Tag: TERF war

The new heretics

HershbloggerLeave a comment

In G.K. Chesterton’s day, it was not necessary to qualify the word “Liberal” with “Classical.”

Culture and political designations have changed. Verities, by definition, have not.

Five score and seventeen years after it was published, this resonates. It requires a careful reading:

“Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion. And the scepticism of our time does not really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them their limits and their plain and defiant shape. We who are Liberals once held Liberalism lightly as a truism. Now it has been disputed, and we hold it fiercely as a faith. We who believe in patriotism once thought patriotism to be reasonable, and thought little more about it. Now we know it to be unreasonable, and know it to be right. We who are Christians never knew the great philosophic common sense which inheres in that mystery until the anti-Christian writers pointed it out to us. The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed.”

― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics, 1905

It is indeed strange that by 2022 courage is required contend that 2+2 is 4. The idea has been declared racist and patriarchal. We’re told simple arithmetic is an artifact of white privilege.

One may speculate that the hue of the impossible grass has been excluded from Progressive contempt only because that color is ‘green.’ And/or because neither white nor asian heterosexual males have mentioned it lately.

As to strange courage… How can it require courage to oppose those who declare men to be women?

Why is courage needed to suggest government profligacy tends toward inflation?

From whence could courage be summoned to contest those who think human life begins only after a full 9 months gestation?

In what reality does the idea that self-defense is a natural right become a courageous position?

What’s even stranger… these ideas have public support. In ‘safe’ districts hoary politicians run on these these ideas. Their wannabe successors echo the themes. Many of them are elected in spite of it. In fact, because of it.

What we can conclude is that our practice of democracy has proved Tocqueville right, and Benjamin Franklin’s fears accurate.

A note to feminists on de-platforming

Hershblogger2 Comments

Perhaps you’ve spent your career arguing for the protection of women from rape, domestic assault, and female genital mutilation. Perhaps you’ve fought to make women’s shelters safe, sex-segregated spaces. I salute you.

Perhaps you were even a speaker at the conference discussing single-sex spaces put on by Woman’s Place UK in Portsmouth, where trans activist protestors waved signs ranging from the benign (“Trans Lives Matter!”), to the acidulous (“Suck My D*ck, You Transphobic C*nts!”). That is, ranging from an attempt to hijack mundane BLM sentiment to a rapist’s summary of why trans activism is not merely incoherent, but deeply misogynist. They want to cancel your entire sex.

This de-platforming ritual was conducted by men pretending to be women for… well, probably for reasons in addition to being able to parade around naked in women’s shower rooms – but that is one of the main outcomes of their passion.

I am all-in on your side in this particular struggle. There are two sexes. Go TERFS!

However.

Perhaps you have uncritically reinforced the hoax of increased violence against women during the Superbowl, perhaps you have recited the utter fallacy that the “rule of thumb” referred to English law allowing men to beat their wives with a stick no greater in diameter than the thumb, perhaps you refuse to acknowledge the gaping holes in the claim that women are paid 73% (or whatever it is today) of what men are paid, perhaps you say “Hands up! Don’t shoot!,” in response to anyone questioning BLM/CRT. That means you celebrate ‘misinformation’, practice fake historical revisionism, push equality of outcome, and then combine all of those things to score political points and quash anyone who disgarees. These ideas come from somewhere close to home for you. The trannies are just taking the next logically absurd step.

Perhaps you now have more insight into where promoting such unexamined tribalism leads. And it isn’t protection of women.

Losing the TERF War

HershbloggerLeave a comment

THE WAR ON STANDARDS, WOKE U.S. ARMY EDITION

The U.S. Army apparently has decided to gender-norm scores on the test it administers for combat fitness… women will be judged based on how they perform in relation to other women.

This radical change is a response to the unsurprising fact that women are failing the Army’s combat fitness test to a disproportionate extent. The test in question evaluates soldiers in six events: dead lifts, a two-mile run, push-ups, a shuttle run, a medicine ball throw and leg tucks, in which soldiers must hang from a bar and bring their knees to their elbows. About 54 percent of women and 7 percent of men failed the test last year.

Wait a minute. If trans women ARE women, every soldier is potentially a woman. But biological females can’t compete on the same physical fitness curve as biological males?

The NCAA could not be reached for comment.

Gender appropriationists

HershbloggerLeave a comment

Well, if they can play Rugby…
California will now house prisoners according to gender identity instead of biological sex

So, buy stock in California prison construction. Last I heard there were hundreds of gender identities. Will furries have to be separated by species? Lions and lambs; cats and dogs.

And another question. If men who pretend they are women don’t have to apologize; why, when some white person is caught appropriating black racial identity, do they have to apologize? It’s mostly the same people who demand an apology for the latter and scream at you if you question the former.

What science are they following?

Asking for J. K. Rowling.

Trans Exclusionary Radical Virus?

HershbloggerLeave a comment

Speculation on TERV Wars from the UK Daily Mail:
Doctors claim new Coronavirus ‘may cause damage to a man’s TESTICLES’
I’d guess it’s click-bait, so no link.

The only reason I mention it is to ask this biology question:
“Does coronavirus know that “Trans women are women?”

I think not.

Update: 3:02PM
Despite early reports, Coronavirus is not Ageist.

All six ICU patients at NJ hospital are between ages of 28 and 48

Sexism is still in play, all 11 patients there are male.

Their pronoun preferences are not known.

Conflation error

HershbloggerLeave a comment

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.

Gentlemen, you can’t say that here!

HershbloggerLeave a comment

This is the free speech society!*

Trans row: Man who said ‘women don’t have penises’ banned from free speech society panel

The dogma is settled.

Later, he was removed from his assistant editorship at Durham University’s philosophy journal.
Student editor who retweeted “women don’t have penises” story fired from university journal

Then the Merseyside Police and mayor of Liverpool started looking into the transgression**:
Is it a crime to say ‘women don’t have penises’?

The counter argument to “women don’t have penises” can be summarized with this contemporaneous example from Newsweek:

“Well, since gender identity is not determined by what kind of genitals someone has, a person with a female gender identity might well have a penis. In other words, yes, some women do have penises.”

This is true – if you use the same definition for “person with a female gender identity” and “woman.” And, therefore, it is boringly trivial.

Since the question under consideration is whether women can have penises, simply substituting the word “women” in your conclusion for the phrase “people with a female gender identity” in your premises dishonestly enlists tautology as a defense.

Assuming your conclusion through poorly executed semantic trickery – ‘gender identity’ is exactly the same as ‘sex’ – does not advance your cause. Just because you think (“feel” in the parlance) that your wife is a hat doesn’t mean you can wear her on your head.

Let me clarify Newsweek‘s defense of calling penises female genitalia (changes emphasized): “Well, since gender identity is not determined by what kind of genitals someone has, a person with a female gender identity might well have a penis. In other words, yes, some people with a female gender identity do have penises.”

There are women who are objecting to this conflation of ‘gender identity’ with ‘sex.’ I welcome them to the club of those who’ve been objecting since the ’60s, to the idea that sex roles are totally socially constructed. I celebrate the fact we’re all now subject to deplorableness.

I don’t expect the editors at Newsweek to understand logical thinking most of us learned in grade school, but it’s worse than that. That meaningless syllogism emanates from the Ivory Towers of the University of Nottingham, where its author is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy. It’s likely, therefore, she is familiar with the logical requirements of a syllogism. It’s equally likely she rejects logic itself as patriarchal, heteronormative, colonialist, and misogynist; or some combination of all of those.

How did universities worldwide come to be hotbeds of this delusion? I’m working on a post to explain that, which will be published in a day or three.

—–
*With credit to President Merkin Muffley who said, “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!”

**How long before the word transgression is banned?