Thoughts

On the basics

A woman is an adult human female. Nice try though.

Aww. How adorably essentialist of you. Are you a full-fledged Trump supporter, or are you just a confused JK Rowling fan? Either way, I’d be happy to provide you with a basic lesson on the difference between gender and biological sex. While we’re at it, maybe we could catch you up on the fundamentals of social constructionism.

Of course, we both know you don’t need those wikipedia links. You’ve already done the reading, and you just don’t care. You simply refuse to eat your vegetables. You’re a spoiled toddler who only wants chicken nuggets, and even if I make airplane noises while spooning them into your whiny little face, you’re still gonna resist swallowing even the tiniest morsels of postmodern theory.

To that, I say fine. I’m not your fucking mom. If you want to stuff your head full of garbage, I really don’t care. The rest of us adults are happy to carry on our conversation without you. Good luck getting out of that high chair.

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15 thoughts on “On the basics

  1. Tenet says:

    Your argument is literally the intellectual equivalent of chicken nuggets. The difference. Between gender and sex is in the literature is frilly nonsense. You may as well be asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

    • CQ says:

      I thought it was pretty clear that I wasn’t making an argument. I don’t owe you a debate on how the world works. If it’s nonsense, you’re either too ignorant or too stupid to play with the adults. If you’re too stupid, I’m very sorry. That’s not your fault. If you’re too ignorant, either correct yourself or go fuck yourself. I don’t particularly care which.

      • Tenet. says:

        This is basically an elaborate brainwashing activity. “You can’t hang out with the adults because you don’t believe our sacred cows.” You’ve turned into your evangelical Christian mother, but with woke bullshit instead. Utterly vacuous.

  2. notperfect says:

    Trans woman are *socially* akin to women. The absolute insistence that we have to accept trans women as *physically* women has created a huge, reality-based pushback and rightly so. I’m stunned someone as intelligent as Coke seems to uncritically embrace every “woke” idea out there. Come on Coke! There is such a thing as immutable, biological reality. It’s important to distinguish between trans women and women not just for biological, medical and legal reasons, but also so we don’t lose touch with reality completely.

    • H says:

      No one is rejecting the existence biological gender, that’d be nonsense. It’s a differentiation between female as in biological gender and woman as a construct, i.e. psychological and behavioural patterns.
      Genuinly curious of the legal reasons perspective, what do you mean?

    • T C says:

      biomedical PhD here – it’s actually not accurate to describe anything as “immutable biological reality.” The way the biological science works is by categorizing things based on similarity and likelihood, and then studying the generalizations you can make based on those categories, but generalizations are virtually never perfectly predictive. You could say that yes, *most* of the time people with XX chromosomes have uteruses and a hormonal milieu with a great deal of estrogen and secondary female sex characteristics like boobs and higher-pitched voices and a typically heterosexual tendency – but there are jillions of exceptions to all of that (androgen insensitivity, intersex ppl, etc.), because all that “sex” is is a cluster of stuff that tends to co-occur.

      You might say that, for instance, someone with Turner syndrome is a woman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turner_syndrome), but they don’t have XX chromosomes – they just have one X. Would you say that those people aren’t female? This isn’t an attempt to shame you by saying “how could you invalidate these women’s identities” (although if they do feel they have an identity as a woman then it’s not cool for someone to dispute it) – it’s an attempt to show you that if you DO want to slot someone with Turner syndrome into the “female” category, you have to acknowledge that chromosomes aren’t a be-all-end-all criterion. Likewise, if you DON’T want to slot someone with Turner syndrome into the “female” category, but also can’t slot them into the “male” category because they lack a Y chromosome, you have to acknowledge that even the biological sex binary is much more a cluster of traits than it is a binary reality.

      *You might note that wikipedia describes these people as “female”, but this doesn’t change the argument. All it means is that the person who wrote the article decided that XX wasn’t a good enough criterion to categorize someone as “female.” It moves the goalposts – what do you do about someone with androgen insensitivity? etc. etc.

    • whoami says:

      trans women are not socially (or physically for that matter) akin to cis women (see what you did there TERF). however we must demand that society treat them both as women, be they cis or trans. it isn’t hard

  3. Jake says:

    Acknowledging trans women is a much less imminent threat to the establishment of feminist society than, you know…

    … well, Republicans; Christianity; Trump himself; World War 3/Cold War 2.5; Kanye West; etc.

    I mean, if I’m missing something let me know.

    Is there some trans-female interest group banning abortions? No.

    Are the same people who correct your pronoun usage also tagging biological women with pink triangles and putting them in camps? No.

    Did Contrapoints literally shimmy out of your closet and stuff your vagina full of sugar-free, vegan saltwater taffy because you refused to acknowledge trans existence?

    Nope, still waiting on that one, myself.

    God I’m so advanced.

    Anyway, stop acting like trans people threaten women.

    All of us LGBT+ people WANT YOU TO GET PAID, HAVE ACCESS TO SAFE MEDICINE, AND LIVE IN A FEMINIST SOCIETY.

    Thank you, Coke.

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