LGBTAIitp Part 60: Still Going Strong

[TaiLiu]

I'm just confused by this case:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-64419533

It's a rapist who started transitioning while awaiting trial, was found guilty, and then isn't being sent to a women's prison.

It's a one off, but apparently it happened.

What's that case got to do with anything that's been said?

Yeah, I'm confused, too. You may be referring to Raymond's quote about rape, but I think Raymond is using the term loosely. And inappropriately, though Raymond probably disagrees.

I really don't want to get into it too much, but that's not the only one I've seen voiced. I've seen serious 'protect the adults' arguments. Also a lot of arguments for trans erasure over 'fairness' (which I really, really don't want to get into).

Oh, I see.

That is such a hard quote to parse that I am not even sure if I can go about agreeing or disagreeing with it, let alone analyzing its logical consistency.

The quote's just an evocative piece of a larger book-sized argument against trans women. The general argument is that of those TERFs you encountered—trans women transitioning is misogynistic, because transitioning harms cis women. It's a logically consistent argument, just a bigoted and false one.

The long and the short of it is that at some point a fringe group in second wave feminism were so desperate to cling to a binary view of sex, they rejected the idea of gender entirely and created wild conspiracy theories that cis women would somehow be "replaced" by the technologies that had enabled medical transition.

The premise it's remained logically consistent with is "trans women are monsters invented by modern science", and they were able to spend decades doing that openly because people just believed any old thing about trans folk until the 2010's.

I suppose, as cruel as they're being now, it's the last gasp of a movement that's realised it no longer has mainstream support to fall back on.

I think the assessment is mostly right. I'm not sure a desire to cling to binary sex caused them to be gender abolitionists or whatevs, though.

... I'm clearly going to have to educate myself on this erroneous argument (the better to argue against it) because I don't even follow the logic. Maybe it's just because my starting point is "biological sex is itself a spectrum" and I don't know where to even go from the opposite point of view, but I have no idea how they get from there to "gender doesn't exist".

Any tips on where to start reading? Sources that dissect the argument would be even better.

You might also wanna take a look at Histories of the Transgender Child. The history is focused on the stuff before contemporary transphobia, but it outlines the history of sex and gender and how those concepts have transformed throughout recent history. ("Recent" starting about a hundred-plus years ago.)