OK, I’m gonna actually lay out
Exactly what the issues are, in plain speech.
The overall problem with the current form of the trans rights movement is that, unlike every other civil rights movement that has ever existed, it relies not on laying out what it’s demands are, but in hoping nobody notices what it’s demands are because people tend to find those demands unreasonable when they hear them. That’s why trans rights activism relies on superficial analogies - “it’s just like gay rights in the 80s!!” - and not on specific demands - “we want X and we need it because Y”.
Let’s look closer at some aspects of trans rights activism that appears any time it’s discussed.
First:
“Trans rights are human rights”
This is a statement that seems reasonable, but actually completely misrepresents the issues at stake.
The “rights” that are being discussed by those women who get called TERFs are *not* baseline human rights; they are rights and policies specifically written for trans people, specifically to address issues raised by trans people about what they want.
Any given demand for a specific group to have a new right, or a new policy or law may be reasonable or unreasonable, and needs to be argued for and the impact assessed to work out whether it can be accommodated.
However, refusing some of those demands - or reviewing policies that have been introduced without much thought - is not campaigning for “removal of a human right” - human rights are the baseline we all have, and then there may or may not be reason for some groups to have specific rights. Trans people are one of those groups, and they need to be able to articulate their specific demands themselves and be able to argue for them, and to convincingly address concerns about where these rights can negatively impact others
Next up:
“Trans women are women”
As a statement, it makes no sense. It’s a call for people to believe and affirm, but it can only be possible by changing the definition of “woman” from referring to an adult female human to something else.
What that something else is is something that trans activists avoid clarifying, but the definition they clearly use, is this;
“A woman is an adult human female who is cool with seeing herself as a woman, plus any male person who sees herself as a woman”
Now that’s a definition that, if trans activists were open about it, we could at least start to get progression on - openly holding that definition would mean that we at least recognise that within the now widened definition of “woman” we have female people, and male people, and that as members of different sexes they may sometimes have conflicting needs.
However, what we find that trans activism *actually* does is it holds that widened definition of “woman” only as a momentary pathway to taking the next step, again using linguistic sleight of hand. It goes something like this - again, I’m using plain language to lay out the process, Invisible Wizard is very welcome to tell me where I’m wrong, if I need I am - “since those male people who identify as women are now, by definition, women, there is no reason other than hatred to recognise that trans women are not the same sex as the adult female humans who were already in the category. We’ve accepted they are women now, so focusing on sex is a weird obsession with genitals!”
That trick there is helped along by the third obfuscation tactic used by trans activism, and that is this:
Conflating Sex and Gender, then telling opponents that it’s THEM who are doing this.
Here’s the thing you’ve probably seen - it’s on these threads here, and any time you’ve mentioned this on Twitter or Facebook you’ve probably encountered it
Person stumblin into debate: “I mean, sure, I can see that people can identify as they want, but a trans woman is still male”
Trans activists “oh, what you’ve done there is conflated sex and gender - nobody is saying people change sex! We’re talking about gender identity, which is about an internal sense of self, not changing sex!”
Here’s the problem with that: trans activists are indeed talking about gender identity, and (while some extreme trans activists do claim that sex doesn’t exist) they do indeed understand that sex exists.
However, the demand is that gender identity overwrites and determines sex category regardless of how that might impact on people in that sex category; this is how “gender identity” - which it’s us anti trans bigots who ignorantly conflate with sex, remember - means that Laurel Hubbard competes in the female category, that there’s a biological male who lied about his sex, who has had no surgery and doesn’t have a gender recognition certificate, who is currently in charge of a rape crisis centre in Scotland and has this week said that rape victims who are uncomfortable with male examiners need to “reframe” their positions.
So trans activism does recognise that sex exists - it just demands that we can’t ever use “trans women are the opposite sex to those women who aren’t trans” as a reason to exclude male people from a given female space. Which is, effectively, pretending that sex doesn’t exist, and that gender identity is the sole determining factor.
These are just the first three, fundamental issues with the demands made by trans activists, and they can be thrashed out. Noting these issues and contradictions however, is not hatred. That’s why I can absolutely r3cognise that dysphoria exists, that some people really do believe they have a gender identity that is at odds with their sexed body and that living *as* the opposite sex can alleviate discomfort, but I don’t accept that recognising that means having to abandon critical thinking and agreeing to every demand on the basis that scrutinising demands and impositions made by a group amounts to bigotry.
We live in a sexist world. Sex exists and matters. I am not convinced that the group “male people who demand access to female spaces, who have redefined what it is to be a woman, and who have got big organisations falling over themselves to have their flag on their socials to show support” are actually more vulnerable women than women.
(, Sun 15 Aug 2021, 8:28, Reply)
