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Something I’ve noticed about gender trolls is that they feel like they can “gotcha” reality by redefining words.
Has anyone here ever heard of the “sovereign citizen” movement? A culture war adjacent recent happening was the trial of a mass murderer named “Darrel Brooks”. Darrell is, and also was, an adherent to this movement.
His belief was essentially that he could use some clever wording to get himself out of trouble for having obviously, on multiple videos, killed a bunch of people at a parade in Waukesha Wisconsin. Despite being obviously guilty of this crime, Darrel spent weeks wasting time arguing with the judge about him, the person in the courtroom, not being Darrel Brooks, but being a “third party intervenor”, as if this would catch the judge in a linguistic gotcha that would prove that the obvious objective reality that the court exists in wasnt actually so real after all.
You can see some of what I’m talking about here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=jm-E3FNUIvs
What’s interesting about that these sovcits is that they aren’t stupid, the arguments they make have some internal consistency; it’s just that they think that if they torture the words enough, that they can warp reality.
I think the gender trolls are suffering from a similar sort of delusion. No matter how much somebody might torture the meaning of words, and no matter how complex and seemingly sophisticated these linguistic arguments might become (they do seem to get ever more complex over time), they will never change the reality that women are in fact women, and men are in fact men, and that there is a very very tiny minority of people who suffer from a genetic defect which causes them to be neither. You cannot make a linguistic argument that alters reality because the language is only a tool which describes reality.
Saying “well actually sex and gender are different! So this whole time when you’ve been using the worded gender to describe something, you didn’t realize but you were actually an adherent to my ideology!” Is just…silly. No, my mother saying “gender” because she does like saying “sex” in front of people, does not change what she meant, which was a description of a reality where men and women both exist.
No, their arguments have no internal consistency, yes they are stupid.
'The government is illegitimate band of gangsters with no authority other than guns, taxes are extortion and armed robbery, but there is one clever trick how to avoid them! If you spell your name in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, they have to leave you alone! Do not ask why, they just have to!"
It is not any kind of brave protest or noble resistance, it is nothing than plain delusion.
Rational Wiki is in their case 100% right.
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For that matter the idea that Gender is not a direct synonym for sex is contested at best. If you just look at the way people debate the gender issue, you can confirm that this is the case.
You might consider a superposition of two states:
In one, gender and sex mean the same thing. Therefore, trans people are both the sex and gender they were born as, can change neither. It follows that they should be legally/practically treated as that sex.
In the other, sex is biological, gender is a social/mental construct. Therefore, trans people are the sex they were born as, but can be whatever gender they want, even totally made up ones. It follows that gender is practically meaningless, there's little reason to ever bring it up or care about it, and all legal/practical behaviors should ignore gender and only use sex as an input.
In either case, the behavioral prognosis is the same: treat people according to their biological sex, at least for the small number of instances where there is legitimate cause to segregate based on sex, such as sports or prisons. It's only by conflating the two via Motte and Bailey shenanigans that trans activists can construct arguments to justify the changing of sex.
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Of course this was the genius of “What is a Woman.” The basic problem with transgenderism is that it equivocates. On one hand, it says woman is based purely on self identification. On the other hand, it requires a platonic ideal of what a woman is (how do you identify with X without being able to categorize what X is outside of self ID). Clearly that platonic form is based on sex. And that transsexual people don’t actually meet this platonic form and therefore are clearly something different.
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