Let’s talk about a group of people: columnists and opinion writers. They’re a small group but they get a lot of attention. What they say and do doesn’t necessarily impact me directly, but sometimes it challenges what I believe, offends me, or even makes me upset. I feel their beliefs and ideas have become the orthodoxy that everyone just goes along with. It’s not that I’m anti-columnist or anti-opinion writer. I just think it’s reasonable to scrutinise their claims. I’ll probably face blowback for even just saying I don’t entirely agree with their views.
If this feels unfair to single out a group like this in a published article in Crikey, imagine how it feels if you replace “columnists and opinion writers” with “trans people”. Voila! I just gave you the outline of an article that appears in Australian media every week or so.
Consider the difference between the two groups. Regular columnists and opinion writers are by definition cultural elites. They have access to enormous audiences that others don’t, which they can use to shape the way the public thinks and feels. Australia’s media are whiter than the general public. In short, they’re a powerful group.
Trans people suicide and self-harm at elevated rates. They’re more likely to be subject to violence and live in poverty. They’re generally excluded from the media — I can think of a single trans journalist with a full-time job at a mainstream Australian news publication. I can’t think of one regular trans columnist. It’s not really a fair fight between the two groups.
Back to columnists and opinion writers. I feel for them. Like scavengers surveying the savannah, their livelihood depends on their ability to spot things that others don’t. They’re constantly on the lookout for an interesting or controversial take on something. And what is hotter right now than “the trans issue”? And shouldn’t they be able to have their say on it?
Yes, they should. I truly believe the media should be able to write about anything that’s interesting and newsworthy. We get nowhere by completely censoring debate. The issue is that historically the media has systematically excluded the voices of marginalised groups while we have the same confected discussions over and over again, often badly. Since 2019, there have been 12 adjudications about Australian media being inaccurate, offensive or harmful about trans people.
Even as we, the media, have come to accept our issues with diversity, we promise to do better — yet then we continue to make the same mistakes. For example, I would bet my house that there are more articles written or interview segments in the last year complaining about trans people — which are more or less the same stuff over and over again — than there have been written by or featuring trans people about any topic.
You want something newsworthy and interesting? Imagine if we used this rare and privileged platform to go and speak to five trans people about what it’s like when both candidates for prime minister of Australia denied that trans women are women in a televised leadership debate. No one wrote that article (including me).
But a lot of people have written about how using genderless pronouns or terminology denies women’s existence. It’s boring to publish that again. In fact, writing that using “birthing person” rather than “woman” is hurting the feminist movement both misdiagnoses the problem and punches down. Who’s restricting reproductive rights access in America? It’s not trans people. In fact, the same people who fought to overturn abortion access are the same ones who are also rolling back access to trans health care. Plus, trans people want access to abortion too. If you knowingly choose to exclude trans people by incorrectly saying that only women access abortion — at best a falsehood — you’re actually cutting out your allies in the fight for the right to choose against a common foe.
Why do I care about this? I’m a white, straight, cis male in a comfy media job who taps out words about the internet a couple of times a week. Writing about this stuff isn’t really my beat (although the crossover between internet radicalisation, politics and transphobia has become troublingly common). I’m not an LGBTQIA+ activist. I’m not signed up to whichever secret mailing list distributes the gay and trans agenda.
The reason is that I got into journalism because I wanted to share information with audiences that helps them to live good lives. This often involves elevating the voices of those who don’t already have a platform so audiences can understand their plight.
I am writing this because it’s not a fair fight. On one hand, we’ve got an influential and privileged group of people whose world view is being challenged. On the other hand, we’ve got a group who are killing themselves in large numbers because of the stigma they face for trying to live life as they choose. As I wrote this article, the Labor government rolled back a change on a Medicare form that used “birthing parent” rather than “mother”, a change that literally erases the existence of trans men who give birth.
Journalism should be balanced, but that doesn’t mean we need to present both sides as equal. When we present topics as if it’s an even trade-off between someone’s discomfort with someone’s fight to merely exist, we’re doing a disservice to trans people, columnists and opinion writers, and our audience.
I fully support the right of trans people to live without discrimination, harassment etc. But trying to redefine words such as “woman” to refer to gender without any real proposal for a new word to refer to people who have female reproductive biology, let alone agreement on it all, means that the massive assault on the rights of people who have female reproductive biology has no single word to refer to the group losing their reproductive rights. Because abortion relates to sex not gender. Leslie Cannold got it exactly right yesterday. Abortion rights activists are hamstrung by an imposed language ban while those seeking to control female reproduction have no such handicaps. Trans rights are important, but should not come at the cost of having language with which to fight for the rights of the majority of women.
The same conservative religious people who are trying to ban trans people are now unsurprisingly coming after abortion rights. They won’t stop there either. Gay rights. Equal marriage. It’s all in their sights. They are your enemy.
Inclusive language has nothing to do with the religious war against reproductive rights. Many women can’t give birth. Most menopausal women for a start. They will fight for reproductive rights. Trans women also will fight for reproductive rights. This war has nothing to do with the reproductive capacity and associated language with women, even trans women. It has everything to to with patriarchal religiousity.
It ain’t us that’s the the problem and if you think it is, you’ll lose, because you’re fighting the wrong people.
The enemy are the conservative christians in the American GOP. The ones who maintain Trump won the last election. Who are rabidly pro gun but anti everyone not them. They are not sane.
I don’t know how you fight the insanity that is overtaking the USA at the monent. I sure as hell know that fighting inclusive language isnfighting the wrong target.
1. Because a group of people object to two things, it doesn’t mean those things are morally equivalent.
2. It’s not giving birth that makes someone a woman, it’s having the organs and chromosomes to have the capacity to.
So, what about someone who is intersex? Are you saying that they don’t exist?
No.
No, but you are saying that an intersex woman is not nescisarily a woman.
What’s wrong with your own term, “intersex woman”?
Do you know what intersex is?
This really gets to the heart of the matter. Solidarity requires effective collective language to be successful.
Jargon & doublethink are the first signs of schism – intended to exclude.
I’m all for journalists covering under-explored topics but to be honest I’m not sure we’re really all that short of editorials written by men explaining to women what the right way to do feminism is.
Yes.
The problem is not “trans people” . The problem is the philosophy of gender
Gender identities don’t exist. They’re not real. As long as you keep equating trans people’s ‘right to exist’ with the acceptance of a philosophy that says that humans are categorised by “genders” rather than sex, we’re going to keep having this problem.
Genders are a social construct.
Sex is real.
You cannot organise a society by legislating “gender”
There are many things that ‘don’t exist’ which are still very important.
These are all social constructs. Every one of them. Just like gender.
None of your listed ‘social constructs’ are artificial, created solely by humans. Every single one of them have equivalents in non-human species. Private property, for example, shown by the aggressive reaction to encroachment into the personal space of territorial species. Do you really think that non-human species don’t experience love, and don’t feel remorse at the death of a partner? Or that other species don’t have some form of language to communicate information? Or laws determining interactions between individuals? Or some way accounting for favours to be repaid later? Or rights of individuals in social species?
Wayne you’ll be delighted to hear that there are trans animals, then. https://www.vice.com/en/article/8x8bez/yes-there-are-trans-animals
Very much the exception rather than the rule. Nevertheless hardly surprising that some animals have the reproductive organs of both sexes. Some animals are born with 2 heads, some with extra toes or even limbs. Apart from a very small number of animals with useful “bisexual” organs, the majority are genetic mistakes.
You’ve actually just proved my point – all the examples you give are of social behaviours among some animals (including human animals). Not all animals have them.
But there are salient differences as well. Territoriality is not the same as private property. Many societies do not practice private property (the kind enforced by laws, deeds and police) but rather some forms of community ownership, which is a very different thing. What’s the difference? It’s socially defined.
Similarly with money – the examples you give are all of social relations. Or language, the meaning of which is all socially defined. Don’t believe me? Go to a country where few people speak English, and you don’t speak the local tongue.
Love is not attraction (yes, that has a biological reality). Love is also not social affinity or fondness (perfect examples of socially defined constructs). Love in its modern, Western concept – romantic love – has no reality apart from a social definition, which can be dated back to the courtly love ballads of the early French troubadours, and possibly back to Persian verse novels.
you forgot “race”
You don’t think race exists?
Race is 100%, absolutely, guaranteed a social construct. As is tribe, clan, nation, etc.
Skin pigmentation is real, but that’s quite separate from ‘race’ as it has been defined variously over the last few hundred years. ‘Race’ studies were obsessed with phrenology, skull dimensions, weird pseudoscience and sheer bunkum.
Absolute denial of reality in the name of ideology. Because acknowledging difference may possibly lead to claims of superiority/inferiority in various respects, you deny the reality that race exists and racial differences exist. Do Africans not have black skin? Do Asians not have less bodily hair than Caucasians. Deny reality if you like, but you’re the one that needs help, not me.
Only if Blueys are a race – all those freckles!
Yeah but not sex – sex is real
Do you realise that some people are born intersex? They aren’t one or the other and the doctor and parents make the decision to operate and turn the baby into one or the other sex.
THAT is real. Sex can be a grey area. What if the doctor chose the wrong sex at birth? Do you think the parents of these children would admit what they chose to do?
Things aren’t so binary as you assume.
Intersex frequency less than 1%.
Hi Emma! Thanks for taking the time to engage. I’m not sure I agree with you that you can’t organise a society around something that doesn’t “exist” (as in, something that’s outside of a social construct). A simple example is that we decided that 18 year old is the cut off for being a child. That’s totally socially determined, but something that we legislate. There’s a plethora of other examples of things aren’t ‘real’ but are enshrined in law (see Gwyntaglaw beloe). Hope this helps!
Well, I appreciate the opportunity to actually have a civilised discussion as opposed to, say, being banned forever as would happen on Twitter. But the thing about social constructs is they’re fine as long as they’re not trying to replace an embodied reality. Sex is an embodied (binary) reality. You cannot have man/woman meaning male gender feelings/female gender feelings at the same time as it means male sex/female sex. Words can only mean one thing at a time. Sex is the embodied reality and gender is the social construct so gender must give way.
Age is also an embodied reality but not a binary one – that’s why we can define the cutoff of adulthood as 14 or 18 or 21 as we see fit – but your age isn’t just the age you “feel like” you are. You can’t rock up to Centrelink and say ‘hey, I feel like I’m 70 now give me an old age pension’
If the embodied reality of sex were still permitted to do the stuff that the embodied reality of sex has always done – defined the categories man/woman, been enshrined in law as a known categorisation of two types of human – then everything would be fine. But it’s not.
This site is notorious for banning people, topics & opinions – eg look at the last two articles on this subject last month which had all comments cleansed and further discussion shut down.
Nothing to touch Twitter though. Or FB. Low bar I know. It’s hard to get as ruthlessly manipulative as big social media.
Free speech is sooo last century.
I wonder how long before all the comments here will be disappeared into the memory hole?
Words frequently mean multiple things at the same time.
Only to people with limited vocabulary.
Were that true, communication would be impossible – as with script, A cannot sometimes mean Z or Q depending on someone’s opinion.
Many aspects of reality (look it up!) are not subjective.
How do you feel about gravity – do you sometimes float off into the stratosphere?
If so, NASA would be interested.
Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? It’s both, because one is a biological definition and one is a culinary definition.
I’m sorry if you feel like two categories should always 100% correlate despite evidence to the contrary but the science is against you.
Well I’ll join in here and ask exactly what a “social construct” is and how it possibly applies to whether a person is a man or a woman. It’s not society that says that men have certain physical characteristics (chromosomes, reproductive organs, skeletal structure, etc.) and women have others. They are just biological facts.
And what difference does it make to a person’s sex, or even gender, if a person who happens to be male likes dolls and dressing in women’s clothes? How does that make the man have the “gender” of a woman? He’s still a man and the fact that he does or likes certain things that are more commonly liked by women makes absolutely no difference to that fact.
Society is what decides that some particular range of physical appearance is masculine, and some other range of physical appearance is feminine. Those ranges aren’t biologically determined – there’s an enormous overlap between even stereotypical “male” and “female” appearance, let alone the actual real world range of appearances (otherwise the word “androgynous” wouldn’t exist, and no one would ever talk about “butch” women or “girly” men).
Biology obviously impacts the way that individuals develop, and individual genetic makeup obviously drives that, but even there it’s not a simple binary. The actual realities of human biology are complex, and the more scientists dig into it with increasingly sophisticated tools the more they realise just how messy it all is. Trying to draw simple binaries really doesn’t work, even when it comes to something as apparently obvious as sex chromosomes and how they determine “biological gender”. You can probably get away with saying things like “the majority of people who appear biologically male have XY chromosomes, and the majority of people who appear biologically female have XX chromosomes”, but as we do broader and broader population studies the number of people who /don’t/ fit cleanly in that binary just keeps increasing. To the point where in biology classes they often explicitly /don’t/ do that kind of genetic testing of students, because of what might accidentally be revealed.
As for “liking dolls and dressing in women’s clothing” . . . your understanding of gender dysphoria is beyond superficial. I know a trans girl who dresses in jeans and t-shirts, plays video games, likes maths and science, rockets and engineering, and would really like to go to Mars – none of that has any impact on the fact that being male feels /wrong/ to her. Presenting as male was uncomfortable for her, and became increasingly distressing over time; once she started presenting as female she became vastly more comfortable and happy, even though she was wearing the same clothes for the most part, playing the same games, and interested in the same things. I’m not trans and have never experienced gender dysphoria so I’m reluctant to say more about the experience – I’ll leave that to actual trans people – but it’s very clear to me that it’s something a lot deeper than just appearances or liking one or other kind of social role.
And as a final note, if someone feels discomfort and distress presenting one way to the world, but comfortable and happy presenting a different way, why on /earth/ should anyone else have anything to say about that? Why should /you/ get to insist that they can’t consider themselves a woman or a man, if that makes it possible for them to live a healthy and happy life?
The answer to your final question is simple. We can have something to say about it because it impinges on OUR reality. I don’t care how individuals want to live or “present” to the world. I truly believe in the adage “live and let live” . I truly believe that discriminating against individuals in a negative way for virtually any reason is a bad thing. But stop twisting and warping truth and reality to suit some unscientific social theory.
You are no doubt correct that gender dysphoria is “something a lot deeper than just appearances or liking one or other kind of social role.”
The discussion becomes an issue worth debate when an idea is promulgated that gender is a social construct and “sex” is presented as something outside of “simple binaries”. On the contrary, it does work because a very, very large majority of human beings identify as falling within that binary definition – in fact over 99% of a population. That number is sufficient to label that 99% plus as “normal”. By definition anything outside of that is “abnormal”.
Much of the current furore around gender and sex determination is a direct result of feminist claims and teachings over the last few decades. It does not suit feminists to regard gender – and in some cases even sex – as anything but a “social construct” because any other viewpoint weakens their entire (fabricated) argument.
I don’t agree at all the ‘much of the furore around gender and sex is a ‘direct result of feminist claims and teachings.’ The furore has been driven by a systematic and deliberate socially engineered attempt to change the way the world views sex and gender. the idea that people can self ID as a different gender is not the problem, The idea that self ID can change sex totally is. This has let a lot of problems such as males in females prisons (documented rape has occurred), males in female hospital wards (documented rape has occurred) males in female toilets (documented rape has occurred) males in rape crisis centres (trauma has occurred to women who have been raped ad do not want males in their environment as they try to deal with this.
There are people out there who experience significant dysphoria regarding both their gender presentation (yes, a social construct, but one that is a real part of people’s lives and experiences), and their actual physical bodies. In some cases changing their gender presentation can relieve that dysphoria; in other cases medical procedures to change their physical appearance is necessary to achieve that relief. These experiences are strong, persistent, and in most cases are something which dates back to quite early in childhood. These experiences are /real/, regardless of anyone’s “philosophy of gender”.
How exactly do you think you can explain these people’s experiences with “sex is real” and “gender identities don’t exist”? What do you propose as a model that would actually support these people living healthy and happy lives? How would /you/ organise society to make these people’s lives as good as your own?
That’s what any discussion about trans people should come down to – real people, real experiences, real lives. This isn’t a philosophical discussion, it’s a discussion about actual individual human beings and their needs.
And yet it should be a discussion on scientific theories and appraisals.
The truth is not intended to “support” anyone in being “healthy and happy” in anything. The truth is truth. How you use it is a separate thing entirely.
I never knew my penis is a social construct.
No, but the meaning assigned to it is.
It’s even referred to in some contexts as one’s ‘manhood’, ie the essence of what it is to be a man.
In some societies, eunuchs were defined as ‘not men’, meaning they had access to some spaces where men were forbidden.
Yet in this society and elsewhere in the west there are men demanding to access spaces where men were forbidden.
There’s no meaning assigned to it. It’s a penis, and its possessor is a man. Nothing to do with being “assigned”, whatever that means.
‘Assigned’ is one of the NewSpeak words used to confuse and obscure simple reality.
Anyone who uses terf/cis etc is trying normlise untruth, as did BigBrother “Newspeak follows most of the rules of English grammar, yet is a language characterised by a continually diminishing vocabulary; complete thoughts are reduced to simple terms of simplistic meaning,nice sounding and easily pronounceable, their purpose is to mask all ideological content from the speaker.”
Eunuchs tended to have access to those spaces, e.g., because they still had male physical aspects for defence but would not inseminate the harem.
The harem guards were usually captive warriors who had only their testes removed as adults so that they retained their physiques – it kept the women amused and stopped them becoming too restive if neglected by their owners.
Full excision pre puberty produced an entirely different body type and those who became scribes used their quills as catheters.
I see my previous comment got “moderated”, no doubt for being offensive to trans men.
But really, how can anyone take seriously someone who claims to be a trans man, and yet goes ahead and gets pregnant and gives birth? How in any possible universe can a man give birth? How can giving birth be in any way consistent with being a trans man?
Why does it bother you? So many people seem to have an issue with this stuff, but i can never work out why. In what way does it make their lives harder? Why does it threaten them?
It bothers me because it’s ridiculous and stupid.
Or is it that you just can’t get your head around it?
I can’t get my head around it because it’s a tautology.
LOL!!! If you’re bothered by eveything in this world that’s ridiculous and stupid, you must be in a permanent state of high agitation
To you
Probably because some people think that “truth” and “rational thinking” are worth arguing about. The whole discussion around transsexualism should be settled and decided by scientific discussion and not emotional needs.
Not only gender dysphoria but expressions of lesbian and gay behaviour (other than in exploratory sexual behaviour in juveniles) is (generally speaking) almost unknown in nature. Since human beings are animals, it follows that human behaviour (again generally speaking) would be expected to be similar to animals. The fact that in the areas of sex and gender it doesn’t suggests there is something in the human environment or condition that causes that divergence (from other animals). That cause is what we should be discussing – not the end result. Until the cause is known it makes no rational sense to argue for decisions one way or another on how to deal with it.
Oh wow, “lesbian and gay behaviour is almost unknown in nature” – that claim is so /Victorian/!
You want to talk about truth and science and so forth, but you’re making claims like that? It’s honestly hard to tell if you’re arguing in good faith here.
Show us the colour of your money.
Just as a matter of interest, do you think the slash marks actually add anything to your otherwise nonsensical argument?
I’d like to think most people are able to recognise the use of punctuation marks to add emphasis to plain text, but apparently this is a new concept for some people.
Not all mobile browsers display the rich text editor one sees in desktop browsers. Himi’s slashes remind me a bit of regular expressions and I wonder if they were an attempt to add emphasis (italics).
Ok, so it took less time than I thought for the transphobia to shift to homophobia. It always does, though, because the arguments are of the same genus – ‘contrary to nature!’ What is nature, then? ‘Whatever I say it is!’
And the ideas about what’s “natural” are all so old and out of date – many of them are literally Victorian, even. Which is particularly amusing (in a garbage fire kind of way) when the same people keep talking about “truth!” and “science!” and “reality!”
Because apparently all discussion about trans-related matters needs to be a discussion about whether they’re even /real/ – that has to be established before you can start talking about whether they’re /allowed/ to exist. And you can’t talk about anything else until everyone’s agreed about that point, otherwise you’re straying off the narrow path of Truth(tm).
Or, as Popeye used to say,”I yam wot I yam!” and you must agree with me or else.
Absolute b0llocks. Homosexuality is widespread across the majority of animal species and is well documented.
And i would argue is irrelevant either way. We’re people, not beasts. Our sole pupose in life is not to eat, sleep and rutt. We have social structures, morality, and individuality. Gay people are people, and equality is mandatory if we’re going to have a ‘society’. As with race and gender. I can’t believe we’re having this argument again.
Based on the downvotes i suppose yall think our sole purpose IS to eat, sleep & rutt. What fun!
It’s impossible to know how many downvotes there have been, or how many upvotes – which is slightly irritating, as it looks like there are only downvotes. I upvoted it but that was canceled out by one of the downvotes
Not in Nature. Occasional pairings are seen in extremis in zoos, laboratories etc – see Mouse Utopia Calhoun et al. and ask yourself whether that sounds familiar.
In the absence of a bull, a heiffer approaching oestrus will stand for other cows to mount her. When she comes into heat she will try to mount others who are not. When it passes normal behaviour resumes.
A spayed dog will mount her mistress’ leg even if she is post menopausal.
This is hormonal, not homosexuality.
Hey, you might want to look up the reproductive behaviour of that iconic Australian bird, the black swan. It might cause you to re-examine your assertions.
“… almost unknown in nature”, “human behaviour … expected to be similar to animals”. You want scientific discussion, so please cite peer reviewed evidence to support your assertions
I think it’s because, if someone says they are a transman people take this to mean they want to live like a man, in all the myriad ways this can be done. There is not a man on the planet who is able to give birth. It is not part of what a man is. So someone who states they are a man but then gives birth………..why?? And why, having gone down this track so they get all upset because the language of giving birth and mothering is the language of women? And we women like that language. We don’t want it to be changed. I am a mother not a birthing parent for example.
“We don’t want it to be changed”. How many of you are there between those ears?
You don’t cease to be a mother just because someone else prefers a different term, do you? Language changes constantly, and it’s been shown many times that resistance is futile
Pretty sure this happens to all new crikey members
Cam, I’m sorry, but a “trans man” who gives birth to a baby is a woman, like it or not.
Why?
Is “having given birth” the only valid definition of “woman”? Or is it “has the capacity to give birth”? Or “may have had the capacity at some point during their life”? What would you say to all the people who spent their lives considering themselves “women” who were born unable to give birth for some reason? Why would you choose /that/ particular biological event or capacity as the defining factor for such a complex social and cultural concept as “woman”?
Your logic is wrong. I didn’t say that all women give birth or have the capacity to give birth. But if a person gives birth, that person is a woman.
Okay – care to explain why?
You’re claiming that “having given birth” defines a person as a woman, while allowing for people who may not even have the capacity to give birth to be women as well – how can “having given birth” define someone as a woman if you can be a woman without even having the capacity to do so?
Are you perhaps conflating two different definitions of “woman” here – some kind of biological definition that encapsulates the capacity to give birth (as demonstrated by actually having done so), and some broader definition that isn’t tied specifically to biology? And if that’s the case, why are you tying those two different definitions together under a single, heavily loaded word like “woman”?
The biological definition, whatever it actually is, doesn’t need to be tied to that broader concept of “woman”, particularly since, as you noted yourself, not all women give birth or even have the capacity to give birth. Doesn’t it make sense to have different terms to talk about these two different ideas – humans who have the biological potential to carry a foetus, and humans who fit within some broader social and cultural understanding of “woman”? And once you’ve broken out these two ideas, why would it make sense to insist on any particular relationship between them?
So again, why? Why must every human who has ever given birth be a woman?
I’m sorry, but at this point logic has ceased to apply and I’m not going to respond.
And just by the way, you have the whole thing completely the wrong way around. It’s not a question of why a person who claims to be a man and has a vagina and a uterus and has given birth should not be recognised as a man, it’s why that woman – and she is a woman, precisely because she has a vagina and a uterus and has given birth – should be recognised as a man. On what possible basis can such a person claim to be a man? Only by completely denying and indeed ridiculing reality.
And the principle applies just as much even if the woman has gone to the extent of having the uterus removed and the vagina sewn up and some sort of fake penis surgically attached and has never given birth. It’s those things that are the artificial constructs, not the fact that she’s a woman who happens to want to look as much like a man as possible and be addressed by a male name and referred to as “he”. I’ll call her Bill if she wants, and I’ll refer to her as “him” if she wants, and I won’t confront her and tell her to stop what she’s doing; but I’ll do those things out of politeness and because she can live as she pleases. If I’m asked whether she’s a man or a woman I’ll say she’s a man because that’s what she is.
Good to see you nailing your biological essentialism colours to the mast – it makes it clear that attempting to reason with you is pointless.
The only value in responding further is to provide counterpoints to your arguments which other readers may be influenced by.
Is this your precise definition of what a woman is?
So I presume you ask every woman you meet how many children they’ve birthed and refer to them as men if the answer is no? No, because that’s silly and rude.
Let’s simplify your definition to:
So after your beloved sister gets a hysterectomy you have to start referring to him as a man and return all those “world’s best sister” mugs? No, because that’s silly and rude.
Let’s simplify further to:
Except a lot of people can pass as the opposite gender without ever getting bottom surgery so I presume you ask ask every person you meet to show you their genitals before you dare to address them by “him” or “her”? No, because that’s silly and rude.
So let’s stick to the normal human method of picking up how each person is presenting themselves and, if they’re particular androgynous, we can just ask 🙂
Robin, to whom you replied, did not claim what you seem to think he did.
Simple logic – saying all tennis balls are spheres is not the same thing as saying all spheres are tennis balls.
The claim being made was very specific and very strong – literally that /all/ humans who have given birth are women. I think it’s reasonable to examine that claim, particularly in a context where the claimant is at the same time allowing for the existence of women who aren’t even capable of giving birth – what exactly does “woman” mean in that case, and why? Clearly there’s more to womanhood than having given birth, or even having the capacity to give birth – what are those things, and is it really necessary for giving birth to be so tightly linked with them?
Tennis balls aren’t spheres, by the way, they’re at best approximately spherical. Reality tends to be messy like that – which includes language and culture, and the meanings we assign to things.
Oh tommy rot. I think we’d all agree that tennis balls are close enough to spheres for the sake of this discussion. You are being ridiculously pedantic for no genuine reason other than a sort of argument bankruptcy.
I wanted to discuss how someone was choosing to define “woman”, and why they chose to do it that way – that’s clearly not a subject which is amenable to hard logic, since it’s a) a matter of language, which is fuzzy at the best of times let alone when actually discussing the meaning of a particular word, and b) is entirely about someone else’s subjective ideas about meaning. None of that can be answered with a simple logical argument, although I did try to tease out what seemed like a logical contradiction as part of trying to understand the thinking behind the original comment.
If you can’t handle discussions like that, I recommend you don’t stick your nose into one. Because for the sake of this discussion, at least the discussion I was trying to have, the definition of both “tennis ball” and “spherical” are completely and utterly irrelevant, as was your comment.
A little thing called biology?
So, my partner of thirty years, a biological female, is not a woman because she didn’t give birth? Or are you saying that if a woman can’t have children then she’s not a woman?
You’re getting yourself tied in knots trying to defend the indefensible.
How about the act of doing so?