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https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j...gender-issues/
I'm really not sure what to think about this. On the one hand, it seems absurd that a man can just go sign a paper, with no hormones or surgery, and say that from then on he's a woman. On the other hand, I think Ms. Rowling minimizes the bathroom issues for trans folks. On the third hand, I strongly disagree with canceling Rowling.
Some of the trans community attempting to cancel J.K. Rowling is the canary in the coal mine.
Rowling is a bleeding heart liberal, and the radical trans community is trying to cancel her.
The far left is going to end up "red pilling" most normal people, and there will be a backlash.
I'm generally for non-discrimination against trans folks, but when you start denying simple biology and common sense that will eventually lead to trouble.
For example, the parents of genetic college woman swimmers who dared to complain about the university sponsoring a trans athlete (that beating the girls by greater than 30 seconds in some races) are being told to seek psychological counseling for themselves.
This sort of thing is going to blow up in the trans community's collective faces big time.
given how political she is, I rly don't mind if she gets bad press for it. It is kind of entertaining to see ppl from one side of the aisle get eaten alive by their own. I'd feel about that but given the climate and how Twitter is just a giant landmine bc of ppl like her I can just sit back indifferent to the outcome but at least be fascinated by how it plays out.
So those of us who stay out of it can at least have our popcorn ready as usual.
Funny, I thought Stavros would have something to say about this.
1. Gender-affirming medical and psychiatric care for gender non-conforming people saves lives. This is obvious when you think about it, and we now have solid scientific evidence proving it.
2. JK Rowling is a bigot and a shallow thinker. She is famous for writing popular children's books. Beyond the topic of children's literature, she has nothing relevant nor interesting to say about anything.
3. "Common sense" is not a real thing. It's a rhetorical device for dumb people who can't justify their position.
4. If you seek out sexual gratification from a group of people that you consider unworthy of dignity and respect, then you're fucking scum.
5. Treating people the way they want to be treated doesn't hurt you at all unless you're an asshole.
I am still in Deutschland, but will reply in due course. Probably next week.Quote:
Originally Posted by Del06
People can have "liberal" opinions on some topics, and "conservative" opinions on other topics. It's not good to reduce everyone into simple categories, because most people are more complicated than that. For example, there are liberals who really like their guns. And conservatives who really like smoking weed.Quote:
Originally Posted by mildcigar_2001
I also don't know how JK Rowling is being "canceled" when she remains one of the all-time most popular authors in the world. The word "cancel" seems kind of meaningless to me, especially considering how alarming the phrase is supposed to sound.
Can a world-famous author be mistaken about a topic, or have an opinion that is wrong? Sure, why not?
It's amazing how many people appear prominently in the media complaining that their views are being suppressed. I'm sure JK Rowling has received more media attention precisely because she is (allegedly) being cancelled. What the net effect on her sales is I don't know.Quote:
Originally Posted by Luke Warm
I also don't know what the term means, or what it means to be against it. If famous people choose to express views publicly on an issue then other people have a right to agree or disagree. People also have a right to choose whether they read someone's books or not for whatever reason.
A close friend of mine had SRS a few years ago. She would never claim to be a biological woman, and has said that those people like her who make the transition should be realistic, and reasonable in what they want and expect from society. Most of all right now, she wants the word Female on her passport.
She believes she has the right to be recognized in her 'new' Gender, which to her is a correction of a mistake, but does not think this gives her the right to, for example, take part in Beauty Competitions as a Woman. In this sense, it is a personal definition of Rights, rather than a legal one. But for some of the more 'Political' agitators in the Trans Community -if indeed there is one- Rights to have meaning must be enforced in law. It is hard to argue with that, yet it is not merely a matter of law that a Woman use Women's Lavatories. In this instance, the focus is on Men who are in the process of Transitioning, or who claim a Female Identity merely because they can.
Thus, the rift is between Gender as Biology, and Gender as Social Role -and the deliberate use of language to breach that divide by claiming it doesn't exist. Post-Modernism and Deconstruction may argue that all definitions are socially constructed and only have contextual meaning, but not everyone agrees. It might be true in some cases, such as 'Mother' and 'Father', or 'Marriage'.
It is somewhat odd that the 'Left' be blamed for much of this, as I can't imagine why a Marxist would ever argue in favour of fluid meanings when it is anchored in definitions that cannot change as long as Class Conflict is the motor of history. But then 'the Left' has become a fluid group of disunited and often contradictory groups.
I don't think JK Rowling is hostile to trans people, but only to those who make intolerant demands of others who just don't agree with their definitions. It is absurd for some trans people to claim absolute equality with women when their own position denies there is an absolute meaning to any category we use, other than life and death (and this is an assumption). The aggressive posturing does them no favours, even as it is odd that Rowling and others like her cannot acknowledge that Biology is not always exact, and specifically so in the case of babies born with no precise male or female genitalia. I thnk there is no argument about that, but about the self-identity process, which raises more questions than it answers.
Hence those men who claim to be women just because they can, some of whom hang around Women's Lavatories for sexual reasons, we are told- I cannot stop them, but they damage the cause of those who are transitioning out of something more profound than choice, who often face prejudice and violence from their own families and local community, who struggle with education and thus employment, have fallen victim to drug and alcohol abuse.
There are too many trans people in need of our support for me to be bothered by a fringe of politically motivated fanatics who are damaging the cause. I wish they would go away, but they are here to stay, and will provoke useless debate for some time to come.
Frankly, this is incoherent. Trans people want absolute equality with other people, regardless of gender identity.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by 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.
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'.Quote:
Originally Posted by thombergeron
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.
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!
"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.
Who determines what is "passable"?Quote:
Originally Posted by diddyboponTOP
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by Del06
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
"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.
What's the difference between biological/DNA sex, gender, and identification?
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by thombergeron
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.
Again, "woman" is not a scientific term. There is no scientific definition of "woman."
"Female" is a scientific term denoting reproductive capacity. It is not a synonym for "woman" in the same way that "tectonic" is not a synonym for "craggy." We don't describe female trout as women trout, because trout cannot undertake the cultural role of women in human society. Human individuals with male reproductive organs, on the other hand, can and do undertake the cultural role of women.
I think the confusion and arguments come from the use/misuse of the following:Quote:
Originally Posted by thombergeron
-Woman
-Gender
-Identification
-DNA/Biological sex
Out of the above, only DNA/Biological sex is based on physical science.
The others are based on psychological science.
Common sense?Quote:
Originally Posted by Lovecox
"We don't describe female trout as women trout, because trout cannot undertake the cultural role of women in human society."Quote:
Originally Posted by thombergeron
-This is what Gilbert Ryle would describe as a 'category mistake', but is an example of the nonsense many produce when making another failed attempt to unravel the lineages of language, science and gender, all mixed up as they have become.
A fetish for language at the expense of science, to confirm and re-confirm a bias regardless of facts. In what world, one wonders, is
'woman' a 'social construct' but 'female' is a scientific fact? The womb is not a social construct, neither is menstruation or ejaculation, my knees, or your penis. Unless, and until there is a reconciliation between science and language this debate is going to move along parallel lines, with two destinations unknown, but much anxiety and hurt along the way.
Psychology is not science, but an interpretation of human behaviour, sometimes using the techniques of science, sometimes of literary criticism, even history, sociology and anthropology and Art, and often producing garbage as a result, interesting though it sometimes is. Consider the multiple ways in which Freud's famous comment can be interpreted -Anatomy is Destiny.Quote:
Originally Posted by MrFanti
Not according to these experts - they state that it IS.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
https://www.phoenix.edu/blog/is-psyc...alert-yes.html
https://www.apa.org/education-career/guide/science
https://www.edology.com/blog/psychol...ogy-a-science/
Had a good laugh at Americans being paid to defend Psychology confirming they believe themselves to be scientists, what else can one expect?Quote:
Originally Posted by MrFanti
Here is a good example of the desperation involved-
"Psychology refers to the study of the mind and human behaviour'
but in another link
"Psychologists examine the link between brain function and behaviour'-
We can agree the brain exists, but does the Mind exist? Science cannot prove that it does. So half the definition is speculation. The other half according to one of your links-
"Psychologists employ the scientific method — stating the question, offering a theory and then constructing rigorous laboratory or field experiments to test the hypothesis"
-Most of this is basic philosophy, as for 'field experiments' -what 'field experiments' are required to help someone with problems of self-esteem?
Good effort, but as I say, Psychology is an interesting way to think about life, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking it is anything other than a form of therapy that can be achieved with many means that do not require a degree or a statistical analysis of what motivates alcoholics.
Simple Yes/No question.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
Are you a psychologist?
If no, then I would think that those who wrote the articles are more experts than you and I both combined.
Oh and while you're laughing....Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
Psychological Science in the European Union
https://www.psychologicalscience.org...european-union
Founding of a Scientific Psychology in Germany
https://history-of-psychology.readth...mans.html#id35
Mr Fanti, you miss the key point of the argument, which has nothing to do with what some institution defines as science in order to grant itself some respectability, and most of all, a source of funding and jobs with benefits; or the fact that Psychology uses the techniques of science to make claims which can be made by literary criticism or just common sense.
You also ignore an entire tradition in European philosophy which has never been able to prove that the mind exists, just as science can make a connection between neural activity and our understanding of pain and pleasure, but the same science cannot explain why one person finds ecstasy in a piece of music another finds empty of all meaning.
Language, and again language both confirms and denies the facts of science. Consider some of the arguments in a recent book reviewed in this week's Times Literary Supplement 18 March 2022 (available online, if not in Greg Abbott's 'Science is Bullshit' State of Texas)-Claire Chambers Intact: A Defence of the Unmodified Body.
Though there are women who for various reasons don't menstruate, we can I hope agree that only one gender experiences it, and that science can tell us what is, why it is, and so forth. Now consider the language, which for the most part, in English, is negative, most commonly found in terms such as 'the curse'. For science, this is a strange term to use for a process which enables a woman to become pregnant and breed, perpetuating the species. How then did language evolve to treat so natural a condition as if there were something wrong with it?
One answer, supplied by anthropology, is that humans react negatively to the sight of blood, because it is associated with pain, injury and death, and in one sense of course, menstruation is a form of death -dead blood being shed to be replaced by new blood; blood that does not enable life to begin, replace with blood that does. Now consider the opposite, the positive language associated with white liquids, namely breast milk and semen, both of which are linked with life-affirming words and phrases, though few come as close as the French does, with Jouisssance, to linking ejaculation to pleasure so precisely.
Race is even more an explicit example of the rupture that can take place between language and science, not least because there was a time when science not only defined Race in terms of the shape of one's nose, or head, or the colouration of the skin denoting levels of intelligence, superiority and inferiority. It went as far as to claim science could prove that there is a 'criminal mind', with the inevitable result via Eugenics, that 'involuntary euthanasia' -to you and me also known as killing- was the preferred 'treatment' for 'criminals' with the also inevitable consequence that a substantial proportion of 'Negroes' were more liable to be 'criminal'.
CRT was not the first to do so, but has certainly established how language in the form of law and other forms of public discourse has been used to replace the science that has lost its ability to define 'race', and give it a precisely American context. You need only ask if the experience of being born Black in Nigeria presents the same problems of 'the Body in Society' as it does when that Black body is born in Louisiana. Then ask what the difference to that body is were it born in 1722, 1822, 1922 and 2022. I think you will agree the assessment in the American case, is shocking -or ought to be?
We are born with the bodies we have, and science can enable us to modify them, be it a 'nose job', tattoos, SRS and so on -Chambers is thus opposed to the use of Puberty Blockers in Trans-defined Children. But the 'matter of fact' factness of Science does not always result in a language that simply confirms it, and it is at this juncture that all our anxieties emerge, as your posts often show.
Psychology, in these contexts, is merely a way of using language to discuss assumptions about the way in which humans behave, think and even feel, but has failed constantly to offer a single durable explanation of what these phenomena are, or in trying to do so, has had to rely on the languages and disciplines that exist elsewhere, being a completely unoriginal way of doing things.
The most telling example of this takes place in therapy where the most successful therapist says almost nothing other than ask a few questions, all the work being done by the person in therapy, who need only tell the truth about what they think and feel, and is then invited by the Psychologist to do, or not do something about what the person just said. Imagine, men and women being paid -and in the US, paid substantial sums of money- persuading someone else to 'do all the work'.
And you lost me with the American insult.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
It's one thing to have a debate, it's another to have it devolve into insults.
Why should I continue this with someone who laughs at us Americans? (I am Black BTW...)
Pointless IMHO.
Cheers!
An over-reaction on your part, because I am sure you are aware of the reputation the US has for its mini 'industrialization' of therapy which puzzles a lot of us 'old Europeans', it is one of the things California is famous for, if not Texas. But if you are genuinely upset then I apologize as I had no intention of insulting anyone. But it would also help if you could address the key issues instead of wasting time defending some suits whose contribution to the healing of the mind is either limited or questionable.