Exh 555334
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=zRQHZcU9ZqU&feature=emb_logo
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Transcript
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This video is sponsored by Curiosity Stream and Nebula. Gender and sex have been at the centre of public discourse for a few decades now.
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And by the public, I mean gay people, and by discourse, I mean arguing. If you, like me, were unfortunate enough to be assigned online at birth,
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you’ve probably heard the mantra repeated that “gender and sex are different”. That sex is your body, and gender is your brain; or sex is your body, and gender is the way you
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interact with the world. The catchphrase comes from a good place: it's an easy way to explain why gender identity matters, and why we should respect trans people. But honestly… I’m kind
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of over it. This take has been a fixture of the queer discourse for over a decade now,
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and I'm not gonna lie, it’s getting stale. Like okay, sure, they’re different. AZEALIA BANKS: So... what now?
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Nowadays, distinguishing between sex and gender feels so tame, it’s basically useless.
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But this wasn’t always the case. In fact, for most of history, the distinction between gender and sex didn’t exist at all. Gender roles were
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so tied to birth assignment that we didn’t even have a word for them. Women were held back because of their delicate constitution. The social aspect of gender - what it meant
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to live as a man or a woman - was explained away by biology. It all came down to sex.
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In the English-speaking world, it wasn’t until the 20th century that men and women’s places in society really came into question. The first wave of feminism had come and gone,
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and it was mostly a success - for white women. But after they won their battles, and a handful of legal rights were gained - for white women - it became
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clear just how much more needed to change before we could be equal. People began recognizing patriarchy as more than just the natural state of things:
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it was a system upheld in a million little ways, and it was one they could try to dismantle. Simone
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de Beauvoir’s book “The Second Sex” really kicked this off in 1949, talking about how gender isn’t
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innate, it’s drilled into us from childhood. She calls out the church, the institution of marriage,
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and the state of modern motherhood, saying each of them are obstacles to equality. Later, in 1955, the sexologist John Money coined the term “gender role”,
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while on a break from scarring children for life. F*** this guy! With the groundwork laid, we were off to the races! Gender roles were
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a major focus of second-wave feminism, and they’ve been in the spotlight ever since. Sure, the concept feels stale now. But in the 40s and 50s, talking about
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gender roles as separate from biology - as something we made up - was pretty radical!
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Acknowledging gender as separate from sex means things don't have to be this way. Your birth sex
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doesn't have to define the rest of your life. We recognize gender so we can criticize it.
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This is where the so-called “anti-gender movement” comes in. A growing faction of the Catholic right,
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especially in Eastern Europe and South America, have been fighting back against gender as a
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concept. They oppose it for the reasons you’d expect: it goes against God’s will, it threatens the traditional family, and so on. The Christian right is deeply invested
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in woman’s place in society, so of course they don’t want us to challenge it. But it’s not just those reactionaries that want us to stop talking about gender. It’s
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also THESE reactionaries that want us to stop talking about gender! What a bait-and-switch that was! Well. I guess it was in the title, actually. Aw.
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Trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs, are an increasingly mainstream contingent of
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feminists, and they say talking about gender is a waste of time, because it doesn’t matter.
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They prefer to talk only about sex, which they say is simple, unchangeable and the
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only real factor in sexism. Since gender is out of touch with reality, biology is king.
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I know that to many in the trans community, this line of thinking is distressing. If what they say
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is true, trans people have no hope of being accepted as our true genders. All of us are
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doomed to be defined by our birth sexes forever. But is it possible that TERFs have a point?
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No. No, not at all. Today, I’m here to examine what TERFs believe about sex,
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what they believe about gender, why they’re bafflingly wrong about both. Buckle up, baby!
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(Title card: 1. The Abolition of Sex)
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TERFs put a lot of stock in sex - the biological kind, not the kind their husbands keep DMing me
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about. They argue that biological sex is the root of all misogyny, from systemic
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discrimination to casual sexism. They say it's the determining factor in how we mature,
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how we're raised, how we're targeted and treated. And that the genders we live in have little to no bearing on any of these.
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This belief in sex above all sets them apart from most modern feminists. It’s ostensibly
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what makes them radical, because the world is trending towards gender-neutrality in a big way.
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The shift is most obvious when we talk about bodies - if we’re talking about periods, you might hear “people who menstruate” instead of “women”, or “birthing parent”
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instead of “mother”. I think this shift in language is unequivocally a good thing;
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it invites more people to the table. It lets everyone with a stake in this stuff know that they’re welcome in the conversation. It's also just more accurate! The old language
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left out cis women who don’t get periods, and cis mothers who didn’t give birth birth to their kids.
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Unsurprisingly, this shift in how we talk about bodies has sparked some major backlash from
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the anti-gender crowd. They often say it’s inappropriate or objectifying to talk about
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bodies in this way. Take it from someone who definitely knows things about women’s bodies. BEN SHAPIRO: How about the assertion that men and women are essentially social constructs? That even
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biology is a social construct. This is the most extreme form of the argument, that there are men with uteruses and women with vaginas.
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There are women with vaginas? I had no idea! Hot take, Ben! BEN SHAPIRO: CNN, the other day, headlined that individuals with a cervix should
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make sure they are... cervically screened... for cervical cancer. I have no idea what an individual with a cervix is--
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We know, buddy. We know. Anyway, they seem concerned that gender-neutral language excludes
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more people than it includes. Like if we describe the struggles faced by “people with uteruses”,
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we’re suddenly no longer talking about women with uteruses. I’m gonna say something really brave here, but I think women are people.
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(Canned applause) Thank you! TERFs seem especially concerned that we’ll abstract words like “man” and “woman” into
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meaninglessness. They argue that if we approach biology in a gender-neutral way,
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we won’t be able to talk about sexism or discrimination anymore. As it’s often put,
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“How can we talk about misogyny if we don’t know what a woman is?” And of course, what a woman is to them begins and ends with sex.
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So clarifying the meaning of sex - again, not the kind their husbands keep DMing me about - has been a major priority of theirs. Janice Raymond’s book The Transsexual Empire, from 1979,
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addresses this question right at the start. It’s a foundational text of anti-trans feminism, and it has been hugely influential in the movement.
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That said, Raymond defines sex in a pretty sensible way. She used a pre-existing definition of sex that was outlined by the gender role creep himself,
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John Money. She has some criticisms of his definition, but mostly goes with it anyway.
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Money defined sex based on six criteria: chromosomal, anatomical/morphological, genital,
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legal, endocrine/hormonal, and psychological, which Raymond calls psychosocial. The idea is that
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the archetypal woman has XX chromosomes, feminine fat distribution and bone structure - this has
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nothing to do with eugenics, I SWEAR. Ovaries, a female sex marker on her birth certificate,
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lots of estrogen in her system, and the behaviours and attitudes women are conditioned to have.
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And sure. I mean, obviously people who tick all those boxes are widely thought of as biologically female. Endosex cis women’s womanhood is really not under question here,
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so the only thing these rigid definitions do is help us decide who isn’t a real woman. They can only suggest who we should exclude from our feminism,
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not who we should include. And why should exclusion be the starting point? The genderqueer activist Riki Wilchins called this out in 1997, in their book
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“Read My Lips”. The language has evolved since this book came out, but it’s still really good. RIKI WILCHINS (voiced by Sarah Feldman): Even momentarily putting aside the issue
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of intersexual women, doesn’t reliance on “equipment” return us to a definition of woman
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in which biology becomes destiny? Doesn’t it return us to the classic oppressive construction
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of woman which defines her strictly by reproductive organs and function? Will we replace consciousness raising with crotch checks, complete with the edifying spectacle of us all
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squatting and pointedly inspecting each other’s genitals, as if we were a group of chimpanzees?
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Worst of all, we started out to liberate women. We wanted to represent their political interests and,
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in so doing, open up whole new horizons for them. Yet our first act is to fence off all the things
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they cannot do and still be considered women. Our message is no longer "You are free to become
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whatever your talent and heart allow", but rather, "You are free to become whatever your talent and
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heart allow as long as it’s not too masculine or too much like men, as long as you continue to look
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and act like a woman.“ And it appears that the woman you will look and act like is based on that
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traditional, limiting, heterosexual-based model we hoped to chuck for good.
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And really, what does this rigidity even serve? We know we can talk about biology,
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and things that are usually considered women’s issues, without falling prey to bio-essentialism.
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We do it all the time! In fact, TERFs' arguments that “we can’t even talk about biology anymore!”
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usually come up when queer people are talking about biology, just in a gender-neutral way.
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Conversations about “chestfeeding” instead of breastfeeding, or cancer screenings for
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“people with prostates” instead of men, are usually what rile them up in the first place. But we need to have these conversations, because of course, trans people know that “sex matters”.
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We know this because all people have sexed traits that impact our lives. For a trans woman,
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this could look like having broad shoulders, or having breasts - or it the unique way
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you’re treated if you have both. We aren’t ignorant of biology at all. In fact, I think trans people have a really valuable, unique point of view on sex, and the many things it entails.
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For instance, I have some traits that aren’t considered female - like I can’t get pregnant - and I have a good sense of when they matter, and when they don't. It matters when
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I’m talking to my doctor, and when governments pass draconian abortion bans. It doesn’t matter
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in my daily life as a lesbian partnered to someone who couldn’t get me pregnant, anyway. It doesn’t confer privilege in a job interview, or when I’m walking alone, late at night.
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I wish people trusted that trans people know what our own lives are like, and how our bodies impact our struggles. I mean hell, a lot of us have changed the
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traits you use to determine a person’s sex, and seen it change the way we're treated.
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Medical transition is an expensive, years-long process, and we don’t do it for no reason.
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If we thought sex was irrelevant, why would so many of us change our own? (Title card: 2. The Case for Gender)
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The Transsexual Empire came out over 40 years ago, and it doesn’t perfectly reflect what
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modern transphobes have to say about sex. I read a fair bit of it while researching this video, and I was shocked to see how measured it is in a lot of ways,
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at least compared to the hateful stuff coming out right now. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a deeply hateful book, but at the same time, one of the criteria it used to define
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sex was “psychosocial”; the way you feel about your sex and your place in the world.
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And that's just... gender? The Transsexual Empire was gender-critical, but it did acknowledge gender
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as real and at least occasionally relevant. You would never see that now! Today’s TERFs
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are rabidly anti-gender. They’ve made it clear gender has no place at all in their analysis.
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For modern TERFs, sex is simple, immutable and objective, where gender is just the opposite. It's
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imaginary; it's immaterial. It's far too slippery to be of any use. Most contemporary TERF writing
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posits that genders are nothing more than harmful stereotypes, and that by living in our preferred genders, trans people perpetuate these stereotypes. They’re especially quick to come
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for the girls over this: “Oh, you think being a woman is just about being beautiful and feminine!”
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It's like they don't even see us. You think if I thought that, I would look like THIS right now?! They argue that trans women are all hyperfeminine and shallow,
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and that we perpetuate the idea that you need to be those things to count as a woman. Claiming a gender at all is seen as misogynist violence.
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However… they don’t really apply this idea evenly. While they'll often judge trans women
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for presenting as female, that judgment is rarely turned inward. Cisgender transphobes,
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most of 'em at least, never seem to question their own gendering. Why do you have long
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hair? Why do you wear makeup? ‘Cause if my womanhood is oppressive, surely that is, too. And Riki Wilchins actually confronted Janice Raymond on this point in person.
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Here’s an excerpt of a speech they gave at an event in 1994: “You say we want to "pass" as women. Well, I don’t pass. I wear this Transexual Menace
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logo everyplace I go. Between the two of us, only you pass as a woman.
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If, as de Beauvoir held, "One is not born a woman, but becomes one," if femininity is an invention of men foisted on women, if feminine behavior is a learned cultural
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performance of hair, clothing, voice, gesture, and stance so one is perceived as a female,
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then by presenting yourself as a woman it is you who have been co-opted into traditional sex roles,
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you who serve their institution, and you who are performing here.” (Crowd cheers, bad-ass music plays)
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Trans people are marked by our active choices about gender. Think of all those cliched images of trans girls coming into their own:
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spotted trying on their mom’s clothes through a crack in the door. Viewed through a vanity mirror, meticulously applying lipstick and false eyelashes. And obviously, there’s nothing
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wrong with doing these things; if any femme trans girls are watching this… (mouthing "call me") My point is that even when we’re accepted as women,
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the whole dolling-up routine is thought of as foreign to us. On the other hand, cis women applying makeup is part of the expected daily routine.
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In movies and TV, the effort cis women put into their looks is utterly invisible. Women wake up
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with perfectly curled hair and a full face of makeup, and it’s never even acknowledged!
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It’s like this pristine femininity is so innate to their bodies that it happens all by itself.
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Of course, it doesn’t. Being AFAB doesn’t mean you wake up every morning wearing lip gloss and kitten heels. Cis women getting dolled up is just as much a feminization
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as it is for trans women. As a wise fracking tycoon once said, we’re all born naked and
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the rest is drag! What's that, you're on estrogen? No, you can't be on the show! When cis people take on the gendered behaviour expected of them,
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it’s assumed to be a natural outgrowth of their biology. "You like dresses because not because you're a girl, but because you’re female, and females are drawn to these things".
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It could be that or, "You tease people in your class because you’re male, and that’s how males show affection". I can see how, for some cis women, gender and sex might feel
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like they ARE the same thing. All these gendered traits are understood as extensions of their sex.
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That’s how you get people saying shit like “I’m not cis, I’m normal”! Or “I don’t have pronouns, I’m just a dude!”
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LEFT AT LONDON: Hey there! What are your pronouns? Oh, I'm cis. I don't have pronouns. No pronouns? Damn... another victim of gender identity theft.
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Some cis people get so offended when you point out that they, too, have a gender.
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But they do! Their behaviours and their choices don’t exist in a vacuum. The belief that every part of a person’s identity boils down to sex is... sexist. And to be fair,
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it's not something all TERFs believe - many say femininity is completely artificial.
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Some TERFs call for gender abolition on a wider scale: going beyond gender roles, they hope to do away with gender altogether.
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A prominent TERF we’ll talk about another day named Kara Dansky put it this way in her new book:
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KARA DANSKY (voiced by Laura Crone): For feminists, gender is purely a social construction that is loaded with various patriarchal roles, values,
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and expectations [...] The reason feminists have been calling for the abolition of gender
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is that from a feminist perspective, gender is a prison that keeps women in a position
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of subservience to men. For feminists, in other words, gender is the problem, not the solution.
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This argument's a kind of funny one. She says trans people are part of the problem because
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we have gender identities, and gender is a social construct. The funny thing is, saying that gender
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is a social construct isn’t a controversial take in trans communities! Lots of us agree!
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I’ve argued against the innateness of gender in a few of my videos over the past year.
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I’ve argued against the importance of identity in general! I mean, I went viral for a take adjacent to this; I owe my career to saying gender is kind of
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silly sometimes. And having read like, thousands of comments across my videos about gender…
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I can’t remember many people disagreeing with me. Because I acknowledge that even if gender is fake,
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trans people are still here and we still matter. As it turns out, being critical of
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gender is actually pretty welcomed by a community that’s marginalized because of their genders.
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For any TERFs watching, I’d like to offer a tip on how to get the trans community to listen to you.
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Don’t do hate speech. Frankly, if anyone knows gender is fake, it’s us. We’ve seen this shit from the inside, we know just how inconsistent the rules are. It’s like,
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I can see this shit in six dimensions, buddy! You have no idea just how made up it is! But something can be made up and still matter. “Social construct” doesn’t mean unimportant.
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Money is a social construct, that doesn't mean you can go around burning hundred-dollar bills. Traffic laws are a social construct! You don’t see us barrelling through red lights about it!
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When we engage with these things, we kind of make them real. When Judith Butler says gender is performative, that’s what they mean… I think? Honestly,
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I read one sentence of Gender Trouble and enter a fugue state, so who can say for sure. Gender is upheld by all of us, and by so many systems!
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I can’t just decide to stop being gendered. The world wouldn’t listen. I guess we could all collectively opt out; start themming it up in every city on earth--
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In my last video, I made a joke that was insensitive to the nonbinary community. I am so deeply sorry. I'll be taking a step back to learn and reflect. Thank you all.
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But I'm not convinced that would do much good. It wouldn’t cancel out all our gendered experiences.
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I can’t imagine patriarchy would vanish the second all our genders do. Not everyone feels this attachment to gender, of course. There are agender people out there living
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their best lives, miles away from this stupid discourse, and I love it for them! But letting go of mine would feel like a genuine loss. Being a woman is important to me, and not just internally.
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When reflecting on how my gender has mattered, I think of all the gendered bonds I’ve formed
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with people: as a sister, and a daughter, and a friend. I think of the career opportunities
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that dried up the second I came out, the schooling that became impossible to finish.
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It wasn’t because of my sex. All this happened before I’d changed anything about my body or my birth certificate. It was about my gender. I was a woman,
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and a trans one at that. It wouldn’t do me much good to ignore that, would it? I think deep down, TERFs must know the genders we live in are relevant. It’s so obvious that
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they must see it. They usually feign ignorance, and insist that trans women never face misogyny,
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because we’re male, and that trans men remain inescapably female in every way that matters.
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But their tactics tell a different story. I mean, they really fight to keep trans people in the closet, right? They want books banned
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and spaces un-safed and clinics shut down. They want conversion therapy legalized,
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and God, I wish that was hyperbole, but they literally do. All this, despite their insistence that nothing can change a person’s sex. That this dangerous
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gender ideology can only change people’s gender identities. Something doesn’t add up here.
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If sex is all that matters, and nothing can ever change it, who CARES if people want to
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transition?! Who CARES if people want to change their gender? By their own logic,
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everyone from catcallers to lawmakers should see through the facade and treat us as our
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true sex. If gender doesn’t matter, someone changing theirs should make no difference.
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But that’s bullshit, and they know it’s bullshit. Just listen to how TERFs talk about transmasculine
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teenagers, even the ones who don’t want hormones or surgery. They act so concerned that young girls
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are transitioning to escape misogyny and the challenges of girlhood - and they concede that
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it tends to work! They admit that people treat you differently based on your lived gender; sometimes better or worse, but often just differently. It’s a quiet
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admission that the genders we live in are materially relevant, independent of sex. LIERRE KEITH (voiced by Laura Crone): The transgender movement would have
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us believe that sex does not exist as a material reality and should be replaced
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by the utterly incoherent concept of 'gender identity'. they are winning.
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Their current line only works if trans people hold gender in high regard, and think it’s this thing
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that is deeply, persistently true. And some people think that, but I don't. The feelings and actions
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we describe as gender as real, and the things we use to decide sex, like hormones and chromosomes,
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are real, too. I don’t think the cultural meanings we prescribe them are real. I don’t think a person’s sex should matter! But as long as it does, it’s worth talking about. Much to the
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chagrin of TERFs everywhere, I ultimately believe in sex. The question is… do they?
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(Title card: 3. What Is Sex, Really?) Through my research, I kept coming back to the definition of sex used in The Transsexual Empire, the one with six criteria to it.
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I know this has been a pretty dense video, so I’ll refresh you on what the criteria were: Chromosomal, anatomical, genital, legal, hormonal, and psychosocial.
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Janice Raymond using this definition struck me as a real weak point in her reasoning.
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Because, despite her insistence that trans women will never be female, transitioning can change nearly all of these criteria! And I say women
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because that’s who the book's about, but this applies to trans people. Working up the list backwards: Psychosocial. We identify as women,
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and could be said to have the “attitudes and behaviours” associated with women. Hormonal. We can easily change the dominant hormone in our bodies with HRT. Hi baby! Hi!
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Legal. In many countries, we can change our legal. Genital. You can’t change the gametes your body
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has, but you can get rid of them altogether. In fact, it’s fun! I highly recommend it.
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Anatomical. We can change our bodies with hormones and surgery. (Chromosomal) The last one is the most fixed. There’s no way to change the chromosomes in
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your cells, nor would it really be worthwhile if you could. More on this in a little bit. It’s funny: in what’s basically the founding text of anti-trans feminism,
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five of the six definitions of biological sex acknowledge trans women as not being male. The
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one that doesn’t was discovered in 1882, and I’m pretty sure sex has been around longer than that.
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Janice Raymond’s definition of sex lets trans people off pretty easy. No real gotchas to be found. To her credit, it was honest, and scientific for the time,
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but starting your book about how trans women are men with several ways trans women are women is didactically pretty weak. It’s also not nearly as catchy as it should be,
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if you’re trying to build a mass movement. You're telling me sex is these six things, and some aren’t binary, and some are a social construct? How am I gonna fit that on a T-shirt?!
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Unsurprisingly, this approach has fallen by the wayside in recent years. In the
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four decades since The Transsexual Empire came out, the TERF line on what sex is has actually
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shifted quite a few times. Sometimes it changes meaning more than once in a single conversation.
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To start, they might say “sex is what’s on your birth certificate”. A single, binary data point. Easy to understand, impossible to change… That is,
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until you do change it. From there, it might move to “Sex is what’s in your pants”. Of course, you
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can change that too. In that case, saying, "Sex is really just your chromosomes” should do the trick.
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In the past year, I’ve noticed them shifting towards the position that sex is only your gametes: whether you produce sperm cells or egg cells. I think
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they’ll settle on this one for a while, though the others still pop up sometimes. For a supposedly objective thing, transphobes’ definition of sex is real slippery. And if
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it’s so fundamental to their movement, you'd think they would've agreed on it beforehand. According to TERFs, we should talk about sex, not gender, because sex is objective,
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and totally separate from culture. They say sex is really what determines the struggles we face;
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that sex is inherently more in touch with material reality. But that doesn’t gel with the simpler definitions they’ve latched onto lately.
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The thing about chromosomes and gametes is... they’re invisible. Microscopic. If
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someone walks by you on the street, they don’t know what your chromosomes are! Even a doctor can't say for sure without running tests. How could chromosomes be so
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essential to the oppression of women when most of us don’t even know for sure what our own are?
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Well. Chromosomes are important for sex determination because they tell your body what to do as it matures: what happens in the womb, during your puberty, and so on.
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They’re instructions. And when you medically transition, you’re kind of deciding to flout
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those instructions, and follow your own, instead. And I love that for you! So fish! Now this may surprise you, but I’m not a scientist. I am some lady who read a few
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books and set up a camera in her bedroom. But, having maxed out my levels in gender and sex IRL,
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seeing this shit in six dimensions and solving gender in my head like it’s times tables, I feel like I should still put this out there.
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When we’re talking about sex in a social context, I don’t see why chromosomes should matter more
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than the way our bodies actually are in the world. What they look like, how they function, how it feels to be in them. Cause if we’re talking about sex as a way to cut through the bullshit,
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and talk material reality, DNA is kind of a distraction. People don’t exempt me from misogyny based on information they don’t have access to.
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TERFs use “biological sex” to lay claim to some special relationship to material reality,
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some impartial observer position, where they just tell it like it is. But their prescription
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of trans people’s bodies as male or female has nothing to do with how we live, how treat each
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other, or how we interact with institutions. Hell, it barely has anything to do with bodies at all.
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Case in point: gametes. A widely used yardstick for sex in science.
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If a trans woman is on hormones long enough, she stops producing them. Hold up. Okay, that's not quite right. This is true for some people,
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but it doesn't always happen. Hormone therapy is not a reliable contraceptive. Anyway. If she gets bottom surgery, her body can never produce them again. If TERFs used gametes as
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their definition of sex and stuck with it… that would mean that post-op trans women
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are no longer male. But, and this will surprise nobody, they don’t. Instead, they opt to call us…
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eunuchs. Sterilized males. And I’m just like... where do you see that?! On what grounds?!
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According to transphobes, the most important thing about your body is defined not by what your body looks like,
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but by how it might have looked like when you were born. Or not by what your body looks like, but by
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reproductive cells you may have no intention of using - cells you might not even have anymore!
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So what’s up with this? How can TERFs claim this special connection to material reality,
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while denying the realities of trans people’s bodies? Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret.
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Transphobes’ definition of biological sex has nothing to do with biology. In fact,
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it has nothing to do with anything observable at all. They don’t really believe that sex is
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your chromosomes, or your gametes. They don’t believe sex is your legal marker, or your hormones, or your body type. What they believe - the only thing they
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believe - is that sex is how you’re born, and that it can’t change. It’s that simple.
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And they used to be upfront about this! Trans-exclusionary feminism branded itself as being for “womyn born womyn” until like, a decade or two ago. It was exclusion
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for exclusion’s sake. They only shifted gears recently, when their unabashed prejudice came
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under fire. But modern radical feminism is still like that. The only thing that’s changed is they’ve fortified their prejudice with scientific jargon to make it look reasonable.
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And this is why their definition of sex is so slippery. It’s hard to define sex in a single, simple way that is both true and categorically invalidates trans people. Because,
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in most ways that count, trans women are female, and trans men are male! At least we can be. But TERFism can’t survive a conclusion like this, because the whole purpose
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of defining sex is excluding us: deciding who doesn’t get resources or community.
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Deciding who isn’t female, more than deciding who is. If trans people fit into their theory of sex in any way, the theory doesn’t work anymore, so it has to change.
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And here’s the truly galaxy-brained shit, the take I’ve spent the last 40 minutes priming you for.
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TERFs don’t believe in biological sex. They believe in the inescapable power of birth
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assignment, powerful enough that its impact endures even when no trace of it remains. They
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believe that birth assignment dictates whether you are a pure person who's destined to be victimized,
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or a threat who’s not to be trusted. They believe that your assigned sex at birth should determine what you can do, what you can call yourself, and who you can associate with.
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This belief is a rigidly idealist one, and doesn’t hold up to real-world scrutiny,
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but it’s the core of their whole movement. It needs to be true, or everything else falls apart.
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The thing about treating sex as the most important thing, and imparting deep cultural meaning onto
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people’s bodies, is... You’ve just invented gender again! That is literally where gender came from
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at the very beginning. That' what gender was 2000 years ago, and it's what gender was in the 1920s.
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I thought these people were supposed to be gender critical! It seems like they want us to step back
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several decades into the past, when gender did exist, but we had no language to talk about it.
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We named gender in the first place to talk about how gender roles are artificial. How women’s place in society is not natural.
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And I think this has worked! Nowadays, calling gender a social construct is so tame, it barely feels worth saying. But TERFs want us to stop using this language.
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They identify themselves as the most principled, strident radical feminists. But to borrow a page
32:22
from their playbook: I don’t give a shit how you identify, I care about what you are! And the vast majority of TERFs are, at this point, fighting to control the bodies of women, and people they think
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are women. They’re fighting to reinstate the old order, where men and women inhabit separate worlds
32:38
that can never touch. Where gender is ignored, and so-called natural sex differences justify all
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kinds of discrimination. Setting aside whatever ideals they claim, this is the world they’re
32:50
trying to build. This is what happens if they win. You want to talk material reality, there you go.
32:56
(Title card: TERFS ARE WRONG ABOUT BIOLOGICAL SEX (AND EVERYTHING ELSE))
33:02
Ouf! Oh boy. Hey, so on a lighter note, we're coming up on a year of the channel now. It's funny to say that, because I actually started this channel about
33:10
6 years ago. I have been trying at this on and off since 2012, and I never expected it to work in the way it has been. In the past year, I've been
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trying really hard to make this sustainable, and to make this community a healthy one. That’s why I’m really excited to announce that my videos are now available on
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Nebula. Nebula is a streaming platform owned by its creators. There are a lot of upsides to this:
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creators on Nebula aren't bound to the algorithm, so we can explore the topics we care about. We
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can talk about sensitive topics like this one, without fear of getting demonetized. Nebula doesn't even have ads - even the one you’re watching right now! And there is so much
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good stuff on there. Nebula has Lindsay Ellis, FD Signifier, Hbomberguy, Kat Blaque, I could go on!
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And it gets better. If you follow my link in the description, you can get Nebula for free right now, because there’s a bundle deal with Curiosity Stream!
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If you don’t already know, Curiosity Stream is an educational streaming service with thousands of documentaries on all sorts of topics,
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from food to psychology to wildlife. If you like learning about badass women throughout history,
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and who doesn’t, you might enjoy Calculating Ada: The Countess of Computing. It’s about Ada
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Lovelace, the visionary who wrote the first computer program all the way back in 1843.
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If that sounds like your kind of thing, you can use my link and get a discount on an annual subscription. If you sign up before December 25th, you’ll get a staggering 42% off! A whole
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To sign up for Curiosity Stream, and get Nebula for zero extra dollars, head to
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curiositystream.com/lilyalexandre. Thanks again to Curiosity Stream for sponsoring this video.
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And, for that matter, thanks to all of you for your support over the past year. I can't tell you how much it's meant.
35:00
Ugh, I can never manage to do the credits in one go. I also wanted to thank Laura Crone and Sarah Feldman for lending their voices to this video.
35:08
They both have excellent YouTube channels, so definitely check them out. I'm looking back at where I was a year ago, and it is absolutely wild how much has changed. I
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couldn't do that without all of you, and especially my supporters on Patreon. So, as always, a huge thanks to my top Patrons, including:
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TheNumeralOne duck grows chilis Pascal Isaac (Izzy) Mattie Mamode Lillian Butler
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Rebecca Gail Sasha Karbachinskiy Katelyn Hannah Leichnitz Dan Lizotte
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There's always one that's just like, the best username you've ever heard. Alejandro Hernandez Gen Pseudonym
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Chloë Jane Mel Cat Gwen Lofman Rose Dale
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scatterflower midtierart wimbleimble Imogen Campbell
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and that's actually the last one. Thank you all so much for making this possible, and for making 2021 a shockingly good year for me! See you in the next one.
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