New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 18
What is a woman? That’s the question of the year, it seems, and we’re all aghast. The thing is, almost nobody understands what that particularly nasty bit of confusion is about. Luckily, the most high-profile case of the problem, which occurred in the Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Kentanji Brown Jackson, gave us the answer. She said she didn’t know what a woman is (while being a woman) because she’s not a biologist. In other words, to know what a woman is, you have to ask a qualified expert. It doesn’t matter what the definition is because the whole thing is a power grab making use of Queer Theory (better called Queer Marxism) to steal power from deliberately constructed confusion. In this episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay breaks it down for you like no one else can. Join him and hear!
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17 comments
I remember a counter-question to this “question”: when is sex or gender relevant?
In the bedroom, that’s it. Everything else comes with the effort you put in: engineer, doctor, nurse, teacher, weightlifter, professional MMA fighter, model, etc. You might face resistence but that’s life, and frankly, reality in effect. Men transitioning to women in order to win championships? Ok, let’s have separate leagues, and watch if audience grow, fall or attend at all. Let’s have equality take place.
It becomes problematic as soon as equity is forced, and politics bow down to insane demands and introduce DEI measurments, for instance, to all society and majorities.
And in law of course, males and females are not equal before the law…
I wish this matter was as simple as some conservatives claim it is. For example, there are plenty of edge cases and exceptions that perplex the conservative or ‘common sense’ understanding that women and men are unproblematically differentiated by their sex organs.
So, in a sense, I agree with Kentanji Brown Jackson; the definition depends on the context and our purposes. She wasn’t being asked to simply intuit the difference. Her job demands more thought and consideration than that.
However, all we’re doing here is acknowledging some arbitrary or contingent aspect to where we draw the line in objective reality. It doesn’t follow that a qualified repudiation of the intuitive definition opens the door for experts in ‘Critical’ thought to acquire a monopoly on defining (or redefining) sex and/or gender. This is to effectively say either you stand with naive empiricism or the only alternative is post-modern epistemologies oriented around power and conflict.
Would conservatives say that the definitional difference between a chair and a table has no nuances or problems? No grey areas between these two classes of objects?
Anyway, I always thought that a probing question to ask people flexing ‘Critical’ views on the matter of “what is a woman” is to ask them (assuming they’re men and heterosexual) if they have or would date a woman with a penis? 😀
Nine out of ten proctologists report that Pretentsia Praecox (be it anal-retentivus or tightus-assicus variation) is easily cured by a good long bowel movement.
“Everyone’s talkin’ ’bout Windy… la la la la La La La…”
Quit stooling.
And don’t call me Shirley.
Come back and discuss the grey areas concerning tables & chairs mr spin doctor.
Ok, let’s concede the possibility: a generous estimate is 1 in 1,000,000
So what authority are all these gender studies professors using to define womanhood if they aren’t biologists? But then you ask a biologist and they stutter and might say they aren’t a gender studies expert, so they couldn’t say…
Larry Cox’s comments are what I have bee thinking on this woke business in general. Weak individuals gaining power who would have difficulty surviving without the strong and realistic to support a stable society. And some of the queer woke are opportunists cashing in on cushy jobs in teaching in colleges. Insanity being normalized is the danger we face as now our elites in government succumb to this madness. They are testing our sanity.
Yea and they are finding a new vehicle to express it and gas light the general population. They found away to get to kids alright and form their minds with Marxism.
Its so simple , if you are born with female reproductive organs , whether they work or not , you are a woman . The exceptions with both organs are so rare you cant make agendas out of that .
In their private lives they can be who they want but you cant twist society to accomodate such a low demographic .
Forget about trans men in womans prisin , there are already incidents of pregnancy in prison because of it .
Blaire White is totally cool with me . Id want her in a seperate wing if she went to prison , and they have that in some prisons .
Stand up to this neo marxist post modern crap
What is a woman?
The answer in four words:
Trans Lies, Society Dies.
“Woman” a weapon for the powerful. And a submission totem for the sodomized sheeple. Don’t kill me! I’ll say anything! I’ll turn in my neighbours, co-workers, family and friends! I do believe in spooks! 2 + 2 = 5!!! I’ll lick your ass, master. I’ll be a rat. I’ll grovel. Men are women. Trans are goddesses. Whites are Satan. I’m a worm! Don’t stomp me!
Nuke the entire friggin’ mess and start over from the caves!
“We are, I think… forced to conclude that men do not really want to know about themselves… [W]e find it easy to believe such remarks as Aristotle made at the beginning of his Metaphysics: ‘All men naturally desire knowledge’; and to imagine that it is self-evident that knowledge will always be welcomed. But if we examine not what follows from some abstract metaphysical principle but how men behave, some doubts arise. Even in the case of the physical world, knowledge must often hammer long at the door. Where they are themselves the subject-matter, men still keep the door resolutely shut. It may even be that they are right in this resistance.
Perhaps the full disclosure of what we really are and how we act is too violent a medicine.
In any case, whatever may be the desires of most men, it is most certainly against the interests of the powerful that the truth should be known about political behaviour. If the political truths stated or approximated by Machiavelli were widely known by men, the success of tyranny and all the other forms of oppressive political rule would become much less likely. A deeper freedom would be possible in society than Machiavelli himself believed attainable. If men generally understood as much of the mechanism of rule and privilege as Machiavelli understood, they would no longer be deceived into accepting that rule and privilege, and they would know what steps to take to overcome them.”
James Burnham, “The Machiavellians” 1942
I’m not convinced this is power grab is coming from the gay (“queer”) left. It has always seemed to me to have originated from regular straight white people who happen to be communists. They use “queer” theory as a veil for their true intent. They are a mob of pop culture idiots. As a gay person, I’ve seen this from two sides and it’s hard not to be nervous.
Queer theory is a subset of critical theory, a creation of the Postmodern university, so naturally your run-of-the-mill homosexual knows or cares nothing about “heteronormativity” or “subverting the heteronormative paradigm.” In most cases he just wants to live his life unmolested and privately.
However, true-believer college-indoctrinated gender activists, gay or not, care nothing about privacy or individual aims and desires and everything about weaponizing the theoretical homosexual identity as another way to subvert the West’s decaying culture(s) and to advance the dictatorship of the marginalized to attain the usual neo-Marxist undefined amorphous utopia.
What is a Woke woman ?
Paraphrasing Melvin Udall, the protagonist in the movie, “As Good as It Gets”:
“I think of a man. Then I remove all sense, reason, and sanity”.
This whole matter of identity becomes important in understanding people who are very uncertain about who or what they are. This uncertainty, though essentially of their own making, has been reinforced over the ages by “higher forces” that would prefer a population of uncertain (and therefore spiritually weak) individuals.
Ideally, a being could be anything it wanted to be, according to whim or circumstance. Of course, if you are in a certain type of body, acting like you are in a different type is going to be confusing, unless it is done for entertainment purposes (which many people are quite good at). A sane person can take any identity that seems appropriate to the moment, while at the same time taking responsibility for making that decision. An insane person pleads that he/she was “born that way” or some such.
My comments here have tried to follow the theme that what we are seeing is, essentially, an attempt to normalize insanity, including eventually criminal insanity. This goes up against one group of people who know that this is not only wrong but dangerous, yet have no “modern” way of explaining their gut instinct. Another group of people, spiritually weaker, are somewhat tantalized by the prospect of being able to act out their “odd” fantasies with little or no repercussions from the community. Those of us who profess to be thinking clearly about this had damn well better know what we are dealing with. We are dealing with a spiritually weak (I hope that expression conveys the proper meaning) group making a play for power on this planet by pretending to be spiritually strong.
Will we allow (as has been done so many times) physical power to trump spiritual power and enslave us once again for some purpose we are only dimly aware of? The prospects are very real that this will happen. We do, however, have a chance (for the first time?) to see spiritual power – real sanity – prevail on this planet. I hope it does.
There’s also the very major aspect to this that involves big money being pumped into this whole “agenda”.
Take Martine Rothblatt. (For one). Super successful millionaire (Sirius) that also developed a new drug to save his childs life from dying from a rare condition. This is quite admirable, but he also “transitioned” to a “woman” during his marriage – they are still married, and he wrote, “Transgender to Transhumanism”. There is big money working to promote this insanity by very monied, intelligent, very seemingly “sane” and successful people. One reason I imagine why so many in the medical field, etc., have gone along with the madness.
I don’t know how all of the pieces of the puzzle fit together, but it sure gets quite involved, and complicated it seems.
The madness seems to be being pushed from all kinds of angles. Like all four walls pushing in to squash our sanity, and civilization to death.