QT: Is there such a thing as a man wants to be a woman? + 10 additional questions

submitted by SnowAssMan from (self.GCdebatesQT)

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[–]SnowAssMan[S] 8 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 0 fun9 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

I'm aware that words can have more than one meaning. One such word is gender.

Mainstream (99% of the population): gender = bio sex (99% of the time), sex = sexual intercourse (99% of the time) – basically, there are multiple meanings, but there is also a hierarchy of these meanings.

The trans cult has a better PR campaign than feminism does. It makes more sense to join forces with the mainstream, bc regular people don't get direct exposure to gender critical feminism, they've got to go through the mainstream filter first, & the trans ideology filter second, at which point you've lost most of them bc it's got too many layers of complexity to it.

You play into the trans cult's hands by saying "sex" in place of "gender", by helping them make biology obscene.

You really think masculinity is half the conversion within 2nd wave feminist discourse? Not even close. Masculinity is a pointless word anyway, it's like having a single word that describes every visible colour of the colour-spectrum put together, except pink. Men don't really have sex stereotypes holding them back, hence male-privilege: spared sex-based injustice. So if masculinity is just lack of femininity, then 'femininity' should suffice.

In English, the way in which the language is gendered (masculine & feminine pronouns & names) are directly describing biological sex.

I don't accept that it was 2nd wave feminists who made the distinction between gender & sex, or that Judith Butler popularised the replacement of sex with gender, or that John Money was the one who started using gender to replace sex. Do you know of a 2nd wave feminist work that defines gender as not sex, but sex stereotypes?

Stoller is the only one I've seen who calls the distinction between biology & social determinism sex & gender, respectively, but he seems to imply that this distinction is already in use (either way, some non-feminist seems to be the originator). Butler alludes to it, but she doesn't define gender as socially determined, instead she opts for a definition that has no substance. She thinks being a woman & being feminine are synonymous, but that bc the definition of femininity isn't always the same everywhere, she concludes that it doesn't exist, leading her to believe that 'woman' doesn't exist, it's just a self-determined performance, like an idea in the public domain. Neither GC feminists nor the trans cult seem to agree with either of these definitions though, so why does everyone jump to the defence of the distinction between sex & gender?

You may say you believe that gender is not male & female, but masculinity & femininity, but how did masculinity & femininity come to be known as "gender"? Was there perhaps already a close association between the word gender & the sexes? How did that happen? Apparently the OED defined gender as sex in the 19th century. So you claimed it's a modern invention to call sex gender, when in fact gender has always meant sex. So if we're going to go back to "the original" way of using these terms then gender would still end up as the correct term for the sexes.

Any use of gender to mean sex stereotypes, exclusively, is either pretty obscure, or pretty recent. I don't even really see how you being American, & a second-wave feminist, from the latter half of the 20th century, justifies the use of the word gender to mean sex stereotypes & not sex, bc I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that American second wave feminists from the latter half of the 20th century used gender to mean sex stereotypes exclusively & not sex.

[–]MarkTwainiac 4 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

Just as you seem unable to grasp the difference between gender and sex, you don't seem to understand that there's a difference between the significance of terms & ideas put forward or referenced by specialists in rarefied academic fields and the journals/books/texts they wrote in the past that were little-read at the time and the significance of the language & ideas that at the very same era in history were in wide circulation amongst the general public and thus were used in the popular press and in everyday, ordinary parlance.

The niche language used in the 1960s and 70s by specialists in narrow fields like sexology, and the sexology of transsexualisn specifically, and by grammarians prior to that, did not reflect the zeitgeist of the time. Just as even today, the gibberish-filled, obscurant writings and pretentious, performative, material-reality-denying ideas of Judith Butler do not represent the way most people who live in the real world speak, communicate and think even though aspects of Butler's jargon and half-baked theories float through and have wormed their way into the collective consciousness and wider culture like dust motes or virus particles.

If you want an idea about everyday speech, go to a library and look up the style guides used by English-language journalists and editors in the 60s, 70s and 80s. All the major news outlets had them - AP, NY Times, Newsweek, TIME, the networks, the BBC. You won't find any one recommending that "gender" be used instead of "sex."

Also, to get an idea of how people actually spoke back then, listen to/watch press interviews and radio & TV reports from the era.

I don't accept that it was 2nd wave feminists who made the distinction between gender & sex, or that Judith Butler popularised the replacement of sex with gender, or that John Money was the one who started using gender to replace sex. Do you know of a 2nd wave feminist work that defines gender as not sex, but sex stereotypes?

I think you have reading comprehension issues. I said gender was not a term widely used by second-wave feminists. I said most of us never used the word at all. We made a distinction between sex and the sex stereotypes, sex roles and sexist expectations that culture/society impose upon the two sexes - or what is now known as "gender" because that's the terminology that has come into use in the past 30 years. But second-wave feminists discussed these issues without resorting to the word "gender."

Also, I don't care that you "don't accept" what I am saying about the 60s, 70s and 80s and second-wave feminism. You weren't there. I was.

What I find remarkable is that you seem to think you are an/the authority on issues you don't seem very well informed about - and that you apparently believe your views have more validity than mine or anyone else who sees things differently to you just because your views belong to/come from you. I wonder why that is?

You play into the trans cult's hands by saying "sex" in place of "gender", by helping them make biology obscene.

What? That hangup/neurosis is theirs and yours, not mine. I've never depicted biology as obscene. That's on you & the POV you're defending.

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

If the word "gender" serves no purpose in describing sex stereotypes, since you say feminists never even used the word (since the term 'sex stereotypes' made it redundant), then why should it matter that I use the word 'gender' to refer to sex, in order to a) better differentiate biological sex from sexual intercourse, b) speak the same language as everyone else, whether colloquial or academic?

There is a chapter in the Female Eunuch called 'Gender', & it's not on "sex stereotypes", but like the OED, Germaine Greer isn't American, so it doesn't count, I guess?

Anyway, I did a Google Scholar search, customising the range from 1919-1985, confining the search to: "gender" -transsexual -identity -masculinity -linguistics resulting in about 76,800 results, as far as I could tell, gender was not referring to grammar or sex stereotypes in the majority of cases, but biological sex instead.

I asked you whether there are any American 2nd wave feminists who make the distinction between gender & sex, defining the former as "sex stereotypes". You didn't answer the question. However, I looked up Kate Millet's Sexual Politics, bc I remembered she had a useful glossary at the end of the book. She quotes Robert Stoller directly, using his distinction between gender (masculinity & femininity) & sex (male & female). So you could have used that example, except that, she says she agrees with Stoller & Money on gender identity being the result of gendered conditioning, which might have made the example too inconvenient for you to mention, presuming you still reject the aforementioned notion. So Stoller really seems to be the originator of the distinction you're referring to. It turns out Dworkin quotes Money on gender identity too.

What? That hangup/neurosis is theirs and yours, not mine. I've never depicted biology as obscene. That's on you & the POV you're defending.

Tsk, tsk, reading comprehension issues. Sex (the word, the connotation, the definition used in the majority of cases to mean intercourse) is obscene to the mainstream, biological sex (male & female) is taboo to the trans cult. Saying "sex" in place of "gender" helps the trans cult make biological sex obscene to the general public. I'm saying this for the third time in a row now.