Which gender are you?

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Which gender are you?

Female
8
14%
Male
37
66%
Alchemical Androgyne
5
9%
None of your business
3
5%
It's complicated
1
2%
Other
2
4%
 
Total votes : 56

Re: Which gender are you?

Postby zangtang » Tue Nov 24, 2015 4:44 pm

what trans problem ?
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Re: Which gender are you?

Postby guruilla » Tue Nov 24, 2015 4:55 pm

Luther Blissett » Tue Nov 24, 2015 3:47 pm wrote:The small wins (and my evidence for "enlightenment") are most readily seen in the ways in which the younger generations differ from ours in terms of progressivism. Greater numbers of interpersonal relationships that cut across cultural barriers more than ever before, abandonment of organized religions, greater class consciousness in their realization that their generation can no longer do better than their parents', declining proportion of the population participating in the armed forces, greater environmental consciousness, etc. Social engineering fights against those factors and others.

Have you followed the Occult Yorkshire thread at all? Based on evidence there (found in my own family circles) the above is at best over-simplification, at worst just wrong. I mean that, of the changes we consider progressive many of them appear to have been "incepted" early on as elements of a more long-term plan, which I'd sum up as "preventing embodiment" (which is directly related to what the therapist refers to as being separated from our intuition) To simplify, how sure can we be that these apparently positive social changes have really assisted individuals to come into a direct experience of their own inner/spiritual natures?

I mean you could be totally right about trans rights being a trojan horse for transhumanism and that my support for trans people needs to be tempered a little bit so that it's a little more nuanced, but how far back to we take it?

That's a valid question, not a rhetorical one. I'd say pretty far. Maybe Plato? :tongout
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Re: Which gender are you?

Postby Luther Blissett » Tue Nov 24, 2015 6:01 pm

Some of those examples two above are interesting and I don't know what to say about them. Others seem again like libertarians who want to kick over those in global poverty and who just happen to be trans. Others sound somewhat reasonable at face value ("some argue for the deemphasization of gender roles").

Good find on a direct correlation between transgender and transhuman with this postgender theory. I wouldn't guess many people in the small trans community would be into it, but it's already difficult enough for me to get anybody in the general population to side with me on anti-transhumanist activism as it is anyway. I sound like a lunatic.

On edit: this is a response for Guruilla's post one page back. I'll have to respond to others later.
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Re: Which gender are you?

Postby Luther Blissett » Tue Nov 24, 2015 6:10 pm

zangtang » Tue Nov 24, 2015 3:44 pm wrote:what trans problem ?


A lot of people seem to be acting, as far as I can tell, that trans people are a "problem" that needs "solving."
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Re: Which gender are you?

Postby Agent Orange Cooper » Tue Nov 24, 2015 6:21 pm

brainpanhandler » Tue Nov 24, 2015 6:07 am wrote:I didn't want to be bothered with explaining why AOC's post was a shitty thing to do. I try not to waste my time here with trolls and/or trollish behavior.


Please do, seeing as how I wasn't trolling. The issue in question is a very good example of what passes for activism these days. Or is a little sarcasm unwelcome here?
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Re: Which gender are you?

Postby yathrib » Tue Nov 24, 2015 6:25 pm

The comparison with BLM is somewhat disingenuous. Racial issues are a huge, huge thing on the American scene, and the 24 black men killed by police is the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Trans issues, on the other hand, affect a splinter of a splinter. I hate to engage in the fallacy of relative privation, but aren't there more efficient uses of our time for activism? Millions of girls and young women are subject to female genital mutilation, for example. This is a huge injustice and a real feminist issue that affects, again, millions. Where's their close up?


We hear a lot about the Black Lives Matter movement, which is at least tangentially similar. In the first half of this year, only 24 unarmed black men were killed by police. Statistically small, but very important. What's that poison pill?

I don't think trans rights or black lives matter represent trojan horses. They're just problems that a very slowly enlightening society wants to / has the capability / wherewithal / maturity to address.

The question about implants and devices for disabled people wasn't really rhetorical. If I was an oligarch I would be all over that. It's the perfect story.
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Re: Which gender are you?

Postby yathrib » Tue Nov 24, 2015 6:35 pm

I actually don't subscribe to that kind of view of things much at all. Ever since I started digging deeply into these kinds of issues and being around more and more people who don't conform to gender norms, I've become increasingly disenchanted with the binary model. Of course I know that most of the people in the (North American) mainstream do, but it doesn't gain so much traction for me, personally.


Great. But when someone like Jenner claims to be a woman (for example) that is obviously not their view. And the "girl brain in boy body" model is the dominant one in most of the propaganda presented in the media and for public consumption, yes?


The biggest reason why people would conform in looks to a binary: so that the many, many haters out there don't hurt or kill them. Beyond the murder and all that physical violence are lots and lots of other forms of violence that will be done to people who don't conform. Please let's not forget that- this is a huge factor.


Fair enough...

Also, I think there is a very important generational factor in all this- every young feminist I know is definitively and strongly supportive of trans liberation. That is an integral part of their feminism, in fact. Older feminists, it's more complicated- many are trying to get up to speed, even though it's an effort, a smaller number are hostile.

Mostly though- and this is an important point- the people I know who don't conform to those norms, were/are the militant feminists taking Women's Studies classes, including theorists like Julia Serano. It's really not a big deal in my world.


Okay.... But doesn't this illustrate the point some are making that trans issues are highjacking and superceding feminist issues? With so many issues affecting women, is this really worthy of the energy expended?
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Re: Which gender are you?

Postby Luther Blissett » Tue Nov 24, 2015 7:10 pm

Activists can be concerned with more than one issue at once.
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Re: Which gender are you?

Postby divideandconquer » Tue Nov 24, 2015 8:06 pm

UK pediatric transition referrals DOUBLE in SIX months, girls far outnumber boys, many under 10 years old

According to a freedom of information response obtained by the Guardian, the number of children referred to the Tavistock has jumped from 314 referrals in 2012-13 to 697 referrals in 2014-15. In the last six months the service has seen a further increase in referrals with 634 children referred between April and September.

Many of the referrals – 151 from 2012-13 to 2014-15 – relate to children under the age of 10, including one three-year-old and 12 four-year-olds.


Scary.
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Re: Which gender are you?

Postby Sounder » Tue Nov 24, 2015 9:10 pm

Activists can be concerned with more than one issue at once.


One trouble with ‘activism’ is that with folk so inclined, because they see the corrupt nature of the system, they will tend to support things that tear down the ‘system’. Yet these folk do not seem to realize that there will be system one way or another.

Did the ‘activists’ in the Ukraine, Syria, Libya, Egypt and others that accept Soros type NGO money provide any actual service to their communities? Or did they just tear things down causing untold amounts of suffering for millions of people while lining the bankers pockets as nations pile on more debt to cope with the bullshit.

This system is robust because it provides a place for anyone that is obsessed with enemies a forum to act out their pathologies. The system is about coercion and so are many facets of activism, making for an ideal not system supporting, system supporting system.

Neat trick, huh?
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
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Re: Which gender are you?

Postby American Dream » Tue Nov 24, 2015 9:58 pm

yathrib » Tue Nov 24, 2015 5:35 pm wrote:
I actually don't subscribe to that kind of view of things much at all. Ever since I started digging deeply into these kinds of issues and being around more and more people who don't conform to gender norms, I've become increasingly disenchanted with the binary model. Of course I know that most of the people in the (North American) mainstream do, but it doesn't gain so much traction for me, personally.


Great. But when someone like Jenner claims to be a woman (for example) that is obviously not their view. And the "girl brain in boy body" model is the dominant one in most of the propaganda presented in the media and for public consumption, yes?




Also, I think there is a very important generational factor in all this- every young feminist I know is definitively and strongly supportive of trans liberation. That is an integral part of their feminism, in fact. Older feminists, it's more complicated- many are trying to get up to speed, even though it's an effort, a smaller number are hostile.

Mostly though- and this is an important point- the people I know who don't conform to those norms, were/are the militant feminists taking Women's Studies classes, including theorists like Julia Serano. It's really not a big deal in my world.


Okay.... But doesn't this illustrate the point some are making that trans issues are highjacking and superceding feminist issues? With so many issues affecting women, is this really worthy of the energy expended?


All the young feminists who I know would certainly refute the idea that it's one against the other. They see Patriarchy framing and defining both. I highly doubt any of them would claim that the struggle against White Supremacy and/or the Class Struggle were somehow separate from the "many issues affecting women", either.
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Re: Which gender are you?

Postby minime » Tue Nov 24, 2015 10:06 pm

Babylon Sisters, shake it!
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Re: Which gender are you?

Postby backtoiam » Tue Nov 24, 2015 11:29 pm

I highly doubt any of them would claim that the struggle against White Supremacy and/or the Class Struggle were somehow separate from the "many issues affecting women", either.



Me too. I found a white person hiding in a ham sandwich yesterday. Glad I didn't eat it and get infected with white DNA.

this thread never stops giving....i won't even have to watch the comedy channel tonight... :partyhat


(^^^^i know i shouldn't have done that, but i just couldn't help it)
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Re: Which gender are you?

Postby Heaven Swan » Wed Nov 25, 2015 11:27 am

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2015/10/28/4340688.htm

Transgenderism: The Latest Anti-Feminist Wedge of the Left

Caroline Norma ABC Religion and Ethics 28 Oct 2015

Transgenderism is not a political movement motivated by progressive concerns; it's just the latest weapon in the Left's covert battle against feminism.


Comments (111)

At least since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, Lefties have been rankled by the presence of feminists among their ranks.

But purging these uppity women presents a challenge. Overtly denigrating feminists is risky: it can be perceived as misogynistic, and cedes too much political ground on issues lefties like to call their own - such as abortion rights.

Unfortunately, prolific and global male crimes of incest, rape, prostitution, domestic violence, female genital mutilation, child marriage and acid attacks make the feminist cause a bit too justified, and a bit too popular.

So the Left is stuck with having to marginalise through covert means the political movement organised to resist male supremacy and its violent war against women and children.

An effective covert tactic has been to play wedge politics.

Marxists, peaceniks, greenies, queers, animal libbers and some anti-racism groups over three decades have been remarkably united in their commitment to purging feminists from the Left. All agree the womanly concerns of feminists are small-worldish, and tainted with embarrassments like female ageing and poverty. They are unsexy, child-focused, lesbian-loving and distract from the Left's pursuit of "serious" issues like atheism, nuclear proliferation and ecological destruction.

Feminism's mission to dismantle male sexual entitlement is offensive, and inconceivable as a political project even among those who challenge entitlements of meat-eating or capital accumulation. Feminist priorities can also be inconvenient for adored male leaders: the Left rues the fates of Roman Polanski and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, ignores Woody Allen's daughter, and defends Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg.

Leftist tactics against feminists are politically sophisticated, and increasingly so. They have to be: social science evidence of male violence against women and children has piled up over the years, its victims are increasingly organised, and international institutions have been remarkably receptive to feminist thinking and arguments. In this sort of climate, discrediting, ostracising, ridiculing and marginalising feminists is no easy task.

The Left has nonetheless managed to purge feminists from its ranks more successfully today than at any time since the Second World War. Pitting women against each other, first, through bastardising a core feminist demand, and then, by turning it into a wedge issue around which dissenting women are vilified, has proven to be a winning formula.

The Left's first victory came in the 1980s. Throughout this decade, feminist opposition to pornography was beginning to gain traction as a wedge issue. As a result, an entire generation of feminists was driven from the Left for refusing to adhere to the newly minted idea of the sexual revolution that pornography was an expression of women's political freedom.

In 1987 Andrea Dworkin wrote that the Left "cannot have its whores and its politics too," and was thereafter branded - along with Catharine MacKinnon - its arch-enemy. Dworkin and her ilk were cast out, and their work in support of the world's most abused women never attracted broad progressive support. The global sex industry was the direct beneficiary of this win against feminists of the 1980s.

A subsequent generation of feminists in the 1990s was defeated, again by a Leftist wedge tactic, but this time the long history of feminist abolitionist campaigning against prostitution was the core demand turned upside down. Instead of sexual slavery, the Left reconceptualised prostitution as a form of work for women, and a consumer service activity for "clients." Feminists who failed to parrot this newly conceived idea of "sex work" were chased out, and women got rewards for doing the chasing. Academic superstars Martha Nussbaum and Ueno Chizuko were just two of many who got on board.

Prostitution was a particularly cynical choice for the Left as a wedge issue in the 1990s; before this time, opposition to prostitution had been a central pillar of its thinking and campaigning. The 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party had called for the "abolition of the community of women springing from ... prostitution both public and private."

By the twenty-first century, however, both prostitution and pornography have lost some of their strength as wedge issues: the global sex industry's horrors and hangovers were too stark.

The Left today is nonetheless achieving a purge of feminists from its ranks unrivalled by their previous successes of the 1980s and 1990s. Playing wedge politics is still the tactic of choice, but the issue requiring women's pledge of allegiance is brand new.

Transgenderism bastardises the core feminist insight that "woman" is a politically defined social category generated by male violence and the exclusion, expropriation and colonisation of female human beings. Rendered as a Leftist wedge issue, this insight becomes the distorted proposition that "woman" is a flexible human "identity" with which any individual might associate themselves - even fully-grown rational male human beings.

Rather than being a designator of subordinated social class membership, "woman" is a feeling that can swell in any man's breast. Acting on this feeling, he might adopt sex-stereotyped clothing and behaviours, and others must hold these caricatured displays in high regard. Female pronouns must be used, and laws and policies must be changed to newly recognise women, not as an historically vulnerable social group, but as the product of an individual man's inner thoughts and feelings.

The Leftist purge of women who refuse publicly to declare allegiance to such ideas of transgenderism is proceeding apace. It takes the form of the "no-platforming" of feminists at speaking events, the petitioning of conference venues to drop bookings from feminist groups, the public harassment and ridicule of dissenters, and lobbying for women to be removed from jobs and positions of public profile.

Janice Raymond, who authored The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male back in 1979, is still being targeted by Leftists in these ways. Sheila Jeffreys endures the same fate since the publication in 2014 of Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism. Julie Bindel wrote a series of articles criticising the biological essentialism and homophobia of transgenderism, and for her efforts receives death and rape threats. So too does Cathy Brennan for maintaining an online database of transgender-related legislation, criminal cases and police reports.

Most recently, Germaine Greer has hit back in the media about the public sanction, harassment and exclusion she faces for refusing to recognise transgender men as women.

Her comments are notable for their attempt to get behind the wedge issue that transgenderism represents and address the real issue of misogyny on the Left that motivates its ideological spread.

In her discussion, Greer repeatedly flags the especial woman-hating that is reserved for female elders in Western societies, and entreats viewers to "try being an old woman!" and "try running with sagging breasts down the middle of the street" in response to the interviewer's questions about transgender displeasure at the prospect of not being recognised as women.

This comparison of male hurt feelings with the violence, poverty, ridicule, disgust and social erasure that older women inevitably endure goes to the heart of the Left's misogyny: never in history have we seen a broad-based progressive social movement dedicated to championing the rights of the group of human beings who are devalued in male sexual terms as no longer having perky breasts or youthful faces. Even though these women make up the most impoverished and despised of all social groups, Greer reminds us that we instead worry about hurting the feelings of men who embark on extreme feminine beauty practices, and champion them as "a better woman than someone who is just born a woman." In other words, anyone is preferable to an old woman, even a man parading as one.

Transgenderism is not a political movement motivated by progressive concerns - it's just the latest weapon in the Left's covert battle against feminism. Women like Greer, Raymond, Jeffreys, Bindel and Brennan who authentically concern themselves with the condition of women at the bottom of the pile are the feminists being purged in the twenty-first century version of the Leftist wedge.

But Greer was politically savvy in insisting her audience acknowledge misogynistic ageism in response to questions about transgenderism. It's a point feminists should continue to insist upon. The Left's woman-hating has a hard time remaining hidden when confronted with the real lives of aged women, even when it's throwing up dust about "cis-sexism" and "fluid identities."

If political wedges are the currency in which the Left deals, let's respond with our own around misogynistic ageism. It will be interesting to see what floats to the surface.

Caroline Norma is a lecturer in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University.
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Re: Which gender are you?

Postby slimmouse » Wed Nov 25, 2015 12:24 pm

Sounder » 25 Nov 2015 01:10 wrote:

This system is robust because it provides a place for anyone that is obsessed with enemies a forum to act out their pathologies. The system is about coercion and so are many facets of activism, making for an ideal not system supporting, system supporting system.

Neat trick, huh?


:thumbsup

Heres a very simple truth.

Any other individuals Gender, race, religion, political leanings etc etc is actually none of my fucking business. Just as long as they arent attempting to get in my face with it. Some of the threads on this forum can occasionally make a grown man cry.
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