don't even try to make sense of it, the whole "particle accelerators can turn lead to gold, therefor trans women are women!" is pure dumbfuckery
it reminds me of a story about some dude somewhere in africa claiming to have scientifically proven that homosexuality is wrong, and his 'proof' was pointing out that opposite charge magnetic poles attract each other while same charge poles repel each other, which means that homosex doesn't work lol
i don't even know the proper name for this kind of nonsense 'argument' but basically my point is that these people aren't making coherent arguments at all, they're trying to draw conclusions from things that have absolutely no relation to the actual subject matter
The thing is, if you buy their CRISPR arguments (not how it works, you can use CRISPR to cut out one gene or one section of gene and then use a virus to insert something else, not swap an entire chromosome) then you still have a Ship of Theseus situation. If you genetically edit someone into someone else, have you changed their sex or just induced a transgenic mosaic in their body? What if you took a cell sample, edited the chromosomes, grew a replacement body and did a brain transplant - have you changed their sex, or just made Never Let Me Go in real life?
And going back to the embryo thing - in theory you could swap a Y for an X in the embryo. But you could also get a sperm cell, swap a Y for an X and then fertilise the egg, and
functionally that would be the same. Is that changing sex, if it's just modifying a sperm cell? What if you took an X chromosome from a woman that wasn't the mother?
Don't even engage them on that kind of level, it's all part of their tactics. Arguing these far off hypotheticals allows them to ignore the elephant in the room which is that HRT and surgery will not turn a man into a woman. If we had procedures that could make a man so similar to a woman that a reasonably thorough examination couldn't tell the difference then maybe there'd be a point to the debate, but until we reach that point there's no point. Why argue about the precise details when a good look is enough to out 95% of TiMs to an experienced eye (even without stripping them) and a short conversation will expose the other 5% and for the foreseeable future they'll all be clockable once they get their clothes off? Granted, this is a little more complex with TiFs because I'd say that these numbers are a little batter for them, but fortunately TiMs don't give a shit about TiFs.
Also, another hypothetical they love is, "what if tomorrow you woke up in a woman's/man's body and no one believed that you were really a man/woman? Wouldn't that be traumatizing?" and the problem there is that if I had a bizarre belief that contradicted all objective reality then I'd probably schedule some therapy. Believing that your body is somehow wrong is a common schizophrenic belief.
Oh yeah, it's fun to poke holes in their theories on here, but I wouldn't bother actually having this conversation with someone suggesting these things. There'd be no point, because most of them
know what they're saying is bunk. It's like the NPC meme, they're looking for arguments to throw out to stymie "the enemy" rather than actually having a reasoned conversation and thinking through what they're saying.
Anybody who says he understands 50% of Judith Butler is a liar, because Butler is a grifter who writes random fucking words.
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I hate the whole STEM vs Humanities thing, but there's a very noticeable difference in how those academics approach things. STEM tends to try and explain research proposals in very direct ways because the university admin team want to know what they're doing, so saying "we're studying a tuberculosis protein to see how it makes TB more infectious" is going to gain more traction than "we're studying the mycobacterium nonclassical transpeptidase LdtMt2 to eludicate the impact of 3-3 transpeptide".
Meanwhile humanities has the opposite problem, and needs to deal with the admins maybe not taking them seriously. Which is why you get "I'm going to write about how mourning my pet dog is feminist actually" rephrased as a comparative study of Judith Butler's and Giorgio Agamben's bioethics from an anti-anthrocentric perspective. The more obscure you can make it, the better.
Anyway, Judith Butler's sentence kinda boils down to:
"Structuralists argue that capitalism is a hierarchical system from which power is derived from the top and that this makes all institutions work the same way and look very similar. We now think power has a lot more to do with many individual interactions throughout society rather than some central authority".
But of course she couldn't just
say that.
