TokenTransGirl
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User ID: 3226
TokenTransGirl
17d ago
If I, as a man, want to declare myself a woman, what requirements would you place on me to be considered actually a woman?
I mean, me personally? I don't care. Join the club. Self identification 100%
But just because I don't care doesn't mean other people don't have valid concerns, so I figure it's a social negotiation to find a contract that can at least satisfy the majority of people (since, obviously, you're never going to satisfy everyone)
I think if you've gone through the trouble of getting on HRT and consulting a doctor, it's probably safe to let you use the bathroom - the big controversies seem to be about sports and lockers. So not quite "just self identification", but a pretty low bar.
I think once someone has had surgery, the only controversy should be sports (which we've already covered)
I mean, for a medical form, "Which of the following do you have: [ ] breasts, [ ] uterus, [ ] vagina, [ ] penis" doesn't seem particularly unreasonable?
So you basically want to abolish the distinction between sexes in normal English usage?
I feel like "for a medical form" and "normal English usage" are pretty clearly two different domains.
I think in practice, most everyone uses "female" to mean "person I perceive as female" (or who they're humoring), whether they mean to or not. Lots of transphobic people call me "ma'am". Normal English usage, outside of dating and athletics, is about identifying people - and that's all about gender presentation. If you tell the cops they are looking for a guy, they are not going to find me.
Do you really, seriously think that a post-op trans woman is indistinguishable from a cis woman?
Yes, the empirical observation within the post-op community is that it's not an issue. As good as the real thing! Okay, maybe not exactly as good, on average, but well within the cis range, certainly? Vaginas come in a huge variety and most people only get intimate with a few people in their life.
Possibly the connoisseurs would weigh in and say something different, but Hugh Hefner seemed pretty trans-positive. He put trans women on the Playboy cover multiple times. I feel like if we're good enough for his tastes, then it's at least fair to say the onus is on you to show some evidence that neo-vaginas are sub-par goods?
you don't think someone should be able to filter out post-op trans women
If you can filter on whatever criteria you like, and exclude Christians and Democrats and Bisexuals, then it would seem crazy to say "oh, but you can't filter based on trans status"
But if you don't require people to actually list their religion, politics, and orientation, it would also seem crazy to say "oh, but you have to tell us if you're trans."
That said, I don't see any harm in putting post-op trans women in the "women" box.
TokenTransGirl
17d ago
Your counterfactual world where you have XX chromosomes requires you to not exist. It requires a completely different person to have been conceived and born.
Okay, so if a person has Magic XX Genetic Defect Syndrome, and is born with XX chromosomes, a vagina, etc. but no large gametes, they're... third gender? To be clear: there is no world where this person produces large gametes, since as you said, changing their genetics results in a completely different person.
TokenTransGirl
17d ago
some organism in a disease state becomes healthier.
Pre-transition I was miserable, and now I'm happy. Surely that means healthier? Is there some health risk associated with transition that you're particularly concerned about?
If my genetics gave me depression, would you be opposed to me taking anti-depressants?
Are you equally opposed to cis people getting cosmetic surgery?
TokenTransGirl
17d ago
a) it never undergoes menstruation
There's plenty of biological women in that category, so it doesn't really seem relevant
b) it must be continually dilated for several hours every day, for the rest of the recipient's life
"dilation must continue regularly for at least one year postoperatively." I would hardly call that "the rest of their life." It's not even daily after the first six months.
There's also improved techniques being researched to improve recovery time even further. And in many cases already, dilation is just a precaution against a 10-20% chance of stenosis, not a situation where stenosis is guaranteed to occur.
Not to mention that vaginal stenosis is potentially congenital: https://www.nationwidechildrens.org/conditions/vaginal-stenosis
TokenTransGirl
18d ago
What should the government do when ye olde yardstick begs to differ?
Isn't the anti-trans position the opposite, though? You're saying that if someone was "born" 5'10" and somehow gained 2 inches of height, they're still 5'10".
TokenTransGirl
18d ago
“Abraham Lincoln was assigned male at birth”
You're the only person to say it ever, if Google is to be believed, so it is perhaps unsurprising that you can't find anyone from 1995 saying it
TokenTransGirl
18d ago
Google confirms that sex assigned at birth as a term did not exist before 2014.
https://columbialawreview.org/content/sex-assigned-at-birth/ would suggest otherwise. "Not common on the internet" hardly means the term wasn't ever used. A simple Google search suggests there's examples of usage dating back into the 40s.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=AMAB&year_start=2000&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=1 I mean, it seems really odd that "AMAB" goes back to 2000. Did it used to mean something else?
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22assigned+male+at+birth%22&year_start=2000&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=1 If nothing else, "assigned male at birth" takes off a couple years earlier, 2012
Very shoddy methodology - basically all noise and no light here.
TokenTransGirl
18d ago
And to be clear, I'm not (just) mad at those things because I disagree with their politics. I genuinely think those are terrible movies. They have bad plots, bad characters, bad dialogue, and often even bad at basic filmmaking stuff like editing, camera angles, and sound mixing.
I tend to think it's the bad film-making ruining things, not the woke. The original Star Trek was pushing all sorts of boundaries (i.e. "woke" for it's era), but it holds up because the writing is good, and the characters are amazing.
But they went into it saying "I want to write a great sci-fi story that is also diverse", not "I want to write a diverse sci-fi show". The goal was to make a good TV show, not to ensure that black lesbians got more air-time.
A lot of shows these days start with the premise "what if we did X, but 'diverse.'" There's no thought to the characters beyond some token diversity labels - god, when was the last time we saw a Strong Female Character that wasn't basically interchangeable with every other Strong Female Character? But Uhura? She was an actual character, and she existed because it made sense for her to be in the story. She reacted how Uhura would react, not following a generic Strong Female Character script.
(I feel like the recent "all female" Ghostbusters was the best example of this: they swapped the genders, but somehow that had absolutely no effect on the rest of the script. They didn't bother to write interesting new female characters, or even to explore how gender-swapping might affect the existing plot.)
TokenTransGirl
18d ago
If you routinely need to count past 10 on your hands, I highly recommend learning to count in binary. I don't think this is a huge group, though, and decimal is definitely much more compact for doing math on paper
TokenTransGirl
18d ago
I don't think you can dismiss these as "Just that one crazy guy and not a pattern."
C'mon, this is disingenuous. You know we are not talking about someone accidentally popping a boner.
I mean, I think it is a fair point to say "some of these stories are sensationalist bullshit, trying to tar ordinary human behavior simply because the person hates trans people." I think it is equally valid to say "yes, but there are also real bad actors out there."
The point is, the number of bad actors is not equal to the number of stories out there.
It is really amazingly easy to put together a very long list of horrible things that basically any group has done. I'm absolutely positive I could give you a list of a hundred times TERFs made false accusations, or at least accusations with outrageously little evidence behind them. That does not mean that every TERF claim is false, of course, or even that most of them are.
It just means that in a world with billions of people in it, we can easily create an overwhelmingly large list.
The only antidote I know of for this is numbers. If you're worried about a group of anecdotes, that's what, 100, 200 people? I'm going to suggest you build a functional civilization and sort out those individuals. There's 66 million people in the UK, and you're really telling me you can't handle 100 criminals?
And, I mean, if you can't handle them, that's hardly the fault of trans people, is it? We're, what 0.5% of the population or so? I hardly think there's anywhere near enough of us to stop much of anything. Seems unfair to prevent the other 299,900 of us from peeing in peace just because you can't deal with the hundred that are off fucking everything up for everyone. Certainly, we don't want the bad actors either - they're making everything awful for the rest of us.
(The converse of all of this, of course, is that if you've got numbers showing "Hey, when we give men access to women's restrooms, the rate rape doubles" or "90% of non-surgical trans people are bad actors who haven't socially transitioned", that's a completely different story!)
P.S.: Probably worth noting, every day I meet trans people online. That's at least 365/year. Of the thousands of trans people I've known, I've heard credible allegations against exactly 3 of them. Each time, it's for harming other trans folk. The vast majority of trans people I meet either change in a stall, are post-op, or most frequently: avoid the situation entirely because it's too stressful. I'm getting quite the opposite message you get!
Obviously, I don't think this is proof that all trans people are pure and pristine - I'm just saying, I've probably got 100x as many positive stories as you've got negative ones. It is really, really easy to produce a HUGE list when the world has so many people in it!
TokenTransGirl
18d ago
In humans, there are four potential sexual categories (though only three in reality.)
The bit that confuses me here is this weird counterfactual: if someone "would have" developed large gametes, they're a woman. But, I mean, there's a counterfactual world where I got dealt XX chromosomes instead - in that world I "would have" been female. There are plenty of people who "would have" lived if we'd eradicated Polio sooner - are we counting them as "alive" because of that?
What other natural category has this weird counterfactuality about it? The group of people who X, and "would have" X if not for Y? Surely "People who are blind, and would have gone blind if not for medical treatment" doesn't make any sense. People who are born blind and people who get blinded by an accident are both "blind", right? Even though one of those groups has a sighted soul, and the other apparently has a blind soul?
TokenTransGirl
18d ago
it should be revokeable in the case of bad faith charlatans
Do you particularly think there's likely to be bad faith charlatans that take HRT for years, socially transition, update their legal paperwork, and have surgery? I feel like if you're willing to put that much work into something, we can assume good faith. (I can see how bad faith actors would enjoy "absolutely zero requirements", obviously)
Again, in the "post-surgical" domain, what would even qualify as bad faith? Are we willing to apply that standard to cis-women who behave the same way?
(For the pre-surgical domain, things get complicated; I don't think "zero gatekeeping" is the right answer, at least currently)
what word should we use to distinguish between the two (2) human sexes? Because I ain't calling people "uterus-havers" and "penis-havers."
I mean, for a medical form, "Which of the following do you have: [ ] breasts, [ ] uterus, [ ] vagina, [ ] penis" doesn't seem particularly unreasonable?
I'm fine calling it "men" and "women's" sports; plenty of words have different definitions in different contexts.
I think dating apps should probably sort "pre-op trans-women" into a different category, because people obviously care about penis -vs- vagina when it comes to dating.
I don't think I'm really the person to ask about post-op; obviously some people care about fertility, but cis-women can also be infertile. So, to me, this mostly depends on whether a surgical vagina is "acceptable" for people who aren't looking for fertility. The general consensus I've seen is that modern surgery does quite well there, but I'm obviously in a giant biased bubble.
TokenTransGirl
18d ago
People who think gender is defined circularly have a certain intuition about words - namely, that words don't really mean anything. These are usually highly systematizing people who would feel at home in a math textbook.
I've noticed people do not at all share my intuitions about these terms, so I'm curious to explore this a bit more:
a non-self-referential definition of gender that doesn't just mean 'sex'
Gender is which pronouns I prefer, the same way my name is an identifier I prefer. Does this mean "names" are also an "empty" concept?
that doesn't just mean 'sex'
So, names used to be based on profession, right? Smith, Cook, so on. Does this mean that a name "just means" profession, even though that's a historical feature, not a modern one? Are you okay with the modern tradition of divorcing names from that former meaning?
Currency used to be based on the gold standard, but now it's just a bunch of numbers on computers. Is currency still "just about" gold? Is currency now also a circular word with no real meaning? Are you okay with the modern tradition of divorcing currency from the gold standard?
TokenTransGirl
18d ago
But it's not cutting off your dick, it's turning it into a vagina. If the end state was a Ken doll, it'd be a very different conversation.
TokenTransGirl
18d ago
I don't, and I think generally speaking people should be able to use the restroom they "identify" with
So, if I'm correct: You're fine using my preferred pronouns, letting me use the restroom I "identify" with, and (post-surgery) using the "appropriate" locker rooms and prisons?
I would not agree that having vaginoplasty makes you female (I will still consider them a male who had surgery, sorry)
At that point, wouldn't it be easier to just say "female", though? Like, except for my ability to join a sports team (I'm too old for that stuff anyway), I look like a duck, I quack like a duck, why not just call me a duck?
TokenTransGirl
18d ago
(a scenario I've read about happening more than once)
Again, this seems like heat instead of light if we're talking about "this happened once". I'm sure there's been guys with erections in the men's locker room at least once as well? Sometimes those things happen involuntarily, and it's terribly embarrassing. I remember that much from my time as a guy.
That said, I'd be less cynical about trans rights if every trans person who does act in bad faith didn't seem to be a hill that trans activists are willing to die on defending.
Yeah, there we agree. I've certainly met reasonable trans people, but they're quieter. Even us trans women get shouted down by the loud ones if we try to be moderate, which is part of why I'm here.
In case it's not clear: if someone is deliberately making women uncomfortable, I think we should have procedures to deal with that. I don't think these procedures need to be gendered - I think women making other women uncomfortable, and men making other men uncomfortable is also a reality you've got to deal with there.
At the same time, I think a lot of people try to sensationalize the slightest incident, like "simply being naked", so I'm going to be slow to condemn any specific individual without knowing the full details. In general I tend to be a very "innocent until proven guilty" sort who doesn't like the idea of trying people in the public spotlight.
TokenTransGirl
18d ago
Trans, intersex, extremely androgynous people and people lacking in reproductive organs are such small minorities that if you meet someone and they look like a female person (meaning they have ovaries, a uterus etc.), you will be correct 90+% of the time. It's an extremely reliable heuristic, more reliable than any medical protocol ever designed.
True. And if you assume everyone is bipedal, you'll be even more "accurate"! You might get extremely confused by people in wheelchairs, but hey, what are 80 million categorization errors between friends?
(Because, you do realize, 1% of the population is... 80 million people?)
It's an extremely reliable heuristic, more reliable than any medical protocol ever designed.
more reliable than any medical protocol ever designed.
Do you actually stand by that claim? That seems like an extraordinary claim. If "they look female" is more reliable than medical tests, why are we going around checking for uteruses and gametes? Why not just say "if they look female, they should use the women's bathroom"? Like, again, this test you're proposing, "they look female", is MORE reliable than even the best test on the market! So... why rely on anything else at that point?
The Swedish Study
Second, regarding any crime, male-to-females had a significantly increased risk for crime compared to female controls (aHR 6.6; 95% CI 4.1–10.8) but not compared to males (aHR 0.8; 95% CI 0.5–1.2). This indicates that they retained a male pattern regarding criminality. The same was true regarding violent crime. By contrast, female-to-males had higher crime rates than female controls (aHR 4.1; 95% CI 2.5–6.9) but did not differ from male controls.
Okay, so... trans women are no more of a threat than trans men, or cis men are? Are you suggesting we also kick trans men out of the bathrooms?
Isn't it odd that trans women don't commit crimes any more often, despite having access to bathrooms and locker rooms? If trans women and cis men are equally violent and criminal, that suggests that we don't need gendered locker rooms or bathrooms at all - there's literally no change in crime rate when we let people use the bathroom they want.
That's neat information, thank you (I am honestly surprised to learn hormones and even surgery don't affect that for MtF but do for FtM. I had assumed things would be more symmetric!)
Ministry of Justice 2020 Data
Prisoners with a gender recognition certificate were not counted as transgender
I'm guessing this study isn't the one you were referring to? Or are there a lot of post-op trans women who don't bother to get a gender recognition certificate? I don't know the UK that well.
Either way, 76 trans offenders vs 13,234 cis male offenders makes me think there is, once again, not much evidence that trans people are actually that much of a threat. That seems like you've got some lopsided statistics from a small sample group (especially since, again: "Prisoners with a gender recognition certificate were not counted as transgender")
These are clearly male type crimes (rape is defined as penetration with a penis)
A bit of a tangent, but: "Made to penetrate" is now widely regarded as a form of rape, and it turns out that when you don't explicitly gender the crime, the gender bias is vastly weaker. At least in the US, the male:female rape rate is somewhere near 1:1, maybe 2:1. Hardly something women are innocent of. It's a bit difficult to take gendered claims seriously, when you've cheated and used a definition that explicitly excludes cis female offenders.
TokenTransGirl
18d ago
My point was that we don't bother to differentiate between "born" handicapped versus "became" handicapped. They're both just handicapped/disabled/legless/need a wheelchair. The idea of "transitioning" between able-bodied and disabled is not terribly controversial. So why is it that when it comes to "female", you're suddenly against the very possibility that someone could change categories?
TokenTransGirl
19d ago
Edit: it's like you are claiming that someone with heart disease isn't in the phylum Chordata. A disease does not change a classification.
Do you think trans people are a different phylum? Do you think trans people are claiming to be a different phylum, or able to transition between phylums?
Like, if we're just talking general biology, hermaphroditism is hardly a controversial idea. Biology obviously supports the idea that individuals can change sexes. (And in case you're particularly bad at reading: no, I'm not claiming humans can do that yet; we're obviously still a few years away from an artificial uterus - which, hey, it's amusing that no one in this debate is willing to bite the bullet and discuss whether that'd be sufficient to qualify)
I'm not convinced you understand me and I don't know any way to be clearer.
I mean, you have the category of "was/will be fertile at some point", and the category of "never fertile at any point."
You then want me to take someone who was born XX but never developed a uterus, and put them in the... first category? That's a "woman" even though they don't have a uterus, will never produce gametes, and so on? But a trans woman, who also never developed a uterus, also has a vagina, also has breasts... that person is "male". And this is a totally consistent, natural, intuitive way to split people up?
TokenTransGirl
19d ago
Yes ma'am, there are a few such people. Otherwise I'd find the sir/ma'am distinction sufficient, without gesturing at the broader cluster.
TokenTransGirl
20d ago
Again: "ma'am" is a cluster of behaviors, not just a word. People who call me "ma'am" tend to treat me with respect, while people who call me "sir" tend to be assholes. Seems like pretty obvious incentive structures?
TokenTransGirl
20d ago
The trans woman strutting around with her cock on full display in the women's locker room is doing it to make women uncomfortable
So can we also safely assume that the man strutting around with their cock on full display in the men's locker room is also a bad actor?
Is "strutting around naked" really an unusual thing to do in a locker room? Are your genitalia somehow NOT "on full display" while you shower? We have had very different experiences of the men's locker rooms if you've never seen another guy's cock.
I feel like it's pretty easy to come up with an alternate explanation for why someone might be naked in the locker room, beyond "wanting to make others uncomfortable". But if we really do care about comfort, why not move to single stall designs so that no one has to see unwanted genitalia?
There is probably at least one. But come on, are you not seeing the same news reports I have? How many women getting assaulted/impregnated by a trans woman would be enough to make it a problem?
Do you have any statistics there? Are trans women more dangerous than cis women? Are trans women more dangerous than cis men? All the statistics I've seen about assault and rape say that intimate partners are the major threat, not strangers in bathrooms.
But come on, are you not seeing the same news reports I have?
I mean, realistically, probably not! Media is a massive bubble of filters, there's dozens of sources out there, and we probably live in different parts of the world.
If I want to understand an issue, I consider news a terrible way to learn. Keep in mind that news reports are mostly heat, not light - the very fact that it made the news means it's unusual enough to report on that event.
TokenTransGirl
20d ago
I mean, you can change heart conditions and kidney conditions, why not everything else? We treat "people who have heart problems" as a discrete category regardless of whether it's congenital or not. No one sane is going around saying "well, your heart USED to function properly, so it's ridiculous to suggest you can transition into not functioning properly"
Also, really, "bitch"? C'mon, try to have some manners :)
"And now the real surprise: when asked about experiences in the last 12 months, men reported being “made to penetrate”—either by physical force or due to intoxication—at virtually the same rates as women reported rape (both 1.1 percent in 2010, and 1.7 and 1.6 respectively in 2011)."
https://time.com/3393442/cdc-rape-numbers/
I feel like the CDC is a pretty good source.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8360364/
Or maybe the NIH?
At least for me, the Google Search "made to penetrate" produces quite a few other good sources
People I dislike are often right about things! That's the benefit of debate; sometimes it turns out the facts don't actually align with your beliefs, so you change your mind. I was pretty blown away when I first ran into this, but it would certainly seem like Feminist anti-rape efforts have done a remarkable job leveling the playing field in recent years.
I think the word has like six different definitions, and everyone handles that just fine for every other English word. But it's still cheating when 99% of the category is incapable of the crime. I don't think you're actually willing to count trans women as women so it's hardly a "gotcha", just pedantry about how I use language. I don't think you're really confused here, you're just trying to score petty debate club points.
If you simply want to chide me for a minor slip in language... okay, fine. I'll go edit it since it's so incredibly important to you
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