woke.

[Vamp]

1 hour ago, JLM said:

 

They also know full well that they will see how a person presents and make the call on whether they think they’re a man or woman without asking to see their genitals or carrying out any tests, so there is clearly more to it than chromosomes. 

I dunno, telling a transphobe you can't know what gender they are till you've had a quick gander at their genitals seems like a good way of getting out of some circular arguments. 

[Lion_of_the_Midlands]

14 hours ago, no user name said:

I meant a therapist. I might have used the wrong word 

As someone who knows a lot of therapists I can confirm that Rashers original statement is still correct. 

[RedRooster]

What I find most bizarre about the whole anti-trans movement is the people who define their very existence by it. Many of them accuse trans people or pro-trans people of denying biology; of ignoring facts and of being part of a pro-trans ‘cult’. That kind of language is thrown around so often. Yet it’s the anti-trans people who obsess over it - and we reached a point recently where JK Rowling inexplicably attempted to argue against the stance the Nazis took on trans people. If your argument or stance on an issue comes from a place of rationality, you should be capable of saying ‘that’s true, that’s awful - but it doesn’t invalidate what I say because…’

But Rowling doesn’t do that, Linehan doesn’t do that and the right wing grifters who probably don’t care one way or the other (but pretend they do) don’t do that. It’s about as venomous a ‘movement’ as I’ve seen against a minority group in my lifetime; and the hatred fuelling it only seems to grow. I think we’re only a Trump administration away from seeing genuinely horrific policy decisions made to ‘deal with’ this issue that are replicated elsewhere;  laws restricting not only where trans people can go but what they can do (want to be a teacher? Tough shit, it’ll confuse kids) and perhaps even restrictions in some states on access to surgery and hormone tablets - or perhaps even an outright ban, with an emphasis on a therapeutic approach. Trump in the White House could drive on and encourage Republican-voting states to implement discriminatory policies and glorify in doing so; with a Trump administration aiding them by attempting to water down any defence the constitution might offer.

Edited April 6 by RedRooster

[Devon Malcolm]

43 minutes ago, RedRooster said:

Yet it’s the anti-trans people who obsess over it - and we reached a point recently where JK Rowling inexplicably attempted to argue against the stance the Nazis took on trans people. If your argument or stance on an issue comes from a place of rationality, you should be capable of saying ‘that’s true, that’s awful - but it doesn’t invalidate what I say because…’

Rowling has become a really important testing ground for people who claim they're trans allies. There's practically a generation of people out there who grew up on Harry Potter and it's always interesting to me how quiet or defensive many of them will get about Rowling while also tut-tutting about the latest cuts to NHS gender services. Or how many of them still follow her on Twitter even though she never posts about anything else. Priorities.

[Nexus]

Fuck JK Rowling and fuck Harry Potter tbh. 

[SuperBacon]

4 minutes ago, Nexus said:

fuck Harry Potter

Harry right now: 

[Vamp]

Personally, I find it hard to divorce her views from her Enid Blyton approach to teenagers, the lazy antisemitic tropes in her world building and the suggestion that longer and duller equals more adult. 

I do also think that she just went too far down the wrong rabbit hole and didn't want to lose face by climbing out of it so just keeps on digging. But then  when you've had that much smoke blown up your arse you either develop one hell of an ego or lung cancer. 

[BomberPat]

On 4/5/2024 at 5:28 PM, JLM said:

People do struggle with the distinction (or pretend to struggle with it to barely mask their transphobia). People will think (or dishonestly claim) that saying  gender is a social construct means you’re denying biology. However, most of them know if they’re honest with themselves that one can ask the question “what is a woman” and not purely be talking about biology.

I think "social construct" has maybe just outlived its usefulness as a term, as a lot of things that start out in more academic circles tend to once they break containment and start getting used to mean something that's not quite the definition by well-meaning liberal kids, then becomes a TikTok/Tumblr buzzword, and then ridiculed by the right who only encounter it once it's morphed into something it was never really intended to mean in the first place; it happened with "emotional labour", which went from being a specific critique of how capitalism expects workers (and especially women) to regulate their emotions and put on a smiley face in the workplace, alienating themselves from their genuine emotional response, but ended up being used to mean "anything that might make me feel sad". More pertinently to the idea of "woke", the same thing happened about the phrase "politically correct", starting out in academia to basically mean "you're fixating too much on using the 'right' language at the expense of clarity", but by the time the right-wing newspapers had got hold of it, meaning anything from not saying the N word out loud to basic health and safety regulations.

With that off my chest, I think the problem is that - and it's hard to not to sound like a snob about this - we're having the conversation with people who haven't ever encountered an idea like "social construct" before, so rather than approaching it in the context that the term requires, just have a bit of a reckon of what it sounds like it means. The result is that, usually, they just see "social construct" as meaning "all made up", and if it's made up, then it doesn't matter. But something can be a social construct and still have enormous significance and material impact - our life is governed by social constructs; the law, the value of money, nation states, all of these things are social constructs but are still very real and very important to how our lives are organised. But when people only encounter the term in one context, and that's the context of gender, I can see why they get a bit kneejerk reactive against it.

One of the shibboleths of the anti-trans lot is the phrase "Adult Human Female", intended to say that "woman" is actually something with a very clear definition, that excludes trans women, and that to pretend otherwise is just equivocation. But they've literally just pulled up a dictionary definition and not thought about it - the map is not the territory, but it's an assumption that an appeal to some nebulous authority (the dictionary, in this case) is sufficient argument. Except it's not even a useful definition - "Female", in this context, is no less contentious a term than "Woman", and "Adult" is in itself just as much of a social construct, and, historically, you could find examples of "Human" being a constructed definition with boundaries that fall in a different place to where most people would define that term today. So the only correct response to defining woman as "Adult Human Female" is to then define "Adult", "Human" and "Female". 

[Loki]

8 hours ago, BomberPat said:

So the only correct response to defining woman as "Adult Human Female" is to then define "Adult", "Human" and "Female". 

It's also a total dead end as far as a definition.  I don't know if you read Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens but he had a great section on sex v gender which put it into a more historical perspective.   

Quote

Sex is child’s play; but gender is serious business. To get to be a member of the male sex is the simplest thing in the world. You just need to be born with an X and a Y chromosome. To get to be a female is equally simple. A pair of X chromosomes will do it. In contrast, becoming a man or a woman is a very complicated and demanding undertaking. Since most masculine and feminine qualities are cultural rather than biological, no society automatically crowns each male a man, or every female a woman. Nor are these titles laurels that can be rested on once they are acquired. Males must prove their masculinity constantly, throughout their lives, from cradle to grave, in an endless series of rites and performances. And a woman’s work is never done – she must continually convince herself and others that she is feminine enough.

He goes on to list cultural definitions of man and woman throughout history, and how they've changed between different cultures and civilizations.  It makes the point very well that gender is a mutable and constantly changing definition where chromosomal sex is a biological function.  He wasn't talking about trans issues at all, but certainly helped me understand the debate better.

It's absolutely a good thing that discussion of transgender issues is more mainstream nowadays but the fact that most of it is on Twitter/Reddit is depressing, because those platforms massively amplify the extreme views on both sides of the discussion and force a polarisation of opinion that's really unhelpful.  You go two or three comments deep and you'll have one side denying the existence of gender separate from chromosomal sex, and the other side denying the existence of scientific definitions of male and female.

[BomberPat]

I haven't read Sapiens, only the random graphic novel adaptation, but - other than nitpicking over chromosomes as an absolute definition of sex - I think that's a really useful explanation, and worthwhile in how it explains that without consideration of trans identities, because you'd hope that something like that would make it easier for those of who aren't trans to recognise that all of our genders are constructed through social and cultural factors, it's not only trans people for whom that's true.

The problem is that recognising when something is cultural rather than innate is extremely difficult, because, as Terry Pratchett said, a fish has no word for water. If you've never been given cause to, it's difficult to unpick the culture that you're immersed in and has permeated every aspect of your entire life. I think that explains almost all reactionary kickbacks against "woke", against trans rights, LGBTQ+ rights in general, against equal rights movements of the past, and against basically all cultural criticism - to a lot of people it feels like these things have come out of nowhere and told them, "the way you think the world is ordered is wrong", and they think, "it can't be, it's always been this way, why are you trying to change it now?".

Similarly, one of the reasons that using examples from history or other cultures often fails to land is because people instinctively kind of write it off - okay, people in the past thought differently, but we're in the enlightened present, so we must have it right. Another culture has more than two gender roles? Well, that's them over there, but here in civilised society we know how things work.

 

Going back to the earlier point about how it's useful framing the idea of gender being cultural without reference to trans identity, it's a similar thing with having pronouns on your email signature or social media bio. There's a kneejerk bigot response, but it's not just trans or non-binary people who benefit; some names are gender neutral, and some names may be unfamiliar to you, perhaps from a culture or language you haven't encountered before, so that context clue of their pronouns can be useful. I've made that point before, and people gave argued that pronouns in an email signature shouldn't change anything because you wouldn't write an email to a male colleague any differently than to a female colleague anyway, but it's as simple as not causing embarrassment by saying "he" instead of "she" in a meeting when talking about a colleague called, for example, Ashley.

 

I think one of the things I find frustrating about it all is that gender as a cultural role distinct from sex was explained to me in my first year at university, and it was all so simple and straightforward and obvious as to be self-evident. Better part of twenty years later, and people who have had it explained to them more often and in greater detail than I ever did act as if it's either brand new information or impossibly complicated. It's really not!

[no user name]

An issue I have with the anti trans people is they make out it's genuine concern. That's not to say there aren't some people who have genuine concerns but for many it's just something new to them that they can't get their head around. I think in 20 years time a lot of us will wonder what people were worried about. That's not to say that there aren't issues like women's sports, safe places etc but a lot of it isn't really an issue 

[westlondonmist]

A new managers job has been made at my organisation. Public conveniences and animal welfare. Both previously managed by Street Cleaning, with 1 guy (me) doing SC and PC (80% the latter), 1 guy doing SC and AW (A 50/50 split) and one just doing AW. So I have no experience with animal welfare and they have none with PCs so will be interesting. PCs has 10 times the budget despite less staff. The manager will manager 2 members of staff. I obviously need to read up on Animal Welfare. Does anybody work on anything like that? Apart from DDA 91 and AWA 2006 I don't know where to look.

[JLM]

I’m sure animal welfare is considered woke by some people, but I suspect this post was intended for the Work thread. 

[SuperBacon]

What next? VOTING for animals? 😤😤😤

[westlondonmist]

37 minutes ago, JLM said:

I’m sure animal welfare is considered woke by some people, but I suspect this post was intended for the Work thread. 

Well I'm sure I heard some old bloke complaining about millenials identifying as a cat

Edited April 9 by westlondonmist