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] 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.