5 ms·

"to protect transgender men and women, a class of people who are supposedly more “oppressed” than biological women. Even if this were true (and I’m deeply skept

"to protect transgender men and women, a class of people who are supposedly more “oppressed” than biological women. Even if this were true (and I’m deeply skeptical)" I thought trans people being oppressed was clear statistically and unambiguous. I am surprised at her skepticism. Are the statistics not clear? One can quibble over causality, but my understanding is that they are a group with massively higher rates of suicide and depression, and so a group that would likely benefit from support.

lo_zamoyski 4y ago
- QuantumPain 4y ago
  I find this claim surprising could you provide a source?
  - angry_octet 4y ago
    They can't provide a credible source because the evidence is exactly the opposite.
golemiprague 4y ago
762236 4y ago
"at a time in my life when I have never felt more essentially female, more debilitated by a physical condition directly attributable to my biological sex, more in need of clear, informative language describing what I’m going through, journalists and medical authorities are hard at work seeking to obfuscate the differences between male and female bodies."
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- watwut 4y ago
  There is zero ambiguity or confusion in the changed language. The bio parts are super clear.
  - Rebelgecko 4y ago
    I found "chestfeeding" to be pretty confusing. If you put me on the spot I'd assume it was a reference to the movie Alien before I guessed it referred to milking mammaries. I can also see how being called a menstrator would feel objectifying (kinda like how in some contexts calling someone a breeder or a bleeder is derogatory)
    - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
      Especially because you need (female) breasts to breastfeed... men have chests too.
      - infradig 4y ago
        There's no such thing as female breasts, there are just breasts and both women and men have them.
        cedilla 4y ago
        Men can even lactate, as can infants and women who aren't pregnant. Avoiding "breast-feeding" seems unnecessary to me.
        dehrmann 4y ago
        They also call it "breast cancer" in men, so you're probably right.
      - Waterluvian 4y ago
        I have met our species and I’m confident that if not taught carefully, there will be individuals who are confused to find that they do not produce milk. To be clear, I’m not talking about gender identity, but that unless we speak in clear, non-riddles, we’d be shocked by how many people don’t understand some things that we think are obvious, like how about 50% of human nipples/chests/breasts will never naturally produce milk.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
PartiallyTyped 4y ago
Also housing discrimination, work discriminated, etc etc.
cedilla 4y ago
The author also states that she never "felt constrained by being a woman". A bit further down, it becomes clear that the article isn't really about erasure of women in pregnancy literature, it's just another pamphlet against trans people. It begins with a link to a news story to a press release of a university about babies being able to distinguish female faces from male faces, labelled as scientific proof that "polite society has largely submitted to being gaslit on a set of delusions so demonstrably false that even infants can see through them." That's the highest level of scientific rigour demonstrated in the article: a cherry-picked news article that's not completely off-topic. The perspective of people identifying as trans or what scientists have to say on the topic is completely ignored, instead there are simply assertions that any other view is obvious "nonsense". I'm also not a huge fan of many of the new terms referred to in this article. However, here they are only a pretext for spilling hate against trans people. If the point of the article was to criticize PC language, there would have been no need to insult some random trans-woman. Not even a trans-man, the people who the inclusive birthing language is intended for; no, the author just casually throws in some hate against trans-women because that's what she actually wants to talk about.
- JBits 4y ago
  As far as I can tell you're the first person here to comment about the actual article without stopping after the beginning. While I'm guilty of this too, almost everyone here hasn't clarified what we're actually arguing about. Your's is the best response in this entire thread.
  - pnt12 4y ago
    I wanted to read the article but it appears to be paywalled .
- bscphil 4y ago
  I think you've really nailed it. It's very hard to take her views seriously if you've done the slightest bit of reading on this topic at all. The fact that it's receiving so much attention here is embarrassing, and in my humble opinion, very telling. Just in case it isn't clear, virtually no one in the literature takes the idea of a "adult biological woman" as a useful distinction, no matter how intuitive it may seem to most engineers. There's no real daylight between claiming that being "gender-critical" is "biologically based" as this author does, and outright rejection of transgender identities, which the author claims not to do. Virtually everyone with any philosophical training or background whatsoever thinks Quillette is a joke of a publication, not because of "ideology" or "social enforcement" but because, well, they publish embarrassing shit like this. Add that to the fact that there have been almost 600 comments here on this joke of an article that doesn't manage to get past screed and offer a single coherent argument, and the result is frankly pretty infuriating. Half of it is just misdirection, to be clear. Abortion is absolutely a women's rights issue, everyone involved agrees on that I think. It is nonetheless false that everyone who gets an abortion is a woman.
origin_path 4y ago
"I thought trans people being oppressed was clear statistically and unambiguous." Oppression isn't something you can even give a clear and unambiguous definition for, let alone measure statistically. "my understanding is that they are a group with massively higher rates of suicide and depression" This does not automatically imply they are oppressed. An obvious and common alternative interpretation is that choosing to surgically change your gender is at least sometimes caused by mental illness, which also causes depression and suicide, and/or that people who change gender discover that they don't actually like their new gender (for internal reasons, not due to the attitudes of others).
- antifa 4y ago
  Even if we follow your chain of logic uncritically, then we still arrive at the same conclusion because mentally ill people are oppressed.
jimbokun 4y ago
> I thought trans people being oppressed was clear statistically and unambiguous. I see this being asserted all the time, but very rarely with any kind of quantifiable evidence attached.
- QuantumPain 4y ago
  Injustice at Every Turn: The Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey https://www.academia.edu/download/31122982/NTDS_Report.pdf https://www.academia.edu/download/31122982/NTDS_Report.pdf
  - jimbokun 4y ago
    Thanks for the link, but it's giving me a 404.
    - QuantumPain 4y ago
      Sorry about that! Here's a link to site you can download the article from: https://dataspace.princeton.edu/handle/88435/dsp014j03d232p https://dataspace.princeton.edu/handle/88435/dsp014j03d232p

lo_zamoyski 4y ago

QuantumPain 4y ago
I find this claim surprising could you provide a source?
- angry_octet 4y ago
  They can't provide a credible source because the evidence is exactly the opposite.

golemiprague 4y ago

762236 4y ago

"at a time in my life when I have never felt more essentially female, more debilitated by a physical condition directly attributable to my biological sex, more in need of clear, informative language describing what I’m going through, journalists and medical authorities are hard at work seeking to obfuscate the differences between male and female bodies."

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
watwut 4y ago
There is zero ambiguity or confusion in the changed language. The bio parts are super clear.
- Rebelgecko 4y ago
  I found "chestfeeding" to be pretty confusing. If you put me on the spot I'd assume it was a reference to the movie Alien before I guessed it referred to milking mammaries. I can also see how being called a menstrator would feel objectifying (kinda like how in some contexts calling someone a breeder or a bleeder is derogatory)
  - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
    Especially because you need (female) breasts to breastfeed... men have chests too.
    - infradig 4y ago
      There's no such thing as female breasts, there are just breasts and both women and men have them.
      - cedilla 4y ago
        Men can even lactate, as can infants and women who aren't pregnant. Avoiding "breast-feeding" seems unnecessary to me.
      - dehrmann 4y ago
        They also call it "breast cancer" in men, so you're probably right.
    - Waterluvian 4y ago
      I have met our species and I’m confident that if not taught carefully, there will be individuals who are confused to find that they do not produce milk. To be clear, I’m not talking about gender identity, but that unless we speak in clear, non-riddles, we’d be shocked by how many people don’t understand some things that we think are obvious, like how about 50% of human nipples/chests/breasts will never naturally produce milk.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

PartiallyTyped 4y ago

Also housing discrimination, work discriminated, etc etc.

cedilla 4y ago

The author also states that she never "felt constrained by being a woman". A bit further down, it becomes clear that the article isn't really about erasure of women in pregnancy literature, it's just another pamphlet against trans people. It begins with a link to a news story to a press release of a university about babies being able to distinguish female faces from male faces, labelled as scientific proof that "polite society has largely submitted to being gaslit on a set of delusions so demonstrably false that even infants can see through them." That's the highest level of scientific rigour demonstrated in the article: a cherry-picked news article that's not completely off-topic. The perspective of people identifying as trans or what scientists have to say on the topic is completely ignored, instead there are simply assertions that any other view is obvious "nonsense". I'm also not a huge fan of many of the new terms referred to in this article. However, here they are only a pretext for spilling hate against trans people. If the point of the article was to criticize PC language, there would have been no need to insult some random trans-woman. Not even a trans-man, the people who the inclusive birthing language is intended for; no, the author just casually throws in some hate against trans-women because that's what she actually wants to talk about.

JBits 4y ago
As far as I can tell you're the first person here to comment about the actual article without stopping after the beginning. While I'm guilty of this too, almost everyone here hasn't clarified what we're actually arguing about. Your's is the best response in this entire thread.
- pnt12 4y ago
  I wanted to read the article but it appears to be paywalled .
bscphil 4y ago
I think you've really nailed it. It's very hard to take her views seriously if you've done the slightest bit of reading on this topic at all. The fact that it's receiving so much attention here is embarrassing, and in my humble opinion, very telling. Just in case it isn't clear, virtually no one in the literature takes the idea of a "adult biological woman" as a useful distinction, no matter how intuitive it may seem to most engineers. There's no real daylight between claiming that being "gender-critical" is "biologically based" as this author does, and outright rejection of transgender identities, which the author claims not to do. Virtually everyone with any philosophical training or background whatsoever thinks Quillette is a joke of a publication, not because of "ideology" or "social enforcement" but because, well, they publish embarrassing shit like this. Add that to the fact that there have been almost 600 comments here on this joke of an article that doesn't manage to get past screed and offer a single coherent argument, and the result is frankly pretty infuriating. Half of it is just misdirection, to be clear. Abortion is absolutely a women's rights issue, everyone involved agrees on that I think. It is nonetheless false that everyone who gets an abortion is a woman.

origin_path 4y ago

"I thought trans people being oppressed was clear statistically and unambiguous." Oppression isn't something you can even give a clear and unambiguous definition for, let alone measure statistically. "my understanding is that they are a group with massively higher rates of suicide and depression" This does not automatically imply they are oppressed. An obvious and common alternative interpretation is that choosing to surgically change your gender is at least sometimes caused by mental illness, which also causes depression and suicide, and/or that people who change gender discover that they don't actually like their new gender (for internal reasons, not due to the attitudes of others).

antifa 4y ago
Even if we follow your chain of logic uncritically, then we still arrive at the same conclusion because mentally ill people are oppressed.

jimbokun 4y ago

> I thought trans people being oppressed was clear statistically and unambiguous. I see this being asserted all the time, but very rarely with any kind of quantifiable evidence attached.

QuantumPain 4y ago
Injustice at Every Turn: The Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey https://www.academia.edu/download/31122982/NTDS_Report.pdf https://www.academia.edu/download/31122982/NTDS_Report.pdf
- jimbokun 4y ago
  Thanks for the link, but it's giving me a 404.
  - QuantumPain 4y ago
    Sorry about that! Here's a link to site you can download the article from: https://dataspace.princeton.edu/handle/88435/dsp014j03d232p https://dataspace.princeton.edu/handle/88435/dsp014j03d232p