I’ve been meaning to post this for some time; it’s a letter from a petulant Wall Street Journal reader who’s respondong to my op-ed about the KerFFRFle: my clash with the Freedom from Religion Foundation about whether, as one of its fellows wrote, “A woman is whoever she says she is.” The reader thinks that this self-identification is a perfectly good definition of “woman” as opposed to the gamete-based definition that most biologists hold.
The psychologically-based definition implies that the objective reality of who you are is exactly who you think you are. I won’t go over that well-trodden ground except to say again that there are lots of people who claim to be things or people that are not objectively true, like all the religious people who claim to be prophets. But just check the Oxford English definition for “woman,” and you won’t find anything based on self-conception. Instead, you find this: 
I guess the OED hasn’t caught up to progressive wordsmithing!
At any rate, David Opderbeck, a professor of law at Seton Hall University, had a rather confused response in the WSJ, which I’ve put below. I’ll have a few words about it after you read it:
What is the sweating professor trying to say? First, Dr. Opoderbeck doesn’t seem to realize that the conflict is about the biological definition of “woman”, and so he claims that there can be many definitions of woman, presumably including men who say they are women.
Now this part I don’t understand at all:
. . . . . when they otherwise vigorously deny that there is any objective reality to traditional ontological categories. A “human,” for dogmatic materialists such as Mr. Coyne, after all, is nothing but a random configuration of matter, without substance, intentionality, teleology, mind or being beyond the entirely contingent fact that matter happens to have configured itself in a certain way in this moment of evolutionary time.
How do we chop through this thicket of verbal weeds? Of course I accept that there is an objective reality to an individual human, and of course a human can be defined as a member of a group, Homo sapiens, having certain biological traits (note the similarity to “woman”). As for the claim that reality has to involve teleology about material objects that “happen to have configured themselves in a certain way at this moment of evolutionary time,” it’s opaque if not ludicrous. There is no teleology in evolution, and matter does not “configure itself.” If that were true, I’d configure myself into the young Robert Redford. But all this confusing verbiage, I detect a whiff of religion, And that supposition is supported by the observation that Opderbeck got his master’s degree at Fuller Theological Seminary, and has written some books with a theological bent:
His first two books, Law and Theology: Classic Questions and Contemporary Perspectives (Fortress Press 2019) and The End of the Law? Law, Theology, and Neuroscience (Wipf & Stock / Cascade 2021) received broad acclaim. His third book, Faithful Exchange: The Economy as It’s Meant to Be, a theological assessment of economic paradigms informed by rule of law principles, will be released by Fortress Press in 2025. In addition to his appointment at the Law School, he is Affiliated Faculty in Seton Hall’s Department of Religion.
Theology is, as Dan Barker observed, a subject without an object, and “theological assessments of economic paradigms” seems a very weird thing to do.
But never mind. In his second paragraph, Opderbeck supports the FFRF self-conception definition, meaning that he also supports whatever brain chemistry that makes some individuals objectively fat because, although they have anorexia and are skeletal, nevertheless think that they’re fat. Or whatever brain chemistry makes a person think that they are Jesus reincarnated. Yes, they must be Jesi.
Opderbeck’s ignorance is best revealed when he claims that the gamete-only doctrine is “arbitrary” and that I think it’s “best for society”. It’s not at all arbitrary, but comes from biologists observing animals and plants over more than two centuries, and observing that, yes, all species have only two types of reproductive systems. One evolved to make small mobile gametes (males) and the other large immobile ones (females). That’s hardly arbitrary. As for that definition being best for society, that’s like saying that recognizing that Saturn goes around the Sun is arbitrary, but recognizing that is good for society. These claims would be true only under the construal that recognizing the truth is good for society. But clearly that’s not what Opderbeck means.
In fact, I myself am not sure what Opderbeck means, except that he’s cooked up a hash of words that imply that reality is, objectively, what you think it is; that biology is driven by teleology; and that an objective recognition of gamete types that maps perfectly onto what biologists have recognized forever is nevertheless just “arbitrary.”
All I can say is, “Lawyer, stick to your courtroom.”
We can certainly expand the meaning of “woman” to include the sociological, but she is first and necessarily a female before she is anything else.
Interesting how these arguments mostly revolve around the term “woman” rather than “man.”
The only thing that comes to mind about “A “human,” for dogmatic materialists such as Mr. Coyne, after all, is nothing but a random configuration of matter” is Mereological nihilism. I quote from wikipedia: “there really are no tables. There are only fundamental physical simples spatially arranged and causally interrelated in such a way as to jointly cause perceptual faculties like ours to have table-like perceptual experiences. Nihilists often abbreviate claims like this one as follows: there are fundamental physical simples arranged table-wise”
This is an example of why I think some debates are better left to other fields (aka philosophers). I don’t think there really is any doubt about what is the BIOLOGICAL definition of a woman. Apart from the blog-that-must-not-be-named and similar idiots. The objections usually are of philosphical or ethical or sociological nature.
And I try to respond in kind. For example, “a woman is whoever says they are” is logically inconsistent because it’s circular. “A schnargel is whoever identifies as a schnargel. Now have you any understanding of what a schnargel may be?”
Or even conceding the argument. Let’s assume you could define “woman” as a socially salient cathegory, specifically for humans (not for other animals) and that this doesn’t define a perfect overlap with “cis women”. But “cis women” would still be a salient social cathegory. So why should you re-define the usual meaning and then find a new word to replace the “old concept”? Let’s just stay with woman = adult human female and use a new word for the new concept (but of course, every philosopher attempt to define such a cathegory has failed as of now)
Here is what I had in mind. Let’s use “man.” A man is defined as an adult human male. But there is much more than this to being a man. One culture might view manhood in terms of being a provider, another as a warrior. One might say that “real men” don’t cry. But no matter what other behaviors or characteristics a society wants to apply to men, they are first and necessarily males.
Note that I said nothing about redefining what a woman is. But even among those women who accept that a woman is “an adult human female,” they will disagree amongst themselves about what it “means” to be a woman. That is an entirely different discussion—one that can proceed quite productively without ideological concepts like “gender” and “cis woman.”
Yes I understood what you meant.
But those “add ons” on the human female are just stereotypes. That’s what second wave feminists used to call “gender”: what society imposes upon females in order to regard them as “true” women. But this is limiting how a person can express themselves (and also a “no true scotsman”) and in fact a radical feminist would say that there is nothing more to be added on human female to be a “true” woman.
I didn’t want to expand too much, but on the queer/critical studies side there are many third-wave self-identifying as feminist (and self-identifying as philosophers) professors that embarked upon an “ameliorative project” to (re-)define womanhood based on social norms, attitudes, roles, oppressions, expectations, etc. And they all came short, because it turns out their proposed definitions all end up unintentionally excluding someone that clearly shouldn’t (e.g. severely mentally disabled women, the queen of england, etc); at least until now. Because they tried to define womanhood entirely in terms of “add ons” completely discarding the “female” part (which is actually the only thing in common in the group)
“Interesting how these arguments mostly revolve around the term ‘woman’ rather than ‘man.'”
I think that’s because a woman dressed in a pendelton shirt and carrying a spit cup can’t really do anything that interests or discomfits me. I, on the other hand, if I put on my best Sunday frock, could pose several different kinds of risk to women in a change room.
Bottom line is that a woman dressed like a man can’t threaten me, whereas the converse is not true.
Good point!
Much like athletic competition.
Dr Opoderbeck knows exactly which sex he needs to breed with to produce offspring. He also knows that he cannot possibly become pregnant and he cannot make another man pregnant. He also knows exactly which sex(es) he is attracted to.
Why do ‘academics’ pretend they don’t know what sex is? How many of them are heterosexual but have accidentally dated the same sex? Or are gay and accidentally dated the opposite sex? Zero in both cases I expect.
I don’t know anyone who has dated someone of the sex they aren’t attracted to. Even neanderthals managed to breed ok. It seems that ordinary people are far more intelligent than these ‘academics’.
If sex is a spectrum then how does one know who to breed successfully with? Does a 70% male need a 30% female to breed? How did his parents manage to find each other and breed successfully? Dr Opoderbeck maybe thinks it was just pure luck that his parents were a compatible pair for breeding.
Scholar squirrels. That was Gore Vidal’s moniker for academics of mediocre intellect and/or ambition. They have to study something, and lacking the horsepower for difficult research on important problems, they invent controversies and issues to “deconstruct”. Scratch the surface of any “studies” discipline, and you’ll mainly see nonsense and banality dressed up in jargon.
Spot on.
Opoderbeck doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but that doesn’t prevent the WSJ from publishing his letter.
Shows it’s a journal not worth paying attention to.
There are 78 reader comments, all criticizing Opderbeck. I don’t why the editors published it but I they do publish other stuff worth reading.
I suppose that some journals will publish nonsense like that in order to stir up their readers and see how the public is feeling on such matters.
Personally, I think they should give the Prof a right of reply.
They probably would if he asked.
The hash has the purpose of ushering in the noumenal realm. By magic.
He’s a propagandist for Plato.
Boo-ya for noumenal.
I’m guessing that his letter amounts to: “nothing has meaning without religion, atheists think there is no meaning, therefore they shouldn’t claim that “woman” has a definite meaning, as opposed to meaning whatever anyone thinks it means”.
I see what you mean.
🙂
I think that is exactly what he means.
I caught that religious whiff immediately. He can’t see past Jerry’s atheism.That’s what he really wanted to talk about. He didn’t say anything that made any sense.
Leftist / post-modernist / etc. praxis does not make logical sense because it is not logic, it operates through paralogy – in the logic sense, not genetic sense. This is intentional. It drives the praxis.
It is, however, ritually coherent – sublating a false center (e.g. material males/female categories) by summoning a collective consciousness of scattered identities at the margins.
Hopefully this saves lots of sweating hidden details if you can tell the game from a mile away. Good writing never hides truth / details, it makes them plain.
Here’s an unconfirmed quote I found recently illustrative of the point of praxis :
“If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history.”
-Hannah Arendt
(I need to find the source still – PS there’s a fake Arendt quote like this Out There).
Also – might check user Yuri Bezmenov’s Ghost in eXtwitter, as this user frequently has such – IMHO – perceptive insights.
So someone is a woman, instead of a man. Ok, we all seem to agree there is a difference, otherwise what is the justification for the “instead of”?
The difference for some of us is that a man produces one type of gamete and a woman produces a completely different type of gamete. Such that there are two completely different ways for a human to solve the task of getting copies of 50% of their DNA into a descendant.
If you don’t like this difference, then what is the difference then between a man an a woman? Just a feeling?
A woman is someone who identifies as a woman. That means: to identify as a woman is to identify as someone who identifies as a woman. In other words: a woman is someone who identifies as someone who identifies as someone who identifies as a woman, and etc. It’s turtles all the way down.
But how do these turtles identify? That, surely, is the question. But don’t call them Shirley.
As noted – a good example of someone who doesn’t understand the position they are critiquing, and also likely – has never understood or bothered to understand, any philosophy that counters his own.
It’s hard for people to get out of either-or thinking, because they experience the emotional need to be right over the need to find a shared space. There must be a space in which we accept that we are biological males or females, that it would be harmful for men to inhabit certain woman’s spaces and sports, that some ifentifiers have real gender dysphoria while others simply wish to gender-bend for emotional reasons, and that we use a shared new word for an identification that doesn’t deny biological sex. It is simply that few people wish to share that space.
Somewhere along the way, the word “identity” has become confused and ambiguous. Depending on context, when we speak of a person’s identity we might mean 1. The person’s actual objective state of being, but in a different context the word refers to 2. the person’s psychological self-understanding and perception of their state of being. Why do so many people fail to get this simple distinction? Then from that simple confusion people get the idea that “people know who they are” and “their identity must be respected and not questioned”.
Really? Nobody on the left felt that way about Rachel Dolezal’s self-identification as black. Nobody feels that way about Donald Trump’s self-identification as a stable genius. I wish people more fully agreed with my self-identification as handsome and brilliant, but I don’t fault people for “trying to erase my existence” if they only partially agree or, perhaps, completely disagree.
This, I think, is very much a feature of modernity, the idea that an “identity” is something we construct and cultivate rather than something we simply have. I can no more “identity”, in the sense of going through a psychological process, as male than I can identify as tall, or dark-haired, or somewhat nearsighted, or anything else that I simply objectively am.
As the old joke goes, “Sex is great! Everyone should have one.” As for the gendered lifestyle you choose to cultivate, do whatever you want. But don’t confuse the two.
Nicely put, Michael.
I wonder whether the ability to create an online presence and to create a personal ‘avatar’ or emoji for that identity plays into this. I can admit that I really enjoy video calls with my sister using filters that adjust our features to look more like Sophia Loren or Audrey Hepburn. No, make that Gina Lollobrigida! But do some people become so much more comfortable hiding from reality that something goes awry and they genuinely lose the ability to front up in reality?
An interesting point. I wonder if this has been put to any psychological testing.
Dolezal is one of the major flaws in gender ideology. Trans activists insist that you can identify as another sex, but not as another race. Why not?
People can actually be mixed race, but they can’t be mixed sex. If the former claim is racist, then the latter is sexist.
How much of this nonsense derives from post-modernism? It’s as though they needed something to do but couldn’t come up with anything, so they thought, “Let’s say that nothing is real and everything is a social construct and it’s about nothing other than powerful people crapping on those without power and believing that verifiable facts exist makes you an enemy to that which is good. Now, let’s establish some journals and get to work pumping this stuff out.”
And 30-40 years ago, we dismissed this stuff as simply an affectation of a few
poseurs in obscure corners of academia. Who knew that they would one day take
over so much? How, exactly, did that come about?
Yup, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay got it right in their book Cynical Theories.
It’s too bad that we have arrived here, dug into these seemingly intractable fortresses on this issue. I have wondered how it might have played out differently if the activists were better biologists.
Imagine a parallel universe, much like this one. Like us, their debate-‘o-sphere was pretty much settled down over earlier issues like minority rights, women’s rights, and gay rights, and like us there was arising awareness of people who identified as trans. In fact, like in our universe, trans-identified people were probably always around, but were usually closeted since there were real risks for ostracism and physical danger. But here they are, and they are starting to speak up about it being their turn for greater visibility and acceptance. How could all of that have played out differently?
Rather than saying that a trans man literally is a woman, with all the attendant gas-lighting over the biology of sex and outrageous demands that bio-women stfu, suppose ahead-of-the-curve activists campaigned around just wanting us to use preferred language, out of kindness, and that is ALL? The talking point could have been that “sure, we agree that she (a trans woman) is not literally female, or literally a woman in that sense, and that sex evolved to be essentially binary. But like a gay persons’ brain tells them that they are same sex attracted, even though their evolved anatomy makes that, er, an awkward fit, the brain of this biological male tells her that she is a woman. So let’s’ call her that, with preferred pronouns, out of kindness and recognition of this very tough situation, shall we? And let’s make sure that basic rights like where she lives, works, and so on are protected like anyone else. That is all we are asking, and nothing more”.
In this parallel universe, there would be no demands to let trans women compete with bio-women in sports, or to let (claimed) trans women be put into a female prisons, and so on, since people over there recognized the obvious facts that those things are both unfair and dangerous to the hard-won rights of females.
In this parallel universe, this debate would not even be happening.
My favorite comment so far.
+1
I am not sure what exactly what you mean by this comment. Do you really believe that a trans woman should just be called a woman with preferred pronouns etc in a kinder world?
This seems to be a very subtle erasure of the class of being a woman.
How can you tell the difference from the brain of a man telling him he is a woman from the brain of a male predator pretending to be a woman?
As usual women will pay the price and this should be unacceptable to anyone who has an ounce of kindness.
Of course to demonstrate the insanity these trans activists go to they are currently attacking a charity that supports bunnies. Yup bunnies!!
https://x.com/Jebadoo2/status/1929485970174279996
https://x.com/carrotcottagerr/status/1929864634430828988
For an excellent interview on how trans rights conflict with women’s safety and dignity please watch the excellent Helen Joyce below.
https://x.com/HJoyceGender/status/1929651785666560372
Thank you, Kelcey.
How about we say that if for whatever reason a man wants to present himself in typical women’s attire, or even go so far as to have medical or surgical interventions to more closely resemble a woman, other men should be willing to accommodate him in male-only spaces such as sports competitions, prisons, etc. without intimidation.
The acceptance of trans-identified men is a men’s problem for men to resolve.
The problem is that that is not what trans-identified men want.
The difficulty is that your solution won’t be enough for many of the trans-identifying men, who want the validation of being seen as “real” women and seek that by being allowed into women’s single-sex spaces and sports etc. Once you’ve called him “she” he has already got his size 12 shoe halfway into the female changing room door.
Also, some people – especially, say autistic people – really struggle to use opposite sex pronouns and why should anyone have the extra cognitive burden of doing so? Not only are pronouns a slippery slope, they are also Rohypnol: https://fairplayforwomen.com/pronouns/
Isn’t it useful to have a noun that would describe the female of a particular species, like doe, sow, hen, mare, etc. We have one for homo sapiens, it turns out: woman.
What Opderbeck seems to be saying is that biological sex is nothing more than a social construct
Regardless of what might have happened in a parallel universe, what happened in this one was that trans-identified men wanted access to women’s spaces first, (to fully actualize themselves), and then created the imaginary offence of misgendering to thwart efforts by women to keep them out. “A transwoman is a woman and she gets access to all spaces that all women do. Don’t call me a man, you unkind bigot!” The expectation of the “kindness” of submitting to pronoun and other language demands (like ‘woman’) was backed up with enforcement tools to cause people who weren’t “kind” to suffer for it.
Pronoun compliance is the key that unlocks women’s spaces. A person arguing to keep a man out of a women’s competition or prison gets accused of misgendering — ‘unkindness’ — when he refers to the male interloper as ‘he’ or a ‘man.’ The language actually causes confusion about what we are really talking about: Why would you keep a ‘woman’ out of a women’s sporting event or send ‘her’ to a men’s prison? Is he a man or is he not? Calling him ‘she’ out of kindness or out of fear of cancelation tells us you’re not sure yourself.
You can imagine anything in a parallel universe, Mark, such as that trans people there don’t want access to women’s spaces. But I think you have to posit how a biologist-man in that parallel universe who innocently and sincerely believes he’s a woman (while knowing he really isn’t) would benefit just from being called ‘she’ and ‘a woman’ and would, by virtue of his biological knowledge, want nothing else but that kindness. I just don’t believe that such a man will, in any credible story arc, reward our kindness in hiring ‘her’ by submitting to being told, oh, by the way, just so we’re clear, you know you need to use the men’s bathroom and stay out of the women’s, right? I can see the pout forming as he fumes about the unkindness of being misgendered. So management will have to tell the female employees in the parallel universe, just like in this one, to suck it up, or the company will face a complaint of civil rights violations, a system of state-enforced kindness at work. Some women will quit. And that’s why we won’t hire “out and proud” trans people: they make demands on us that homosexuals don’t.
(And no I’m not renovating the plumbing in my workplace just to indulge a single disturbed employee. The reason is that all the “inclusive” solutions result in many fewer urinals, or none at all, which means the bathrooms can accommodate fewer people of both sexes per hour per unit of floor space.)
Perfect response, Leslie.
Imagine the insanity if it becomes a crime to misgender.
This means a legal protected class around GENDER, not objective reality, bringing the coercion power of the state down on the guy who stated the facts and used the correct nomenclature.
An army of Rationals devote their lives to the factual taxonomy of identification. The father of reason and therefore science and it’s taxonomy is Aristotle.
Aristotle famously articulated the Law of Non-Contradiction, which states that “It is impossible that the same thing should and should not belong to the same thing at the same time and in the same respect”. This principle essentially means a thing cannot both be and not be itself at the same time and in the same way.”
Non-contradiction:
My explanation
Seton Hall is a Catholic University. I think what the author is indirectly saying is that he is anti-abortion and that an embryo is not a random clump of cells. This reminds me of other tirades showing up in letters to the editor where this topic seems to crash into the discussion with no warning.
Science has nothing to do with his letter.
He is stigmatizing Jerry Coyne as an atheist who has a postmodern view that there is no objective truth (that is, his Catholic faith). Since we know this isn’t true (that PCC has approached this question objectively and scientifically, and explained it so well I think it is likely to become the standard) the letter is confusing.
It is also confusing because on this ONE limited point PCC agrees with many conservatives, albeit with a solid scientific explanation why “common sense” is right.
It seems to me like he hasn’t understood the article and regardless of what PCC says he would disagree with it because of the underlying point that an embryo is not a clump of cells. I know this doesn’t really make sense, and I could very well be mistaken in my interpretation.
Many Catholics use “objective” as a synonym for “authoritative.” To them, “If God exists, He is objective” means “If God exists, He is the supreme authority.” This use of “objective” is bogus. The letter writer’s claim that Jerry, Richard Dawkins, and Steven Pinker deny “objective reality” is a whine that they don’t bow to his religion.
I recently had a “Malibu Moment” by having a conversation with Caitlyn Jenner at the Trancas Starbucks. My first question was what she thought about trans-women in women’s sports, and she is adamantly against it. She pointed out that she is still 6’2″ and can drive a golf ball nearly 300 yards, and that any male who transitioned post-puberty has obvious physical advantage. She added that she thought that trans-women in women’s sports was ruining the sport, and the women should continue to protest, boycott and forfeit.
THAT was the best argument against your case that the WSJ found fit to print?
They have scraped the bottom of the barrel so hard they have broken through to the sludge on the other side.
I thought Opderbeck’s comment was fascinating — it seems to do several backflips.
First, it starts out with the usual religious plaint that atheists can’t believe in anything because their reductive materialism leaves out meaning (and, apparently, levels of description.) When brought up in the context of the gender debate, this is usually followed by the explanation that trans ideology is the fault of atheism. Even though a woman is an adult female, atheists think “woman” can mean anything at all because, unlike the religious, they do not have a metaphysical grounding for reality and/or God’s assurance that male and female, He created them. The saps.
So at first it looks like Opderbeck’s a religious conservative scolding Jerry for not agreeing with fellow atheists and believing something stupid.
But wait — there’s more! Reading on, it now looks like the stupid definition is supposed to be the wise one — the one with depth and nuance and the ability to transcend “pinched” and narrow mere biology for that Certain Special Something whereby an individual knows they’re a woman (and no, nobody is going to tell what that is, least of all Opderbeck.)
So Opderbeck now looks like a religious liberal who agrees with the atheists at the Freedom From Religion Foundation — who apparently got something right despite their sad lack of metaphysics. Jerry’s biology-based definition of “woman” makes him a a fundamentalist atheist. That’s always the worst kind of atheist, even according to actual Fundamentalists, let alone enlightened theologians.
Of course, Opderbeck went to Fuller Seminary, which is Evangelical, and now apparently hangs Catholic, so his level of enlightenment and what he truly means might both be anyone’s guess.
Opderbeck is saying “Transwomen ARE women” and that men are entitled to everything women have – including the very word for their sex class – just by declaring their own “womanhood”. Not very original.
At the same time, women aren’t allowed to retain anything that those men can’t fake – so it’s transphobic to say “mother” or “pregnant” or “breastfeeding”.
Trans rights activism is the men’s rights movement in drag and it’s astonishing that so few people see it for what it is.
🎯
Haha brilliant.
I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest we almost 100% agree that Trans rights should be fostered and the community protected, and we all acknowledge and abhor this and any forms of discrimination. However, applying the cleaver of “reductio ad absurdum” we can see that simply because an individual identifies as a – let’s say Head of DOD or capable of running the FBI or as a very smart man or able to make good decisions as the Secretary of HHS or identifies as a Patriot or Christian or peace loving Muslim or a reputable news organization etc, etc, etc does not make it so. You still have to have the receipts. There is still a burden of proof that must be met. I love and support my friends and family in the Trans community, while knowing that this issue is divisive and wrong headed, led in part to the red wave that is threatening Democratic and Enlightenment Values and will lead to more discrimination and a reduction of their rights. They are who they are and they are beautiful and perfect. I just wish that could be enough.
Not 100%. I certainly don’t agree that Trans rights should be fostered, nor should the community be protected, not until I know what the claim means.
What rights do trans people have, qua trans, that they are in danger of losing?
What rights do trans people not have, qua trans, that they should get bestowed upon them?
Should misgendering be a criminal offence? (The right to have the police arrest someone for doing it.) Should it be a civil tort like libel? (The right to sue someone for doing it.) Yet truth is an absolute defence in libel cases. How about “harassment”? Yet it seems illiberal to allow suit for harassment when someone is stating truth without menacing or persistent stalking or the usual elements of harassment. Should yelling “Tranny!” out a car window at a man dressed in drag be an offence?
An example of misgendering occurs when the manager of a premises tells a man to use the men’s washroom and not bother the women in theirs. Should it be illegal for the manager to do that? Should it be illegal for the women to complain about a man in their washroom? (It is, in Canada, you know.)
I will go out on a limb and say that I don’t think there are any rights that trans people have or should have, qua trans, any more than there are rights that creationists have or should have, qua belief in creationism. I don’t think there is any reason to “protect” the community of trans people any more than there is a reason to protect the community of creationists. Roving gangs of biologists and cosmologists shouldn’t go around beating up creationists, no. So I’ll grant the same to trans people. Habeas corpus is a good one, too. But laws prohibiting discrimination against creationists in hiring biology teachers….hmmm, No.
I certainly don’t think that trans rights should be fostered. Good God! The essence of trans rights is that women have to give up their rights to men.
But if you are talking about receipts, let’s see the trans community produce some. Feelz don’t count, as you diligently point out.
Wake me up when someone is proposing to send the trans people off to concentration camps and do medical experiments on them, qua trans.
Denial of housing, employment, protections from violence, discrimination. Basic rights available and enjoyed by all.
Misgendering? No. That’s pretty much covered under 1st amendment.
Bathroom Bills? – Single occupant facilities seems a reasonable solution in many cases. Costly yes, but much better use of funds vs. a military parade.
Access to sporting competition? We separate participants by age, weight, experience, gender etc to ensure fairness in almost every instance. Think handicaps in bowling leagues or golf.
Our current administration is actively denying rights such as due process and suggesting sending citizens to foreign prisons. It shouldn’t be too hard to imagine that slippery slope.
It cannot be denied that Trans identified individuals are discriminated in many areas of life. Yeah that’s what protection refers to.
Special protections or rights that then deny someone else their rights? Not so much.
https://reports.hrc.org/an-epidemic-of-violence-2024
https://www.tc.columbia.edu/articles/2024/april/data-reveals-new-insights-on-transgender-workplace-experiences/
https://apnews.com/article/transgender-hud-fair-housing-trump-lgbtq-turner-003a354b933592303a4eea350ebbc804
https://www.aclu.org/news/lgbtq-rights/trans-students-should-be-treated-with-dignity-not-outed-by-their-schools
Fostering rights and supporting protections. I try to keep it simple.
Housing, employment, freedom from violence.
As far as receipts, research into women’s and minorities health issues often is underfunded or ignored. I’ll go out on a limb and assume research into health issues that particularly affect the trans communities, or the LGBTQ+ community in general, is similarly underfunded or ignored. Not likely to get better in the next couple years. I think just because the trans community ( or any minority community) is not in a position to support the research financially or practically doesn’t mean it should not be performed, so requesting receipts from a community that may not have the access to produce them seems unfair. Again I point to history of ignoring health issues affecting females or African Americans as evidence that there is discrimination in health care.
So yeah, fostered and protected work for me. Advanced beyond what we all enjoy? No.
I think the “roving gangs” example is a good one, but fails to consider the systemic, state fostered, socially accepted discrimination of the LQBTQ+ community that is historically prevalent. I point to states which still have laws that have religious exclusions when running for office despite constitutional protections.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/nov/08/facebook-posts/7-states-ban-atheists-public-office-supreme-court-/#:~:text=It's%20pretty%20rare%20to%20find,is%20not%20as%20clear%20cut.
Yeah, I can imagine the concentration camps and medical experiments down a very slippery slope.
Sorry if there are formatting issues. I’m not sure how that gets fully corrected.
This statement
‘ research into women’s and minorities health issues often is underfunded or ignored. I’ll go out on a limb and assume research into health issues that particularly affect the trans communities, or the LGBTQ+ community in general, is similarly underfunded or ignored. ’
Is a typical trans tactic of co opting often unwilling groups to falsely support a trans wish.
Think of the now patently desired divorce from the LGB from the rest of the alphabet. They hijacked onto their causes and like any decent parasite took over the host.
Women have said No.
I find that point of view objectionable and indefensible.
The divorce you site is unfounded and is bound to your feelz.
The examples I cited, with sources, are pretty straight forward equivelancies and have a place in civil discourse and I admit we no longer have grounds for reasonable discussion.
Exactly. I get tired of the LGB being yoked to TQ+ all the time. Being attracted to members of the same sex has nothing to do with believing you’re born in the wrong body.
“I’ll go out on a limb and assume research into health issues that particularly affect the trans communities, or the LGBTQ+ community in general, is similarly underfunded or ignored”
You’re almost certainly wrong. I don’t know how much money is funneled into trans “medicine” in particular, but the trans movement is very well funded indeed. Billionaire Jennifer (né James) Pritzker is just one of the movement’s angels. George Soros’s Open Society Foundation is another.
What you won’t find much of, in the the U.S. at least, is research into gender dysphoria that doesn’t assume that “gender identity” is an innate characteristic that must be affirmed. And you won’t find it because believers in genderism (the trans movement) do everything they can to suppress it. And they can do a lot.* This is NOT a “marginalized community.”
*See: Lisa Littman
🎯
Yup claiming marginalized vulnerable and oppressed status does not make the claim true. I don’t know of any recently identified group that has so quickly garnered so much corporate backing and official endorsement without any grassroots support or real evidence.
The wheels are starting to fall of the bus as the support is vanishing as the absurd claims are rippling through society.
Regarding Should yelling “Tranny!” out a car window at a man dressed in drag be an offence?
Language evolves. My Grandfather using the term coloreds or negro can be assigned to his being of a different age, while knowing he was generous and accepting of all he came in contact with. If I use the terms I’m ignorant or insensitive to current cultural norms.
There are terms that are considered as violent and as harassment and there is context and tone that could be interpreted as such.
I could overlook persons not being aware of the current acceptable language and hope that where I have failed to use acceptable terms that it’s understood that I meant no offense.
Just as Global Warming gave way to Climate Change and the tremendous misunderstanding that humans didn’t evolve from apes, but belong to a particularly successful group that branched off from apes and share a common ancestor. Language matters. Intent matters.
Some groups consider Happy Holidays as an assault on their religious liberties since, in some cases, it replaces Merry Christmas. Talk about victimhood.
Part of being “woke”, to me, means seeing the equivalencies in these examples.
And I would hope it’s understood that there is a history of “roving gangs” committing violent crimes against almost every minority, and especially when the minority has very obvious identifiable differences.
You’re kind of all over the map, there, Stephen. An unfocused diatribe about religious customs and the policies of the current Administration, which are all irrelevant to trans rights except one executive order aimed at protecting children from mutilation and another from the Commander-in-Chief excluding trans people from military service, neither of which you mentioned. A Gish Gallop. Most of what you call for sounds like more government funding for trans issues and, secondarily, more effort to correct what you feel is disparate enforcement of existing laws that apply to everyone. But those aren’t trans “rights” as rights are understood. Trans people aren’t being denied habeas corpus because they’re trans. If one gets beaten up he can go to the police like anyone else. (The women’s shelter won’t let him in, though.)
You go a long way out on a limb about what you think is the state of research into trans health issues and other unrelated minority activism. I can reassure you there has been an avalanche. The journals are full of activist research.
I’ve said before that employers should be free to not hire people who seem toxic, weird, and demanding, likely difficult to get rid of, and who aren’t extraordinarily talented to make up for it. If that common sense lands with disparate impact on trans people, well, too bad. No one has a right to a job. You didn’t rebut that argument.
I’m going to pick one bone, though. You seem ambivalent about men who say they are women competing against women. You allow with some waffling that we segregate on the basis of weight, experience, age, “gender” — we don’t segregate by “gender”, in fact — … but you never mention the obvious and presently contentious category of sex. Why is that? Segregate by self-claimed gender but not by sex? That would mean “transwomen” have a trans-based anti-discrimination right to play against women, No? For me that undermines everything else you say about employment rights, violence, etc. Athletic advantage enjoyed by men over women is about the most straightforward and best-studied physical phenomenon we have. To evade endorsing that explicitly, up front and unambiguously, and make it sound instead like a golf handicap, really does exclude you from any debate I’m interested in having.
Was chatting today with a PhD in Gender Studies. I told him I like the definition offered by Emma Hilton, biologist:
“female: a person whose reproductive role (actual, potential, historical, broken) is in the production of ova.”
He kept getting stuck on the fact that the definition isn’t true in all cases despite me repeatedly pointing out how it is.
girls: potential
post menopause: historical
DSDs: broken
just could not accept that the definition covers all bases simply because they are trans.
It’s sad to see that mental health issues become so politicized, I don’t think this will help anyone. David Opderbeck thinks that values should be included in our science for the greater good without giving the facts. What we observe is that good science has no values.
What we believe ultimately depends on which authority we accept, in this case science or our ego. For most people their ego is too big to accept that science does a better job on discovering the facts about reality then their introspective capabilities. Every argument David Opderbeck makes is subjective and not in accord with what science carefully observes.
Whether in our passports a M or W is printed should be printed is a political question, not a scientific one.