Sure, I'll inspire your learning
I have been cleaning up my laptop's hard drive in fits and starts.
"What's a hard drive?"
It's The Cloud, if The Cloud actually lived on your computer instead of being on someone else's computer where you stored your stuff and people could break into it whenever they wanted and you got to pay a ridiculous monthly fee for the dubious privilege. Laptops are still being made with hard drives now, but I wonder how much longer that will be true. Is it time to go back to home-built desktop computers? I think it might be. Just about.
But I digress.
My process is more fits than starts, I'm afraid, but in the process of doing this -- when I'm doing this -- I keep running across old screenshots and memes. I found a screenshot I'd long forgotten about the day I wrote this, and it inspired me. It seems to have been a photo from some sort of workplace indoctrination seminar for the purposes of making people think gender is real or matters one fucking whit. The logo down in the corner of the PowerPoint slide says "Inspire Learning!" Hence the title of this essay.
I think it is an excellent example of some common genderdork arguments. I thought I would dispute its points for your benefit. Here we go:
"Biological sex" is not a binary
When you see a word or phrase written with quotation marks around it in precisely this fashion, the writer wishes to convey that the word or phrase describes an imaginary thing. (This is why I write trans woman as "trans woman." Sure, men who think they are "trans women" are real, but they aren't "trans women," because those are not real.) So right there you know you are about to be bullshat, because of course biological sex is real. As a matter of fact, calling it biological sex is redundant. Sex is a biological phenomenon. You might as well say "wet water."
(If I need to make it clear I am discussing reproductive parts and not the reproductive act, I say anatomical sex. Both kinds of sex are biological, after all.)
Also, BZZT. Yes, Virginia, sex is binary. There are two gametes (the cells we use to make babies). There are two types of gonads (the organs that make gametes). NO ONE who has EVER claimed sex is not binary has been able to tell me the name of the third gamete or the third gonad. The closest they've ever gotten is claiming that fungi have ten thousand sexes. That is incorrect. Some fungi have thousands of mating types, which is a specialized reproductive cell. Gametes (ovum and sperm) are technically very specialized mating types (mating-type cells are usually the same size as one another; obviously that's not true of gametes), but most mating types are not gametes. Fungi which use non-gamete mating types for reproduction do not sexually reproduce.
That's about as clear as mud but if you do some digging around, and also filter for all the idiots who don't know that fungi which use non-gamete mating types don't have sexes, you'll find my summary here quite accurate. I'll say it again: NO ONE who has EVER claimed sex is not binary has been able to tell me the name of the third gamete or the third gonad. Or the third sex. They also don't know the name of that one. Non-binary doesn't count, I'm afraid. The "haha" react on Facebook is not the third sex either.
Assigned Sex at Birth is assigned and only tells us limited things
Oh, would you look at that. No quotation marks.
I'll address the second part first. Any word only tells us limited things. Even the word everything excludes the concept of nothing. In fact, I'm gonna go nerdy here for a sec: One purpose of language is to limit concepts. You can't just think vibrations at people and have them understand you. You have to transmit specific ideas about specific things or you will just be making noise. Even if it is a pleasant noise, all it will do is make the people who hear it happy. You won't have actually told them anything. (Sorry, music geeks. Vague feelings are not usually messages.)
Plus, I can agree that your sex is never going to tell another person everything about you, but it does say a whole fucking lot about you, like which role you would hypothetically play in reproduction or how much tolerance your body probably has for alcoholic beverages or whether you would ever be at risk for ovarian cancer or prostate cancer or whether your sports talents are better suited for endurance or for sudden bursts of speed. "Only tells us limited things" sounds like your sex is about as significant as your eye color, which is absolute horseshit. Feminists have been fighting for a long fucking time for the medical community to finally acknowledge ALL of female people's known biological specifics, not just our reproductive anatomy, so we can get appropriate medical treatment (most doctors still think we have the same heart attack symptoms as men!!!), and this sort of nonsense the genderdorks are pushing literally puts women and girls at greater risk. Next time someone asks you what "trans people" have ever done to hurt women and girls, throw this in their face.
Now for the first part. I have pondered this off and on for a long time now. What the fuck does it mean? It looks to me like the genderdorks are claiming that before the doctor AsSiGnEd YoU a SeX at birth, you didn't have a sex, and if we put an end to that practice, we'd all be sexless. I don't know what these nitwits think sex is or what it's for, but clearly they've got the wrong idea.
I also find it passing strange that sex "assignment at birth" is so arbitrary yet, without fail, the babies they "assign male" who make it to adulthood all manage to have penises and balls when they get there. It's a miracle!
And? They keep telling us sex and gender are different, but they use the terms assigned sex at birth and assigned gender at birth interchangably. Uh, "folx," y'all need to have a talk amongst yourselves.
Assigned Sex at Birth is not Gender Identity
I would bet a million dollars that I will never, ever have, and I'd be right, that when they say "gender identity" here they mean womanhood and manhood. Once again, someone is saying gender identity when they mean sex class. Remember, kids: Woman and man are sex classes, not genders or gender identities.
They are, strictly speaking, correct that sex is not gender identity. That's because sex is real and gender identity is made-up sex-stereotypical bullshit.
Gender Identity is not Gender Expression
A man who says he's a woman can be a beardy balding person with a dick all he wants, bigot.
Seriously, that's what they're saying. And, look. I absolutely agree that if someone actually is a woman (an adult human being who was born with ovaries) but she has a beard, that doesn't make her less of a woman. But it does make her a woman with polycystic ovarian syndrome, most likely. In other words, women with beards are not the medically typical standard and they are not something (someone) we expect to see. I am 100% against allowing men to be taken seriously when they claim to be women, but men claiming to be women but refusing to try to look more like one are men who want society confused about who the men are and who the women are, because men with beards look very different from women with beards and if I have to constantly ask bearded men which of them are women, that wastes energy I could be using practicing accurate discernment to protect myself. They never have a legitimate reason to do this, it causes unnecessary conflict, and it makes us all less safe.
(Same goes for men claiming to be women at all, but the woman-LARPing men who never change a thing are particularly saying "fuck you" to women and girls. It's adding insult to injury.)
Anyway, gender expression is not a thing, because -- and here I will turn their argument on its head -- there isn't a specific uniform way for a man to "act like" or "look like" a man, nor for a woman to "act like" or "look like" a woman, except when it comes to reproductive anatomy and behavior. An adult human who gets pregnant using an ovum that same adult human produced is always female, and it doesn't matter if she has a buzzcut and likes to work on cars. The people who say there is such a thing as gender expression are saying that a man who grows his hair long and wears heels to work and cries at weddings is Expressing Woman Gender but Buzzcut Mechanic who literally was able to get pregnant is not. It's made-up sex-stereotypical bullshit. Like I said.
The gender binary expects us to fit in strict boxes where assigned sex, gender identity, and gender expression all align
You need to make up your minds whether you are talking about sex or gender, genderdorks. One minute it's "sex is not a binary" and the next it's "gender is not a binary." Pick one.
In any case, you're the ones saying that a person has to feel and act a certain way to be a woman. That's your entire basis for accepting that some men are women. All we terfs are saying is that women are of a certain species, are in a certain age range, and were born with ovaries. For this, we are bashed and canceled.
Saying that a woman is an adult human being who was born with ovaries opens it up so that women can have long hair or short hair, be aggressive or subdued, play sports or go shopping, be a mother or get a dog. Saying that a woman is any person who wants to wear lingerie reduces half the human population down to only being lace negligée models. You do not want to see me in a lace negligée. Ever. I am still a fucking woman and you can get the fuck over it.
It is normal and healthy to create spaces for gender play and exploration
Oh, sure. And while we're at it, let's bring back minstrel shows.
No?
Right. Stop calling everything "gender" and just wear what the fuck you want. It doesn't make you anything, and you will never be anything but what you physically are.
Seriously, what this is calling for is creating spaces where grown-ass men can put on frilly shit and go "tee-hee, I'm so girly!" It's mockery. I wouldn't go so far as to outlaw it, but actual women should be allowed to mock them right back, because they haven't been told No enough in their sorry little lives and boy does it show.
The journey is the point, not the end point
This one, for some reason, reminds me of the title of George W. Bush's autobiography, Decision Points. It's the sort of phrasing you use when you're quasi-illiterate with no real grasp of language. Kinda like George W. Bush.
Anyway, I'm going to get nerdy again for a second: An identity is basically an end point. It's a stopping place. It says "I am," not "I am going to be." If the end point is not the point, there's no reason to have gender identities. There's no point (har har) getting angry at people when you are a man, they see you're a man, and they address you as a man. They can't see you're oN a JoUrNeY. That's all in your empty fucking head. Not visible to others.
(Ain't it amazing how men accuse women of wanting men to be mind-readers when we expect them to pick up their skidmark shorts off the floor but then we have to read their minds when they decide to Have A Gender...?)
I get an idea they're also trying to say that woman and man are not end points of any sort and that we all figure out which one we are by playing around with costumes and shit. I won't even dignify that one with a response, because it's nonsense. The actual men in this world who are not ashamed of being men are fully aware of their place in the world relative to women and if we suddenly changed everything tomorrow and made everyone "explore" their way to deciding whether M or F goes on their birth certificate, men would just change the criteria for declaring oneself a man. Probably making it a lot more difficult, actually. Gotta preserve that privilege.
But these people are all about the magical thinking. No one ever explained to them what Cogito ergo sum actually means. I wish it really did work the way they think it does. I'd have that million dollars after all.
P.S. Finally deleted that stupid meme. I should just do a purge.