5434a
23d ago
I think trans people have shared traits and interests that justify - make useful - the existence of the group term.
So do I when they're grouped as a sub category to a referent super category, but if we call them women the super category ceases to signify anything essential and becomes effectively arbitrary and correspondingly insignificant. (And when it's arbitrary I have no need to justify my opinion beyond it being an opinion that's mine. Back to square one, the circle created by trans rhetoric travels in both directions despite their intention.)
When I say "transwomen aren't even transwomen" I say it to contrast their own rhetoric and demonstrate their dependence on the binary they (selectively) disavow.
At base my argument is that "men who [choose to pursue and increase their femininity, AKA transwomen]" is legible. Each element points to something distinct even where the element might be fuzzy at the boundaries. "Transwomen are women who want to affirm their gender identity as women by pursuing feminine social signifiers" (the most charitable framing I can come up with) loses legibility the more you think about it as each element circles back to itself until the boundaries it depends on collapse into meaninglessness.
My own belief is that they do this because, less charitably, they are men who [want to be women and throw out these convoluted rationales to avoid the distress of acknowledging that they simply can't]. What they can do is increase/maximise their femininity, which is what they're already doing, and which I can't see anyway of discrediting. It's plausible, it's feasible, and it's legible. It doesn't float my boat, but it doesn't knit my brow either.
5434a
19d ago
I've been reading more of James Clavell's Asian Saga. I've also been catching up on cleaning and maintaining my garden tools.
In the books every peasant bows and scrapes at the feet of the samurai. My very limited knowledge of martial arts is that those same peasants developed ways of fighting with their gardening tools because they were forbidden from owning real weapons.
So... who were the peasants fighting?
5434a
16d ago
How long is the engagement for a typical arranged marriage? What would be the longest and the shortest?
5434a
20d ago
I consider those attributes critical inasmuch as absenting them from the discussion leaves us with nothing to discuss, or at least nothing conclusive. Non rhetorical question: How can it be otherwise?
I might be mistaken but your objection seems to rest on "man" operating as a floating signifier that can be either male (sex) or masculine (gender). This is problematic because for transgenderism to be legible the gender has to be associated with sex. A gender that is unassociated with a sex is effectively arbitrary. If transgenderism depends on gender being arbitrary then it can't make strong claims predicated on gender, if gender is illegible then claims on gender can't be understood, and if gender is strict then gender only serves its function as it relates to sex.
5434a
20d ago
Lost Girls is a fun bit of erotica from Alan Moore you could finish in an afternoon. The Sandman is another good Alan Moore piece but as far as I know it's a full length comic series rather than a self-contained graphic novel, but maybe there's a compendium.
For something not involving Alan Moore Transmetroplitan was good fun and from what I remember would probably appeal to the Motte crowd for it's cyberpunk / absurd culture war aspects (sexy Sesame Street!) but it's another full series.
5434a
19d ago
Go to www.chatgpt.org/chat, you won't have to sign up or log in. Then type in the box.
5434a
20d ago
I read one of each of the gentleman burglar character books (Fantomas, Arsene Lupin and Raffles) and from what I remember Arsene was the best of the bunch.
5434a
27d ago
@zorbathehut
While we're doing site UI feedback, it would be great if the site tracked read/unread status while logged out.
When I'm logged in the site tracks how many new unread comments a thread has accrued since last viewed. When I log out and log back in the new comment count resets to all read, meaning I can't see which threads have been active, and I can't ctrl-f through the thread for "~new".
Transwomen aren't even transwomen. In their quest to deconstruct gender in order to grant themselves accommodation within that same genderscape that they disavow they have inadvertantly demonstrated that it's transgenderism itself that carries no semantic water. That is to say; there's no such thing.
Nevermind the old chestnut of "what is a woman?". That one has multiple satisfactory answers from the simple to the scientifically robust. Try out "what is a transwoman?". The sole universal quality of every possible rational answer begins with "a man who...". A man. Because without that there's no binary boundary to transit. A woman cannot be a transwoman.
Either it's real, and they're not it. Or it's not real, so there's no it to be.
[Obligatory olive branch that I don't care two iotas (iotes?) about men rendering themselves maximally feminine. Obligatory post script that this all applies vice versa too.]
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