As of November 2022, gender self-identification, where no judge or medical expert are involved, is part of the law in 18 countries: Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Ecuador, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Portugal, Switzerland and Uruguay.
Thank you Graham. These are very hard posts to read and watch. I am afraid as they intend and will consider avoiding those countries. I am afraid about what Scots gender self-ID is about to bring to the rest of the UK. I hate what they have introduced to Ireland and all countries this has infiltrated. And I'm fucking furious too and about all of it.
Women in my family have talked and known of the urinary leash all my life, so maybe that makes us, me and my generation Suffragettes too. I know women engineers who had to fight to get access to loos as men just peed wherever on sites. People and our needs are still not 'designed in' to our environments. And women are still viewed as offshoots and odd, weak versions of the default human being and form - men.
"transwomen" -- compound word like "crayfish" which ain't.
The adjective-noun pair just concedes defeat right out of the chute; "transwomen" doesn't. And it gets transwomen's knickers in a twist -- win-win:
"However, ['transwoman'] is often associated with views (notably gender-critical feminism) that hold that transgender women are not women, and thus require a separate word from 'woman' to describe them. For this reason many transgender people find 'transwoman' offensive." -- suck it up buttercups.
That's the nature of compound words - it's not necessarily the case, often isn't the case, that the parts of them accurately describe those labelled with them:
Why there's some value in DEFINING "gender" to encompass those stereotypes and the personalities and behaviours that contribute to their creation. Those stereotypes aren't cut from whole cloth -- they EXIST because there are differences in behaviours and personalities by sex. For example, there's the personality type of "introvert", and the many people who exhibit varying degrees of introversion.
The sex/gender confusion is partly just exhibit no. 2301459623409857.0.1(ii)(a)(3) of ideological capture here—but it's also the result of cumulative '90's prudishness, especially in the US from what i gather. (That was the decade when US Second Lady Tipper Gore unironically chose censorship and age-restriction of music lyrics as her pet public-selrvice cause—despite representing the Democratic Party, which back then actually stood against censorship 'n shit for the most part... Le sigh.)
Basically, add up 999,999,999 individual instances of "haha sex! tee hee, 'sex' ahha! I can't say naughty words like that" from honestly well-meaning if ingenuous Americans-—aspecially from the born-again evangelical crowd (here I note with glee the similarity between "born again" and "born yesterday" bwahaha!)—who substituted the word "gender" instead, and... well, here we are.
In any case, I'm raising a glass right now to the absolutely fantastic little irony of people writing "gender and sex are interchangebale" on an explicitly GENDER CRITICAL blog ahhaha.
like guuuurl, just think about it for a sec... we're pretty clearly NOT "biological-sex critical" over here; ergo, sex ≠ gender. Q.E.D.
Link to Joanna Williams' "The Corrosive Impact of Transgender Ideology" therein.
But quite agree about sex not equal to gender. Or at least agree there's some merit in DEFINING the words so as to denote quite different kettles of fish. Most people don't realize there are no intrinsic meanings to words. Moses didn't bring the first dictionary down from Mt. Sinai on tablets A through Z so NO definitions carry the imprimatur or signature of Jehovah - Himself.
But, as mentioned above, the BMJ underlined that dichotomy, even if somewhat imperfectly:
Lycaerix: "You don't think 'societal sex-based roles/expectations and 'sex-related behaviour' are inherently stereotypical?"
Sure, they're "stereotypical". But where do you think they come from? Hatched in the inner-sanctums of "The Patriarchy (!!11!!)"? Just to "oppress" women"? 🙄
The stereotypes ASSOCIATED with those who are members of certain categories -- the sex categories in particular -- weren't cut from whole cloth; they're the result of many people exhibiting those traits. For some examples of typical sex-related stereotypes, there are MORE neurotic women than neurotic men, but there are MORE men who are rapists or violent than there are women who are.
Lycaerix: "I agree that 'gender' has many meanings, but you'll note that they're all related to sex."
So what if "they're RELATED to sex"? You're related to your parents -- does that make you the SAME as them?
Stereotypes are NOT what it means to have a sex, to be members of the sex categories. Don't think you're reading or thinking about anything I've said. See the Oxford Dictionary definition for "male" for example (link above):
"male (adjective): Of or denoting the sex that produces gametes, especially spermatozoa, with which a female may be fertilized or inseminated to produce offspring."
The ONLY requirement specified there to qualify as a male -- of ANY sexually-reproducing (anisogamous) species -- is to be able to produce sperm on a regular basis. Prepubescent penis-havers, and transwomen who cut their nuts off don't qualify and are therefore sexless.
There's diddly-squat there in those definitions about ANY stereotypes. As an analogy, consider "teenager". There are probably dozens of stereotypes about teenagers -- "irresponsible", "binge drinker", "selfish", etc. -- but it does not necessarily follow that ALL teenagers are like that, or that those who are 20 to 120 don't also exhibit those traits, those stereotypes:
TRY thinking that there's a difference between the criteria that are essential to qualify as members of various categories -- "male", "female", and "teenager" for examples -- and the stereotypes TYPICALLY associated with people in those categories.
Lycaerix: "So no, gender isn't different to sex. It's another name for the same thing."
In your entirely unevidenced OPINION. Try doing some reading and thinking about the facts on the table instead of just thinking that the way you think is gospel truth.
You might note a recent story about Cambridge Dictionaries over at Reality's Last Stand (indeed) who have redefined "woman" to include "adult human males", AKA men:
"woman (noun): an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth"
What a bunch of ignorant blathering -- "may have been said to have a different sex at birth"; idiots. But they are just contributing to the Big Lie that people can change sex. Should be anathematized in no uncertain terms.
Colin Wright at RLS had a decent summary of the problem:
"The circular definition declaring a woman is anybody who lives or identifies as a woman doesn’t actually do any work explaining what a woman is."
"Circular Definitions R Us" seems to characterize various transactivists and their "useful/useless" idiots like Cambridge Dictionaries. Rather depressing.
Yes, this is very dangerous I think. Changing the definition of a word in print seems like a way to erase the original meaning, and make the new invention official. You can then proceed to remove all previous dictionaries with the original meaning from the shelves. Young children would never know about the original meaning.
Something similar to this happened in New Zealand when I lived there as a kid.
Exactly right -- echoes of Orwell there in your comment. Maybe the import and source of your avatar picture? 🙂
In any case, reminds me of a passage from an oldish Quillette article (archived) on "Words Lose Their Meaning at [Canada's 😞] Wilfrid Laurier University":
"Though different literary forms, the key message of both works [1984, & 'Politics and the English Language'] was the same: beware any person or group that redefines words so that they no longer align with facts, common sense, and common usage."
Of particular note there is NZ's re-definition of "lesbian"
"Lesbian: A woman who is sexually attracted to people of the same sex or gender."
And, of course, "woman" as a gender encompasses various deluded if not psychotic penis-havers.
Cretins, frauds, charlatans, grifters, and the scientifically illiterate. Being charitable ... 😉🙂
But a rather serious problem -- not sure yet if it's hyperbole or an understatement to say that western "civilization" is hanging in the balance over how we resolve the transgender clusterfuck.
Somewhat apropos of which, a new series of posts on Helen Dale's Substack which looks to address that issue:
"This is a series of essays dissecting the social mechanisms that have led to the strange and disorienting times in which we live. "
How far the Cambridge Dictionary has fallen, for a once-venerable publication that's been around since its first edition was published all the way back in...
((checks notes))
uh
((rechecks notes))
...2001 🤡
lmao.
on top of that, their website proudly declares that this dictionary is based on a "Corpus" that's "continuously updated" to stay "relevant"... ahha.
One could be forgiven for assuming the entire thing is just a pet project of some ragtag reject crew of activist hacks.
But I'm not impressed with many dictionaries these days, about the only one of any value being Oxford Dictionaries -- I bought a subscription for $20 for the year:
'Tis a bit hard to believe -- why I was surprised by your 2001 date.
Though "Stunning & Dave" had a good point that dictionaries tend more to reflect actual usages. So if the population uses words in contradictory ways then it is not surprising that dictionaries reflect those contradictions.
But that makes pretty much all of us "guilty" and culpable. Partly why I get "peeved" about sloppy language -- just devalues our common currency. One of the more egregious cases is all of the "reputable" newspapers which talk about "sex changes" as if that is actually possible -- contributes to the butchering of defenseless children. Hanging is too good for them ...
Though not sure about your "oxbridge" comment -- "Oxford Dictionaries" seems the best one I've run across but it is different from the "Oxford English Dictionary".
But some of the better dictionaries are "prescriptive" -- they promote various principles instead of pandering to the mob:
Sure, but there's a yawning gap between emphasizing descriptive over prescriptive language and claiming without an ounce of irony to "stay relevant".
The latter just leapfrogs all the way over the legitimate territory of "dsecriptive" and lands way over in the dank morass of "trendy"—not a place where any halfway serious reference source should be terribly happy to find itself.
Part of the issue, in any case, is that English doesn't have any sort of public institution that's actually chartered to document the 'living language' (= descriptive treatment)—so that job sorta falls by default to dictionaries, which are ill suited to it to say the least. (It's pretty hard to make a viable chronicle of the evolution of a language when you're stuck with a format consisting entirely of single-word entries.)
At the opposite pole of this sort of thing is Spanish, which has not just one but 37 individuaally autonomous Academías Reales de la Lengua Española/Castellana (take your pick depending on the region).
These bodies are of intensely local interest, to such an extent that they are often split along boundaries other than political ones. There's an Academia Real estadounidense, headquartered somewhere in the Dallas/Ft Worth area i think, to document U.S. Spanish. And e.g. in Colombia there's one Academia in Medellín for Colombia cachaca (the richer, Whiter, highland part of the country, where the grammar of Spanish is distinct to say the least—they don't even use the pronoun tú up in those parts) and a second Academia for Colombia costeña (the low-lying, poorer, more baseball- than fútbol-addled, pointedly Caribbean northern reaches of the country).
These Academias exemplify what to do if anybody is halfway serious about taking the descriptive fork of the path. Linguists from the various Academias Reales go EVERYWHERE that Spanish is spoken, from gangster dens to L.A. Zoot suit shops, and they put an ear to the ground and really just LISTEN—and the papers they produce, even to a relative outsider like me, give glimpses into various hidden subcultures at a level of detail that would make George R. R. Martin or J.R.R. Tolkien do a triple take.
E.g. in Uruguay—the only country in the world that has bootstrapped itself to the World Bank's "rich countries" tier by sheer weight of unionized blue-collar trade labor, with university grads mostly sucked across the river into greater Buenos Aires—a whole new lexical class has arisen around the uniquely weird relationships that persevere among Uruguayans who've stayed; expat-yet-almost-still-neighboring friends and family in BsAs; and older family/friends who've returned to Uruguay (or, for a small handful of born-and-raised porteños, who've emigrated there) to retire or work lesser hours from home.
That no such institutions exist in the many corners of the world where English is either the native language or a lingua franca, is an incalculable (and ongoing) loss from my POV.
.
Probably also worth mentioning that the analogous institutions for some other languages have gone mostly prescriptive instead, e.g., the Académie Royale in Paris—which, non-coincidentally, doesn't have sister institutions in other francophone areas (except in Québec, where there's a whole nativist Québécois political party tied to the effort)— and Kotus (the Finnish language authority) in Helsinki.
Crucially, these bodies manage to stay as legitimate prescriptivists, without degenerating into purists; i.e.,they're willing to amputate what's dead or clearly moribund in their languages.
One impact these have had has been the surprlsing vitality of native-brewed words for internet and computer stuff—in stark contrast to most languages, which have merely appropriated long lists of English loanwords for tech stuff.
In most parts of the world nowadays, you buy a "컴퓨터" or "kompyuta" or even just "un computer", but not in France or most other francophone countries (Garçon! Un ordinateur, S.V.P.!) or in Finland (tietokone, kiitos).
That's no small feat in either case, considering the impressive global reach of the French language (which, for tech stuff, serves much more to create new battlefronts in the struggle against English loanwords than to lay down any sort of global French-language footprint) and the tiny native base for Finnish (which has only 5 million native speakers in the world—most of whom are highly proficient, even fluent, speakers of the very English whose influence they're trying to knock back at the pass). Kinda neat—although the global hegemony of English makes most of those functions reduntant.
Yes I saw that nonsense. As you say, depressing. Many young women complicit in this nonsense, sadly. They have no idea how easily their rights can be removed.
It already is. Some of these bastards think the word and entity 'woman' means a thing that a man has power over, a thing a man rapes and defiles - they've waxed lyrical about 'abuse' men dish out to them and how it makes them 'feel like a woman'. Academic papers like Gray Slavery and his pals vomit. From wolf-whistling to sexual harassment, to being propositioned, to leered over, followed and stared at, to groped, to raped. Raped. Beaten. Bitten (See Gray Slavery, again). Murdered. Being 'entered', being 'subsumed', being 'abused', being 'dominated'. Being ‘owned’. Being ‘erased’. Removed, invisible. Being ‘submissive’. Paid less. Even ignored and spoken over gives them a little boner. They get off to think that. It’s how they see us and treat us, so therefore they ARE us.
They 'play' with this and 'how it must feel to be raped and coerced'. These apparent moments of 'realisation' where they have 'insight' and 'get it'. The full shebang. They ‘get’ what we’ve been ‘moaning, nagging and whining’ about. In their minds, to be assaulted by men is to be a woman. That's it. That's as far as their stunted imaginations take them and it always cycles back round to them and their needs. Their perspective, their feelings, their thoughts, their rights. We are spaces, we are shells, we are things, we are empty absences until we are filled by men. Completed. Literally. It and they are grotesque. To take our words and bodies, they fill this space with ‘real’ female essence, real 'femininity' and properly own it, they believe they are far better, stronger, more beautiful women than we are. As the real female essence is of course male. See: India Willoughby and pretty much all of them featured here. They are better in every way, they are more vulnerable, they make more effort to appeal to men, they’re nicer, they give better and more sexual pleasure (See: keyboard penis man) as they only see us as weak victims they are strangely insanely jealous of, as they are the proper, powerful righteous victims, claiming their ‘true’ victimhood as that makes them more powerful, then they punish and harass us for daring to think, state or act otherwise.
It's a few anniversaries at the moment and I am in no mood to lie or obfuscate about the absolute onslaught I feel all this is! :-)
All these men with suddenly wonky heads, too heavy for their pretty little bodies to hold up, staring lovingly into cameras and at their own pouty image, then posting that and gaining senior academic positions which is how they convince others that there's some credibility to what they do and 'feel'. It's reams and reams on how they experience maximum sexual pleasure and at the expense of others.
Yes, indeed, Though, it is all about the sexy feelz. Someone once said that there are as many, if not more, sexual fetishes/paraphilias as it is possible to count, and then some. It is an area of sexology that few have ventured into, but, from the evidence we do have at hand, there is little doubt that this, at its lowest level, has been driven by the porn industry. These chaps get really, really angry when women confront them on that aspect, and the activists, who are mainly men's rights pushers, will not countenance it either, but that is precisely what it is, most of it.
As I've recently argued here in this thread, I quite agree with you about "record the way words are used" -- and the consequences of such sloppy if not egregiously dishonest "principles".
But there ARE a few more or less reputable dictionaries who take a more "prescriptive" approach to their entries, and are less willing to pander to the mob:
From the "Circular Definitions R Us" crowd. What a bunch of cretins, dickheads, charlatans, grifters, and scientific illiterates. Being charitable .... 😉🙂
I'd dearly love to know the answer to that. And why these countries? If two-thirds of Scots are opposed to gender self-ID (and you can be sure it would be a much bigger majority if a fraction of this stuff was reported), then why would people in any of these countries be any more inclined to want mentally-ill men in dresses screaming at women in toilets?
I'd doubt citizens of any of these countries actually voted for this insanity, yet it's been foisted on them all.
Most of the people in the countries affected will still have no idea that they have self ID or what it actually means in practice. It's been sneaked into legislation, like smoke wafting its way up through your floorboards. Do you know the Denton document? Massive law firm, with others including Reuters, advising how to get all this stuff done under the radar.
What I am disturbed by is that Dentons template has been exposed and still this marches on. The creators remain in positions, largely anonymous and unaccountable in 'law' and 'rights' and 'diversity' sectors. In government. It's like it was seeded in the minds of a few men in a few rooms all over the world, then a few clever businesspeople created an industry, utilised the theoretical political gumpf a few academics and paedophiles spouted/spout and boom it's this unstoppable new force. It's hard to compare it to previous ideological movements, cultures, historical timeframes or periods but it feels like one as I'm living through this.
I believe that very easily. I wasn't allowed to touch surfaces in any public loo as a child. My mother was very clear on that and it made opening doors and turning on taps a bit challenging. Lots of jumping, balancing and hopping. I developed the hover that is bad for girls and women to not be able to fully relax or double void by sitting on a seat, but it avoids the fapped on toilet seat, the fapped on handles, loo roll, doors, taps and sink. Every surface covered with bodily fluid and effluent. The sticky floor. Don't work out why, don't ask.
That was because people destroy things, people are nasty and selfish and all public loos used to suffer this fate. Often men and sometimes women. I knew the budget for one set of bus station loos and how they would be refurbished, then trashed, refurbished, then trashed. How the mirrors were made of plastic so they couldn't be smashed but still they tried. Blue lights so people wouldn't shoot up in there. Those who do this damage walk amongst us. Those loos were then shut as it cost so much to clean and maintain them with constant intentional damage. It's the same vile mainly men.
This isn't new, now they take endless photos and videos of themselves and their fetishes. To build their collections. Then parade it to us all on social media and how this is what they do (like notCursedE does). Oh we know, we know, we've always known. It's boring and they are not vulnerable and marginalised. It's not a 'rights movement' in the usual sense, but it is about their rights to do what they want, all the time...go right ahead ;-)
Thank you so much, Graham, for doing this. In Scotland, it is always claimed that other countries have introduced self-ID with no problems. I have argued so many times that this is not the case.
Graham HAS been left swinging in the wind -- no cowardly doubt about it. People with power and platforms who have not pushed back against this woman-hating ideology are far more culpable than the average person without influence. May their cowardice haunt them for the rest of their lives.
There's a TON of followup on that incident, because Ms. Jaman didn't take it sitting down, to say the least.
If you're on twitter, search the hash tag #LetJulieSwim and/or have a look through the feed of the inestimable Amy Sousa (@ KnownHeretic), especially her feed for Aug/Sept.
Or even put #letjulieswim AND @ knownheretic into the search bar.
Yes I remember. I was actually looking for a different one in Norway where a woman was arrested for questioning why a man was using the female changing room (not Christina Elingsen)
There needs to be an international register recording all sexual/violent trans crimes to demonstrate the evidence to those who don’t want to believe it.
Well I'm glad your comment gets to see the light of day here. Apparently 'after gaining popularity, she published an autobiography titled Woman in 2018. In the autobiography, she spoke about her gender reassignment surgery.' Nah, mate, sorry, you're not a woman. I don't care how much surgery he's had. Date fellas, but he is never going to be a woman. The gall to write an 'autobiography' called that.
How many years before the word 'cup', 'spoon', 'tiger' and 'space' are all used interchangeably with the word 'woman'. It really is just a vague feeling they identify into, a creation of all their jumbled fetishes and fantasies, then they get surgery to emulate what we look like. I feel as if I am constantly being forced to solve some endless cryptic quiz to work out what is happening. We're this object to own or copy or play with, literal objectification.
All the heads of fashion houses who've liked a very particular shape of women's bodies for a very long time and how unhealthy the fashion industry is? They just fit right in, no need to swap any of their little misogynies.
I read an article a few months(?) ago, when those paparazzi pictures of them on a boat first dropped, that said mbappé's... er, themfriend had the whole 9 yards, vaginoplasty etc etc, at SIXTEEN. Like Susie Green's pet son.
uh
yeahh um
No comment. I yield my time.
.
"Themfriend" is NOT a piss take BTW. That's an actual, poker-faced "«„'word'“»" that these crusty wanksocks have actually managed to push into the curriculum materials at Portland (Oregon, USA) Public Schools. FFS. I shit you not.
I mainly endure this fuckery by constantly reminding myself that, some number of years hence, we'll all be able to laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh at this shit, and at all of its purveyors.
I gotta say, the one part of all this that i never saw coming, and that still floors me, is... i mean... the biggest handmaiden mothers of tWahh!!nsKids are exactly the same demographic who were all overprotective, borderline suffocating, joined-at-the-hip "helicopter parents" until three point fucking two nanoseconds ago!
I mean, that's no way to raise an eventual self-sufficient adult, but, I at least thought their omnipresent excessive helpfulness was born out of actual love (however misguided)!
Never ever would I have guessed that those same moms (sadly it's overwhelmingly moms who are superduperdoubleplusTRA++) would just up and leave their own children to the clutches of ANY random group of strangers... Let alone a politically motivated ragtag band of fucking obvious groomers with WAY too much interest in participating in children's events.
What the fuck happened to maternal/parental love? Jesus, what even happened to basic minimum due diligence?
Thank you Graham. These are very hard posts to read and watch. I am afraid as they intend and will consider avoiding those countries. I am afraid about what Scots gender self-ID is about to bring to the rest of the UK. I hate what they have introduced to Ireland and all countries this has infiltrated. And I'm fucking furious too and about all of it.
Women in my family have talked and known of the urinary leash all my life, so maybe that makes us, me and my generation Suffragettes too. I know women engineers who had to fight to get access to loos as men just peed wherever on sites. People and our needs are still not 'designed in' to our environments. And women are still viewed as offshoots and odd, weak versions of the default human being and form - men.
Petition to repeal The GRA here, presently at 4,450
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/628382?fbclid=IwAR2yIvElzkVUDU5cS0G2d-_j_xLhs2b9v9_whV2jSmuSxnWpFNMKmrk00Y8
Defrock 'trans women'. It's time.
Defrock: to remove from a position of honour or privilege.
"transwomen" -- compound word like "crayfish" which ain't.
The adjective-noun pair just concedes defeat right out of the chute; "transwomen" doesn't. And it gets transwomen's knickers in a twist -- win-win:
"However, ['transwoman'] is often associated with views (notably gender-critical feminism) that hold that transgender women are not women, and thus require a separate word from 'woman' to describe them. For this reason many transgender people find 'transwoman' offensive." -- suck it up buttercups.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/trans_woman#Usage_notes
Better terms to use...
FiB: Female Impersonating Blokes.
TiM: Trans Identifying Males.
Twonks, Twerps, Narcissistic woman facers.
I dislike using transwoman or trans woman as men are not, never have been, were never meant to be and never will be Women.
Are seahorses horses?
That's the nature of compound words - it's not necessarily the case, often isn't the case, that the parts of them accurately describe those labelled with them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_(linguistics)
Seahorses only LOOK, vaguely, like horses. Rather like transwomen ...
In passing, I saw that there's a new Twitter hashtag that's increasingly popular: #TransWomenAreConMen ... 😉🙂
Lycaerix: "... Gender is synonymous with sex. "
Nope, sorry, it's not. The insistence that it is is a large part of the whole transgender clusterfuck.
See biologist Colin Wright's tweet on the point:
"1/ Most confusion about "gender" results from people not defining it. Many definitions are in circulation:
1. Synonym for sex (male/female)
2. A subjective feeling in relation to one's sex
3. Societal sex-based roles/expectations
4. Sex-related behavior
5. Personality traits"
https://twitter.com/SwipeWright/status/1234040036091236352
"Sex" is simply the ability to produce either of two types of gametes, period. There's nothing else included in the concept.
Try looking closely at the definitions; show me ANYTHING it says about stereotypes:
https://web.archive.org/web/20181020204521/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/female
https://web.archive.org/web/20190608135422/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/male
Why there's some value in DEFINING "gender" to encompass those stereotypes and the personalities and behaviours that contribute to their creation. Those stereotypes aren't cut from whole cloth -- they EXIST because there are differences in behaviours and personalities by sex. For example, there's the personality type of "introvert", and the many people who exhibit varying degrees of introversion.
See this British Medical Journal editorial:
https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n735
Rather doubt you can argue that they've been "ideologically captured".
The sex/gender confusion is partly just exhibit no. 2301459623409857.0.1(ii)(a)(3) of ideological capture here—but it's also the result of cumulative '90's prudishness, especially in the US from what i gather. (That was the decade when US Second Lady Tipper Gore unironically chose censorship and age-restriction of music lyrics as her pet public-selrvice cause—despite representing the Democratic Party, which back then actually stood against censorship 'n shit for the most part... Le sigh.)
Basically, add up 999,999,999 individual instances of "haha sex! tee hee, 'sex' ahha! I can't say naughty words like that" from honestly well-meaning if ingenuous Americans-—aspecially from the born-again evangelical crowd (here I note with glee the similarity between "born again" and "born yesterday" bwahaha!)—who substituted the word "gender" instead, and... well, here we are.
In any case, I'm raising a glass right now to the absolutely fantastic little irony of people writing "gender and sex are interchangebale" on an explicitly GENDER CRITICAL blog ahhaha.
like guuuurl, just think about it for a sec... we're pretty clearly NOT "biological-sex critical" over here; ergo, sex ≠ gender. Q.E.D.
Think you missed a few exhibits in your case against ideological capture ... 😉 ICYMI, you might be interested in my kick at that kitty:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/statistics-departments-corrupted
Link to Joanna Williams' "The Corrosive Impact of Transgender Ideology" therein.
But quite agree about sex not equal to gender. Or at least agree there's some merit in DEFINING the words so as to denote quite different kettles of fish. Most people don't realize there are no intrinsic meanings to words. Moses didn't bring the first dictionary down from Mt. Sinai on tablets A through Z so NO definitions carry the imprimatur or signature of Jehovah - Himself.
But, as mentioned above, the BMJ underlined that dichotomy, even if somewhat imperfectly:
https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n735
Lycaerix: "You don't think 'societal sex-based roles/expectations and 'sex-related behaviour' are inherently stereotypical?"
Sure, they're "stereotypical". But where do you think they come from? Hatched in the inner-sanctums of "The Patriarchy (!!11!!)"? Just to "oppress" women"? 🙄
The stereotypes ASSOCIATED with those who are members of certain categories -- the sex categories in particular -- weren't cut from whole cloth; they're the result of many people exhibiting those traits. For some examples of typical sex-related stereotypes, there are MORE neurotic women than neurotic men, but there are MORE men who are rapists or violent than there are women who are.
See:
https://spsp.org/news-center/character-context-blog/stereotype-accuracy-one-largest-and-most-replicable-effects-all
Lycaerix: "I agree that 'gender' has many meanings, but you'll note that they're all related to sex."
So what if "they're RELATED to sex"? You're related to your parents -- does that make you the SAME as them?
Stereotypes are NOT what it means to have a sex, to be members of the sex categories. Don't think you're reading or thinking about anything I've said. See the Oxford Dictionary definition for "male" for example (link above):
"male (adjective): Of or denoting the sex that produces gametes, especially spermatozoa, with which a female may be fertilized or inseminated to produce offspring."
The ONLY requirement specified there to qualify as a male -- of ANY sexually-reproducing (anisogamous) species -- is to be able to produce sperm on a regular basis. Prepubescent penis-havers, and transwomen who cut their nuts off don't qualify and are therefore sexless.
There's diddly-squat there in those definitions about ANY stereotypes. As an analogy, consider "teenager". There are probably dozens of stereotypes about teenagers -- "irresponsible", "binge drinker", "selfish", etc. -- but it does not necessarily follow that ALL teenagers are like that, or that those who are 20 to 120 don't also exhibit those traits, those stereotypes:
https://theparentingco.com/8-stereotypes-about-teenagers/
TRY thinking that there's a difference between the criteria that are essential to qualify as members of various categories -- "male", "female", and "teenager" for examples -- and the stereotypes TYPICALLY associated with people in those categories.
Lycaerix: "So no, gender isn't different to sex. It's another name for the same thing."
In your entirely unevidenced OPINION. Try doing some reading and thinking about the facts on the table instead of just thinking that the way you think is gospel truth.
How very male of him.
Thank you Graham for consistently producing the best and most complete GC content out there 💚🤍💜
Pakistan of all places.
Wana bet some fully captured NGO demanded that the Pakistani govt pass that legislation, lest they withhold humanitarian aid?
It's JUST the kind of thing these horrids would do with access to those kinds of levers of power.
Yep, quite a surprise
Yeah, who could have guessed he was female! Just another ugly man pretending to be a woman.
You might note a recent story about Cambridge Dictionaries over at Reality's Last Stand (indeed) who have redefined "woman" to include "adult human males", AKA men:
"woman (noun): an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth"
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/woman
What a bunch of ignorant blathering -- "may have been said to have a different sex at birth"; idiots. But they are just contributing to the Big Lie that people can change sex. Should be anathematized in no uncertain terms.
Colin Wright at RLS had a decent summary of the problem:
"The circular definition declaring a woman is anybody who lives or identifies as a woman doesn’t actually do any work explaining what a woman is."
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/weekly-recap-524
"Circular Definitions R Us" seems to characterize various transactivists and their "useful/useless" idiots like Cambridge Dictionaries. Rather depressing.
Yes, this is very dangerous I think. Changing the definition of a word in print seems like a way to erase the original meaning, and make the new invention official. You can then proceed to remove all previous dictionaries with the original meaning from the shelves. Young children would never know about the original meaning.
Something similar to this happened in New Zealand when I lived there as a kid.
Exactly right -- echoes of Orwell there in your comment. Maybe the import and source of your avatar picture? 🙂
In any case, reminds me of a passage from an oldish Quillette article (archived) on "Words Lose Their Meaning at [Canada's 😞] Wilfrid Laurier University":
"Though different literary forms, the key message of both works [1984, & 'Politics and the English Language'] was the same: beware any person or group that redefines words so that they no longer align with facts, common sense, and common usage."
https://archive.ph/rKKcl
Sad that too many supposedly reputable "dictionaries" are no better than branches of the Ministry of Truth in peddling dogma and corrupting language.
As for New Zealand -- increasingly a basket case if Jerry Coyne's "blog" is anything to go by (https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2022/01/23/more-from-new-zealand-a-nation-about-to-be-taken-over-by-insanity/) ... 😉 -- you might have some interest in my critique of the corruption of various governmental statistics departments, New Zealand's in particular:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/statistics-departments-corrupted
Of particular note there is NZ's re-definition of "lesbian"
"Lesbian: A woman who is sexually attracted to people of the same sex or gender."
And, of course, "woman" as a gender encompasses various deluded if not psychotic penis-havers.
Cretins, frauds, charlatans, grifters, and the scientifically illiterate. Being charitable ... 😉🙂
But a rather serious problem -- not sure yet if it's hyperbole or an understatement to say that western "civilization" is hanging in the balance over how we resolve the transgender clusterfuck.
Somewhat apropos of which, a new series of posts on Helen Dale's Substack which looks to address that issue:
"This is a series of essays dissecting the social mechanisms that have led to the strange and disorienting times in which we live. "
https://helendale.substack.com/p/worshipping-the-future
My avatar is a graphite copy of a mr Bean photo 😁 I thought his expression was appropriate.
How far the Cambridge Dictionary has fallen, for a once-venerable publication that's been around since its first edition was published all the way back in...
((checks notes))
uh
((rechecks notes))
...2001 🤡
lmao.
on top of that, their website proudly declares that this dictionary is based on a "Corpus" that's "continuously updated" to stay "relevant"... ahha.
One could be forgiven for assuming the entire thing is just a pet project of some ragtag reject crew of activist hacks.
i actually have a subscription to the Macquarie dictionary (from Australia) of all things, lol.
More precisely i freeload off of my Sister's subscription, but the international randomness of it is right on the nose for us.
Not sure of the connection between Cambridge Dictionary and Cambridge University, but the latter at least goes back some 500 years:
https://www.cambridge.org/our-story
But I'm not impressed with many dictionaries these days, about the only one of any value being Oxford Dictionaries -- I bought a subscription for $20 for the year:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/oxford-dictionaries-premium-9780191836718?q=oxford%20dictionaries%20premium&lang=en&cc=us
You might be interested in their definitions for "male" & "female", being the closest I've found to the standard biological ones:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170902010637/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/female
https://web.archive.org/web/20190608135422/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/male
"Oxford English Dictionaries" is something different and not really worth the money, except for historical records:
https://www.oed.com/
Published by Cambrudge University Press, if you can believe it.
Maybe those other oxbridge dictionary boyos just stick their thumbs in their ears and pretend not to know.
'Tis a bit hard to believe -- why I was surprised by your 2001 date.
Though "Stunning & Dave" had a good point that dictionaries tend more to reflect actual usages. So if the population uses words in contradictory ways then it is not surprising that dictionaries reflect those contradictions.
But that makes pretty much all of us "guilty" and culpable. Partly why I get "peeved" about sloppy language -- just devalues our common currency. One of the more egregious cases is all of the "reputable" newspapers which talk about "sex changes" as if that is actually possible -- contributes to the butchering of defenseless children. Hanging is too good for them ...
Though not sure about your "oxbridge" comment -- "Oxford Dictionaries" seems the best one I've run across but it is different from the "Oxford English Dictionary".
But some of the better dictionaries are "prescriptive" -- they promote various principles instead of pandering to the mob:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription#Authority
Sure, but there's a yawning gap between emphasizing descriptive over prescriptive language and claiming without an ounce of irony to "stay relevant".
The latter just leapfrogs all the way over the legitimate territory of "dsecriptive" and lands way over in the dank morass of "trendy"—not a place where any halfway serious reference source should be terribly happy to find itself.
Part of the issue, in any case, is that English doesn't have any sort of public institution that's actually chartered to document the 'living language' (= descriptive treatment)—so that job sorta falls by default to dictionaries, which are ill suited to it to say the least. (It's pretty hard to make a viable chronicle of the evolution of a language when you're stuck with a format consisting entirely of single-word entries.)
At the opposite pole of this sort of thing is Spanish, which has not just one but 37 individuaally autonomous Academías Reales de la Lengua Española/Castellana (take your pick depending on the region).
These bodies are of intensely local interest, to such an extent that they are often split along boundaries other than political ones. There's an Academia Real estadounidense, headquartered somewhere in the Dallas/Ft Worth area i think, to document U.S. Spanish. And e.g. in Colombia there's one Academia in Medellín for Colombia cachaca (the richer, Whiter, highland part of the country, where the grammar of Spanish is distinct to say the least—they don't even use the pronoun tú up in those parts) and a second Academia for Colombia costeña (the low-lying, poorer, more baseball- than fútbol-addled, pointedly Caribbean northern reaches of the country).
These Academias exemplify what to do if anybody is halfway serious about taking the descriptive fork of the path. Linguists from the various Academias Reales go EVERYWHERE that Spanish is spoken, from gangster dens to L.A. Zoot suit shops, and they put an ear to the ground and really just LISTEN—and the papers they produce, even to a relative outsider like me, give glimpses into various hidden subcultures at a level of detail that would make George R. R. Martin or J.R.R. Tolkien do a triple take.
E.g. in Uruguay—the only country in the world that has bootstrapped itself to the World Bank's "rich countries" tier by sheer weight of unionized blue-collar trade labor, with university grads mostly sucked across the river into greater Buenos Aires—a whole new lexical class has arisen around the uniquely weird relationships that persevere among Uruguayans who've stayed; expat-yet-almost-still-neighboring friends and family in BsAs; and older family/friends who've returned to Uruguay (or, for a small handful of born-and-raised porteños, who've emigrated there) to retire or work lesser hours from home.
That no such institutions exist in the many corners of the world where English is either the native language or a lingua franca, is an incalculable (and ongoing) loss from my POV.
.
Probably also worth mentioning that the analogous institutions for some other languages have gone mostly prescriptive instead, e.g., the Académie Royale in Paris—which, non-coincidentally, doesn't have sister institutions in other francophone areas (except in Québec, where there's a whole nativist Québécois political party tied to the effort)— and Kotus (the Finnish language authority) in Helsinki.
Crucially, these bodies manage to stay as legitimate prescriptivists, without degenerating into purists; i.e.,they're willing to amputate what's dead or clearly moribund in their languages.
One impact these have had has been the surprlsing vitality of native-brewed words for internet and computer stuff—in stark contrast to most languages, which have merely appropriated long lists of English loanwords for tech stuff.
In most parts of the world nowadays, you buy a "컴퓨터" or "kompyuta" or even just "un computer", but not in France or most other francophone countries (Garçon! Un ordinateur, S.V.P.!) or in Finland (tietokone, kiitos).
That's no small feat in either case, considering the impressive global reach of the French language (which, for tech stuff, serves much more to create new battlefronts in the struggle against English loanwords than to lay down any sort of global French-language footprint) and the tiny native base for Finnish (which has only 5 million native speakers in the world—most of whom are highly proficient, even fluent, speakers of the very English whose influence they're trying to knock back at the pass). Kinda neat—although the global hegemony of English makes most of those functions reduntant.
Whole bunch of people should be receiving dictionaries from Santa this year for Christmas ... 😉
https://www.facebook.com/LegendFMFiji/posts/i-know-a-few-people-that-will-need-a-dictionary-from-santa-legendfm_nightlife_wi/10156760951001770/
wait wUt? it's not even OED .co .uk? Blasphemy!
Yes I saw that nonsense. As you say, depressing. Many young women complicit in this nonsense, sadly. They have no idea how easily their rights can be removed.
It already is. Some of these bastards think the word and entity 'woman' means a thing that a man has power over, a thing a man rapes and defiles - they've waxed lyrical about 'abuse' men dish out to them and how it makes them 'feel like a woman'. Academic papers like Gray Slavery and his pals vomit. From wolf-whistling to sexual harassment, to being propositioned, to leered over, followed and stared at, to groped, to raped. Raped. Beaten. Bitten (See Gray Slavery, again). Murdered. Being 'entered', being 'subsumed', being 'abused', being 'dominated'. Being ‘owned’. Being ‘erased’. Removed, invisible. Being ‘submissive’. Paid less. Even ignored and spoken over gives them a little boner. They get off to think that. It’s how they see us and treat us, so therefore they ARE us.
They 'play' with this and 'how it must feel to be raped and coerced'. These apparent moments of 'realisation' where they have 'insight' and 'get it'. The full shebang. They ‘get’ what we’ve been ‘moaning, nagging and whining’ about. In their minds, to be assaulted by men is to be a woman. That's it. That's as far as their stunted imaginations take them and it always cycles back round to them and their needs. Their perspective, their feelings, their thoughts, their rights. We are spaces, we are shells, we are things, we are empty absences until we are filled by men. Completed. Literally. It and they are grotesque. To take our words and bodies, they fill this space with ‘real’ female essence, real 'femininity' and properly own it, they believe they are far better, stronger, more beautiful women than we are. As the real female essence is of course male. See: India Willoughby and pretty much all of them featured here. They are better in every way, they are more vulnerable, they make more effort to appeal to men, they’re nicer, they give better and more sexual pleasure (See: keyboard penis man) as they only see us as weak victims they are strangely insanely jealous of, as they are the proper, powerful righteous victims, claiming their ‘true’ victimhood as that makes them more powerful, then they punish and harass us for daring to think, state or act otherwise.
Wow, though, tell it like it is, why don't you? Well done. In a nutshell.
It's a few anniversaries at the moment and I am in no mood to lie or obfuscate about the absolute onslaught I feel all this is! :-)
All these men with suddenly wonky heads, too heavy for their pretty little bodies to hold up, staring lovingly into cameras and at their own pouty image, then posting that and gaining senior academic positions which is how they convince others that there's some credibility to what they do and 'feel'. It's reams and reams on how they experience maximum sexual pleasure and at the expense of others.
Yes, indeed, Though, it is all about the sexy feelz. Someone once said that there are as many, if not more, sexual fetishes/paraphilias as it is possible to count, and then some. It is an area of sexology that few have ventured into, but, from the evidence we do have at hand, there is little doubt that this, at its lowest level, has been driven by the porn industry. These chaps get really, really angry when women confront them on that aspect, and the activists, who are mainly men's rights pushers, will not countenance it either, but that is precisely what it is, most of it.
Excellent comment.
As I've recently argued here in this thread, I quite agree with you about "record the way words are used" -- and the consequences of such sloppy if not egregiously dishonest "principles".
But there ARE a few more or less reputable dictionaries who take a more "prescriptive" approach to their entries, and are less willing to pander to the mob:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_description#Descriptive_vs._prescriptive_linguistics
Too many of them are not much better than the Urban Dictionary.
I'm reminded of a recent tweet featured here on Graham's Substack about Merriam-Webster "defining" "female" as, gawd help us, a "gender identity":
https://twitter.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1549382790952656899
"1b) female (adjective): having a gender identity that is opposite of male".
What is "amusing" -- particularly if one has a predilection for gallows "humour" -- is MW's definition of male:
"1b) male (adjective): having a gender identity that is the opposite of female"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/male
From the "Circular Definitions R Us" crowd. What a bunch of cretins, dickheads, charlatans, grifters, and scientific illiterates. Being charitable .... 😉🙂
I'd dearly love to know the answer to that. And why these countries? If two-thirds of Scots are opposed to gender self-ID (and you can be sure it would be a much bigger majority if a fraction of this stuff was reported), then why would people in any of these countries be any more inclined to want mentally-ill men in dresses screaming at women in toilets?
I'd doubt citizens of any of these countries actually voted for this insanity, yet it's been foisted on them all.
Most of the people in the countries affected will still have no idea that they have self ID or what it actually means in practice. It's been sneaked into legislation, like smoke wafting its way up through your floorboards. Do you know the Denton document? Massive law firm, with others including Reuters, advising how to get all this stuff done under the radar.
What I am disturbed by is that Dentons template has been exposed and still this marches on. The creators remain in positions, largely anonymous and unaccountable in 'law' and 'rights' and 'diversity' sectors. In government. It's like it was seeded in the minds of a few men in a few rooms all over the world, then a few clever businesspeople created an industry, utilised the theoretical political gumpf a few academics and paedophiles spouted/spout and boom it's this unstoppable new force. It's hard to compare it to previous ideological movements, cultures, historical timeframes or periods but it feels like one as I'm living through this.
A lot of stuff has been foisted on people in various countries, usually by the U.S.
Anecdotal only, she doesn't want to be identified.
Old friend in Malta: bloke, in women's loos, caught photographing himself with his todger slopped on the side of the sink.
She believed he was about to fap into sink whilst videoing.
Anecdotal, but I've known her for 20 years, or so, and therefore I believe her & have no reason not to.
I believe that very easily. I wasn't allowed to touch surfaces in any public loo as a child. My mother was very clear on that and it made opening doors and turning on taps a bit challenging. Lots of jumping, balancing and hopping. I developed the hover that is bad for girls and women to not be able to fully relax or double void by sitting on a seat, but it avoids the fapped on toilet seat, the fapped on handles, loo roll, doors, taps and sink. Every surface covered with bodily fluid and effluent. The sticky floor. Don't work out why, don't ask.
That was because people destroy things, people are nasty and selfish and all public loos used to suffer this fate. Often men and sometimes women. I knew the budget for one set of bus station loos and how they would be refurbished, then trashed, refurbished, then trashed. How the mirrors were made of plastic so they couldn't be smashed but still they tried. Blue lights so people wouldn't shoot up in there. Those who do this damage walk amongst us. Those loos were then shut as it cost so much to clean and maintain them with constant intentional damage. It's the same vile mainly men.
This isn't new, now they take endless photos and videos of themselves and their fetishes. To build their collections. Then parade it to us all on social media and how this is what they do (like notCursedE does). Oh we know, we know, we've always known. It's boring and they are not vulnerable and marginalised. It's not a 'rights movement' in the usual sense, but it is about their rights to do what they want, all the time...go right ahead ;-)
Thank you so much, Graham, for doing this. In Scotland, it is always claimed that other countries have introduced self-ID with no problems. I have argued so many times that this is not the case.
Graham HAS been left swinging in the wind -- no cowardly doubt about it. People with power and platforms who have not pushed back against this woman-hating ideology are far more culpable than the average person without influence. May their cowardice haunt them for the rest of their lives.
https://wingsoverscotland.com/the-invalid-women/
I don’t know if this will work ( I’m not very techno minded ) but a blistering piece from wings over Scotland today
It worked. Thank you. Blistering comments too. The word is spreading thank goodness
I had a huge reply but deleted it
We’ve become so scared against a tiny minority
But follow the money
Elderly woman noticing male in female changing rooms watching young girls get changed. She got banned, https://reduxx.info/senior-woman-banned-from-local-pool-after-expressing-concern-over-male-in-womens-washroom/
There's a TON of followup on that incident, because Ms. Jaman didn't take it sitting down, to say the least.
If you're on twitter, search the hash tag #LetJulieSwim and/or have a look through the feed of the inestimable Amy Sousa (@ KnownHeretic), especially her feed for Aug/Sept.
Or even put #letjulieswim AND @ knownheretic into the search bar.
Yes I remember. I was actually looking for a different one in Norway where a woman was arrested for questioning why a man was using the female changing room (not Christina Elingsen)
There needs to be an international register recording all sexual/violent trans crimes to demonstrate the evidence to those who don’t want to believe it.
A bit of cheery news in The Times https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/former-snp-minister-ash-regan-i-had-to-vote-with-my-conscience-and-resign-over-gender-reform-bill-8vz87j265
and
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/warning-over-proposed-gender-reform-bill-mpzpbjxl7
and Australia - in most states now
This was in the Mail this morning but was very quickly pulled
Yes yes I know it’s the Mail but it’s the only online news where I can read the comments
Scottish Sun comments used to be blinders but hey ho 3 million quid buys your silence ……..
Well I'm glad your comment gets to see the light of day here. Apparently 'after gaining popularity, she published an autobiography titled Woman in 2018. In the autobiography, she spoke about her gender reassignment surgery.' Nah, mate, sorry, you're not a woman. I don't care how much surgery he's had. Date fellas, but he is never going to be a woman. The gall to write an 'autobiography' called that.
How many years before the word 'cup', 'spoon', 'tiger' and 'space' are all used interchangeably with the word 'woman'. It really is just a vague feeling they identify into, a creation of all their jumbled fetishes and fantasies, then they get surgery to emulate what we look like. I feel as if I am constantly being forced to solve some endless cryptic quiz to work out what is happening. We're this object to own or copy or play with, literal objectification.
All the heads of fashion houses who've liked a very particular shape of women's bodies for a very long time and how unhealthy the fashion industry is? They just fit right in, no need to swap any of their little misogynies.
I read an article a few months(?) ago, when those paparazzi pictures of them on a boat first dropped, that said mbappé's... er, themfriend had the whole 9 yards, vaginoplasty etc etc, at SIXTEEN. Like Susie Green's pet son.
uh
yeahh um
No comment. I yield my time.
.
"Themfriend" is NOT a piss take BTW. That's an actual, poker-faced "«„'word'“»" that these crusty wanksocks have actually managed to push into the curriculum materials at Portland (Oregon, USA) Public Schools. FFS. I shit you not.
https://www.city-journal.org/in-portland-the-sexual-revolution-starts-in-kindergarten
I mainly endure this fuckery by constantly reminding myself that, some number of years hence, we'll all be able to laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh at this shit, and at all of its purveyors.
It sure as hell is.
I gotta say, the one part of all this that i never saw coming, and that still floors me, is... i mean... the biggest handmaiden mothers of tWahh!!nsKids are exactly the same demographic who were all overprotective, borderline suffocating, joined-at-the-hip "helicopter parents" until three point fucking two nanoseconds ago!
I mean, that's no way to raise an eventual self-sufficient adult, but, I at least thought their omnipresent excessive helpfulness was born out of actual love (however misguided)!
Never ever would I have guessed that those same moms (sadly it's overwhelmingly moms who are superduperdoubleplusTRA++) would just up and leave their own children to the clutches of ANY random group of strangers... Let alone a politically motivated ragtag band of fucking obvious groomers with WAY too much interest in participating in children's events.
What the fuck happened to maternal/parental love? Jesus, what even happened to basic minimum due diligence?
I would have definitely upvoted this one