Trans women are not women (Part 8)

[Emily's Cat]

Look women were turned into a political class by the left as a kind of new proletariat. That's partly why women have this class consciousness, because they are an old, now largely discarded, vehicle of the revolution.

This view, right here, is a problem. This view that females are things to be used by males, and discarded when males are done with them... that's the problem. This idea that females don't have minds and desires and needs of their own independent of the whims of males is the problem.

 

[The Atheist]

This view, right here, is a problem. This view that females are things to be used by males, and discarded when males are done with them...

Ah, the good old days.

Gotta confess, I never thought the trans lobby would be the reason the clock got turned back 100 years on women's rights.

 

[theprestige]

Who is describing conservatism like this?

As a conservative, I'm allowing it. Though I actually subscribe to the "liberal" viewpoint in that triad. What would be interesting is if a trans-activist were to say, "that's not a charitable description of conservatism, and here's why." What would be really interesting is if a trans-activist were to say "that's not a charitable description of the Progressive TRA position, and here's why."

 

[shuttlt]

Even if we reduce females to the most materialist perspective available... That still leaves us with half the population that is weaker and more vulnerable, and which bears the burden of reproduction.

And? There are plenty of strong women and weak men out there. There are barren women and lesbians. What is important about this class "women"?

If you reduce children to the most materialist definition of "sexually immature humans"... does that then suggest that there is nothing about children worth defending? Does not their status as the continuation of the species count for something?

Right, well, at the end there you are starting to touch on things that have more than material significance. In as much as I care about the continuation of the species, it is because of things like I love and miss my father and that is connected to him being the eldest son and me being the eldest son, and his relationship with his father and his father going back into time and my son and my love for my son and seeing that going forward. I don't care about the species continuing for materialist reasons. I care about it continuing for transcendent reasons. Same with how I feel about women.

And if you don't view females as fundamentally defined by their reproductive role in contrast to males... what exactly do you view females as, and what about that view leads you to think them worthy of protection?

Because there are thousands of years of cultural significance manifested in them. Because being a man doesn't make sense and doesn't have a point without women. It's a nonsense question that is only asked because the materialism that came out of the enlightenment has systematically stripped the transcendent out of the culture. It's like everybody today sees the world through the eyes of Richard ******* Dawkins.

It is often unclear whether you are paraphrasing someone else's view. I recommend clearly marking it out as such.

That said, I am pretty sure I have significant fundamental disagreements with your views.

Without question we disagree in fundamental ways.

 

[shuttlt]

Are you somehow under the impression that YOU get to choose the implications of my beliefs? On what basis? Does that penis grant you the power to foretell the future?

Logic and reason and experience of the world are what I'm basing this on. I'm happy to argue it out. Enough with this pseudo-Freudian nonsense about penises though, please.

 

[shuttlt]

This view, right here, is a problem. This view that females are things to be used by males, and discarded when males are done with them... that's the problem. This idea that females don't have minds and desires and needs of their own independent of the whims of males is the problem.

Christ! Do you want to tell me that the original working class proletariat were not organised by marxists into political movements? Does admitting that mean that one is viewing working class men as not having "minds and desires and needs of their own independent of the whims of" labour organisers? Where are you getting this from? Loads of those Marxists were women and yet you are ranting about men. Loads of the people pushing trans-activism are women. Loads of the MPs who have dropped women as a class and have moved on to trans-women are themselves women. Your fixation on this 2nd wave feminist frame makes you interpret everything in this mechanical way.

Not everything that negatively impacts women can be interpret as men oppressing women! Sometimes it's other women doing it. Sometimes the sex of the person doing it is irrelevant. Generally conservatives don't have this hostile zero sum game attitude to relationships between the sexes that you keep projecting. We aren't inverted feminists.

 

[shuttlt]

Ah, the good old days.

Gotta confess, I never thought the trans lobby would be the reason the clock got turned back 100 years on women's rights.

New boss same as the old boss

 

[Meadmaker]

Yeah.
we are talking about modesty though.

What your said is that the absence of modesty in young children demonstrates that it is not instinctive. I think that's incorrect.

In formal logic terms, your assertion would be "If X is not practiced by children, X is not instinctive."

I'm giving a counterexample (interest in sexual intercourse) where X is not present in children, but is instinctive, proving the assertion false.


I cannot prove that modesty is instinctive. However, you assertion that modesty is not found in small children does not disprove my assertion that it is instinctive.

 

[Roboramma]

One additional thing to add on to that final point. I think the basic radical egalitarian urge is very, very old. You see it in the French Revolution, you see it in communities that grew up around the English Civil War, you see it in early Christianity. What is unusual is making it the operating principle of nations.

I'd say it's older than that, there's something in modern egalitarian values in the way hunter-gatherer societies were organized as well.

Ian Morris, I think, has a point, in this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Foragers-Farmers-Fossil-Fuels-Values/dp/0691160392

Most people in the world today think democracy and gender equality are good, and that violence and wealth inequality are bad. But most people who lived during the 10,000 years before the nineteenth century thought just the opposite. Drawing on archaeology, anthropology, biology, and history, Ian Morris explains why. Fundamental long-term changes in values, Morris argues, are driven by the most basic force of all: energy. Humans have found three main ways to get the energy they need―from foraging, farming, and fossil fuels. Each energy source sets strict limits on what kinds of societies can succeed, and each kind of society rewards specific values. But if our fossil-fuel world favors democratic, open societies, the ongoing revolution in energy capture means that our most cherished values are very likely to turn out not to be useful any more.

While they don't completely align with your views, you might find his ideas interesting.

 

[Roboramma]

And she is also correct that the strong frame is of practically zero significance, because the women's frame style is plenty strong, and I am not the least worried that my new women's bike might fail mechanically.

If your bicycle's frame is stronger than it need to be, it's also heavier than it needs to be.

 

[905]

Reformulating post. Sorry.

 

[shuttlt]

Apologies for talking about you like you're not in the room, but I do find shuttit's arguments fascinating, sometimes even compelling.

However, I wonder if I'd find them as compelling if I were a woman.

It's not hard to flip around. For good or for ill, I think maybe Emily's Cat sees men in more significant terms than just "people who produce sperm". There is a whole deep history and set of connotations and evocations that come with that. The categories of "man" and "woman" are like Proust's madeleines, and the materialist worldview wants to reduce them down to being small cakes. Yes they are small cakes, but what makes them worth caring about it is that long ago he ate with people he loved and the sensation of the madeleine brings them back to him.

I remember when my son was born and all of a sudden the category of "child" meant something completely different and I couldn't watch news stories about murdered children any more without a strong emotional reaction because that category was now linked to my son. What makes the categories powerful, and deep, and worth writing epic poems about is those connections.

It's a grey, colourless, emotionless world if we reduce woman, man, child down to materialist definitions.

 

[shuttlt]

Reformulating post. Sorry.

Too slow

 

[905]

I'm not the world's fastest writer, and I had to deal with a rabbit in the house in the meantime. (No really.) At the risk of having my jugular opened, here's the edited version. Give me another hour and I'd probably completely rewrite it.

—

Apologies for talking about you like you're not in the room, but I do find shuttit's arguments fascinating, sometimes even compelling.

My conception of my wife as a woman involves the ability to produce ova, but in a more transcendent sense in terms of the connection to cultural ideas associated with fertility and nurturing and all sorts of other connections and associations. Her being a woman gives me the opportunity to aspire to and try to enact the things that are noble in being a man and require a woman. Yes, at the root of it there is physicality, but if you reduce it to just some materialist thing about ova I think you've thrown away what everybody actually cares about.

However, I wonder if I'd find them as compelling if I were a woman with, in the current parlance, lived experience.

Take my wife. (Not a setup for a Henny Youngman joke.) Last year The Lancet's now infamous "bodies with vaginas" issue

made her, and many others in these parts, livid, not least for the blatant double standard. It doesn't matter that if you read the article itself, given the context a case can be made for that particular sentence formulation. Using that on the cover was another in a long line of insults.

Given the quote I opened with my assumption here – please correct me if I'm wrong (and it may have come up previously in this epic series of threads) – is that shuttit wouldn't approve either. On the other hand, I can also imagine him carefully reading the article and concluding that "bodies with vaginas" was indeed the correct if not only way to phrase that, so sorry, ladies.

—

It's not hard to flip around.

I actually think it is, a little. If you need that unpacked I may be some time.

 

[shuttlt]

Given the quote I opened with my assumption here – please correct me if I'm wrong (and it may have come up previously in this epic series of threads) – is that shuttit wouldn't approve either. On the other hand, I can also imagine him carefully reading the article and concluding that "bodies with vaginas" was indeed the correct if not only way to phrase that, so sorry, ladies.

I'm not very interested in precise physical definitions. I kind of feel that if somebody claims to need a definition to know what a woman is they have lost contact with reality past the point where they can be reasoned with. If we have to have one, the ova definition seems fundamental. To me though, that's because it's a physical definition that gives you the right answer to the question of "who is a woman" rather than because it is the essence of woman.

Physical definitions are tricky. Tigers have four legs, but if one is born with three, it's just a deformed tiger, not something else. A woman without a vagina is a woman without a vagina. In the movie Freaks there is a guy called, I think, Johnny Ekk. He was a human torso. Nothing from the waist down. I don't need to know what was in his pants, if there was anything, to know he was a man.

I didn't learn the category "woman" from a dictionary. I learned it from having a mother and father, seeing they were different and forming categories around that. Same as people have done since before the invention of language. I think accepting that a discussion about definitions is necessary is like having a conversation with HAL predicated on him being sane. He isn't. The conversation is pointless. All you are doing is giving power to these people by pretending there is a question there to debate. A man isn't a woman and can't become a woman.

Man and woman aren't rationally derived categories.Debating definitions forces us to pretend that they are.

The only reason this debate about definitions is happening is because something is insane at the heart of enlightenment rationalism. It's like how you slowly realize something isn't right about HAL in 2001. This is the ideology that thought the 10 hour day and 10 day week were good ideas.

I actually think it is, a little. If you need that unpacked I may be some time.

Please do.

 

[905]

Please do.

Oh frak.

 

[Rolfe]

The thread seems locked in "indeed transwomen aren't women, but women shouldn't have any single-sex provisions anyway because reasons, they're happier when we oppress them" mode.

I'll come back when it's moved on.

 

[lionking]

The thread seems locked in "indeed transwomen aren't women, but women shouldn't have any single-sex provisions anyway because reasons, they're happier when we oppress them" mode.

I'll come back when it's moved on.

I agree. This thread has been completely derailed.

 

[p0lka]

What your said is that the absence of modesty in young children demonstrates that it is not instinctive. I think that's incorrect.

I think we would need to define 'instinctive' before moving on.
I'm moving on anyway

In formal logic terms, your assertion would be "If X is not practiced by children, X is not instinctive."

define instinctive. Instinctive to me means a thing that all of us do.

In formal logic terms 'if all x is y, how come x isn't always y?

I'm giving a counterexample (interest in sexual intercourse) where X is not present in children, but is instinctive, proving the assertion false.

Don't know if it does what you think it does.

I cannot prove that modesty is instinctive. However, you assertion that modesty is not found in small children does not disprove my assertion that it is instinctive.

We would need to define 'instinctive' I think.

It is a fact that children have to learn to wear clothes though, modesty isn't a thing until they're societally indoctrinated into it.

 

[p0lka]

I agree. This thread has been completely derailed.

What should the thread be about then? let us get back on the rail.