J.K. Rowling on sex and trans issues

[cali8989]

Frankly, this is incoherent. Trans people want absolute equality with other people, regardless of gender identity.

Gender is not a biological phenomenon. It's a cultural one. We have organized our society around a binary concept of gender, so there are currently no spaces for trans people to occupy apart from "man" or "woman." So if you're, say, a trans athlete, you're not allowed to participate at all. J.K. Rowling is hostile to accommodations in language (they/them) and accommodations in participation (such as trans women in women's beauty contests). She supports, pretty strongly, the status quo as it relates to gender in our society, and we know, from evidence, that the western binary concept of gender is unhealthy for gender non-conforming people.

Thailand third-sex is such a huge outlier in the binary cultural idea, but it is basically ignored by everyone else except us peeps here.

[thombergeron]

There's some very interesting cross-national research out there about gender norms in early adolescence that allow us to look at psychosocial developmental trajectories as they relate to relate to specific norms. You can see pretty clearly that strict binary gender norms are not necessarily supportive of healthy human development. Interventions that encourage more expansive and accepting views of gender almost universally result in better health at a population level.

[Stavros]

Frankly, this is incoherent. Trans people want absolute equality with other people, regardless of gender identity.

Gender is not a biological phenomenon. It's a cultural one. We have organized our society around a binary concept of gender, so there are currently no spaces for trans people to occupy apart from "man" or "woman." So if you're, say, a trans athlete, you're not allowed to participate at all. J.K. Rowling is hostile to accommodations in language (they/them) and accommodations in participation (such as trans women in women's beauty contests). She supports, pretty strongly, the status quo as it relates to gender in our society, and we know, from evidence, that the western binary concept of gender is unhealthy for gender non-conforming people.

This is a myth. Please refrain from spreading misinformation.

On the last point I agree and had an exchange with Natina in one of her threads to point out that in the case she cited the person concerned was a serial offender and that the overwhelming number of people in transition did not behave like that, I was not 'spreading misinformation'.

Of the M2F transexuals I have known, 100% believe in a binary division of gender and that they are women, even if they acknowledged that they were never going to menstruate, or become peregnant. Discussions on the meaning of Gender and Sexuality as social constructs go nowhere because it doesn't interest them, and they don't believe it anyway. At least one I still know has an adopted child.

I don't know how many people believe gender is a social construct, so to some extent it doesn't matter, but I agree that when it comes to political issues and Rights, there is no reason why anyone should be denied their Rights -Constitutional in the US but not in the UK where there may be legal rghts- and certainly not have them taken away -indeed, I attacked the Trump administration for this very reason in threads a few years ago.

The incoherence is due the fact that there is no definitive position on what being transgendered means or how it should be, can be fit into a social order which for so long has been shaped by binary concepts of Male and Female, where the existence of people who are neither has only been accomodated in forms we are familiar with -criminal, pantomime, sexual, satire and so on. In these cases, tolerance permitted some kind of existence, where the issue in recent years has been a degree of acceptance in public life, for example in the military, in the civil service, in education (but mostly at College/University level).

The difficult area has become Competition, where trans people are challenging the binary stucture of Sport by insisting their participation cannot or ought not to be denied, but where the authorities are struggling to accept that someone who has transitioned can indeed be classfied as 'male' or 'female'. I am not convinced by the arguments that M2F athletes are in some sports at an advantage because they once were male, as this begs the question how Male they are if they have been taking hormones and have lost much if not most of their 'male' attributes, but as it is now possible for a Man to declare himself a Woman without taking hormones or having any other treatment, the sense that there is a lack of fairness is a strong one, but do any of us have the right to challenge so personal a decision, or deny the authorities in Sport the right to refuse a person A to participate because they don't think they are men or women?

There is another issue in the argument that awards ceremonies in Film and Television drop the binary categories 'Best Actor' and 'Best Actress', which appears to limit the opportunity that actors will have to win, though the logical consequence should probably be to drop awards ceremonies altogether, not least because, as we know with 'Oscars' the award is not always given for quality in performance but some other reason. This may be an example of what happens when the binary division of Male and Female, when challenged, leads to nothing rather than something.

Out of this word soup, one can see how an aggressive posture by those who automatically attack critics as 'Transphobic' is divisive, and alienates the very constituency -public opinion- they need on their side. But I feel not enough people in society know enough, or care enough about trans issues to embrace the open-ended view of what Gender and Sexuality are or might be, and I am not sure we have the admin to handle the consequences of dismantling Male and Female in public life.

I think Rowling is mistaken in some areas, and the same is true of Prof Kathleen Stock but that doesn't mean they are wrong about everything, I referenced Stock's book on Gender a while ago (in the What Have You Been Reading thread), and woud prefer an adult debate on the issues rather than the tiresome accusation-defence circus that leads us nowhere.

[diddyboponTOP]

If a TS is passable enough then use the ladies room any TS I ever dated did but they all looked passable Enough or Fam enough. If not use the Men's room. That's my opinion and it stops a lot of issues. Get in where you fit in!

[Del06]

"I think Rowling is mistaken in some areas, and the same is true of Prof Kathleen Stock but that doesn't mean they are wrong about everything, I referenced Stock's book on Gender a while ago (in the What Have You Been Reading thread), and woud prefer an adult debate on the issues rather than the tiresome accusation-defence circus that leads us nowhere."

Thanks for the good sense. That's why I was waiting for your replies. I agree with you about Rowling and Stock. The latter was actually effectively "canceled" - she basically had to leave her job. No adult discussion there.

I do think the gender as social construct idea is fascinating, and accurate. That doesn't mean gender "doesn't really exist" of course: compare other social constructs, like Nation or Race. Nationality is a good example -- it's clearly a social construct with no, or very little, underlying biological content, but becoming a "trans-national" (i.e., revoking your citizenship for citizenship in another country) can be fantastically complicated.

[Lovecox]

If a TS is passable enough then use the ladies room any TS I ever dated did but they all looked passable Enough or Fam enough. If not use the Men's room. That's my opinion and it stops a lot of issues. Get in where you fit in!

Who determines what is "passable"?

[Stavros]

I do think the gender as social construct idea is fascinating, and accurate. That doesn't mean gender "doesn't really exist" of course: compare other social constructs, like Nation or Race. Nationality is a good example -- it's clearly a social construct with no, or very little, underlying biological content, but becoming a "trans-national" (i.e., revoking your citizenship for citizenship in another country) can be fantastically complicated.

Rowling is at it again, because of Keir Starmer's definition of a 'woman' which is to her mind 'legalistic' though I think she is wrong on the legal aspect.
https://news.sky.com/story/jk-rowlin...women-12564477

The Social Construction approach to me is a matter of language rather than biology. We can debate what is meant by words such as 'Woman', 'Father' 'Love' and so on, but my knees are not a social construct, neither is a woman's knees, and one cannot really say that pregnancy is a social construct, even though the point Wittgenstein made about language is that it is social in the sense that there is a collective agreement on what words mean. Some would argue these words change over time, which is true but so do terms that refer things such as 'marriage' which I think we can agree is quite different in 2022 from what it was in 222.

If you are interested in the wider debate that attacks DeConstruction and Post-Structuralist ideas about language, the go-to guy is Raymond Tallis who in the link below offers an effective debunking of Derrida, Lacan, Kristeva and Irigary, and whose books on this topic are quite short and easy to read, though I think his faith in science alone does not allow him the flexibility required to understand what the varieties of gender can mean. The link is here-
https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/tallis.html

Lastly, I offer this quote from Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton, who wrote a play about Oscar Wilde in which he imagines Wilde making this statement in Court -

" ‘I object to this trial on the grounds that no Irishman can receive a fair hearing in an English court because the Irish are figments of the English imagination. I am not really here; I am just one of your racial fantasies. You cannot manacle a fantasy. I do not believe in your morality and I do not believe in your truth. I have my own truth and morality which I call art. I am not on trial here because I am a pervert but because I am an artist, which in your book comes to much the same thing. You hold that a man is a man and a woman is a woman. I hold that nothing is ever purely itself, and that the point where it becomes so is known as death. I therefore demand to be defended by metaphysicians rather than by lawyers, and that my jury should be composed of my peers - namely, poets, perverts, vagrants and geniuses.’ "
http://www.ricorso.net/rx/az-data/au...on_T/quots.htm

[thombergeron]

"Woman" is a socio-cultural phenomenon that has already seen vast malleability over the course of human history.

"Female" is a specific biological signifier with narrow applicability beyond reproduction.

I don't understand why this is such a difficult distinction.

[MrFanti]

What's the difference between biological/DNA sex, gender, and identification?

[Stavros]

"Woman" is a socio-cultural phenomenon that has already seen vast malleability over the course of human history.

"Female" is a specific biological signifier with narrow applicability beyond reproduction.

I don't understand why this is such a difficult distinction.

The above post is a good example of how language and science can appear to contradict each other, or rather, where science claims a fixed meaning that language challenges. It bears some similarity to the conflict between Wittgenstein and Popper, the former the finest philosopher of the 20th century, the latter an irritating jerk.

To make a distinction between the 'Female' and 'Woman' is nonsensical both in terms of language and science, whereas a distiction between 'Woman' and 'Feminine' offers a subtlety that is determned not by biology but behaviour -a man called Joe can thus dress up as Josephine say, at the weekend, and indeed, behave in as 'feminine' a way as he can, thus insisting on being addressed as She, while wearing a woman's garments. But femininity can also occur in males in other ways, but it does depend on how one defines what it means to be feminine, with a reverse argument for masculine, and I hope, not one where there is a simple binary assumption -Masculine=Active, Feminine=Passive.

If we also accept, as we must, that there are women who do not menstruate, who will never become pregnant for medical/biological reasons, who may not even have a womb or ovaries, then the precise definition of 'Woman' is in fact, not precise at all. The same applies to men. Suppose, and I know this once happened in the 1960s, a young boy in a road traffic accident loses his penis and testicles -does he cease to be Male? No. The moral case is weak too -the idea that if a man does not marry and have children then he is not in fact a man- the moral judgmen some men make of others. There are multiple reasons why men and women do not, or can not have children, so the attempt to corral gender into fixed categories is always going to collide with reality, as long as the language that is used to describe people is also used in an inflexible way.

The difficulty is thus created by those divisions in society which challenge the political, economic and social status of men and women who resist the need the law has (had) to package gender and sexuality into simple categories. But even more so by the division opened up when the issue is re-framed, not in terms of science, but the politics of equal rights, where equality is an 'essentially contested concept'.

In the US, this conflict has been generated by the Constitutional right to equality, such as the equal right to vote, and an attemp by some political groups, for example the Republican Party, to modify equality -for example in voter suppression- in order to gain or retain power through the transparent means of denial, for whatever procedural details that are invented to 'secure' the registration and voting of citizens might be, the aim is without doubt to remove from the process voters who vote for another party, or are assumed to do so.

Lastly, the creation of a 'cultural crisis' manipulates issues around Gender and Sexuality to present society with an 'existential crisis, one in which the very survival of society -or 'society as "we"/"they" know it- cannot sustain a diversity of definitions, and not one where the right of self-identification is considered simply wrong.

I think that there are few human conditions that generate more anxiety than Sex, be it sexual behaviour or sexual identity, and that most of the disputes that are currently boiling in the pot, are a reflection of a deeper problem that just won't go away but is personal as well as social, and is interwoven with the challenges of language and science, which at least makes it permanently interesting.