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We won’t back down in defending Women’s rights here at DWR. If commenting on Sasha White’s thread is enough to get one in hotwater, so be it. There is too much at stake to sit down and shut up over this issue. Women (adult human females) are currently being unfairly ostracized, doxxed, and harassed for defending their rights, boundaries, and safety in society. We will not bend the knee to TRA demands here. Not ever.
This from 4w.pub describing the situation.
“An assistant literary agent made international headlines this week when she was fired from her job at Tobias Literary Agency in New York. Sasha White, a feminist who had started her career at Tobias as an intern, announced that she had been fired from the agency on Monday for expressing her “feminist stance” on Twitter.
White maintained two Twitter accounts—one professional, and one personal. Her professional account, @SashaSemyonovna, stated her role at Tobias while her personal account, @iamGrushenka, was largely anonymous until recently and states no connection to her former employer. In a statement to reporter Jesse Singal, President of Tobias Literary Agency, Lane Heymont, claimed that White was fired because she “did not specify her views were her own in her Twitter bio, thus suggesting and it was perceived she was speaking on behalf of the agency and those views are not in line with our beliefs. Therefore we had to part ways.”
When asked by Singal specifically what tweet violated their policies, Heymont pointed to a retweet White had made on her personal account of a post explaining the difference between how women and trans-women experience male violence.
In an official statement, Tobias Literacy Agency claimed, “We do not have any room for anti-trans sentiments at TLA. Period. Thus, we have parted ways with Sasha.” TLA did not clarify what part of Sasha’s violating tweets, specifically, included anti-trans sentiment.
In response, feminists began tweeting in support of White, trending #IStandWithSashaWhite, a riff on a previous hashtag in support of another fired feminist, Maya Forstater. Forstater was fired in 2019 from her job at a UK think tank, The Center for Global Development, for similar tweets in support of a feminist analysis of gender. Forstater’s case gained global attention in December of 2019 when Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling tweeted in her defense.”
Women are a distinct exclusive category of human beings. Simply they are adult human females. This is the sort of shit that results when males think that through magical gender thinking they can be women too.
They are not.
The misogyny always comes through.
Twitter usually isn’t the best place to find valuable insights into complex topics and ideas. I do like to be proven wrong though, and that was very much the case when I saw this thread by “H”. This person precisely identifies a several key points where the ideology of transgender has gone markedly afoul. Much has to do with the correspondence between their activism and narcissistic male entitlement.
Common threads do exist between feminism and the trans movement. The current focus though of putting the validation of (usually) men’s gender-delusions ahead of female rights makes progress in this area difficult at best.
Wow episode four already, and still more to come. Woo.
This form of bad argumentation is fairly common when it comes to TRA and their allies.
It is very easy to sound like you are the oppressed party when you confabulate the circumstances surrounding the issue. There isn’t much to explain here other than to reaffirm the notion that there never is a “wrong-time” to stand up for women’s rights.
One of the axis the transgender debate swirls around is access to washrooms and change-rooms. The argument from the TRA’s is simply this: A person should use the washroom of the gender (sex) they identify as. Please note I put the word sex in parenthesis there as it is one of huge linguistic obstacles in the argumentative form of the the debate, more on this aspect later (as in different post later).
The problems with this argument are multitudinous, but I hope to cover the main points of contention. Firstly the immutability of sex in the human species, secondly the effect of socialization on males and females, and thirdly the sex classes and how they interact in society.
It should go without saying, but yet it must be said – One cannot change their natal sex. Therefore it does not matter how many gendered stereotypical practices and mannerisms a man adopts, his quest to be a woman will never come to fruition. He shall always be male, despite whatever feelings of gender he happens to possess. Now certainly, given enough money and time under the plastic surgeon’s knife, a man can be made to look like a women, but looking like and being a woman reside in two completely different categories. Plus, there are no standards defining what a transwoman actually is and with proposed self-id laws all it takes is a simple declaration by man to say he is a woman. The potential for abusive males to use self-id to gain access to female only spaces is a clear and present danger to females in society.
Secondly from birth, males and females are treated differently by their parents, peers, and people in society. The patriarchal gender norms in which we are inculcated with do not magically get programed on day, but are a result of a constant exposure to a set of normative values, that by default, channel men into dominant positions and roles in society and women into submissive ones.
The life long exposure to this unequal gendered treatment is not forgotten with a simple declaration of gender. Thus, it is fairly common to see TRA’s being quite vocal and aggressive in their activism because as males they are used to their voices being heard the first time and their opinion actually mattering in social situations. So if the male socialization remains intact even after the nebulous transition process – whatever it may be – then the corrosive patriarchal attitudes toward women also remain intact, along with all the male behaviours (objectification, predation, et al). that necessitate female only spaces in the first place.
Thirdly, since we cannot change our sex class the assumptions of females regarding men identifying as women remain the same. Males are responsible for the vast majority of violence perpetrated against women in society, how they ‘identify’ with their gender is irrelevant to the safety of females. This reason alone is enough to preserve single sex spaces in society.
The twitter snip is just one facet of what men will say to justify the invasion of female spaces. The assertion Owen Jones make is risible from the start, because in most cases we can successfully identify members of the opposite sex. We’ve been doing it for thousands of years as it is part of the necessary task of keeping the species going. So no, no Genital Inspection Unit is necessary, men just need to keep out of female spaces.
Our second installment here at DWR of what those wacky transactivists have to argue with when confronted with people who will not take the knee and accept the tenets of their misogynistic gender religion.
I have yet to see any feminist (gender critical or not) state that trans people do not deserve human rights. It would be very nice to see a list of rights that trans individuals do not already possess under the law. One must keep in mind though, that forcing others to accept and play along with your personal identity (gender or otherwise) is *NOT* a right.
You may indeed feel like you are 100% the opposite sex, but no provision in a free society, forces people to share that view with you.
So, like many of the TRA statements, they are arguing against ideas and statements that have not been made by their opponents. The straw is heavy in most cases, as here is what Rowling actually has said –
So. remember folks to argue cogently, please try and address what the other side is saying, not your (often emotive) ‘hot take’ on what you think they are saying.
The profession can change, the venue can change, but the gender-woo methodology remains the same. Personally attack the person who dares to speak about biological reality, libel and defame their character while poisoning the well as to prevent discussion of an import issue facing women.
The bullshit doesn’t change. It is especially disheartening to see professionals whose business is to be thoughtful and charitable completely abandon those principles in order to defend normative patriarchal values.
“A debate has arisen among philosophers concerning a couple of papers published recently in the prestigious journal Philosophical Studies. The first paper, “Are women adult human females?” by Alex Byrne (January, 2020) attempts to refute what Byrne identifies as “the orthodox view among philosophers,” that “the category woman is a social category, like the categories, wife, firefighter, and shoplifter,” rather than “a biological category, like the categories vertebrate, mammal, or adult human female.” Byrne argues woman is a biological category, that to be a woman is to be an adult adult human female. The second paper, “Escaping the Natural Attitude About Gender,” by Robin Dembroff (forthcoming, but available already online), attempts to discredit Byrne’s argument.
The controversy surrounding the two articles does not concern the arguments themselves but the fact that Dembroff’s article includes an ad hominem against Byrne in which Dembroff effectively accuses Byrne of bigotry against transsexuals despite the fact that there is nothing in Byrne’s paper to support such a charge. The editor of the journal, Stewart Cohen, resigned in protest because he wanted to publish an apology for printing an article that included defamatory rhetoric, rhetoric which should never have made it past the journal’s referees, but the publisher of the journal, Springer, refused to allow him to do that.
Philosophers are not generally known for being warm and fuzzy. But Dembroff’s paper represents a new low in levels of civility. Usually, philosophers aim their barbs at an opponent’s cognitive abilities. Even then they aspire to some subtlety. They’ll intimate that an opponent is feebleminded, but they rarely say so directly. It’s not simply that it’s rude. It’s unprofessional. It’s rare, for the same reason, for a philosopher to directly accuse another of being a “shoddy scholar.” It’s rarer still, again, for the same reason, for a philosopher to accuse another of being immoral. Yet Robin Dembroff has advanced both charges against Byrne.
The debate amongst philosophers surrounding what Byrne has dubbed GenderGate, focuses on a brief passage at the end of Dembroff’s article. The line is:
Byrne’s paper fundamentally is an unscholarly attempt to vindicate a political slogan [“women are adult human females”] that is currently being used to undermine civic rights and respect for trans persons. And it is here that I return to Byrne’s advice to question the motivations behind this debate.”If someone is personally heavily invested in the truth of [some proposition] p,” Byrne writes, “it is prudent to treat [their] claim that p is true with some initial caution.” I agree. So we may ask: What are the motivations of someone who would so confidently insert themself into this high-stakes discourse while so ill-informed?
That is, Dembroff is insinuating here that Byrne has an anti-trans agenda that he is trying to advance in an scholarly paper published in an academic journal even though, again, there is nothing in Byrne’s paper to support such a charge.”
The Gender-woo really needs to stop. :/
Catch the rest of the essay on Counterpunch.
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