Staff at a Californian spa defend right of man to show his genitals to naked and half dressed women and underage girls.

aloris342 · 2021-06-28T02:27:38+00:00

https://www.instagram.com/tv/CQfqaRDnS36/

I want to point out something. In the second video (I linked above), one of the women says that they were in there with a 9 year old and a 14 year old, neither of whom had ever seen a penis before and were traumatized. I just want to point out that even if these girls HAD seen a penis before or were not visibly traumatized (and we do know that trauma can be invisible for years) that it would still be wrong for an adult with those genitals to be exposed to them, or for their unclothed bodies to be exposed to that person. I think we need to be clear about our expectations that the boundaries of safeguarding for children do not depend on those children's emotional response to violation of those boundaries. It is only recently that we have become aware, as a society, that grooming children to accept boundary violations is problematic. We need to ensure that society does not walk that standard backwards.

aloris342 · 2021-06-18T14:50:48+00:00

So many terrible diseases in the world but someone decided to spend research resources on this.

aloris342 · 2021-06-17T05:54:01+00:00

There are several reasons I dislike these words. First, despite containing the word "people," these terms focus on body functions rather than the actual human person. Boys jeer at girls who are on their period. Men still make jokes in the workplace at times that a woman who is sharp towards them must be having "that time of the month" (notice that, even here, men are using a euphemism). Things like tampons were empowering because they allowed women to hide the fact that they were menstruating, which removed a tool that had been used to bully or humiliate women and therefore to gain social power over them. Calling women "people who menstruate" brings a physical vulnerability of women's bodies to the forefront of the conversation and to the forefront of the listener's mind, and therefore changes conversations to give us lower status. That is why it is dehumanizing.

Birthing people is problematic because it separates the physical (animal) (never forget that the idea is to position women as mere animals, in comparison to men who are the full and default humans) act of giving birth from the wholeness of the relationship between mother and child. Once I've given birth to my child, what am I then? No longer a birthing person, I suppose, but what? The fact that I gave birth to the child is unlinked from the fact that I am that child's mother. Terms like "birthing people" carefully slice up motherhood into functions that can be sold off or controlled from outside. And, as with "person who menstruates," it paints a particular picture in the mind (a partly naked woman, in pain, probably bloody, with her legs apart), and the goal of painting that picture is to disempower the woman in the social interaction of the person with whom she is talking.

Altogether, the big issue with redefining womanhood according to individual body functions, is that it attempts to separate each woman from the other. Little girls, adult human females, and postmenopausal women (even those without a uterus) have fundamental interests in common with each other. We have solidarity with each other (or, we should). But if we can't even speak about ourselves as a coherent class, then we can't organize or talk to each other about our common concerns.

aloris342 · 2021-05-09T18:57:09+00:00

The practice of referring to "other girls" is prejudicial and assumes the conclusion it is trying to prove. It is a logical fallacy that misleads the general listener into the assumption that trans girls are a kind of female person, when in reality trans girls are biologically male and should correctly fit into the category of male persons. The general listener thinks, "well of course any particular kind of girl should compete with other girls." But the real question is whether biological males should be allowed to compete with biological females if they wish to do so, and another question is whether biological males who wish to compete as if they were biological females should have the right to entirely redefine the category of biological female, not just for themselves, but also for everyone else.

aloris342 · 2021-05-02T16:09:34+00:00

The early part of the article says, "The United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) states that a period is the part of the menstrual cycle in which blood, comprising uterine lining, leaves the body. People who do not have ovaries and a uterus do not experience periods."

Later the article says, "How do trans women experience a period?" implying that transwomen DO have periods. This is internally contradictory to the prior statement, but likely is an example of the attempt to shift the dictionary definitions of sex-specific words so as to eliminate their sex-specificity and make them more "trans-friendly" (i.e. eliminate words that allow anyone to communicate about experiences or events specific to biological females).

Unfortunately I'm familiar with this website and it's fairly mainstream so when this site changes how they use words, then it is likely the commonly held meanings will also change, which means the dictionary definitions will then change.

aloris342 · 2021-04-15T00:00:13+00:00

Maybe they meant mammograms for people with chests.....

aloris342 · 2021-04-12T19:36:49+00:00

I think it doesn't help that scientists as a group have not really stood up for women as biological females. I think many Democrats consider themselves the "party of science" so if they think "science says" sex is a spectrum then they really will never examine who made that declaration or what it means. When they say they "believe in science" they are being more literal than they know: they don't know enough about the scientific details to accept "consensus" scientific claims on the basis of data, so instead they accept those claims on the basis that they believe scientists to be trustworthy. It's really a kind of faith for them, even though they think of themselves as rational, data-driven people. I generally trust scientists too, but I think what has happened here is that scientific claims have been mixed up with metaphysical claims. Yes, you can surgically alter human beings to remove or modify specific organs. Scientific research has helped show doctors how to remove a uterus from a woman safely, how to perform mastectomies safely, which hormones to give to induce breast growth. Those are science issues. Does removing a uterus turn a woman into a man? That is a metaphysics issue because it depends on what it means to be a woman or a man. Science can inform the issue, but does not decide the issue. People in favor of gender ideology have co-opted society's concept of woman and man (and, somehow, male and female) and redefined them for their own gain by conflating science and metaphysics. Surely the traditional concept (and the definition in law) was on the basis of reproductive adaptation (a girl/woman is adapted to reproduce as a female even if, for medical reasons, she never menstruates and is never able to carry a pregnancy to term). Now it's whatever trans right activists say it is, whether actual women agree or not.

aloris342 · 2021-04-12T00:48:45+00:00

wow, their attitude to their own biology is very sad.

aloris342 · 2021-04-11T22:54:08+00:00

In order to have a hysterectomy, one first has to have had a uterus. This, to me, is part of an argument that sees people as mere collections of cells outside of space or time, like dolls with parts that can be attached or detached with surgery. Attach one part, add some hormones, and you become a woman. Remove a part, you become a man. In reality, human beings are a unity of all our parts, adapted along a lifecourse that is either male or female. Just as menstruation is a normative part of the female lifecourse, so is menopause. It's very strange, the idea that since men do not have a uterus, then any person who does not have a uterus must be a man (unless the person is a transman, in which case they can have a uterus and still be a man, by some reasoning process that I don't understand).

aloris342 · 2021-04-11T22:24:00+00:00

"The two college-age TIFs who tried to convince me of the merits of this neologism a couple of Thanksgivings ago told me that giving birth vaginally is inherently debasing & disgusting, much more so than defecating."

Wait, what?

aloris342 · 2021-04-11T22:20:50+00:00

I'm worried about this because I feel it is very confusing to children who are trying to learn basic biology. Remember the kid who asked why women couldn't just hold their period blood inside until they can get to the bathroom? The reason society needs a word for periods and menstruation is because of the logistic and practical considerations around menstrual bleeding (or, if you want to be pedantic, shedding of the endometrial lining), not because of the hormone flux. Girls and women in certain countries are/were considered ritually unclean because of the period blood, not because of how they feel.

Even in my local community, there is a lot of political pressure to erase legal protection for girls as biologically different from boys. The general public seems to be unable to see how wrong this is because they are unable to reason through the issues clearly. The campaign to change public opinion by using language that obscures reality seems to be working, and anyone who speaks the truth is labeled a bigot and socially ostracized.

aloris342 · 2021-04-08T13:03:34+00:00

This is a good idea. I wonder if there is also a way to set up a watchdog type of organization where people could go into women's prisons and communicate with them in a way that allows them to speak freely. A prisoner advocacy organization. Prisoners must have privacy rights (in the sense that any random person can't just walk in off the street and say, "Hey I want to ask Jane Smith if she feels safe here. Can I visit her?"). But presumably they also have the right to speak to people on the outside and, as part of their right to advocate for their own welfare, disclose events that affect their safety within the prison environment. Pipe dream? Anyone?

aloris342 · 2021-04-07T20:30:10+00:00

"are forced to use the word choices dictated by their opponents"

Well said. That's the whole point of forcing them to do so, I would think. They are forced to cede the argument before they have even made it.

aloris342 · 2021-04-07T20:28:16+00:00

If the word "risky" applies to women's welfare, then it's clearly inhumane to women (i.e. not compassionate or benevolent to women), and the sentence as a whole does not make sense (a humane but inhumane experiment? What is that?). The word "humane," in the context of this sentence, only makes sense if the word "risky" applies to the same persons: humane to the men, and risky for the men. Seems like he only cares about the men here.

aloris342 · 2021-04-06T05:54:07+00:00

It's worrying to hear that the women's concerns have already been dismissed as misinformation and transphobia. This does not bode well for the commitment of the prison system to ensure the safety of the women in the system or to take accurate records of reports of negative events that occur after transwomen are moved into women's prisons. Is there any way for an independent watchdog to whom women prisoners can report their experiences? I feel so sad for these poor women who are trapped in a system where the very people who disregard their safety and dignity also have complete control over the information-collecting systems that record whether their safety and dignity have been kept intact.

aloris342 · 2021-03-30T13:32:35+00:00

I agree. If it were random, I think you would see these articles separated by a few days at a time as newsrooms saw that a particular article was getting clicks and decided to jump on the bandwagon. Instead, these articles seem to push particular strategies or talking points at the same time. It's really weird and I can't see how this is random.

Also amazing that the perspectives of biological girls are never considered. No one ever does an article allowing the girls to speak freely who lost competitions to transgirls or were forced to share private spaces like bathrooms or locker rooms. THOSE girls have been silenced. The transgirls are allowed to speak freely. It's so sad. I must say, if I were one of the girls who had been forced to give up sex-specific resources for a transgender girl, I would also be unwilling to admit I was uncomfortable, because girls and women who say they don't believe TWAW seem to get horribly doxxed and harassed.

I'm now revisiting my own childhood values and wondering how many of them are based on truth and how many are just things I internalized from cultural propaganda.

aloris342 · 2021-03-27T01:51:32+00:00

Is that an archived version? Sorry, I'm not good with that kind of thing. How do we archive it in case it gets censored?

aloris342 · 2021-03-26T04:27:39+00:00

Slanted writing seems to be rampant in reporting, especially on this issue. It seems like misinformation to me. Transwomen would not be banned from sport, they would just have to play in the division matching their sex. Aren't we supposed to be calling out misinformation? And yet somehow, this sort of reporting is allowed to continue.

aloris342 · 2021-03-24T13:10:20+00:00

This seems like another example of very privileged women thinking that the world is the same for everyone else as it is for themselves, so if a particular thing is safe for themselves, then it is safe for everyone.

aloris342 · 2021-03-22T06:31:41+00:00

Bioethics as a field has gone off the deep end, IMHO. As you point out, part of the problem is that the governing philosophy seems to be "I want it" rather than going with what is really healthy for our bodies. Hence, sterilization of young people can somehow be framed as a benefit, even though it is objectively damaging.

Also worried about the issue of women as organ donors for this kind of thing.

aloris342 · 2021-03-22T05:14:26+00:00

This highlights the problem that we will never be able to fix this situation because advocating for legislative fixes usually requires data and the entire situation has been carefully constructed to make it impossible to collect the data. I feel real despair about women's welfare right now.

aloris342 · 2021-03-22T04:28:59+00:00

“A woman who is born without a uterus and a man who transitions into a woman because of gender dysphoria have a similar claim to maternity if we consider them to have equivalent rights to fulfill the reproductive potential of their gender,”

Someone please deconstruct this sentence for me because, as written, it does not seem to make any sense.

aloris342 · 2021-03-20T14:43:58+00:00

I think this is just about power. Where do women, as a class, differ from men functionally, if we don't differ in material ways like having a uterus or ovaries? Well, on average we're smaller, weaker, slower, less physically robust, need more frequent contact with medical providers, need more societal protection of our physicality. If you redefine the class of women to include people who are actually male, you distort the statistical curve of any feature that affects our class. In fact you erase the physical differences that vary on a continuum. Thus we have males able to defeat (with ease!) females in running, cycling, etc, and the rationalization: "some women are really tall/really strong/really fast, so what's the big deal?" as if females who have similar features as males are not extremely rare in our sex class. What is the overall societal effect of this? It takes away protection and resources from those of us who, because of our biological femaleness, are smaller, weaker, slower, and erases the evidence that we even need that protection. It solidifies power in the hands of the powerful.

Everything about this is really about power.

aloris342 · 2021-03-11T14:34:22+00:00

I agree with you that people seem completely clueless about transwomen maintaining an advantage after transition. I think that the low profile of accurate statistics about male and female features is a problem.

aloris342 · 2021-03-07T02:26:13+00:00

Lots of information in that post, it will take me a while to digest it! I will say to begin with that I think the core of the issue is in your first paragraph, about how we define being of equal worth, vs being the same.

aloris342 · 2021-03-06T23:38:01+00:00

Exactly. When girls who speak out are publicly smeared as bigots, then how can we believe that subsequent surveys of girls' opinions or needs will produce accurate results?

aloris342 · 2021-03-06T18:16:41+00:00

I think that we have spent a lot of years inculcating into the culture the idea that girls and boys are equally good at everything and it is now being used against us. It's a lose-lose situation for girls and women. If we acknowledge that males and females are different in some ways, then it is used to give credence to arguments that men are smarter or better leaders or more capable than women. None of these claims are necessarily true, but people believed them for years because if men and women can be different in important ways, then why couldn't IQ be one of those differences (personally, the IQ difference argument never made sense to me; in evolution, wouldn't the sex that cares for offspring have a greater need for the IQ that allows them to help their young survive?) On the other hand, if we claim that males and females are fundamentally similar, then suddenly there are NO differences between male and female, even pretty obvious differences such as height, muscle strength, etc. It's a double bind.

aloris342 · 2021-03-06T16:25:40+00:00

It's also misinformation because such people are not banned from playing sports, they are simply expected to play in the division that matches their actual sex.

aloris342 · 2021-03-05T15:49:59+00:00

Yes, and I'm wondering if there is a way to pin this research as this would be good for those of us trying to convince others that women and girls really do need sex-segregated bathrooms.

aloris342 · 2021-03-05T15:22:28+00:00

I think for me it is not about the immediate safety aspect (i.e. the rate of assaults in women's restrooms before and after legal changes in policy), but about the dignity of women being able to set boundaries around private bodily events, and the more global (long term) safety aspect of women having a right to set these boundaries. People shrugged when I explained to them that women in a shelter had to shower with a man who was leering at them, or at the idea that women in prisons might be impregnated by a transwoman. The argument is that this is all about compassion and kindness (i.e. we need to be compassionate to transwomen), but the lack of compassion for biologically female people gives the lie to this argument. A new societal construct is being built where women are considered selfish bigots if we exert the right to set personal boundaries. This has nothing to do with compassion and everything to do with power.

Where I am really concerned is about girls, about their right to be safe in their bodies, and, as importantly, the rights of their parents to protect their bodily safety and privacy.

aloris342 · 2021-03-05T03:29:40+00:00

I like the comment below that consent is not transferable. "My privacy is not yours to give away." My experience, however, has been that these people generally are not people who can be convinced. They are men, or they are women in good financial situations who are at little risk of themselves or their daughters being placed in a dangerous situation. As long as they get theirs, they don't really care about vulnerable women. When you question them a little about their reasoning, you discover that in their hearts, they consider a woman who can't fight off a (larger) man, or who is afraid to walk home alone late at night, or who has any kind of debilitating female problem, or is physically unattractive, to be unworthwhile people who don't deserve to have safety. If such women would only improve themselves to be worthy of good lives, then they wouldn't need stupid things like sex-segregated spaces.

Sorry to be so cynical.

aloris342 · 2021-03-03T20:31:28+00:00

I think also that this also speaks to the problematic idea that a vagina is nothing more than a hole in a woman's form. This is a way of looking at the female body that really centers the idea that women, as women, exist merely to serve men sexually. In reality, the vagina functions as a complex channel between the uterus and the outside world, with adaptive functions that protect the health of the woman and any babies she might gestate and deliver.

aloris342 · 2021-03-03T16:05:20+00:00

Facial feminization surgeries do convince the public that there is a gradient from male to female. People are not aware that the person did not look feminine before the facial feminization surgery, so they think that these are people who are born with male reproductive organs but who naturally look feminine. That makes it much easier for them to believe that biological maleness and femaleness naturally occur along an intrinsic gradient. The practice of hiding a person's entire pre-transition history likely will contribute to reinforcing this perception. Expect this practice to become law: that it will be considered an act of harassment to disclose a transgender person's pre-transition gender.

aloris342 · 2021-02-27T01:03:57+00:00

Good ideas!

aloris342 · 2021-02-26T14:41:05+00:00

Glad you were able to get through to them. I talked about it to my mom and she just kept declaring TWAW. I explained some of the risks to women in prisons and in women's shelters, citing specific examples, and she actually didn't believe me. She said the events I was describing were too bizarre and couldn't possibly be real. This is why I think we really need to focus on documenting the evidence for the effects of these laws. I think her perspective is an example of the fact that middle-class women are sometimes unable to see the truth because they really do not have any experience of what life is like for women who are lower on the scale of income, social power, and family support, or of how having female biology creates material disadvantages for those women that make them vulnerable to misbehavior by men.

aloris342 · 2021-02-26T14:12:03+00:00

I think the only way to address this is to let it happen and let people see what happens when you eliminate the entire concept of womanhood as a sex-based category. Then document it. The problem is that I don't think we will be allowed to document it. Instances of women being harassed in public restrooms will be treated with "what proof do you have?" Journalists will step up to cover up the original identities of criminals, so that it will be impossible to track the sex divisions of various offenses. In fifteen years, the tables of height, weight, strength, and so on, will all have been "updated" to reflect that, wow, girls can get really tall!!!111! Tall girls are much more common than we thought! Women are so much faster than we thought! etc.

But I think trying to soften the effect will be counterproductive, because then people will think the changes are not harmful. Honestly I'm not really sure what to do about this.

aloris342 · 2021-02-26T01:55:33+00:00

This is good, but if we really want to gather usable evidence that eliminating women-only spaces causes harm, then these reports need to be verifiable. Obviously, we cannot have a situation where victims are asked to post their stories with their names attached, because that could be very risky for them. But maybe we could discuss whether there is a way for the victims to gather evidence without putting themselves at risk. For example, we need to help victims to know what kind of evidence they should be keeping in their private records: name of the establishment, date of the incident, names of any witnesses or other people present (if known), etc. Maybe they could take a photo of the outside of the establishment so they can document where they were and when they were there (obviously, for legal reasons, they would not be able to photograph the relevant areas). That way, if they wanted their experience to become part of the body of evidence later, they would have some written documentation. I doubt anything will be good enough for the people who are in charge of regulating all of this (of course the problem with eliminating the sex-specific nature of restrooms is that there is no way for a woman to prove what happened to her). But I think we have to prepare to gather evidence where we can, and work with the situation we have.

aloris342 · 2021-02-24T18:45:21+00:00

The more I think about it, the more I think that what the Equality Act does is nullify decades of political activity by women for their own interests, by redefining "woman" to mean not "adult human female" but "females and also males." It eliminates the effects of democratic legislation by redefining words and thus is anti-democratic. It is a massive form of disenfranchisement of women and should be declared unconstitutional.

aloris342 · 2021-02-23T16:41:10+00:00

I think one of the main problems here is that with us all being isolated from each other physically because of Covid-19, organizations such as Zoom count as essentially the public square. So this is problematic. I think this highlights that, as citizens, we need to push back on government restrictions on freedom of movement, even in a pandemic. When all of this first began, it was meant to be temporary. A few weeks to slow the spread and learn more about the virus. Now it has been almost a year, we know the virus will never go away, even with vaccinations, we have some tools to fight it, and yet there are still restrictions. These restrictions constrain our right to have private discussions with other people, to organize for political activity etc. (And how easy would it be, in addition, to translate this reasoning into "women aren't safe to go out unless they are with a male minder" once we have lost the right to sex-specific restrooms). So when various organizations step up to sue for retention of civil liberties during a pandemic, I think we need to support that.

aloris342 · 2021-02-23T00:38:02+00:00

I understand. It's great to be registered as an organ donor but I think we can do that and also recognize that there might be problems in some of the common underlying philosophies and the (moral and social) pressures (explicit and implicit) that are exerted on other people as a result.

aloris342 · 2021-02-22T18:31:40+00:00

I can believe that there is an effort to get people used to the idea that human beings are just collections of parts, which makes it easier to commoditize human life. I feel that a similar philosophy is evident in discussions of organ donation where we hear that there is "a shortage" of organs, which subconsciously makes the listener feel there is a moral need to increase the "supply" of organs. This belies the truth that everyone is born with their own organs and no one is actually entitled to any one else's organs. Surrogacy, I think there is something similar going on, the idea that a mother is just a uterus that nourishes the baby and that her intimate connection with the baby is not something that has any moral meaning. The way that science works, which is by reducing everything to simpler parts, so that you can study each aspect individually, does make it easier for people to think about humans as collections of parts. I think there are holes between science and philosophy, where the connection between our parts, or the biochemical mechanisms that keep us alive, and what we really are as human beings, has not really been discussed sufficiently. Even though learning about the workings of our different parts is useful, human beings are, in fact, NOT mere collections of parts.

aloris342 · 2021-02-22T15:56:01+00:00

Maybe we should make one.

aloris342 · 2021-02-22T05:28:53+00:00

I think there is careful political pressure on other countries. I agree that there is something chilling about it - if only the same focus were applied to child marriage, or female genital mutilation, for example. Again, it's strange that transgender ideology should be the issue chosen to be so favored.

aloris342 · 2021-02-22T04:33:13+00:00

I agree with you. The pandemic has made this much worse but the power of immense corporations is the essential problem. They can crush dissent and they are weirdly all aligned in the same direction.

aloris342 · 2021-02-22T00:55:37+00:00

Yes, that is worrying, isn't it? We should probably start thinking of ways to archive all of our data, ways that are independent of technology or that cannot be "canceled."

aloris342 · 2021-02-22T00:17:32+00:00

I have only been back to Target once since then, because there was something specific I had to get. Yes it was packed. Other than that one time, I have not been back there nor shopped there online. I'm happy to choose other suppliers. On the other hand, most suppliers are probably going to go woke and I doubt there will be options for those of us who do not with to support this ideology. There's also the issue of upstart establishments being shut down by other powerful corporate players (e.g. Parler) if they fail to comply with this ideology. Notice how only transgender ideology gets this privilege.

aloris342 · 2021-02-21T23:28:37+00:00

Actually this is one of the more concerning things I have read recently because it indicates that there is effort to stop people from communicating the truth to one another. If I wish to pick books for my children that avoid pushing transgender ideology, it would be helpful to read reviews from other people who read it with an eye to that concern. But this prevents me from knowing whether such topics are present in books I pick for my children.

aloris342 · 2021-02-21T23:21:53+00:00

I want to draw your attention to one of the tactics being used to get people to buy into gender ideology without noticing that gender ideology doesn't make sense. "It's time," "break the habit" and "the right concepts." All of these phrasings imply that the argument has already been had, settled, and that the right decision has been made; all that's left is for reasonable people to accept the result. Take a look through other reporting and notice how often articles use phrasing like this.

aloris342 · 2021-02-18T18:08:15+00:00

Biologists know what sex is. The thing is that we are used to mentally thinking of living organisms as collections of their cells so we can analyze their inner workings. It's a sort of reductionism. But we understand that these parts don't function individually. They need to be seen in the context of the whole organism to truly understand them. We are more than the sum of our parts. That is, the information gained individually from each part is insufficient to explain the behavior of the whole organism. In order to understand the whole organism you need a further level of information that you can only obtain by looking AT the whole organism; you need the way the different parts naturally relate to each other. A uterus does not live on its own in the wild, foraging for food or randomly producing babies. It is always found in the body of an actual woman.

aloris342 · 2021-02-18T17:40:12+00:00

The slicing apart of the plain, universal understanding of the word "women" into individualized bodily functions (menstruator, chestfeeder, vulva haver, birthing person) is precisely targeted at preventing us from engaging in political or social advocacy for our common interests. Not only does it (by separating us into disparate groups by biological minutiae) prevent us advocating for our common interests in the future, it also strips away the fruits of political advocacy that women have already achieved, hence nullifying legitimate political activity. It is a method of political disenfranchisement. That so many women fail to see this is strange to me. Why bother electing or petitioning to our elected representatives at all, when any law they write can simply be nullified in the future by redefining the basic meanings of words? The consequences of the legal erasure of women (by allowing males to define themselves into the legal category of women at will) go far beyond merely the consequences to ourselves. This is significant for our entire system of representation.

aloris342 · 2021-02-18T02:34:25+00:00

I think the media warping of the issue has made a big impact. How often have we heard the perspective of women forced to give up their privacy in a prison for the comfort of men, or women in a shelter forced to do the same, or of the girls who lost sports scholarships to boys? The language used to present the issue is very biased towards the transgender person's perspective, and as presenting the girls' perspective as mistaken or selfish or bigoted (or just not presenting it at all). It would be interesting to see a formal analysis of the language used in media articles on this topic.

aloris342 · 2021-02-15T20:13:28+00:00

Same here. Biologists have always been reductionists. We, of all people, know that sex counts. It's just weird to see biologists deny a reality that is so fundamental to our field.

aloris342 · 2021-02-11T19:06:46+00:00

We are the people who dare not speak our name. Maybe we can make up a new name. Unfortunately, the erasure of the words "women" and "female" (by redefining them to have only circular meaning and therefore no meaning at all) politically disenfranchises us by erasing the benefits of legislation targeted at our needs and fought for by prior voters.

aloris342 · 2021-02-05T16:19:12+00:00

I think this is true. I see a lot of scientific misinformation being presented as fact, by people who have no scientific background. They seem to be imbibing and then regurgitating standard talking points without understanding those talking points and without realizing that they are being misled. I think this is partly because our societal discourse tends, for some reason, to work along principles of soundbites: easy to ingest, not very meaningful. For example "Transwomen are women." That's easy. Most people do not realize it means nothing. Or, "Girl brain in a boy body." That makes no sense but people with a high school level of biology do not understand this. People fall for the "but a woman who had a hysterectomy is a woman so why can't a transwoman be a woman eleventy one" and, again, I think this is because it's easy to grasp this argument (even though the argument is fundamentally flawed). It is difficult to explain to the average voter that even though sex determination is indeed complex, that it is still true that there are two separate developmental pathways (male and female), and that it is possible to determine which pathway a particular person's body follows.

I know a number of parents of daughters, who (the parents) are completely on board with TWAW and I think the combination of the difficulty of explaining scientific reality, along with ideological loyalty to the idea that progressives always have your best interests at heart, is at work here.

aloris342 · 2021-01-29T02:32:39+00:00

Thanks!

aloris342