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JK Rowling – Biological Reality – So Controversial

December 19, 2019 in Culture, Gender Issues, Radical Feminism | Tags: Bio Sex is Real, Feminism, Reality, Sex not Gender | by The Arbourist | 1 comment

A spark of light folks, yet another prominent individual believes in biological reality. Go go JK Rowling!

The Urinary Leash – Feminist History

December 16, 2019 in Feminism, History | Tags: Feminism, History, Urinary Leash | by The Arbourist | Comments closed

How you are treated in society is dependent on your sex. Men never had to deal with bullshit like this.

“In the Victorian period, the lack of public facilities for women was intentional as a way of controlling their movements and keeping them out of public spaces, argues Dr Clara Greed, emerita professor of inclusive urban planning at the University of the West of England in Bristol.

There was a negative attitude towards building women’s toilets as it was considered improper for women to use public facilities, she adds. “This is why women simply would not come out of their homes for long periods.”

Public institutions, including educational buildings, workplaces and recreational spaces, were designed around the needs of men. Women tried to cope with the lack of toilets in a variety of ways, including drinking less water, holding in urine for hours, and spending less time in public spaces, says Meghan R Dufresne, architectural designer at the Institute for Human Centred Design in Boston in the US.

It wasn’t until the rise of the suffragette movement in the late 1800s – and the popularity of department stores and cafes, which encouraged women to stay and browse – that public toilet use for women became more acceptable, says Dr Greed. “

Just a small historical inkling of how deeply patriarchy is entwined with the fabric of our society.

The Removal of Female Sex Based Rights – Female Erasure

December 4, 2019 in Radical Feminism | Tags: Call to Feminist Action, Female Erasure, Female Sex Based Rights, Feminism, Gender ID | by The Arbourist | 1 comment

Replicate far and wide folks. The stakes are very high for females in our society. We need to push back and defend the sex based rights of females in our society.

Unlike any other social justice movement in history, the contemporary push for “Transgender Rights” as it is currently being played out are unique in that they are based on eliminating the sex-based rights and protections of women and girls.

“Here is a list of the Human Rights of Women that transactivism is eliminating. No-one is saying trans-identified individuals should not have rights civil protections such as housing, employment etc. But what IS wrong is that the transactivists are erasing females as a protected sex class and erasing the sex-based protections of women and girls.”

• Removing the right of women to assemble outside the presence of men.

• Removing the legal right of women to organize politically against sex-based oppression by males.

• Elimination of the patient right of dependent females to hospital/facility/bed assignments separate from males.

• Removing the legal right of women to be free from the presence of men in areas of public accommodation where nudity occurs.

• Elimination of the right of dependent females to prefer female providers for their intimate personal care requirements.

• Removing the legal right of women to educational programs created for women outside the presence of men.

• Elimination of sex-based crime statistics.

• Elimination of the human right of female prisoners under state confinement to housed separately from male prisoners.

• Eliminating athletic programs and sports competition for women and girls.

• Eliminating data collection of sex-based inequalities in areas where females are underrepresented.

• Elimination of grants, scholarships, board and trustee designations, representative positions and affirmative programs for women.

• Removing the legal right of women to create reproductive clinics, rape crisis services, support groups or any organisation for females.

• Eliminating media and all public discourse specific to females.

• Removal of the right of journalists to report the sex, and history, of subjects.

• Eliminating the legal right of lesbians to congregate publicly.

• Elimination of lesbian-specific organisations and advocacy groups.

• Removing the legal right of women to free speech related to sex roles and gender.

• Elimination of the legal right of women to protection from state-enforced sex-roles (appearance/behaviour/thought).

• Elimination of the legal right of girls to protection from state-enforced sex-roles in public education.

Edited to add, since compiling this list Gallus Mag has been censored and had her account deleted by WordPress for advocating for women’s lawful sex based rights. I had to hunt for this list, it, it was not easy to find, and had I not already seen it at one point and known her name and what to search for it would never have come up in any queries about women’s rights being eliminated by transactivists. Please share.

The Totalitarian Left’s Bastardization of Intersectionality

November 18, 2019 in Canada, Gender Issues, Radical Feminism | Tags: Actual intersectionality, critical thought, Feminism, gender identity, Sexism | by The Arbourist | Comments closed

Intersectionality is one of the positive additions that heralds from Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw. Her concept of intersectionality is as follows – “The main argument of this black feminist paper is 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 between the two, which frequently reinforce each other.” Elegant isn’t it? Simply – one must consider the many axis of challenges and oppression that people face and how they interact with each other.

Intersectionality changes though once run through the mill of gender ideology. Intersectionality magically becomes synonymous with being inclusive which is distinctly not what the term means. I cringe when someone says that they are an ‘intersectional feminist’ because inevitably it means that they have gone down the rabbit-hole of regressive politics and now somehow believe that men should be centred in feminism because those men who choose to enact female sex stereotypes suddenly become the most oppressed people in society.

That friends, is grade ‘A’ bullshit. Feminism is necessarily an exclusive category, and it is reserved for those occupying the females sex class. One cannot refuse to be in said sex class, nor can others somehow magically identify into it. Patriarchy, whether you believe it exists or not, defines men and women into correspondingly dominant and subservient roles in society based on the immutable factor of which sex class you happen to be born into.

The embrace of this bastardized intersectionality leads to a great deal of confusion, as Andrew Sullivan illustrates in this excerpt.

^“But now I’m confused, and I don’t think I’m alone. Slowly but surely, the term “sex” has slowly drifted in meaning and become muddled with gender. And that has major consequences for what homosexuality actually is, consequences that are only beginning to be properly understood. Take the Equality Act, the bill proposed by the biggest LGBTQ lobby group, the Human Rights Campaign, backed by every single Democratic presidential candidate, and passed by the House last May. Its core idea is to enhance the legal meaning of the word “sex” so it becomes “sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity).”

The Act provides four different ways to understand the word “sex,” only one of which has any reference to biology. Sex means first “a sex stereotype”; secondly “pregnancy, childbirth, or a related condition”; thirdly “sexual orientation or gender identity”; and last “sex characteristics, including intersex traits.” Yes, at the end, we have “sex characteristics” in there — i.e., biological males and females — qualified, as it should be, by the intersex condition. But it’s still vague. “Sex characteristics” can mean biologically male or female, but can also mean secondary sex characteristics, like chest hair, or breasts, which can be the effect of hormone therapy. So in fact, the Act never refers to men and women as almost every human being who has ever existed on Earth understands those terms.

The definition of “gender identity” in the Equality Act is “the gender-related identity, appearance, mannerisms, or other gender-related characteristics of the individual’s designated sex at birth.” Notice that this views “sex” as merely “designated” at birth. It seems to have no deeper meaning than a provisional social label attached by others. (That’s why the current trans-friendly terms for babies are not “male” and “female,” but “AMAB” — assigned male at birth — or “AFAB” — assigned female at birth.) It is as if we have redefined all of humanity around the tiny minority that is trans or intersex, so that the exception no longer proves the rule, but completely redefines it.

For a glimpse of what this means in practice, here’s a Canadian website, Sex-Ed School, relying on the resources of The Sex Information and Education Council of Canada. In this clip from their web series, the sex educators ask the elementary-school kids if “everyone born with a vulva is a girl.” Most of the kids say yes. But they’re wrong. The correct answer is that “our genitals don’t determine our gender and people born with vulvas can be boys.” Gender, the young kids are told, is “how you feel on the inside about whether you’re a boy or a girl, a man or a woman, if you’re nonbinary, feel like neither or both. People can also be fluid, feel more like female, more like a male based on the day or time. It’s all individual.” This is being taught to school kids ages 9 through 12 as fact by people who say they are sex researchers and educators.

And notice how “boy” and “girl” are in the very same category with the very same status as “fluid” and “nonbinary”. In the sex-ed course, the first lesson is not on the differences between men and women and how they make babies, as one might naïvely imagine. No, it’s on consent, not sex, and then there are episodes for gender and orientation, but still no lesson on sex itself, on the natural reproductive differences between boys and girls, which is how humans exist at all. The dolls they use for reference are sex-free, Ginger and Blue. The teacher tells us that one of them uses “they” as a pronoun. One lesson has the kids attaching toy versions of penises, vulvas, boobs, balls, which the kids assign at random. The teachers almost never say “boys” and “girls,” it’s always “people.” So some people have breasts and some people have penises.

In these lesson plans, here’s the definition of homosexuality: “a person’s sexual identity in relation to the gender to which they are attracted.” Homosexuality is thereby redefined as homogenderism. It’s no longer about attraction to the same sex, but to the same gender. I’m no longer homosexual; I’m homogender. But what if the whole point of my being gay is that I’ve always been physically attracted to men? And by men, I mean people with XY chromosomes, formed by natural testosterone, with male genitals, which is what almost every American outside these ideological bubbles means by “men.” I do not mean people with XX chromosomes, formed by estrogen, with female genitals, who have subsequently used testosterone to masculinize their female body — even though I would treat them with the respect and dignity they deserve in every context.”

How can we fight against sexism if we cannot define what a woman is, or what sex is? Reasonable people have to stand up against gender ideology, as it serves only to erode the rights, boundaries, and spaces of women.

The Meghan Murphy Speech They Don’t Want You To Hear

November 4, 2019 in Canada, Culture, Feminism, Gender Issues, Politics | Tags: Battling the Trans Argumenets, Feminism, Gender Identtify Harms Women, Meghan Murphy, Toronto Public Library | by The Arbourist | 3 comments

This is the talk that the transactivists don’t want you hear. They protested, they shouted, they tried to intimidate the Library and women organizing the event. Share this widely folks, do not let the woke totalitarians win.

Crossing the Gendered Picket Line – Holly Lawford-Smith

October 21, 2019 in Feminism, Gender Issues | Tags: Feminism, gender identity, Holly Lawford-Smith | by The Arbourist | Comments closed

Interesting point of view. But I do like the notion that individualistic solutions to societal problems isn’t the way go.

“Natalie Wynn has objected to this point by saying that if the objection was really to reinforcing sex stereotypes we’d expect to see feminists directing anger at particularly feminine women. She asked, why do feminists focus their anger on transwomen, rather than people like Kim Kardashian? (Wynn’s video here and a fuller reply from me here). But this question can be answered. While people like Kim Kardashian do conform to sex stereotypes, they don’t necessarily reinforce them. That’s because, as I said already, feminists believe there are as many ways to be a woman as there are women, or more. The only thing you need, to be a woman, is to be female. After that, do whatever you like, be however you want. Being feminine is one of those ways. Because there’s no ‘right’ way to be a woman, being feminine is not a ‘wrong’ way.

But the same goes for being a man. There’s no ‘wrong’ way to be a man, including being feminine (even though of course not everyone in society agrees with feminists on this point). When a transwoman adopts femininity and takes the extra step of claiming to be a woman, he is expressing to the world that he thinks being feminine is not a way to be a man. He reinforces sex stereotypes of masculinity. The usual criticism is made in the other direction: it is a familiar thought that transwomen reinforce sex stereotypes of femininity, because of the type of women they tend to try to be. But I don’t find this particularly persuasive. If this were the only criticism, Wynn would be right to ask why we’re angry with transwomen for doing this but not with women who do it. But because being trans involves a repudiation of one’s sex (or one’s ‘gender’ understood as a sex-typed social role), it necessarily involves the statement that this way I want to be is not a way of being my sex. For example, being sexually subordinated by men is not a way of being a man; being the person who takes care of the house and raises the children is not a way of being a man; taking a passive role and deferring to the man in my life is not a way of being a man; wearing dresses and makeup and having long hair is not a way of being a man; (you get the picture). (I take some of these examples from transwomen Raymond interviewed and quotes from in her book).

The same goes for nonbinary people, because all the ways that nonbinary people are, are ways of being their sex. It’s sex stereotypes that make us think they’re not. If nonbinary people would be the way they want to be (e.g. a female person with an elective double mastectomy and short hair) without claiming not to be their sex, then they would be contributing to the project of busting sex stereotypes. By claiming to be nonbinary instead, they send the message that this is not a way to be their sex, that in order to be this way you must repudiate your sex (or ‘gender’ understood as sex-typed social role).

This is an old point put in a new way. Feminists have long accused transwomen of reinforcing sex stereotypes. But it’s not stereotypes about women they’re reinforcing, it’s stereotypes about men. Many people instinctively felt this when they heard about UK Stonewall advisor Alex Drummond claiming to be widening the bandwidth of being a woman, by having a beard. Feminists worldwide asked, why isn’t Drummond widening the bandwidth of being a man, by wearing skirts and eyeliner? What makes it the one rather than the other? The reason feminists have been so angry with those trans and nonbinary people who don’t have a good excuse for claiming trans and nonbinary status is that it’s a form of crossing the picket line on the feminist project of busting sex stereotypes. This is not just an idea for a project, where there might be reasonable disagreement about which project to take up. It’s a project already in full swing and which has made massive gains for women. What we need is a movement comparable to feminism aimed at freeing men from the constraints of masculinity. What we don’t need is large numbers of people acting like gender dissatisfaction is an individual problem, and the solution to it is reconceptualising sex stereotypes as innate features of persons (under the banner of ‘gender identity’).”

The Tyranny of the Toilet Queue – When Equal isn’t Fair

September 9, 2019 in Culture | Tags: Feminism, Society, The Fallacy of Gender Nuetral Spaces | by The Arbourist | 6 comments

The term gender-neutral is a misleading term. It is because gender neutral spaces almost always become male spaces due to the previously existing imbalance in society. Because many women still rightly fear men in restricted spaces, many women avoid gender-neutral spaces because those spaces give males access to them. These are cultural, as well as structural differences that need to be addressed first before simply slapping a ‘gender neutral’ sign over the ladies sign in public spaces.

“In April 2017, the BBC journalist Samira Ahmed wanted to use a toilet. She was at a screening of the James Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro at London’s Barbican arts centre, and it was the interval. Any woman who has ever been to the theatre knows what that means. This evening, the queue was worse than usual. Far worse. Because in an almost comically blatant display of not having thought about women at all, the Barbican had turned both the male and female toilets gender neutral simply by replacing the “men” and “women” signage with “gender neutral with urinals” and “gender neutral with cubicles”. The obvious happened. Only men were using the supposedly “gender neutral with urinals” and everyone was using the “gender neutral with cubicles”.

Rather than rendering the toilets genuinely gender neutral, they had simply increased the provision for men. “Ah the irony of having to explain discrimination having just been to see I Am Not Your Negro IN YOUR CINEMA”, Ahmed tweeted, suggesting that turning the gents gender neutral would be sufficient: “There’s NEVER such a queue there & you know it.”

On the face of it, it may seem fair and equitable to accord male and female public toilets the same amount of space – and historically, this is the way it has been done: 50/50 division of floor space has even been formalised in plumbing codes. However, if a male toilet has both cubicles and urinals, the number of people who can relieve themselves at once is far higher per square foot of floor space in the male bathroom than in the female bathroom. Suddenly equal floor space isn’t so equal.

But even if male and female toilets had an equal number of stalls, the issue wouldn’t be resolved, because women take up to 2.3 times as long as men to use the toilet. Women make up the majority of the elderly and disabled, two groups that will tend to need more time in the toilet.

Women are also more likely to be accompanied by children, as well as disabled and older people. Then there’s the 20–25% of women of childbearing age who may be on their period at any one time, and therefore need to change a tampon or a sanitary pad.

Women may also require more trips to the bathroom: pregnancy significantly reduces bladder capacity, and women are eight times more likely to suffer from urinary-tract infections. In the face of all these anatomical differences, it would surely take a formal equality dogmatist to continue to argue that equal floor space between men and women is fair.”

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Tag Archive

JK Rowling – Biological Reality – So Controversial

The Urinary Leash – Feminist History

The Removal of Female Sex Based Rights – Female Erasure

The Totalitarian Left’s Bastardization of Intersectionality

The Meghan Murphy Speech They Don’t Want You To Hear

Crossing the Gendered Picket Line – Holly Lawford-Smith

The Tyranny of the Toilet Queue – When Equal isn’t Fair

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