DJP
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“My name is Zoe and I am a trans-woman. By this I mean that I was assigned male at birth but identify as a woman. This raises the question of how I know that I’m a trans woman? People who ask this often expect to be provided with some systematic list of reasons as if I were explaining how I know that it is raining. One’s internal sense of self is not, however, the same as the weather. We can both look out the window and easily observe the weather together. You cannot, however, jump inside my head and experience life as I do. Instead you have to rely on my highly in-adequate attempts at conveying the richness and complexity of my first person experience to you. I might tell a person that I find a joke funny but this is not the same as successfully conveying to them how it felt to find the joke funny. Likewise, I can tell a person that I feel like a woman but this will not successfully convey to them my inner experience of this feeling.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOdChL4tKjg
https://anarchopac.wordpress.com/2018/01/11/im-a-trans-woman/
I’m thinking Jordan’s attempt to find a “falsifiable” definitions misses the point somehow..
Depends what you’re talking about I guess. Some concepts are unavoidably fuzzy, especially those used in politics.
I prefer Nietzsche, “it is only that which has no history which can be defined”
“Loose thinking leads to the loose use of words, but the loose use of words also leads to loose thinking.”
Time to allow Labourites and Leninists to say they are socialists then? Why not?
Out of interest where does this quote come from? To be honest, I don’t think who said had much of a grip on how language works.
There was a recent court case in the UK where a woman successfully sued for damages after being given puberty blockers.
Also in the UK, schools are no longer allowed to push the “born in the wrong body” narrative
https://www.thearticle.com/the-sexist-reality-behind-the-transgender-narrative
https://thecritic.co.uk/the-sexist-pseudoscience-of-gender-identity/Alan, thousands of articles about these topics are on the internet. What in particular do you think is special about the two you posted?
Jordan – thanks for taking the time to read my links. I think there is something in the arguments you mention. There’s a few things I disagree with though..
money’s definitely a social construct. it’s not real. it didn’t exist before humanity.
So capitalism is not real either? Phew there’s a relief!
“Real” doesn’t mean existing before humanity, or “physical”. Money, capitalism, The World Socialist Party of America, patriarchy; all of these things are real they just exist, as Grace-Chappell says a few lines on, “as the reality of historical and social formations. They don’t have the reality of the natural kinds that science is concerned with, like Panthera Tigris Tigris and H2O and tungsten. But whoever said that the only real kinds of things were the natural kinds?”
Also, I don’t think language works how you seem to think it does, it doesn’t work like geometry. A definition is not an argument, it’s not the kind of thing that has a truth value or is falsifiable. Circularly in definitions is not uncommon, or really a problem, look in a dictionary. But now we’re talking about philosophy of language..
The thing with the transgender debate is it *is* a struggle of the meaning of words and concepts, and struggles over the meaning of words and concepts of this kind are political struggles.
Perhaps posting a bunch of links isn’t a particularly useful thing to do, but I found these articles useful in the past…
https://blogs.cardiff.ac.uk/openfordebate/2020/11/30/is-jk-rowling-transphobic/
https://www.philosophersmag.com/interviews/219-sophie-grace-chappell-talks-sex-and-gender
Jordan. For starters, if the “RadFems are right about everything” then Marx is wrong about the nature of capitalism. You can’t have it both ways…. You’re making yourself look foolish here, in more ways than one.
High-risk people in the UK can already get Vitamin D for free from the NHS:
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/people-at-higher-risk/get-vitamin-d-supplements/
(I know David Harvey did a guide/help for understanding Volume 1 but I couldn’t find anything similar or any guide to understanding Volume 3 so I’m a bit confused).
There are problems with the Harvey guides, see here:
https://critisticuffs.org/texts/david-harveyA useful, though unfinished, guide to all three volumes could be this one by Simon Clarke:
https://libcom.org/library/reading-guide-capital-simon-clarkeCapitalism is production for profit NOT human need.
The “not” here seems a bit odd. If a capitalist produces useless things, things that do not satisfy a need, nobody will buy them. Capitalism does produce things that satisfy human needs, but it only produces to the extent that there is a profit to be made. In the case of covid vaccines, the state has had to step in to ensure that it is profitable for the companies to do so. If it hadn’t done so the functioning of capitalism as a whole would have been affected, that’s why the state is a necessary component of the whole system. In this case the interests of the working class (to not get struck down by a debilitating disease) and the interests of capital (to have a workforce that can continue working) allign.
I didn’t have the stomach to look, so could be wrong, but the original article has a quote from them saying that they regularly post “against Boris Johnson’s Covid policies”
To hazard a guess I think it most likely the SWP temporarily fell foul of an algorithm, because of their anti covid stuff. That’s how Facebook works, it’s mostly robots doing things, not humans. TBH I think they’re trying to make a drama out of this to gain publicity and support.
But do you really think that being kicked off Facebook is the same thing as government censorship? Surely freedom of the press also involves the freedom of a press to decide what it does not wish to publish?
If anything it shows the importance of not over-relying on private or corporate platforms that might not share our agenda.
