Trans Rhetoric – Part 1

(Introduction & Mantras)

Purpose

With these blog posts, I have no intention of converting anyone away from being ‘trans’. Nor do I have any issue with any trans individuals in particular. As an organisation however, I do take exception to the totalitarian ‘trans’ or else attitude, particularly with the shutting down of free speech and the refusal to accept the privacy, dignity, respect, and rights of women and girls to their sex segregated safe spaces and exemptions under the Equality Act 2010.

To that end, these posts will attempt to demonstrate how ‘trans rhetoric’ is being used to manipulate you and hopefully provide you with some armour of understanding so that you can spot it when it is used against you.

The highlighted areas in the mind map below will be discussed in this blog post.

Why Should We Argue?

Let’s be honest, arguing is good! Not the heated kind, but the justification for holding on to a particular idea or concept. Arguing forces us to justify why we think a certain way or believe a certain thing (e.g. empirical proof, testing by the scientific method, or logic and reason). If people are open minded then we can hopefully convince them of our position, on the other hand, if they believe the opposite is true and we both take entrenched positions we normally end up going round in circles with neither giving ground.

We all know someone that can run rings around us with any argument, be it because they like playing devils advocate or just out of sheer orneriness, but if the current discussion on trans rights above all others is going to have fundamental changes for 51% of the population, it is important that we understand what is being asked and the arguments they are using to justify handing of women’s rights away to men who demand we pretend they are women.

However, as we shall see with “Cancel Culture”, when you have no arguments and only resort to meaningless mantras and assertions, then refusing to argue or preventing others from countering your narrative is the only way to propound your belief.

Why Argue with Zealots?
Arguing on social media can seem like a pointless exercise – especially when people are so wedded to their belief system that every bit of science and learning of biology is ignored. However it is important to remember that often GC people are not arguing to convince the TRA, it is to highlight for uninformed or curious people that might come along trying to find out more about the issues.

The Scottish Independence Referendum of 2014 can be used as a corollary here where many people had fully made up their mind years before and took entrenched positions. Undecided voters would then investigate and quietly follow threads/discussions (an action known as ‘lurking’) between the two opposing sides and then make up their own mind.

Similarly, the intention is not to humiliate any TRAs belief system, but to counter the narrative that there is only one way to think and that is the trans way and that women should be forced to give up their hard fought for and won rights to men demanding we pretend they are women.

As we shall see in later posts, when people believe something without any evidence, or in the face of overwhelming evidence against it, we normally refer to this as “blind faith”.

Mantras & Assertions

In any political sphere, having a good slogan that you can parrot out relentlessly to embed in peoples subconscious is a good thing. It does not have to be true, it just has to stick. (Think Theresa May’s “Strong and stable”, “Brexit means Brexit” etc.) Some of the most common ones used by TRAs are:

• Trans Rights are Human Rights
• AMAB – Assigned Male at Birth
• AFAB – Assigned Female at Birth
• Right Side of History
• Born in the Wrong Body
• TWAW – Trans Women are Women

If we use these stock phrases to answer the question “Why should men be allowed into women and girls sex-segregated safe spaces” then we should be able to reply with “men should have access to women’s safe space because…” and add each mantra as a justifiable reason. As we shall see, this simply does not work

They are simply assertions that TRAs believe and want us to take as fact, without question, investigation, and not even in consultation with the people who’s rights they are trying to supplant (women).

Trans Rights are Human Rights
Every person in the UK, irrespective of how they identify or present themselves has the exact same rights under the ECHR. There are no human rights that trans people do not have.

In respective of the UK Equality Act 2010, there are exemptions for people with Protected Characteristics such as sex. This means that women and girls are entitled to, for example, their own safe spaces, to be examined medically by an actual woman etc.

TRAs will regularly parrot this mantra but never actually admit what rights they do not have or what rights they desire. This leads to the suspicion that they do not want to admit their true motives for demanding full access to women and girls sex-segregated safe spaces.

AMAB / AFAB
Taking AMAB and AFAB, these are quite simply lies. No-one is assigned a sex at birth. Sex can be determined in the womb during pregnancy or observed when the child is born. By using ‘assigned’ they are trying to lodge the idea that even though the child is born with a penis, the doctor/midwife somehow made a mistake and got it wrong that the child was actually female all along to justify a sex change 20+years later. Poppycock! It’s a lie.

Now, to justify this, TRAs will normally cite intersex people (people born with differences in sexual development -DSDs). This is a recurring theme in ‘trans rhetoric’ where the physical differences of intersex people⁽¹⁾ are used to justify emotional feelings of trans people who have no such physical conditions.

For the record, intersex/DSD people are not a third sex, they are real people and either male or female and will have male DSD conditions or female DSD conditions. They are not abstruse arguments to justify trans ideology. No reliable statistics are available for people with DSDs, hospital IT systems log sex as “male/female/indeterminate” and registration of birth will be delayed as necessary until any medical determination is made. As such, there are no statistics recorded by ONS⁽²⁾ on the prevalence of people with DSD conditions so any statistics used to justify trans ideology should be viewed with wariness.

Right Side of History
Now this is just silly. To suggest that rolling back women’s rights is somehow progressive and enlightened and that anyone opposing male domination of women’s sports is on the wrong side of history is ridiculous. I am confident that when we have a women’s relay team consisting of only male trans athletes, people will realise what side of history is the right one.

This mantra is intended to suggest anyone who disagrees with ‘trans ideology’ is somehow an intolerant bigot (transphobe) and unenlightened and living in the dark ages. If only they just believed the ideology then they would become enlightened too.

It’s very difficult to swim against the tide, especially when very rich benefactors are pushing it across all areas of society. When Police are recording sexual assaults as committed by women instead of men demanding we pretend they are women and skewing crime figures; when schools are unilaterally changing girls toilets to be trans inclusive without parental consultation; when every single “International day of..” is being taken over by trans activists; when women are no longer permitted to meet to discuss their sex-based rights; when women only shortlists are being overtaken by men identifying as women; when the NHS is removing references to women for women-only cancers; when women are no longer women but birthing people, menstruators, cervix havers, and chest-feeders. The list goes on.

Born in the Wrong Body
There can be no scientific basis for this at all. It is someone’s subjective opinion used to validate their desire to be something that they are not. It is telling that it is the body that is wrong and not the brain/mind. This is particularly problematic with an affirmation-only model for trans children where helping children come to terms with who they are is seen as wrong and akin to conversion therapy.

Adults are free to live their life in any way they see fit (within the law etc.), but teaching children that they are in the wrong body is reprehensible.

TWAW – Trans Woman are Woman
The mantra “trans woman are woman” has become so ubiquitous that it is often used as a threat or challenge. If you refuse to parrot the phrase or refuse to pretend that fully male bodied people with no intention of transitioning are women then, you are back to being a bigoted transphobe and anything you say can be ignored as hate speech.

Likewise, refusing to admit this fallacy, makes you less than human and open to all kinds of abuse that is deemed legitimate by TRAs. A cursory glance of the abuse tweeted to JK Rowling demonstrates the level of vitriol on open display that men who want to be seen as women direct at women.

So if TWAW is true then how many GRCs are regularly issued to support this notion? The following table demonstrates the number issued by birth year.⁽³⁾

Now whilst there is no reliable statistics (at least until after the analysis of the 2021 census) the government estimates there are between 200,000 – 500,000 trans identified people in the UK⁽⁴⁾. Now if there are only approx 300 GRCs issued per year then that means there are between 199,700 and 499,700 trans people who are in the process of getting a certificate or have no intention of getting a certificate. Now clearly, with many trans people being happy in their bodies and having no desire to transition from or to anything else, where does this leave women in their own safe spaces?

With there being no reliable data, lets just evenly divide the numbers by 3 for: Male to Female trans; Female to male trans; and both male and female non-binary. That means that women will have to differentiate between the 300 men working on or obtaining a GRC each year and the 66,566 to 166,566 men who have no intention of transitioning or seeking to obtain a GRC.

To be clear, there is only one qualifying criteria for becoming a trans-women: you have to be a man. Ergo, you are not a woman. You can undergo various surgeries to mimic the appearance of a woman, but you cannot change sex; it’s encoded in your DNA. You will have male bone structure, male biology etc.

Summary

Hopefully the above will have demonstrated that mantras that you must believe or else do not make for cogent, reasonable arguments. Next up, we will look at how language can be used to confuse and exclude people.

Rhetoric Index

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(1)On Twitter, @ClareCAIS and @IntersexFacts are valuable sources of reliable information on intersex issues.

(2) Office of National Statistics: No tracking of Intersex statistics

(3) Assets Publishing Service (gov.uk): Tribunal & GRC Statistics

(4) Assets Publishing Service (gov.uk): Trans people in the UK