Mob justice over what people said years ago is very dangerous. And due to the global nature of the internet, it is very hard to get the mob off your back. It seems many students have been denied their college admissions due to stuff they tweeted as a teenager. It seems in the modern world felons deserve redemption, but bad tweeters do not. Not to mention that cancelling people over what they said in the past is so stupid, that if applied consistently, will lead to funny scenarios. For example, if teenagers should be punished for their past tweets, why shouldn't be Joe Biden for saying on the record that he doesn't support same.sex marriage in the 2008 VP debates. This is not even counting what opinions biden held in the 20th century.
It seems that we have come to a point where you simply can't speak on certain topics, neither in the affirmative nor in the negative, and so most people end up saying what will keep the mob at bay. Case in point, all the people attacking JK Rowling do not want to say that any man who self ids as a woman should have access to women's private spaces.
How many of them have still been denied after showing genuine remorse for their views? Nobody is owed a college admission.
> all the people attacking JK Rowling do not want to say that any man who self ids as a woman should have access to women's private spaces
Nobody's saying that men who falsely claim to be women should have access to women's spaces.
What are they saying?
You don't see people saying "trans women are biologically female" for a reason.
Can you elaborate on what makes that statement so ridiculous on it's face?
The Wikipedia article on Sex Differences in Humans uses the terms man/woman and male/female interchangeably[1]. What little I've seen of the scientific literature follows this convention as well.
It's my experience that, across a broad swath of American society, that many people follow the old convention as well.
Yes, in most contexts in present western society, male/female and man/woman are interchangeable (and certain groups have a vested interest in maintaining this state). There are however contexts in which they are not. Trans people (and allies) need to be cognizant of these things to be able to discuss the differences.
If your argument is that to an observer, "trans women are women" could be interpreted as "trans women are biologically female", then sure one could interpret it that way. But in the context of discussions about trans people, women and female mean different things, which is why "trans women are women" is the phrase, and not "trans women are biologically female".
That dictionaries haven't caught up is kind of disappointing, but if you look at the wiki page, it mentions trans women at the end, which seems kind of strange to do in the context of biological female-ness.
I'll also note that because it's so common to conflate the two, that I try to explicitly add the "biologically" modifier when discussing bio sex. in contexts not talking about trans groups, I'm sure I've conflated the terms without noticing.
In terms of the science of sex differences, my understanding is that they (at least sometimes) don't make the distinction between sex and gender because many traits and social behaviors that we might assume to be part of "gender" end up having a underlying biological component as well (that isn't easily separable).
In terms of the general populace, I would say that for many people the realities of their biological sex (including their reproductive capacity) have a great deal of impact on their gendered experience.
This is not to say that the experience of trans people should be ignored. But this may help account for some of the surprise people express at statements like "trans women are women" or "women is not a sex".