QT: Would any of these women be transwomen? (Also GC: Can you think of any other hypothetical tries?)

submitted by levoyageur718293 from self.GCdebatesQT

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[–]levoyageur718293[S] 6 insightful - 4 fun6 insightful - 3 fun7 insightful - 4 fun -  (3 children)

I take a great deal of delight in engaging with you, MarkTwainiac; I like the fact that you challenge me to do better.

In your description of your debate it seems that you and the person you are arguing with are equating biology with female fertility and childbearing capacity. So in that sense it seems you definitely are taking a reductionist view, albeit not a bio essentialist one. But rather a mat essentialist one that says women = mother, and a particular kind of mother at that. The view you're advancing seems to be that to be a woman a human has to be able to release viable eggs, get pregnant, carry a pregnancy to term, give birth vaginally and breastfeed.

None of these things are necessary, certainly, but I find that QT loves to hedge around at the corners of biology - clownfish, Mullerian ducts, XXY, that sort of thing - and I figured that it was best to close those lines of inquiry categorically. A woman can be a woman without doing any of those things, or even having the opportunity to do those things, but when the rubber hits the road and the baby comes out, all that COINing falls away instantly.

[–]MarkTwainiac 7 insightful - 3 fun7 insightful - 2 fun8 insightful - 3 fun -  (2 children)

Delighted right back at you, levoyageur! And your word choice reminded me of the band Deee-lite from 1990: https://youtu.be/zUx2jkIh4zY

Your user name always makes me think of this flick, which speaks directly to the issues you raised in your OP: https://youtu.be/aWLRULhIyCE

I think I got what you were trying to do in the OP, but frankly I've never understood what "bio essentialist" is supposed to mean in this context. Don't people who speak this way really mean "gender essentialist"? Or "bio determinist"?

The larger issue is that I just don't get why pointing out that we are all members of a sexually-reproducing species who are biological in our essence and by our very nature is supposed to be such a diss and a no-no. Even those of us who have done all the things you listed - ovulating, pregnancy, giving birth, breastfeeding - were not reduced to or solely defined by those activities or aspects of our being at the time we did them, much less forevermore. Girls' & women's intellects, talents, range of interests, sense of humor, multifaceted personalities etc don't suddenly all shut down or evaporate when we're ovulating, carrying a pregnancy, giving birth or breastfeeding. All of us are many things at once... The only people who seem to believe otherwise are the incredibly sexist misogynists who are always banging on about how recognizing human sex and particularly the roles human females play in human reproduction is somehow insultingly "essentialist." It's like they can't hold in their heads the fact that Marie Curie gave birth to two children AND she was awarded two Nobel Prizes - and that neither set of accomplishments negates the other set. IMO, the big problem is that the QT crowd are obsessed with reducing people to one-dimensional identity labels & pigeonholing everyone into teeny, tiny boxes.

Can you tell me what COIN means here? I looked it up in acronym dictionaries & directories and all the usual places that inform us oldies about the meaning of internet abbreviations & slang, but I came up empty.

[–]levoyageur718293[S] 7 insightful - 2 fun7 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

COINing means "Co-Opting Intersex Narratives." The fact that we struggle to discern some people's sex - not that those people don't have a sex, as the article posted by u/BiologyIsReal pointed out, but that their sex is sometimes hard to discern - doesn't actually help TRA arguments, but they like to pretend that it does. The argument they make usually goes something like this: * A woman is still a woman without a uterus/vagina/ovaries * Therefore a person without a uterus/vagina/ovaries can be a woman * Therefore TWAW. (Yes, yes, I know...)

But I wanted to put that sort of thing aside right out of the gate. We're not dealing with XXY or guevedoce, we're dealing with people whose sex is unambiguous.

Since the TRA argument, as I've encountered it, is that trans means "gender other than assigned gender" and "assigned gender" means "what you were raised as," rather than something to do with the body, it means that their argument should have room for someone "female but cis-nonbinary," or for someone who was "female but not raised as a girl," and therefore "female but transwoman." I think any TRA who was confronted with this possibility would reject it, even though it's a logical consequence of their position, and they'd have to say what they believe but don't want to say - that yes, there is such a thing as male and female, but they only want it to count when it's convenient for them.

[–]MarkTwainiac 7 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 0 fun8 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Thanks for explaining COINing. I'm so old that when I see the letters COIN all in caps like that, I immediately think of COINTELPRO. From Wikipedia:

COINTELPRO (syllabic abbreviation derived from Counter Intelligence Program) (1956–1971) was a series of covert and illegal projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic American political organizations. FBI records show COINTELPRO resources targeted groups and individuals the FBI deemed subversive, including feminist organizations, the Communist Party USA, anti–Vietnam War organizers, activists of the civil rights movement or Black Power movement (e.g. Martin Luther King Jr., the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party), environmentalist and animal rights organizations, the American Indian Movement (AIM), independence movements (such as Puerto Rican independence groups like the Young Lords), and a variety of organizations that were part of the broader New Left, and unrelated groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.