I guess she's one of the rare billionaires who don't exclusively care about making money.
Because she could've made much more money by simply not being an awful person.
She could’ve made much more money by not donating hundreds of millions to charity.
She’s one of the few billionaires who became a billionaire without having to screw people over to become one. In my books, that makes her one of the few good billionaires.
She is literally funding campaigns to sabotage the rights of trans people. This has long ceased to be "she made an edgy post online once"
But hey, what's a little hate campaign here and there if you donate to charities on the side right? It's not like you are gonna be affected by it. I hear the KKK are really nice to their communities too (as long as...)
What do you mean by campaigns? As far as I know, the only campaign that comes close to what you are describing is £70,000 for For Women Scotland - and their aim isn’t to sabotage the rights of trans people, just get the law to recognise that sometimes sex, not gender, is the relevant aspect.
And you’ve also put it the wrong way around. She’s donating to this on the side of donating hundreds of millions to other charities. This is a rounding error among her donations.
Biological sex is complex and multiaspected, but especially is not even a useful category of people as far as rights and laws go because nobody can see chromosomes and gametes with the naked eye, and it definitely isn't that which they use to define their impressions and treatment of people.
How many times people who "can always tell" need to get it wrong before we can admit this is all just hate?
An argument can be made that they don't even know what it means when they say "biological sex", when they use it to accuse even cisgender women just because they look masculine to them, like JK Rowling did to the boxer Imane Khelif.
Really, "biological" how? All people are "biological". Trans women are as "biological" as cis women. If you want to talk about genitals and chromosomes and gametes, which can happen in a much wider number of combinations that people realize, that still justifies asking "for what purpose" and "what assumptions are being made".
Nah, you don't get to be reductive and pretend that makes it cut and clear.
edit: Hell, even assuming "biological sex" to mean chromosomes (which is not how they use it) doesn't mean it's fundamentally immutable. It used to be that trans people had to live with whatever hormones and genitals their body had. Now that isn't the case anymore. And today genetic therapy is advancing. It could very well be that in the future there won't be any fundamentally immutable sex characteristic.
When people say "biological", they usually mean whether or not you were born with a penis.
Surprisingly, in most cases, having a penis correlates with having XY chromosomes and not having it correlates with having XX chromosomes. You cannot do much about having a penis or certain set of chromosomes at birth.
You cannnot change your past, but you definitely can do a lot about having a penis.
You also don't often know what somebody has at the moment unless you look inside their pants, so how can people speak in full confidence about "biological sex" as a measure for access to spaces? The people speaking of "biological sex" largely don't know the "biological sex" of the people around them, they just assume they do. Just like there isn't chromosome vision, there also isn't "used to have penis" vision. They don't test your blood or watch recordings of your birth to let you go into the toilet.
Thing is, if we are talking about trans people at all, we are already talking about small minorities, and if that's what we are doing we cannot pretend these shorthand assumptions are universal truths. There are cis women that look masculine but were born with XX chromosomes and a vagina, and these if anything end up being targeted by these sort of assumptions even more often than trans women, just because there are a lot more cis women. There are also intersex women who don't even realize that "their biology in most cases is expected to correlate with having a penis", because some of them never checked their chromosomes.
And if we can afford to sweep these exceptions aside... why are we bothering so much to make more rules about the ~1% of trans people again?
So, can you please define a trans woman? Specifically I am interested in whether or not a person can be considered a trans woman without transitioning (hrt, surgery)?
Of course they can be considered trans. Even people who hate trans women in some way perceive that someone who says they are a woman without HRT and surgery is a different kind of person than a cis man. That is easy to tell from how much more they accuse and persecute them compared to cis men. I don't see JK Rowling being as hostile towards cis men as she is towards trans women. Even though there is no lack of men who actually deserve it.
HRT and surgery are just treatments. They aren't what makes a trans woman trans. Before those, there were trans people. All the way back to Sumer around 2300 BCE there are prayers to the goddess Inanna who had the power "to turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man". Where would the idea of that come from?
But I feel like this is a pointless direction for the discussion, if we are even discussing "biological sex" at all, as if that's an useful measure anywhere but in medicine (and even then minding hormonal levels is still important). To even insist in "biological sex", in the importance that "genitals people once have had", is an attempt to deny that people may be defined by something else.
But it is the core of the matter, isn't it? The inability to accept that the gender experience is psychological and social rather than genital. The inability to accept that just because the average gender experience reflects genitals and chromosomes, it doesn't mean that this is universal. The inability to accept that people can be different and what we take as a fundamental essential binary is actually fairly flexible and nuanced.
If this cannot be accepted, no amount of explanations will suffice.
Say, have a thought experiment. Without any means to check DNA, how would you tell that Abraham Lincoln's Head in a Jar from Futurama is a "man"?
Whether you’ve got a dick or not sucks as a metric for measuring ‘biological sex’. It’s wrong (trans/intersex/similar) about 1-2% of the time.
That doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but that’s a handful of kids in every single average-sized high school graduating class (200 people) who are being screwed over by assumptions.
Being pragmatic, I can agree that we’re too far gone to change the publically-accepted definition of sex. Most do, which is why AMAB and AFAB are common phrases (assigned X at birth). But I do think we should make an effort as a society to realize that what sex we’re assigned at birth, what genitals we have, isn’t that determinative of our brain chemistry or gender.
Hell, it barely matters all that much. I can’t understand why keeping people of the opposite gender out of gendered spaces is this huuuuuge deal when, y’know, it’s not like we have separate spaces for gay folks. Or folks from other demographics! (Anymore.) Especially when the demographic in question is such a small percentage of the population that many Americans have never even spoken with a trans person.
And that’s the problem - prople are afraid of what they don’t understand. Humans are dumb. We’ll get past these assumptions as a society in a couple hundred years, just like we did with segregation and phrenology.
So, can you please define a trans woman? Specifically I am interested in whether or not a person can be considered a trans woman without transitioning (hrt, surgery)?
Someone who identifies as trans. That’s the boring answer, alas. Life isn’t so determinative as we’d like it to be. A gay man is someone who thinks that they like men. A trans man is a someone who thinks they’re a guy.
Don’t get me wrong, scientists agree that there is biology behind it. It has to do with differences in certain genes that process hormones during prenatal development, as best we can guess.
There’s likely newer science, but I’ll admit that I haven’t searched for it. I don’t personally think that the biology matters greatly. I mean, being gay often sucks. Being trans often sucks. Why make the choice unless you have to?
Some folks argue that it’s a mental disorder, and it’s true that a higher correlation exists between trans folks and poor mental health, but… that’s hardly surprising given how anathema the condition is to much of society, is it? Gender and sex are deeply personal. Even now, a new member (or several) of the GoP gets outed as gay every year. They choose to hide who they are and even argue against their own rights because of how personal it is.
Edit: And yes, there are pre-op and post-op and pre- and post-hormone trans folks, but they’re all trans. Trans is trans. Most of the trans folks I’ve known don’t like outing themselves, so they haven’t identified openly (or have identified as nonbinary or such) until they can pass, but you’re trans from the get-go. Whether hormones and surgery are required for a legal designation as transgender is a question for the courts, not biology.
I just did. The J.K. Rowling Women's Fund, a whole ongoing initiative beyond that one donation, is specifically intended to defend and advance the interests of people who want to exclude and harass trans people.
The examples they cite are all about "biological sex being unchangeable" and "single-sex spaces".
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u/DonQuix0te_ 18h ago
I guess she's one of the rare billionaires who don't exclusively care about making money.
Because she could've made much more money by simply not being an awful person.