A woman is one of those things where know you one when you see one. Doesn't have to be any more complex than that.
Like Jiminy Cricket said, "Let your conscience be your guide"
this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2025
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It is deeply confusing to me why people think they can define a word in a way that covers all it's meaning and no additional ones and make fun of those who admit they can't.
Challenge for anyone, define "to eat". Remember, you have to cover eating soup but not drinking tea, or smoothie. But obviously, that isn't everything.
It shouldn't be that confusing, considering this is literally the challenge lawmakers (honest ones, as rare as they are) face.
There's a great blog post by Neil Gaiman (despite recent revelations about his misconduct) that talks about "why we must defend icky speech".
Long story short, the law is a blunt instrument. If you cannot clearly and accurately define the terms being used in the language of the law then you wind up with a law that can be applied beyond the intended scope. Like when you write laws about freedom of religion and then wind up with The Satanic Temple erecting statues of Baphomet in court houses. Or banning the Bible from library because it contains depictions of violence and sexual deviancy or promiscuity
These issues aren't just academic. They have real-world consequences. Like, there have literally been legal rulings made based on the presence or absence of an Oxford comma
Is that kind of pedantry useful to the average conversation? No, of course not. But there are people trying to make laws that target women, or trans women, and if they can't accurately define what a woman is then the law can be used to target people they didn't want targeted.
Which is one of many reasons why trying to target trans folks with legal authority is a fool's errand
What shouldn't be confusing?
In this particular case the available words are easily found in a dictionary, and if it comes to law you can easily write about cisgender women and transgender women.
The problem is people that want the word women to not include trans women. They want to say trans women are not women, while also saying trans men aren't women, and that's why to them it is gets confusing talking about what gender is. Because once they realise they are basically saying trans people are not people, they subconsciously know they are morally wrong. And it's confusing when you think you are doing something that is morally right, while knowing (maybe only subconsciously) you're not.
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Is this the kind of picture millionaires take these days?
Or anyone from, you know, the rest of the world.
That man is moments away from financial disaster
That man is 100% in Germany. He's fine.
I once dropped 6 eggs while working and cried
A woman is when a guy crosses the line. You say "Wo! Man!"
"capability of holding eggs" covers the vast majority of humankind. Hands are useful like that.
Welcome to the joke.
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There’s a deep insecurity in recognizing that there aren’t “objective right answers” to a lot of things. Language is not a law, it’s a negotiated thing. Being a trans man doesn’t sunder me completely from the existence of living as a girl, and there are contexts in which my “assigned” sec does matter. The fact that abortion is utterly illegal in my state is just as harmful and terrifying to me as it is to the cis women I know.
These are people who desperately want to feel in control of the world, and the idea that they would not be able to put a person into a category based on their immediate evaluation of their sex makes them feel a loss of control. It’s attacking something of their ways of knowing, it’s an epistemological challenge that sends them reeling.
With lesbians - it’s the gold star lesbian types. They find joy in their identities as lesbians, which is great, but they treat penis in vagina sex as a contagion. It almost “horseshoe theory”‘s back into sounding like conservative Christians. They squint at some actually good critiques of porn and the way that human sexuality is marketed, and turn into a Holy War against the Y chromosome. This is not common - but it’s a very marked type of pathology. The TERFs are the type to actually be manhaters - to post things like “it’s a girl or it’s an abortion.”
Is that really common among terfs?
I’ve seen some truly toxic female tictokers where every second video is about how men are the worst and we don’t need them for anything and I was wondering how someone gets to that point.
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Trying to categorize people into strict definitions for the purpose of determining their responsibilities without considering feedback from the people themselves about how they want to categorize themselves violates Kant's categorical imperative, also known as Granny Weatherwax's definition of sin as “when you treat people as things”:
The nature of sin
“There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment about the nature of sin, for example.”
“And what do they think? Against it, are they?”
“It’s not as simple as that. It’s not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray.”
“Nope.”
“Pardon?”
“There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”
“It’s a lot more complicated than that—”
“No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes—”
“But they starts with thinking about people as things . . .”
Worthy of Diogenes
Diogenes was the fucking man.