How about being a compassionate human being who tries to understand the conversation partner’s fears without bowing down to misinformation? If that’s not enough for them because they see debunking their bunk as personal attack, I don’t think anyone in their cult is an acceptable conversation partner for them.
rah@feddit.uk 2 days ago
That works both ways. Everything you’ve said could be seen as applying from the perspective of either party.
flying_sheep@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
As a biologist, your statement would amuse me if there wasn’t so much harm being done to trans and gender non-conforming people.
TERFs invoke half-remembered high-school level biology as if it was mathematical fact. In actual biological reality, nothing is binary or absolute.
rah@feddit.uk 1 day ago
I’m curious (perhaps against my better judgement) what you think a biologist could tell Rowling that would challenge her?
flying_sheep@lemmy.ml 21 hours ago
We could maybe give people like her a glimpse into the sheer defiance that nature has against all attempts to fit into tiny categorical boxes.
It’s not just the topics that she doesn’t understand (especially the intersection of gender with endocrinology and neurology), but everything.
If you are a biologist and think you have found a rule that applies to some part of biology, you will feel deeply uncomfortable until the inevitable exceptions start cropping up that tell you that while the theory is still statistically sound, it’s not unnaturally strict and therefore plausible.
Obviously trans people exist and are valid. Thinking otherwise would be ignoring mountains of biological patterns and data that tell us that every binary in biology isn’t actually clean-cut.