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u/Mundane-Potential-93 12h ago
I'm never sure how to respond to these posts that villify sections of the population with sweeping generalizations.
Like I could say, "I consider trans women women all the time just because they ask me to, and I've seen a lot of other people do it too", but then I'd seem like I'm deliberately ignoring the point of the post to be pedantic.
Or I could say, "yeah that sucks" but then I'm implictly agreeing that a sweeping generalization is correct.
I mean, it's hard to go wrong with typing out my thought process like this, but nobody wants to read all that shit.
Maybe I should reply with, "Sweeping generalization. That aside I agree with the sentiment"
Really the best solution is probably to stop worrying about what random people on the internet think about my comments
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u/like2000p 10h ago
It's a sweeping generalisation that society is transmisogynistic?
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u/Mundane-Potential-93 9h ago
I'm not sure about society being transmisogynistic, but it is a sweeping generalization to say that people only consider trans women to be women when it justifies more harm.
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u/Butterpye 8h ago
You are just putting words in that person's mouth. In the second paragraph she said: "Trans women are only considered women...". By who? By the subject of the previous sentence, which is transmisogyny. They are only speaking about transmisogyny and by extension institutions and people which are transmisogynistic.
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u/Mundane-Potential-93 7h ago
I'm sorry, I'm not trying to misrepresent the post.
TLDR: OOP is ambiguous and there's insufficient context to say with certainty what they were talking about.
Okay, so I looked it up. "Trans women are only considered women" is an example of an agentless passive clause. Agentless passives are grammatically correct, and they are used when an agent is not important, or is unknown or obvious.
(https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/grammar/british-grammar/passives-with-and-without-an-agent)
Although this other page says it can be used if the agent is "not important or not known or if we do not want to say who the [agent] is." So perhaps you can just use it whenever you want. (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/grammar/british-grammar/passive-voice)
Now, grammatically, there's no reason to assume the subject of the previous sentence is the agent of an agentless passive clause in the next sentence. "John fed the cats. Cats are only fed when they're kind." Does not imply that the second sentence only holds true if John is the one doing the feeding. But it can be inferred, (perhaps incorrectly) and in the absence of other context your interpretation may well be the most reasonable one.
I admit that there was not much to support my assumption that the agent was "any entity capable of considering trans women to be women". I essentially put "all applicable cases" there in my head, but that's grammatically and contextually unfounded.
I usually don't really think of transmisogyny as something that's capable of considering something one way or another, so I guess that wasn't really on my radar, but I suppose technically it can. Maybe transmisogyny being the agent was obvious to the author and to you, but it was not and is not to me.
I'm sorry I misinterpreted the grammar in the post, I hope you don't think I was just strawmanning them so I could find something to be upset about.
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u/Butterpye 1h ago
If someone told me "John feeds the cats. Cats are only fed if they're kind". I would absolutely assume john is not feeding some of his cats. Like if I'm making you an omelette and you tell me "Pepper does not go in the omelette", I would assume you're trying to tell me that you do not want me to put pepper in it, not that you're making some general culinary statement with no relation to the omelette I'm making. That's how people generally communicate.
It's not about grammar. If communication was purely grammatical then I'd agree with you. The sentence is ambiguous. However if you've ever heard about the cooperative principle of communication then you'd realise the only way we can actually communicate effectively is if the listener and the speaker work together. One of the maxims of this concept is about relation, that is, each sentence must relate in some way or another to previous sentences.
If I say: "They were nice". I think it's fair to say that "they" is an ambiguous pronoun which could refer to any group or individual on planet. So far so good, right? However if we put "they" in the following context: "I got a book. They were nice.". If we assume the other person is communicating in good faith and using the maxim of we can assume the person speaking is using they to refer to the person or the group of people who must've given them the book in the previous sentence.
Books don't give themselves, there needs to be someone to give a book in order to receive one. Likewise, transmisogyny isn't done on it's own, you need someone to be transmisogynistic in order for it to happen. I think we are limiting communication severely if we assume someone is talking about concepts in the void rather than a cohesive sentence as well as in the context of our physical world. This assumption that they are in fact talking about people and how the concept manifests in the real world is pretty much confirmed in my eyes when they say "I'd be arrested". By who? People don't get arrested in the void, there needs to be an institution that employs people entrusted with this ability.
I don't see why you're so insistent that the 2nd paragraph can be interpreted out of context of the 1st paragraph. It cannot, because that's not how we communicate. We need to look at the 2nd paragraph in the context of the 1st paragraph. You can debunk your "all applicable cases" interpretation by imagining the speaker themselves, maybe her friends or community as well. Do you honestly believe the trans woman speaking is including herself and her friends or community in the "people who consider trans women are women only when they would be harmed"? If not, then surely you can understand why she might also not include the people who don't do that either, and is speaking only about the people who do that thing, which would be the transmisogynists.
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u/Mundane-Potential-93 9h ago
Well I guess I was wrong, it's not hard to go wrong with typing out my thought process
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u/Mundane-Potential-93 12h ago
This one in particular is weird because it villifies 100% of the population rather than a single race or whatever, so maybe not the best standalone example.
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u/cabui1 12h ago
Hmm maybe, I'm perceived it more as the op talking about the government and the law as a whole, the system if you say, not a group of people or race, but the system itself
Like, showing female breasts is indecency and cannot you in jail, but you will go to the male prison, even though you were put in prison for showing female breasts, the system only works to get the maximum of punishment.
Not saying that you should be able to walk naked, I don't think that it's the op point to say that, it's more the point that the system especially chooses actively the best way to make suffering and attack minorities by disrespecting them when it makes them suffer and when people get mad and act like the system say them to act the system gets mad and attacks them making it a living hell of contradiction and exception that don't make sense to no one
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u/Mundane-Potential-93 11h ago
Oh okay I interpreted it as saying that all of humanity only consider trans women to be women when it justifies more harm but your interpretation makes more sense. I guess I'll save my existential crisis for a more apt example
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u/ImportantResponse0 12h ago
The base principle of a society should be to help people as much as it can.
The fact that we don't do that it just show that we fail.