The good thing about critical thinking, logic, and the basics of rhetoric, is that they are self-evident, and skill in them can be trained (I am not an example of that training). That is why they have to resort to ridiculous notions like "rationality is racist". This is among the most racist things I can think of. Native Americans memorized treaties upon hearing them, and understood the terms rationally and understood when the government violated the terms. It was not rationality that was was used against them to break the treaties but rationalization, bureaucratic BS, in a spirit later described as the banality of evil.

No wonder the woke were actively trying to find some kind of sophistry to justify the idea that 2 + 2 = 5 (it does not). So, how could they possibly complain about what governments did when they broke treaties? This kind of movement will lead us directly to a point where a law is just what ever a judge or prosecutor says it says. We already are there, where judges have told juries to ignore certain facts about the law as they send them out for deliberation. This is hardly woke at all, and as is so often the case it is tricking people into building their own cages around themselves. How evil this is really is profound.

They appeal to "other ways of knowing" but these do not supersede rationality. Intuition or emotions do not invalidate valid reasoning. Even the Catholic Church acknowledges that religious truths can not and do not contradict truths found in the natural world, so even those this woke nonsense really is a bad new religion, the emphasis is equally on bad, new, and religion.

Appeals to "lived experiences" should best be used to understand how to communicate, not what to validate or invalidate. Otherwise, they do privilege one point of view over another. The replace one racism for another, one sexism for a ridiculous gender-ist-ism, one set of privileges to ignore logic and solid reasoning for another. ( * long tangent below for the brave or the board)

So, I really do think we need to pick apart their bad arguments and stick to basic and obvious truths.

1) There is no such thing as "trans women". No individual is this thing they created. Sex is real, it is the only natural means of reproduction any of us have. If they find some strange anomalous person, that is not licence to reclassify everyone who wants to be reclassified, it is in fact a red herring.

2) Men and women are classified by, and only by, the reproductive function their bodies are designed to fulfill. When they say "So you want to reduce women to their genitals?" they are knowingly asking the wrong question. They are purposefully confusing the features that distinguishing reproductive function with the totality of an individual. A person can not be defined, but their attributes can be classified. A person can be what ever they are capable of being. A woman is a person who can be what ever they are capable of being, whose body has one specific function in the reproductive process. So, the one thing a woman can't do is naturally father a child, or put a legitimate pregnancy scare into another woman.

3) The one thing men can't do is naturally give birth to a child, or be put into a legitimate pregnancy scare as a woman can. These attributes rule out membership in the set of the opposite sex. Dr. Levine of the Biden administration and formerly of the state of Pennsylvania, who while there stuffed elderly people into nursing homes if they appeared to have covid, essentially signing their death warrant as nursing homes were incapable of providing care even before the deluge of patients while also putting his own mother into a hotel to save her from the fate Levine sentences others to, fathered children and therefore is a man and not a woman.

4) to call Levine a woman is to change the definition of the word so that it includes its opposite, rendering the word useless. This is essentially the "emperor's new clothes" where nakedness is redefined as clothed. The effort will remove from us the tool of syllogism.

5) They might counter "you don't know what genitals I have!" but that is not the point. This not Schrodinger's cat (which was an idea created to show how ridiculous the Copenhagen interpretation is, not to be accepted as just how it is. #TeamDeBroglieBohmForLifeBaby). Not knowing which someone has does not mean they have do not have one and only one of the two and only two possibilites-- red herrings not withstanding. Passing is in fact lying. Getting away with it does not make it right. "Hate the game not the player" does not justify cheating or lying.

6) what about the red herrings mentioned above, those extremely rare cases where proper classification is not readily observable? We do not have to classify those red herrings, but more importantly they are not relevant to the "gender" question. Most importantly, we do not have accept when they use those red herrings to reclassify themselves because they are irrelevant to the gender question.

I don't pretend to have ThomasAquinas'd this issue, but I think if team "TWain'tW" works to see the specifically bad logic and rhetorical tricks used, and to articulate the best ways to counter them, winning is easy. Who keeps score will always be a problem, but winning is easy. I also don't pretend I counter them well. I'm too verbose and given to tangents, my latest, mentioned above, is below for proof.

• Tangential bs mentioned above for those who want to stop reading.

The idea of jealousy between the middle classes and the ruling classes is applicable. So many bad ideas flow from an idle middle class educated away from their own good, and educated:1) into a system that serves no overall greater good but the good of those a top the system, and 2) into a false sense that they deserve somethings others have but probably do not deserve. I first noticed a problem when I saw people claiming to be oppressed who I saw as pretty well off and comfortable. I realized they were not complaining about rights they did not have or problems they had, but privileges they say others had. Basically it is "I made it! I should not be experiencing these things lower people experience."

This, I think is the whole point of "allies" in the woke coalition, which is no different than it ever was when Rudolph Rocker pointed out the failings of working class and labor movements every single time they allied with the middle classes to bring about changes in society. It always prioritized middle class privileges over working class needs.

This is why so many pretty well off dudes are "in the vanguard" of this counter-revolution that erases women.