waywardwaverer.bsky.social
Sad, tired, disabled, mentally-ill millennial transfem NEET from the British Isles. Autistic and perhaps ADHD. Bi(?).
Interested in the physical sciences, computers, maths, languages, retro and indie games, sci-fi, and yuri manga/anime; knows little.
2,112 posts
1,090 followers
982 following
Discussion Master
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Sometimes a dog woman wants to relive her puppy girl days. Is that so wrong?!
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True.
Given the dedication and constant effort required to be a full-time pro athlete, it's hard to be well rounded and develop informed, nuanced views on the world outside your immediate competitive milieu.
So you can argue that we should cut *her* some slack.
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Okay, but what about the other three words I used?
Plus whether you phrase it like that or not, the claim that transfems aren't feminine enough to be allowed to compete with cis women is de facto one of brokenness in a world where one's adherence to conventional gender norms dictates one's worth.
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(Although to be sure I'm not suggesting that Biles or the people lauding her disappointing and thoughtless comments are actively transphobic insofar as wanting us to suffer; it seems like trans people are, for them, so abstract and hypothetical that they barely considered us at all)
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Notice how she has to pretend she's making this suggestion so that "trans" will feel safe in sports, but anyone who's paid even a modicum of attention, as you would hope a professional sportswoman might have, ought to know that trans people never requested such a thing.
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Even if she had believed that - even if it had actually been true - there's still no way to construe forcing us into specific transgender leagues as anything but discriminatory.
Everyone who proposes this does it because we're viewed as too icky, impure, compromised and broken to merit inclusion.
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Cisgender people are so disappointing.
Segregating trans people in their own leagues is clear anti-trans discrimination.
How can we trust any of you to advocate for our rights when you're incapable of grasping that very obvious fact?
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If Kinnock imagines that buttering Starmer up like this is somehow going to imbue him with these imagined qualities such that he starts to make actually good and principled decisions, then I would suggest that he's very much mistaken.
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How could anyone seriously believe Starmer is gutsy, highly intelligent, or progressive after everything we've seen over the past several years?
He is quite far removed, to say the least, from having any of those qualities.
Even when they're trying to save their party, Labour pols can't be honest.
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I've had a bad feeling about this person for a long time.
She likes to present herself as a staunch defender of both women's and LGBT+ rights, but she seldom talks about trans people at all, and I've seen her speak glowingly of articles written by out-and-out transphobes.
Another covert bigot?
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She's a transphobe. She's not fit for the role.
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I'm getting the impression a lot of your discussions turn out this way given your apparent reluctance to engage in specifics.
I think we would both be better served by ending this particular discussion here, since I'm also finding it tedious.
Farewell.
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So you acknowledge that it's unreasonable to make the blanket assumption that an expert consensus is always correct but you're going to do it anyway on the grounds that it's probably correct.
As a heuristic it's not *the* worst, but if you're not going to think about issues why discuss anything?
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You should be specific, because dependent on the precise context, your statement may or may not be accurate.
Division of labour and specialised distribution of resources are, taken in the most literal sense, inevitable but they needn't always be respectable. I'm sure you can understand that, right?
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It may or may not be. That would depend on the specifics, wouldn't it?
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In reality, you've done nothing in this discussion but appeal to academic consensus (that you vaguely gestured at rather than proving even exists, and I note you've been vague about precisely which academic views we're meant to be privileging here) while ignoring my points about Cartesian dualism.
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Is it?
For someone apparently so fixated on reason, you sure seem dedicated to parroting the conventional wisdom and appealing to the beliefs of great numbers of people and accredited experts without further examination.
I'd remind you that once commonly held ideas do get overturned in science.
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lol
I'm hardly the only person to feel this way about the gender/sex divide, and you can find proponents of my critical view of 'biological sex' in the literature.
So I don't think you need to be quite so condescending.
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I do think they're incorrect.
Turns out that advancing our understanding of empirical reality is not done by unquestioningly accepting received notions.
Since this consensus turns on Cartesian dualism, I would suggest that there are grounds for challenge.
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Like 'species,' 'biological sex' is neither coherent nor objective, and the assumption that it is (and that you can parcel off any inconvenient facts that might complicate this narrative into the subsidiary category of 'gender') obfuscates truth, inhibits understanding, and causes real harm.
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Since reality exists on a continuum you're pretty much forced to think, discuss, and argue along a continuum if you're trying to make sense of the universe.
In this case, the widely-accepted notion is incorrect and unhelpful because it enshrines a reductive and misleading idea of 'biological sex'.
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Well, yes. It doesn't really make a lot of sense, after all.
Thoughts and feelings are biological, after all. And, contrariwise, human bodies don't exist in a void absent of thought, feeling, definition, interpretation, and categorisation.
Sex and gender are vague, fuzzy, intertwined notions.
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I'm glad you're a supporter of empirical reality and science, but I don't see how you can then claim that psychology isn't related to biology.
Thought is obviously a function of the brain, a physical organ found in living entities.
Cartesian dualism doesn't sit easily alongside empirical reality.
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(Also, lots of people make confident statements based on assumptions without being especially foolish or dishonest. Everything we believe is ultimately based on unprovable assumptions to some degree whether we realise it or not. Some assumptions are simply more plausible/reasonable than others.)
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We pretty much do know that it isn't a significant developmental factor actually.
When you talk to trans people, a lot of them consciously realised they were trans (or had feelings strongly indicative of transness) even before meeting other trans people or learning about transness.
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lol.
Pathetic.
Your usage of such loaded phrases as "orgies of arson and looting" tells anyone reading your posts that you as good as belong to the fear-mongering racist right already.
As such, you're not worthy of any more of my time.
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Correction: you know some people who you erroneously assumed to be basically decent.
Subsequent events have shown that to be an error in judgement.
But your description of gratuitous violence makes me wonder whether you're so decent yourself...
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Yep.
:(
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It's possible they won't, since there's a lot of time before the next election and there must be a lot of influential people who don't like the way things are clearly shaping up.
Nothing that could reverse (or just slow!) the dire trajectory the country's following seems apparent so far though.
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They certainly aren't getting the latter wish. They've rendered themselves repugnant parodies of humanity in the eyes of anyone remotely normal as a result of their twisted, monomaniacal obsession.
As for the former... I hope you're right about that, but I don't feel optimistic.
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Yes. It's rather worrying.
How hard can it be to imagine yourself as a cisgender woman being altered by testosterone at puberty and how it might make you feel while it was happening and in the aftermath? And vice versa for cisgender men.
Their lack of concern looks like a desire to be rid of us.
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(Also, there's an awful lot that can still go wrong under Labour, even if they aren't able to take it as far as Reform will.)
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Feels like since a Reform victory looks probable they probably will get everything they want. But they're going to get so much else alongside it that I doubt they'll be grateful in the end.
And amidst all the chaos no one's going to be paying a lot of attention to us anyway.
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If you won't introduce legislation to remedy clearly ludicrous judgements like that made by the Supreme Court in the recent FWS case and won't call out misjudgements when they happen (preferring, as you do, to criticise courts that uphold asylum seekers' rights), you clearly have no such commitment.
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(Don't get me wrong; it's meaningful and important to highlight all forms of inequality and exclusion of marginalised groups. But when you don't have speakers from a group whose participation has literally been forbidden, it looks very much like equality isn't an actual concern.)
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With no trans inclusion, this conference looks very much like a hollow farce.
Truly absurd.
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Then you said it poorly, since this second post is a lot more sensible.
It's important to be careful when opposing bigotry lest you end up reinforcing certain harmful misconceptions that turn out to undergird that bigotry.
Still, it's good that you do know better. I apologise for being a grouch.
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Let me guess, you're the kind of fool who is totally scandalised when people express happiness at the deaths of the likes of Henry Kissinger and Margaret Thatcher, right?
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Since Berns was happy to oppress trans people and wanted them to die even though they'd never done her any harm and had merely been trying to live freely, it's hard to hold this kind of behaviour against trans allies, let alone trans people.
Her lesbianism is meaningless in this context.
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Saying trans women are male and trans men are female is transphobic, btw.
Our "physical being" doesn't actually make decrees about what artificial, human-created category we should be placed in. That's something people decide. And they could easily decide better.
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Really dumb take, bestie.
Transphobia long pre-dates the existence of whiteness, so this makes literally no sense.
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I suppose I can't deny that "transform[ing] the quality of public services for residents" is, in the most literal sense, what we can expect of the introduction of generative "AI" for use by local authorities.
I would have thought, though, that we should be trying to *improve* public services.
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It's good to hear she apparently had a change of heart concerning us (although I'm not actually going to click on the link since it's Twitter; I'll take your word for it) but it doesn't render the sexual harassment of a trans minor and her earlier history of hatefulness totally irrelevant either.
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But on the other hand it's not easy to feel as regretful as I ideally would either, given her behaviour and the wider anti-trans context, as you point out.
And seeing her praised, especially by ostensibly supportive people, just makes me angry.
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So I can't say I'm happy. I want bigots like these to be defeated, but I don't want them to know that kind of misery (or at least not unless I'm in a particularly foul mood).
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I feel pretty conflicted about her death, actually. Cancer's a horrible disease, and in a better world (like the world I wanted to hope we were creating) nobody would die so horribly.
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No problem.
I'm sorry for being a bit too combative in my initial reply. Social media always tends to make me grumpy, and that tendency's been even more pronounced lately for... reasons.
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I'd like to think most of the people eulogising her aren't aware of her past behaviour, but it's nonetheless pretty frustrating and hurtful that people can behave so monstrously towards trans folk and then have it mostly disregarded even in the current political climate.
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I'm sorry you have to deal with such a difficult neighbour. I do very much appreciate that there are those willing to speak in defence of trans people, but I don't know if you're going to get through to a Christian fundamendalist.
Still, I know it's not easy to ignore expressions of bigotry.
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I think it's better to understand it as a developmental variation that may or may not require medical intervention, since there do exist trans people who don't want or need transition care as well as those who very much do.