A Sensible Question about the Language Gender Ideologists Insist that Everyone Use

Wilfred Reilly asks:

Even if you're pro-gender ideology, why not just say "woman" and "trans woman?" Why would an additional modifier ("cis," etc) for 99.5% of the population ever be necessary? We don't use the label "hearing man" every time we describe someone who is not deaf.

Other contributors to this thread wrote:

Thank you for pointing this out I will now be referring to every person who is not disabled as able-bodied man or able-bodied woman. Brilliant.

Because it's a signaler that when you use it, it signals that you have accepted the gender cult's dogma.

because, no matter how hard they try to convince themselves and everyone else, they know it’s not the same!

That's power. Make 99.5% do the extra work. —woman —cis woman simple 😐

Norm Macdonald once said cisgender was "a way of marginalizing a normal person."

Because no men are a subset of women. There are women and men. That’s it. Some men LARP as a 1950s version of women but that doesn’t make them women

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The Transgender Intersex Gambit: “But Intersex People Exist!”

There are only two biological sexes because there are only two types of gametes. Yes, some people are difficult to categorize by simply looking at their bodies, but if they produce a gamete (a cell capable of combining with another cell to produce a human being), it will be either an egg or a sperm, not a spegg nor any other functional option. See this short video produced by the Paradox Institute.

Almost inevitably, upon taking this position, you will hear people who have inhaled gender ideology say the "But intersex people exist." Intersex conditions exist, but they are rare (2/10,000), much rarer than the (approximately 1.4/100) of 13-17 year old teenagers now claiming to be transgender. Consider the following chart, which illustrates the number of intersex people compared to the numbers of people whose sex is obvious by simply looking:

How does the Intersex Gambit unfold? You will be challenged with the following, which I've heard in person several times from people formally educated enough to know better than to screw up something everyone learned in high school biology. They will say something like this: "Sex is not binary because intersex people exist and this demonstrates that biological sex is a spectrum." Biologist Colin Wright, author of "Understanding the Sex Binary," elaborates. Gender ideologists advises:

If no single line can be drawn, then anywhere someone chooses to draw one is totally arbitrary and subjective. If it’s totally arbitrary and subjective, then that means the categories male and female are also arbitrary and subjective “social constructs” with no firm root in biological reality. If that’s the case, why are we categorizing people in law according to these arbitrary labels instead of letting people simply label themselves? To do otherwise is to oppress people based on a biological falsehood.

Wright laments that this argument is made with "stunning success" and that it has even been embraced by "parts of the scientific establishment and the medical profession." Those using this argument include historian of science Alice Dreger.

In her book, Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex, Dreger refers to intersex individuals as “hermaphrodites,” and says: “Hermaphroditism causes a great deal of confusion, more than one might at first appreciate, because—as we will see again and again—the discovery of a ‘hermaphroditic’ body raises doubts not just about the particular body in question, but about all bodies. The questioned body forces us to ask what exactly it is—if anything—that makes the rest of us unquestionable.”

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Maine School District Sued by Student’s Mom for Secret Transgender Activism

National Review reports on a new lawsuit filed by a mom against a school district that was secretly trying to transition her daughter:

A mom in Maine has filed a federal lawsuit against local school officials after she says they started referring to her 13-year-old daughter as a boy without her knowledge and provided the eighth-grader with chest binders so she would look more like a boy . . .

The lawsuit alleges that the Great Salt Bay transgender guidelines “are unconstitutional insofar as they provide for the concealment of, or do not mandate informing parents of, a decision to provide ‘gender-affirming’ care to a student.”

After the mom took her daughter out of the school, it appears that someone affiliated with the district filed a child abuse complaint against the mom. From the Complaint:

Almost immediately afterwards, on December 12, 2022, Plaintiff was visited by agents of the Maine Office of Child and Family Services. These agents informed Plaintiff that they had received an anonymous report that Plaintiff was emotionally abusive towards A.B. The investigation was completed on January 13, 2023, with a finding that the information obtained by the investigation did not support a finding of neglect or abuse.

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Read more about the article Paradox Institute is Debunking Transgender Ideology, One Short Video at a Time
Paradox Institute is Debunking Transgender Ideology, One Short Video at a Time

Paradox Institute is Debunking Transgender Ideology, One Short Video at a Time

Zachary Elliott's Paradox Institute has created a series of straight-forward biology lessons to make sense of the reckless (and sometimes intentional) confusion promulgated by transgender ideology. Here is the mission statement of Paradox Institute:

In an age where the very existence of male and female are being denied, the Paradox Institute provides evidence, reason, and above all, clarity to both simple and complex topics in the biology of sex.

The content presented is directly informed by contemporary scientific literature from the fields of evolutionary and developmental biology, endocrinology, personality psychology, and neuroscience.

Each video contains a short description and citations to scientific resources.

For example, here is why "Chromosomes are not Sexes."

Description:

Some claim that rare chromosome combinations prove there are more than two sexes, yet these combinations still result in males and females, not new sexes.

Here's one more video of the many available:

"Origins of Two Sexes"

Description:

This video essay explores the origins of the two sexes: how they formed 1.2 billion years ago and why they are nearly universal across the plant and animal kingdoms. The information for the video comes from peer-reviewed sources in evolutionary biology on the evolution of sex, anisogamy, and the two sexes.

Continue ReadingParadox Institute is Debunking Transgender Ideology, One Short Video at a Time

Our Zeitgeist

What will anthropologists say about us in 100 years? What is our zeitgeist? I suggest this: Uncritically deployed empathy is motivating many of us to close our eyes to dream up utopias du jure. Your wish list can include anything you want, including 87 sexes, equal outcomes for all groups in every endeavor, a world where no police exist and even no opposition when the U.S. instigates its next discretionary war. Anything you can dream up can instantly be yours if you can gather up a mob on social media and occupy our sense-making institutions. 

Step two is to reverse-engineer society to destroy anything that gets in your way, Chesterson’s Fence be damned. This is the Age of Ad Hoc where you are invited to declare your dream to be “self-evident” so that no evidence is necessary. Get rid of traditional math and science because the techniques that allow us to make miracle medicines and airplanes that fly will repeatedly clash with your dream. Get rid of history, criminal justice research based on multi-variate analyses and the Rule of Law. Get rid of all of these things by any authoritarian means necessary, including threatening and defunding inconvenient researchers, deleting their lifetimes of work and silencing anyone trying to question your approach. Develop hundreds of new versions of the ad hominem attack. Snap your fingers to make all Enlightenment principles self-implode without discussion by calling them “racist.” No need to do any work to actually fix any of the problems that motivated your quest. Then sit back and repeatedly blame the ensuing chaos on someone else.

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