep, some may say. The lived experience and struggle of a woman isn’t lipstick and long hair.
Yeah. Overall, this is a simple issue made complex by the sensitivities of those who want people to accept absurdities. I’d be interested to hear an actual argument against this, which is pretty much my thought process on the basics.
1: male people aren’t female people - they are, self evidently, members of the opposite sex to each other
2: “gender” is a societal construct that assigns values of masculinity and femininity to attributes, behaviours, traits etc, and culturally imposes those values onto people, whether people want it or not; it rewards those who comply, makes life more difficult for those who don’t (“feminine” men, “masculine” women)
3: Historically it’s male people who imposed those values onto people, demanding “femininity” from women, creating a context where vulnerability, fragility and compliance are traits expected of women. Many women objected
4: later, some male people who have existed under that structure (created by men, imposed on women and men) who found the imposition of masculinity doesn’t fit them, have decided that as “femininity” feels like a better fit, they must be women.
5: many women maintain that since those male people are using the patriarchal projection of what a woman is as the arbiter of whether someone is a woman or not, it’s nothing more than an extension of male domination and projection about what it is to be a woman.
(It’s why I found it so telling that Brendan had said of his trans friend “there’s nothing about her that doesn’t come over as female” - he was actually saying “my friend is so feminine that I can’t actually envisage this person as not being a woman, because I can’t reconcile femininity with being male”)
Smendrick Feaselberg wrote: ↑Wed Aug 25, 2021 12:44 pm
Nirvana sued by the man who appeared as a baby naked on the cover of Nevermind. As part of this, he alleges that the photo constitutes child pornography and that because the photos shows him reaching for a dollar bill that it depicts him as a sex worker.
Smendrick Feaselberg wrote: ↑Wed Aug 25, 2021 12:44 pm
Nirvana sued by the man who appeared as a baby naked on the cover of Nevermind. As part of this, he alleges that the photo constitutes child pornography and that because the photos shows him reaching for a dollar bill that it depicts him as a sex worker.
E10EU wrote: ↑Tue Sep 06, 2022 12:59 am
Lycett showed "That's the way to do it!"
Sublety ...
Don't waste your time on disagreeing/ disproving ....
Just 'hoist them by their own petard'.
