FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
52m ago
Okay, I was lying and she is a random cis woman I found online.
This is profoundly obnoxious behaviour and I have zero interest in interacting with you in any capacity any further.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1hr ago
Well, I only have your word for it that she is trans. "Is Diana kurnikova trans" returns no relevant hits. Surely you can link one of these interviews.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1hr ago
Where did the 71% figure come from?
In the article it's labelled "Fig. 6", and it's for all convictions, not just sex crimes.
Do you mind spelling out where is the 71% coming from?
In the article it's labelled "Fig. 6", and it's for all convictions, not just sex crimes.
I think the screenshot link needs to be this to work
How did you get the correct link?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1hr ago
You know, I just asked ChatGPT "is Diana Korkunova trans" and it said there's no credible evidence that she is. Where did you hear she was trans?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1hr ago
Yeah, I was trying to be charitable, but that's a difficult comparison to avoid making.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1hr ago
Halloween, for one thing. Christmas plays, for another.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1hr ago
I'm saying that every photo I've seen of them is obviously so heavily filtered and edited that I can't even say with confidence I would even recognise them if I passed them on the street, and hence cannot pass judgement if they are really indistinguishable from a female person.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1hr ago
do you think you could tell them apart?
Yes, not perfectly, but far more reliably than chance
How?
Because humans are sexually dimorphic in appearance. The sexual dimorphism becomes more pronounced after puberty, but it's still present beforehand. There are a hundred little tells that I might not even be consciously aware of that would give it away.
This conversation is becoming a bit surreal, if I'm honest. I never thought the proposition "boys and girls look different from one another" would need defending.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1hr ago
Are you honestly telling me, after looking at various photos of her, that she looks like a man or like she used to be a man?
Who, Petras or Korkunova?
Secondary sexual characteristics don't develop until puberty.
Yes but – are you telling me you can't tell a boy and a girl apart unless they have breasts? Six-year-old boys and girls look like an androgynous mass to you?
You have to admit in many photos she passes.
No, I don't. I was introduced to Petras by my brother, who wasn't aware that they were trans, but I clocked her immediately.
How about Diana Korkunova?
This is clearly a heavily filtered and colour-corrected photo, and Korkunova is wearing a baggy sweater which hides the breadth of their shoulders. A cursory Google indicates that basically every photo of them meets that description, which is surely very telling.
Serendipitous addendum to my previous addendum on the "250k grooming gang victims" figure
Two weeks ago I posted an article on my Substack about the Henry Nowak murder and how it's been covered (or, in many cases, not covered) by progressive journalists. In that article, I took Irish outlet The Journal to task for their claim that there's no evidence that "two-tier policing" is a thing, except in the sense that British police officers conduct stop and searches on black Britons more often than they do white Britons.
Anyone familiar with the 13/52 meme will know there's a better explanation for this phenomenon than just cops being racist. I wanted to demonstrate this, so the last few days were spent doing a deep dive into Ministry of Justice conviction stats from the last decade. The end result was this article, which showed that, unsurprisingly, black Britons are 6 times more likely to be convicted of homicide than white Britons, and are responsible for at least 14% of all homicides in England and Wales.
Why "at least"? Well, that was the most surprising thing I found in my deep dive: we don't know. And this has implications beyond black knife crime.
In less than a week, MP Rupert Lowe's report on the scandal of Pakistani grooming gangs has already achieved infamy, in particular its claim that the number of young girls who were victimised by these gangs (almost all of them white working-class girls) could be as high as 250,000. I initially accepted this claim at face value, pointing out that the grooming gangs scandal has been ongoing since the 1970s: 5,000 victims a year in a country with about 1 million white working-class girls between the ages of 10-16 sounded well within the realm of plausibility to me. Two days ago I walked that claim back after learning that the 250k figure only includes girls who were victimised between 2000-18, and that this figure seemed implausibly high for such a short timeframe. I tried to explain my reasoning in more detail, using intuition pumps like comparing this figure to the number of children admitted to hospital in the period, or the rate of child sex abuse in Britain's nearest neighbour. Others pushed back with their own reasoning for why they believed the 250k was credible, and perhaps even an undercount.
But I discovered something very alarming when digging through Ministry of Justice conviction data. For the overwhelming majority of criminal convictions between 2017-25, the police and justice system did not bother to record the defendant's ethnicity at all.
Look at this screenshot from the dataset, which specifically looks at people convicted of sex crimes in the period. Of the ~60,000 convictions in the period, the convict's ethnicity is listed as "unknown" in nearly 16,000 cases. And the proportion not being recorded is trending upwards over time, from 22% in 2017 to 26% last year. And those are just the convictions: of the 93k people who were charged with sex crimes, 26k of those did not have their ethnicity recorded.
I don't know who these "unknowns" are, but I have to assume they include a lot of men with names like Muhammad, Hasan and Wahid.
We can tell a story wherein the grooming gangs scandal finally broke in the mid-2010s, and the police and justice system belatedly began handing down indictments to those responsible – but, in the interests of not "inflaming community tensions", the officers and magistrates conveniently forgot to write down the ethnic background of those they charged. If we assume that those whose ethnicity was listed as "unknown" are disproportionately Pakistani, there might have been as many as 3,000 Pakistani men charged with sex crimes every year since 2017. If each of these defendants had sexually exploited, on average, two white girls apiece, and for each one who was charged, another Pakistani wasn't charged – all of a sudden, the 250k figure doesn't seem half as implausible as I thought two days ago.
Journalists neglecting to mention the ethnicity of a suspect which is known to them is one thing. Police officers and courts not bothering to write it down is a whole other ball game. If you'd told me that the UK's criminal justice system didn't bother to record the ethnicity of 71% of people it convicted of criminal offences, I'd have thought you were mad. But that's literally what happened!
I genuinely don't know what to believe anymore.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3hr ago
The average trans person is not creepy.
I agree. The average trans-identified male, however, I'm not quite as confident about.
Kim Petras? She started hormones at 12, so she never went through male puberty that would give her masculine features.
Afraid not, clocked them instantly. Very confused by the claim that it's impossible to distinguish male and female people until after they've gone through puberty.
though I don't know if she's as weak as a cis woman. The average trans woman who transitions early is as weak as a cis woman.
Longitudinal studies examining the effects of testosterone suppression on muscle mass and strength in transgender women consistently show very modest changes, where the loss of lean body mass, muscle area and strength typically amounts to approximately 5% after 12 months of treatment. Thus, the muscular advantage enjoyed by transgender women is only minimally reduced when testosterone is suppressed.
With all due respect, I don't think you're quite as well-informed about this topic as you think you are.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3hr ago
Because trans women are not men, creepy or otherwise.
You don't consider any of these people creepy? Or how about some of these.
some don't even have a penis and are visually indistinguishable from cis women
I would love to see one of these trans-identified males who is visually indistingushable from an actual woman I keep hearing so much about.
Why do you only care about cis women's privacy?
Because, being physically weaker, female people are vastly more vulnerable to rape and sexual assault than male people. Unlike male people, female people can be forcibly impregnated.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4hr ago
Ugh, don't get me started. My cousin used to run a chiropracty clinic in the UK. Every time he talked to me about I had to bite my tongue.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
7hr ago
I still don't understand why you want to prevent creepy men from gawping at women changing, unless said men purport to "identify as" women.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
9hr ago
I wrote a very long comment comparing a rabbi urging a Jewish couple to circumcise their son for religious reasons (without presenting himself as a qualified physician) vs. a doctor urging a couple to circumcise their son to treat his phimosis vs. a doctor using his platform as a physician to urge a couple to circumcise their son for religious reasons. I said that, while the first two are fine in my eyes, the third one is not. But that was before I read the rest of your comment, in which you point out that there are qualified doctors who advocate for subpar treatments clearly informed by their religious beliefs. To me, this strikes me as a massive derelection of duty, and I'm surprised they haven't been struck off the register, but evidently the medical occupational licensing boards don't agree with me.
In my ideal world, doctors' sole duty of care would be to their patients, and they would be professionally obliged to leave their personal beliefs at the door. They would keep up to date with the latest standard of medical evidence and dispassionately advise the patient of whatever they thought the best course of action was, irrespective of whether it clashed with their personal religious/political beliefs. A doctor can't just decline to treat a gay man, a racist or a drug addict just because he disapproves of his lifestyle.
But of course, it's more complicated than that. No doctor has the time to read every single journal article that gets published (not even just those in their narrow specialty), and their choice about which articles to read and which not will inevitably be informed (to a greater or lesser extent) by their personal beliefs, which will in turn inform the types of medical interventions he recommends. If an expectant mother is experiencing complications which might require her to terminate the pregnancy to protect her life, of course a pro-abortion doctor will suggest this intervention earlier than an anti-abortion would, even if both doctors are exactly as qualified, experienced and concerned for their respective patients' welfare. While there are many medical interventions with no political or religious valence, and some interventions that no medic could ever professionally recommend without fear of a malpractice suit or losing his license, in the middle there's a whole mess of grey, and it's impossible to draw a bright line in the sand.
In a society where elective circumcision of infants is legal, probably there's no way to outright ban elective mastectomies and vaginoplasties. But I want doctors to be a lot more upfront than they currently are that these are elective procedures and that the evidence base for their efficacy is mixed. That thing of "you have to cut your son's dick off or he will definitely kill himself" has to stop, immediately.
How about defining gender such that "my gender is 'woman'" means "I want to be treated, in most social situations, as you would treat the average person with XX chromosomes (however you refer to such a person)"?
This definition is internally consistent and non-circular. The only problem with it is that it doesn't match how any trans person uses the term "gender identity".
Trans-identified males don't claim that they want to be women. They claim that they are women, in some ineffable sense of the term which transcends mere anatomy.
It also makes every associated word collapse into incoherence. According to your definition, the term "woman" refers to both "a person with XX chromosomes" and "a person who doesn't have XX chromosomes but wishes to be treated as if they did". Doesn't it strike you as strange, using exactly the same word for the thing itself and for people who wish to be the thing itself? Is this how any other word in the English language is defined? The word "billionaire" solely refers to people with a net worth of 1 billion or more; we do not use it to also refer to people who wish they had a net worth of 1 billion or more (for that, we have "aspiring billionaire"). The word "lawyer" refers to someone who is licensed to practise law; we do not also use it to refer to people who wish they were licensed to practise law (for that, we have "aspiring lawyer" or "lawyer in training"). I genuinely can't think of an example of a word in the English language which refers to both the thing in itself and to anyone who wants to be the thing in itself.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
And what about people who have a set of chromosomes other than XX or XY? What about people with mosaicism?
"What about these edge cases that don't describe >99% of the population?"
The existence of some weird edge cases doesn't mean that sex can't be trivially verified almost all of the time.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Well, it is obvious and uncontroversial that sex is an objective fact which can be trivially verified and falsified, which "gender identity" is not. Hell, it can't even be defined in a non-circular manner, although countless people have tried.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Trans people are demanding that they be allowed to use the toilets concordant with their gender, just like everyone else.
What about people like me, who insist we do not have a gender identity of any kind? Which toilet do we use?
Trans activists claim that the women's toilets are intended for anyone who has a woman's gender identity, and that bathroom bans are denying them access to a facility that female people are entitled to. People like me, by contrast, deny that women's toilets are intended for anyone who claims to have a female "gender identity", but are rather intended for individuals of the female sex.
"Gender identity" is an unfalsifiable concept, and basing public policy on unfalsifiable claims individuals make about their subjective inner experiences is a bad idea.
Thanks, I'll amend the links when I get home.
More options
Context Copy link