You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Gender Issues’ category.
Beth Stelzer speaks out against the reality denying ideology of transactivists and the clear and present danger it presents to female sporting events.
“Trans activists demand we accept their feelings as science and attack basic biology at its core. Ironically, their activism invokes the fear they seek refuge from, in the very group they demand inclusion in. They claim to be victims of bullying, yet they bully women incessantly.
Online harassment of those who speak up for female athletes is pervasive. After starting a website advocating for the preservation of biology-based eligibility standards for participation in women’s sport, I received an email telling me to drown in my own blood. But thanks to women like Navratilova, who is continuing to defend women’s sport, despite continued push back and online attacks, I and other athletes around the world feel emboldened to speak up.
My perspective isn’t religious or political — it is based on my experience and on scientific facts. Women should not be forced to compete with men. We have worked for generations to carve out the space we have in sport today, and we owe it to those women who fought for what we have today, as well as future generations of women and girls, to preserve female athletics. “Inclusion” might sound nice, but it could mean the demise of women’s sports altogether. If we allow men who identify as female to compete in women’s sports, there will be men’s sports and there will be co-ed sports, but women’s sports will cease to exist.
This is why I am fighting to save women’s sports.”
This is what happens when we allow men to redefine reality to match their own subjective whims.
The article here.
We do not yet know what the root causes of gender dysphoria are. But, if having an evidently male or female body causes you extreme discomfort and distress in social situations, then that is good grounds in itself for society to deal with you compassionately and to make accommodation where it can. We must seek to create a compassionate society that welcomes and supports those suffering from the crippling dysphoria that leads them to seek surgery and manipulate their hormones. It is essential that transgender people are able to survive, thrive and function freely in society without fear of discrimination. It is on that footing that we must approach transgender issues.
But tolerance and understanding of the trans experience will fail if they are based on bad and disingenuous interpretations of science. Trans people are perfectly capable of recognising the reality of biological sex, while having difficulty accepting it on a personal basis. Sound arguments for acceptance can be made without twisting and distorting our understanding of the whole of humanity and indeed the natural world – and there are signs of a trans backlash against the excesses and illogic of the genderists.2
While acknowledging the material reality that there are only two sexes, we must reject the traditional sexist view that self-expression, mannerisms, talents, ambitions and roles in life – other than reproduction itself – must be limited by, or linked to, our biological sex. The fact that much of the left unquestioningly accepts and regurgitates an ideology in which the subjective feelings of the individual trump objectively observable conditions is a sign that we have abandoned the physical, material reality on which our politics is based, and replaced it with a subjective individualism that is alien to any class-based analysis.
Sex is still one of the major axes of oppression globally: female foetuses are selectively aborted because of it, women are enslaved and trafficked into prostitution because of it, girls’ genitals are mutilated and sewn together because of it, girls in poverty are denied education because of it. The Chibok schoolgirls were not asked how they identified before being abducted and raped. Without acknowledging the reality of sex, it is impossible to even name sexism, never mind understand or defeat it.
The left must stop pretending that sex neither exists nor matters. The biological woman is not a myth – she is real, she is here – and she is angry.
The funny thing is how crazy funhouse mirror-y this ‘debate’ is. Women have observable, material scientific fact on their side and only now are starting to be hear in the gender debate. Speaks volumes as to how deeply ingrained patriarchy is in our societies and how little attention we pay to the evinced needs of women and how much more attention we will pay to the gender-feels of men.
This excerpt taken from Jonah Mix’s essay on medium.com: An Open Letter to the Guy on Twitter Who Wonders if Biological Sex is Real
Lately, I’ve seen a lot of debates break out on Twitter over biological sex — what defines it, how it can be measured, whether it exists at all. The men who dominate these debates are often experts in their fields, meaning they use terms like “bimodal distribution” and “nonstandard karyotypes” to make their otherwise mundane points. I think most of these points are foolish, tired rehashings of fallacies first identified by ancient Greeks in the fourth century BCE. They confuse — or, perhaps, intentionally conflate — imprecision with invalidity, social perception with social construction, and binarism with exclusivity. In other words, they trade in the all-too-familiar illogic that festers at the intersection of science and philosophy, where ontological cowardice appears as the highest form of nuance.
But here I go again, right? It’s so easy to get sucked into this debate, to get that hot indignation in your stomach that comes when a foolish claim is so proudly asserted. And I don’t even have skin in the game — binary or not, my sex will still land me squarely in the “paid more, raped less” category. So what’s the point beyond intellectual exercise? It seems more and more obvious to me that even entertaining the debate is a concession, an assent to women’s lives being made the subject of thought experiments and counterfactuals plucked from the air by some post-grad who, coincidentally, has never once worried about pregnancy from rape.
So that’s my quarter-through-the-year resolution: I’m not going to debate with you about the reality of biological sex, for the same reason I wouldn’t stand on the train platform debating the finer points of physics while the man on the tracks is ground into bits. Not because your position is unassailable. Because even bringing it up makes you an asshole.
That might sound a little dramatic, a flourish of rhetoric to cover up a weak rebuttal. But how long have you spent reading up to this point? Five minutes? Ten? If so, the world has fifty more mutilated girls than when you started. Were the men who carried out those mutilations confused about what makes a female body? Did they ponder chromosome parings and standard deviations when they chose who to cut? Or is that kind of nuance a luxury set aside just for educated, progressive, worldly men like you?
Isn’t it odd that sex was never so complicated before? There was nothing ethereal about biology when it came to allocating the right to vote, or own property, or walk down the street at night without fear. We knew perfectly well what made someone female when that female-ness guaranteed a life of subservience and pain. Only when women began to say no did their bodies become a concept.
So many feminists have made this point, over and over again. I see them say it. I know you read it. Did you listen? If not, why? And why do you always respond when I say it? It seems you do know who has a female body, when it comes to deciding which perspective gets ignored.
Sex is such a mystery to you when women want shelters for themselves, meetings for themselves, words for themselves. Pardon me for asking, but is it equally mysterious when you log off Twitter and move over to Pornhub? The true nature of a female body is so complex when you lecture. Does it become simple again when you masturbate? Who does the laundry in your house? Were you somehow able to navigate an inchoate soup of X’s and Y’s to saddle your girlfriend with the dishes? Give yourself some credit — I think you know perfectly well what a female body is. But in case you don’t, here’s a hint:
It’s the only type of body that gets you thrown on the funeral pyre when the husband dies. It’s the only type of body that gets your feet bound and your breasts ironed. It’s the only type made pregnant through rape and burned with acid, the only type expected to sit quietly and listen while we redefine it away, the only type men have spent millennia criticizing and critiquing and buying and selling until we suddenly decided we don’t even know what the fuck we meant this whole time.
You know what a female body is, dude? It’s the only type of body that makes men like you ask such stupid questions. So please, stop. This is an emergency. This is three and a half billion human beings tied to the tracks, and you’re riding on the train. Your insistence on nuance, your fetish for accuracy, your smug deconstruction of common sense — it doesn’t make you thoughtful. It doesn’t make you wise. It doesn’t make you progressive. It makes you an asshole. It makes you worse than a bystander. A bystander does nothing. He watches from afar. You step into the fray just to prod the victim for the imprecision of their screams.
It is quite satisfying to see the ideological expectations reversed and watching the resulting apoplexy as followers of the current woke transactivist ideology have to jump through their own imaginary hoops.
Identifying as genderfree looks something like this:
So, in identifying and fitting under the ‘trans-umbrella’ one can safely reject gender, respect biological reality and material fact. As shown here:
Correctly identifying gender as a toxic construct in our societies is but the first of many small steps toward gender abolition . The #genderfree tag has it’s place in rendering the silencing and scare tactics of transactivists effectively moot. Their skulduggery can be used against them and thus the necessary conversation about gender and gender self id can continue.
Get your popcorn and strap in for a contentious ride.
Wow. Patriarchal reversals brought to you by the WAVAW Rape Crisis Centre.
“As a trans-inclusive anti-violence organization, we feel a sense of responsibility to provide a counter-narrative to this trans-exclusionary radical feminism. It’s no secret that there is a long, difficult history between feminism and trans people.”
Local Transactivists lobbied Vancouver city council to defund the Vancouver Rape Crisis and Woman’s Shelter because they had a female only policy. Sex is a protected characteristic under the Canadian Charter. Dr. Jones clearly illustrates the problem:
Let’s go through and do a rough line by line response to the highly inclusive blog post put put by the WAVAW.
“This history is rooted in the right wing ideology that queer and trans people and their issues are somehow oppositional to the issues of cisgender women and feminism as a whole.”
There would be less strife and problematic history between transactivism and radical feminism if we could all agree on material, biological reality. Human beings cannot change sex. A woman is correctly defined as an adult human female.
Bullshit. – What Radical Feminist Analysis of Gender looks like…
“[…] Disagreeing with someone, however, is not a form of violence. And we have a big disagreement.
Radical feminists are critical of gender itself. We are not gender reformists–we are gender abolitionists. Without the socially constructed gender roles that form the basis of patriarchy, all people would be free to dress, behave, and love others in whatever way they wished, no matter what kind of body they had.
Patriarchy is a caste system which takes humans who are born biologically male or female and turns them into the social classes called men and women. Male people are made into men by socialization into masculinity, which is defined by a psychology based on emotional numbness and a dichotomy of self and other. This is also the psychology required by soldiers, which is why we don’t think you can be a peace activist without being a feminist.
Female socialization in patriarchy is a process of psychologically constraining and breaking girls—otherwise known as “grooming”—to create a class of compliant victims. Femininity is a set of behaviors that are, in essence, ritualized submission.
We see nothing in the creation of gender to celebrate or embrace. Patriarchy is a corrupt and brutal arrangement of power, and we want to see it dismantled so that the category of gender no longer exists. This is also our position on race and class. The categories are not natural: they only exist because hierarchical systems of power create them (see, for instance, Audrey Smedley’s book Race in North America). We want a world of justice and equality, where the material conditions that currently create race, class, and gender have been forever overcome.
Patriarchy facilitates the mining of female bodies for the benefit of men – for male sexual gratification, for cheap labor, and for reproduction. To take but one example, there are entire villages in India where all the women only have one kidney. Why? Because their husbands have sold the other one. Gender is not a feeling—it’s a human rights abuse against an entire class of people, “people called women.”
We are not “transphobic.” We do, however, have a disagreement about what gender is. Genderists think that gender is natural, a product of biology. Radical feminists think gender is social, a product of male supremacy. Genderists think gender is an identity, an internal set of feelings people might have. Radical feminists think gender is a caste system, a set of material conditions into which one is born. Genderists think gender is a binary. Radical feminists think gender is a hierarchy, with men on top. Some genderists claim that gender is “fluid.” Radical feminists point out that there is nothing fluid about having your husband sell your kidney. So, yes, we have some big disagreements.
Radical feminists also believe that women have the right to define their boundaries and decide who is allowed in their space. We believe all oppressed groups have that right.”
So try a little harder to argue honestly and charitably against your opponents.
“This conflict often shows up in the realm of gender-specific spaces, in shelters and anti-violence organizations. Feminism has been used as a means of spreading hatred against trans people, particularly trans women, and has co-opted the anti-violence movement to implicitly and explicitly exclude trans women.“
No kidding. Male violence is endemic in society. Keeping men away from women and protecting hard fought for female only spaces is a priority in effective feminism. You should try it some time.
“It’s difficult for WAVAW to grapple with this history, especially as feminists doing anti-violence work.“
What part of male violence don’t you get? That is the root of the problem and thus what much of radical feminism works to change in society. That is the material reality of the situation, class based male violence against female people. Idealistic, individual solutions – see pretty much all of gender identity – do not address these systemic issues. They may be important, but do they are not inherently feminist, and thus do not merit centring in female spaces and effective feminist activism.
“This is especially true as trans-exclusionary radical feminism is alive and well in Vancouver; it’s no secret that we’re working amongst a hotbed of transmisogyny that has a global reach.“
Feminists are rightly calling you on your male-centric, misogynistic approach. Get used to it.
“One of the things we hear most often is that by making space for trans women in our feminism we will dilute our politics. We hear rumours of trans women taking over and forcing an anti-feminist agenda on us. “
No, this is about Transactivists successfuly lobbying Vancouver City council to remove funding for the ONLY rape crisis centre that is Female only. Because a refuge from male violence is somehow unacceptable to your ‘woke-ness’ on high. Every other shelter allows men in, but apparently having a female only option is unacceptable, and your particular brand of handmaiden feminism is the only one that should be funded.
“This is factually incorrect. We know this is incorrect because trans women have never accessed WAVAW in large numbers, despite the fact that we have been expressly open to trans women since 2000.”
Fine and dandy. How about respecting woman’s boundaries when they prefer not to be around those members of the class of people that rape them? You prioritize male feelings over female safety and it is a travesty.
“As a rape crisis center committed to supporting survivors, we want them to access our services […]”
No one is stopping you. This is about your support of taking away female only safe spaces for rape survivors. This is you promoting ideology that actively hurts vulnerable women in the name of inclusion.
“Perhaps the most dangerous thing trans-exclusionary rhetoric does is to erase difference by insisting on some shared experience of womanhood.Kimberlé Crenshaw’s hugely influential theory on intersectionality informs our understanding that people embody different intersecting identities that get compounded under systems of oppression. For example, a queer, working class, woman of colour experiences the world in a much different way than an upper middle class, straight, white woman would. Intersectionality shows us that women across race, class, gender, ability, etc., are more different than alike. To say that all women have a shared lived experience based on biological sex erases these differences and upholds white supremacy, patriarchy, and the status quo.”
What is it with redefinition of feminist terminology? Can we get back to what Kimberlé Crenshaw theory addresses in context? Please, and not the queer bastardization that supports your post modern neo-liberal hogwash?
“The term intersectionality theory was first coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989.[3] In her work, Crenshaw discussed Black feminism, which argues that the experience of being a black woman cannot be understood in terms of being black and of being a woman considered independently, but must include the interactions, which frequently reinforce each other.[19] Crenshaw mentioned that the intersectionality experience within black women is more powerful than the sum of their race and sex, and that any observations that do not take intersectionality into consideration cannot accurately address the manner in which black women are subordinated.”
On to what Carly Thomsen says:
“I recently asked my students in an upper division Gender and Women’s Studies Feminist Engaged Research course—in which all students are Gender and Women’s Studies majors or minors—a question about that day’s reading we were discussing in class. A student responded with: “It’s all about intersectionality.” My initial question is not particularly relevant, as I have found that students will attempt to answer nearly any question by referencing (the need for and value of) “intersectionality.” I followed up to ask: “What is intersectionality?” My students looked at me blankly. All of my students had been exposed to what they would describe as “intersectionality.” Yet, not one had read the original theory of intersectionality. Not one could accurately describe the theory. Not one had a sense of the genealogy of the term. Not one could think of limits to intersectionality. Some thought that the term refers to moments in which activism and scholarship “intersect,” while others insisted that it refers to the moment when any two or more marginalized identities meet within one person’s life. Not one knew its roots in black feminist theory or critical race theory. I raise this point not because these moments gesture toward some type of feminist pedagogical failure—if only the students learned the material properly!—but because these moments point to the hegemony of discourses of “intersectionality” within Gender and Women’s Studies. In these moments, we can see that, as Ahmed (2012a) suggests, “intersectionality can be used as a method of deflection,” as a way of re-directing attention away from race and racism (195)—and, by extension, from whichever form of marginalization one is working to address—by bringing up other forms of social exclusion. The failure here lies with neither an individual instructor nor student but with a field that has produced so little critical reflection on the limits of “intersectionality” that it figures as that which is largely beyond contest.”
“Becoming Radically Undone: Discourses of Identity and Diversity in the Introductory Gender and Women’s Studies Classroom” – -Carly Thomsen
The too tl;dr is this. The primary axis on which females are oppressed is SEX. Intersectionality describes the interlocking challenges facing women and particularly women of colour, but in no possible reality-based world does it append the category of sex.
“Therefore, as feminists, we cannot speak to a universal experience of womanhood, and we will not exclude trans women by claiming that there is one.“
That is problematic because sex based oppression – female human trafficking, female sex selected abortions, prositution, domestic violence, FGM, objectification, et cetera – all revolve around the sex based axis of female subjugation in the world. Plugging your ears and not seeing this fact especially in service male gender feels is particular abhorrent.
“For those of us who aren’t trans women, we have work to do. Our responsibility as a feminist organization is to push back against transmisogyny in meeting rooms, and in the movement, and right now, we’re re-committing to doing just that.”
Your responsibility as an ostensibly feminist organization is to centre the needs of females in your organization.
Period.
Shame on you for throwing women (adult human females) under the bus in your nebulous quest for ‘inclusivity’.
“The days of complicity with transmisogyny and trans-exclusionary feminism need to come to an end, as more trans women are speaking up and more organizations are willing to listen.”
Transmisogyny doesn’t exist. Queer theoretical terms often don’t apply in reality, go figure. The actual problem, male violence and the misogyny that goes along with it needs to be addressed. Try starting there.
“We need to be vocal and to encourage our friends, family, and colleagues to examine their transmisogyny. We need to stop excusing it under the guise of feminism.”
Falling over yourself to meet male needs is nothing new in society. It isn’t part of meaningful feminist action. When you’ve worked through your reality problems, please come back and give effective feminism a go.
“Right now, we need to push back against trans exclusionary rhetoric, stop calling it feminism, and remember what revolution we’re working towards.“
Do you even realize the level of newspeak going on here? You issued this response in terms of the only rape crisis centre in Vancouver that explicitly catered to females and a female only space – losing their funding – and the furor it justifiably caused. From your high-horse of ‘inclusion’ you are speaking against the choice of women, who chose not to associate with men in a RAPE CRISIS CENTRE.
Read that again.
Take your proclamations drenched in bullcookery elsewhere. There is feminist work to be done and until you can realign your priorities with material reality, please sod off at your earliest convenience.
Support women in Vancouver go and donate to the Vancouver Rape Relief and Woman’s Shelter here.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…