At Quillette, a look at the logic necessitating the internecine warfare between transgender activists and lesbians/gays: It’s Time for ‘LGB’ and ‘T’ to Go Their Separate Ways
A slice, but RTWT:
Gay rights activists simply want society to accept their different ways of living and loving—since gay men and lesbians pursue romantic interests and build families in ways that are at odds with conventional heterosexual expectations. Followers of radical gender theory, on the other hand, demand that we all reject our basic understanding of biological sex in favor of a recently conceptualized abstract notion of human identity.
…[I]n recent years, transgender activists have demanded that sex and gender be conflated, and that the very idea of innate biological differences be pushed into the background. At the most absurd extreme, there are now athletes and scholars who seriously suggest that being male offers no competitive physical advantages over being female, a proposition that even small children know to be unhinged.”
We’ll meet one such ‘scholar’ below.
I think LGB and T have already gone their separate ways. They have no choice, because they can’t both be right about the human condition.
The Other Club has written about the TERF War several times. A couple examples:
“[T]here is some tension (you might say cognitive dissonance) for that subset of those gender feminists (the so-called Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists) who want to preserve a traditional definition of the word “female” in the face of trans-sexual attack. And attack is the right word…”
And,
Of course, by “biological determinism” both sides of the TERF war mean to reject the idea that there is a biological difference between sexes. Differences between men and women are determined wholly by social conditioning.
If both sides agree with Dr. Matte that there’s no such thing as biological sex, why do they care who calls themselves a woman? Well, if your biological sex can be determined moment by moment at your whim, what’s the point of Women’s Studies? If it can’t be, what’s the point of Transgender Studies? People’s careers are at stake. So is the basis of their power.”
In case you’re unfamiliar with Dr. Matte,
“Dr. Nicholas Matte, professor of gender studies at University of Toronto, is claiming that biological sex differences are an error in perception which only arises because of the way we’ve been socialized. Sexual identity is, therefore, whimsical. Never mind the 99.7% correspondence between physical characteristics and how people identify as men or women; they’re deluded, it’s just words and experience, nothing objective whatsoever.”
Conflating gender and sex is untenable. It leads to the idea that refusal to date a trans person of the same biological sex makes you a heterosexual bigot, while refusing to date a trans person of the opposite biological sex makes you a gay or lesbian bigot.
Now the feminists are being forced to acknowledge their error in popularizing the idea that the psychological traits of human beings are completely determined by socialization.