[tcberry]

And I appreciate that you are not trying to impute ill intent on me, although you may be underestimating my proximity to the transgender community personally. From my reading of the longer-form quotes – those that I have based my opinion on, I really don't think the context helps Rogan out all that much.

"Look, [Fox is] huge! She's not just huge, she's got a fucking man's face. I mean, you can wear all the lipstick you want. You want to be a woman and you want to take female hormones, you want to get a boob job, that's all fine. I support your life to live, your right to live as a woman. Fight guys, yes. She has to fight guys. First of all, she's not really a she. She's a transgender, post-op person. The operation doesn't shave down your bone density. It doesn't change. You look at a man's hands and you look at a women's hands and they're built different. They're just thicker, they're stronger, your wrists are thicker, your elbows are thicker, your joints are thicker. Just the mechanical function of punching, a man can do it much harder than a woman can, period."

"If you want to be a woman in the bedroom and you know you want to play house and all of that other shit and you feel like you have, your body is really a woman's body trapped inside a man's frame and so you got a operation, that's all good in the hood. But you can't fight chicks. Get the fuck out of here. You're out of your mind. You need to fight men, you know? Period. You need to fight men your size because you're a man. You're a man without a dick. I'm not trying to discriminate against women in any way, shape, or form and I'm a big supporter of women's fighting. I loved watching that Ronda Rousey/Liz Carmouche fight. But those are actual women. Those are actual women. And as strong as Ronda Rousey looks, she's still looks to me like a pretty girl. She's a beautiful girl who happens to be strong. She's a girl! [Fallon Fox] is not a girl, OK? This is a [transgender] woman. It's a totally different specification."

I'm not talking about a single sentence here. Despite whatever permissive or lassiez-faire attitudes he might hold, there is a constant drumbeat of "they're not really women." "Benign" transphobia is still transphobia, even if it's preferable to more aggressive forms. It's possible to be sober about physical differences that might exist between trans women and cis women without denying the former "full" womanhood. I'm not even necessarily disagreeing with the main point he's making, but I still find these comments to be transphobic, and I don't need to be a fan of his to hold an informed opinion here.

[afiori]

I premise that your is a perfectly valid interpretation, he said the things your criticize him for saying.

I would disagree with calling this transphobic... On the topic of the statement "trans women are women" for example wikipedia notoriously offer an interesting position

Trans woman: A trans woman is a woman who was assigned male at birth.

Woman: A woman is a female human being.

This is not necessarily contradictory, but it as the effect that the statements "Trans women are women" and "Trans women are females" are linked together.

My assumption (which I believe you agree with, if you disagree with the next statement I would be interested in hearing your opinion on it) is that many people that (strongly) agree with "trans women are women" do not necessarily fully embrace "trans women are female"

I am not arguing for or against any of those statements (I am trying not to inject my opinions (if any) on them in this comment), but to me this says that the linguistic concept of woman is not intrinsically obvious in this phase of an evolving language.

In my opinion what Rogan says here is that in term of fighting he believe the only contextual concept of gender is similar to duck-typing: If you punch like a man, then you are a man.

Agree or disagree with that I believe it is (still) important to be able to express that concept without being transphobic, as in my opinion that would impede our ability to talk about the complex multidimesional bimodal distribution that is human sexuality.

What I am trying as hard as I am able to is to steel-man Rogan's position without straw-manning yours.

A short summary of what I am trying to say is that I believe that Rogan's position is not transphobic; maybe he is toxic, maybe he is poisoning the conversation with inflammatory language, maybe he is on the wrong side of history. And maybe he deserves being called transphobic for what he said; I am not trying to defend Joe Rogan the person, I am trying to find a small reasonable kernel of his position where I believe we can agree.

[CathedralBorrow]

> Agree or disagree with that I believe it is (still) important to be able to express that concept without being transphobic

I fully agree with this. But if he is viewed as transphobic then surely that falls flat?