Comment by cedilla | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cedilla | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

>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.

Try this at a bar in rural (red) Ohio. See how it works out. One of the most annoying things about this extremely online debate is the holier than thou attitude that people take about it. If only you've read the right books, and the right essays, and follow the right twitter accounts ... then you'll finally understand that women have penises and men have vaginas.

> Try this at a bar in rural (red) Ohio

I don't think anyone should be asking bars in Ohio, or anywhere, about this. No more than I would ask a bar in Ohio what they think of climate change. Or a group of theologians in the 16th century about how they felt about astronomy. Or computer science majors about the ethics of vegetarianism. This is just a crass appeal to common sense, where common sense is defined by what mostly white low-education blue collar workers supposedly think.

> you'll finally understand that women have penises and men have vaginas

No, you misunderstood. (First of all, that's not even the correct claim, you should have said some of them do.) But even with that, you misunderstood. The point isn't that you have to accept that transgender people exist. It's that inserting concepts like "adult biological woman" does not show that transgender people do not exist. Nothing interesting whatever can be shown with this distinction. The "biological" part of it doesn't hang together in the way you want it to. More generally, the problem is that critiques of concepts around transgenderism tend not to be well thought out at all (that includes both sides); if you want a proper critique you need to be reading people who have been trained to think consistently about difficult topics around gender, sex, social behavior, etc.

But my interest here is more that we're now up to 634 comments on an article that makes no real argument whatsoever. The author is just here to complain that transgender people have stolen her vocabulary word. Is there really any plausible explanation for why so many people have gathered here other than that a bunch of anti-trans people smelled blood in the water?

My point is that activists generally are not content with merely seeking acknowledgement that gender dysphoria exists, they have to force people to redefine basic biology and change their language. You can call it "crass" all you want, and derisively referring to anyone that doesn't agree with the new ideology "white low-education blue collar" is exactly the kind of elitist navel gazing that I'm talking about. "These people who don't agree with my new religion are stupid" is, while rude, an extremely effective tactic so I expect this to continue.

"Humans are either male or female" is not "basic biology", it's kindergarten biology. It's strictly false, even if we ignore transgender or transsexual topics completely.

It is sometimes an abstraction that is good enough. It's a bit like Newtonian physics in that way.

> Is there really any plausible explanation for why so many people have gathered here

Is it gathering if we were already here? We're concerned that sex-based rights can't exist if sex-related words are redefined. We're doubly concerned that this seems intentional.

> bunch of anti-trans people smelled blood in the water?

Are you anti-trans if you see someone's sex as the primary factor in who you let shower with your young children? Are you anti-trans if you feel that female rape-relief shelters should be allowed to exclude males?

The problem is that anyone talking about any sex-based rights, no matter how important or how much they're willing to concede, is immediately called transphobic or anti-trans.

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.

I wanted to read the article but it appears to be paywalled .

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