Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
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User ID: 290
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
1d ago
And is the solution for female people who don't want to go through agony in childbirth 'talk therapy until they understand that the pain of childbirth is their just deserts for the sin of Eve', or is it better living through chemistry?
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
1d ago
So you've got a dichotomy. Either they want us to know they're here, in which case the demonstration is trivial and we'd already have it. Or they don't, in which case routinely showing up on cockpit thermal cameras is a level of opsec failure inconsistent with the engineering required to be here at all.
Or they want some of us to suspect that they're here, but not be able to prove it, because it amuses them.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
1d ago
Or it could be aliens messing with us.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
1d ago
the first listed example is "adult human female"
It's first because they're in alphabetical order.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
1d ago
(As an aside, this is probably the origin of the "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" joke about Scholasticism)
So they're arguing whether angels are fermions or bosons?
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
1d ago
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Reduce the factors leading people to criminality, such as poverty and lack of opportunity in the legitimate economy. This will not, contra the left-wing prison-abolitionists, eliminate the need for a criminal justice system, but it will reduce the scale of the problem.
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Reform prison conditions to be less damaging, thus reducing recidivism.
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Decrease the extreme sentence lengths, maintaining an option to extend for those who are still a danger to the public. (Cf. Scandinavia, and yes, they have Black criminals there too.)
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
1d ago
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
1d ago
You're the one who brought up gamete-producing organs. If you asked someone at any time prior to the invention of the microscope what the biological definition of 'male' and 'female' are, they would point to the configuration of the parts between the legs. I can think of no reason for preferring your definition over the classical one as the One True Criterion Of Biological Sex that would apply in any society in which either both or neither were changeable; thus I can only come to one of two conclusions:
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You started with the assumption that biological sex is both unchangeable and single-variable, chose 'gamete-producing organs' as your dividing line because we do not yet know how to fully transition them, and, having chosen that as the definition of biological sex, used it to support your claim that biological sex is unchangeable.
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You have some valid reason, which would have applied even prior to the development of what, even thirty years ago, was called a 'sex-change operation', for favouring one definition over another, but that reason is entirely beyond what I can derive from the extent of my knowledge.
I am not assuming that (1.) is the case, but if it is (2.), can you spell out your reasoning for defining sex on the basis of gamete-producing organs?
But don't you agree it would be phenomenally irresponsible to go back in time before the invention of the telegraph and urge a small child to play with a dog that was visibly foaming at the mouth?
I wouldn't think that advisable even now. I just don't think letting trans-women use the ladies' room is equivalent to that.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
1d ago
I maintain that >95% of the time one can accurately tell from a cursory glance what gamete-producing organs a given person was born with.
Given a sample drawn from the population at large,
if identity = "man" then return result "born with small-gamete organs"
else if identity = "woman" then return result "born with large-gamete organs"
will give you ~99% accuracy!
It therefore follows that, 95% of the time, a person demanding that people respect their privacy and not make inferences about their gamete-producing organs is making an unreasonable and quixotic request.
No, it does not follow.
Even if we assume that you have some psionic ability to remote-view a person's chromosomes or their gender presentation in earlier years or the decor of their childhood quarters or the colour of the mushroom cloud at their gender-reveal party or whatever, that does not make it appropriate to bring up or act upon.
If you had some embarrassing skin condition in the parts of your body which you do not generally display to casual observers, it wouldn't matter that I could deduce this by observation; you would still be very justifiably offended if I were to announce it in public, even if everyone in the room had made the same observations and deductions.
And, obvious point, but the fact that Nicole Maines looks passably female in a closely framed still image with a full face of makeup and flattering lighting does not remotely imply that I wouldn't clock them in person.
Well, I don't know how to link 'in person' on a forum!
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
1d ago
Two words for you: Wishful thinking.
Was it wishful thinking for women in the middle of the XX. century to desire freedom from the drudgery of hand-washing clothes?
At least for the forseeable future, men can in fact not become women.
'Foreseeable' is doing a lot of the work there; I cannot currently foresee when we will develop full gamete-production-changing treatments or operations, but I can foresee that we will do so.
Also, people with penises can in fact become people with vaginas, and these are more common referents for the terms 'men' and 'women' than the gamete-production categories.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
1d ago
sin is when we don't do what we ought to because it's inconvenient or too expensive
...and we regard the people thus harmed not as human beings but as numbers on a balance sheet.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
5d ago
· Edited 5d ago
Sincerely – what on earth are you talking about?
When we were struggling to pronounce Eyjafjallajökull, a child born with cystic fibrosis had little chance of seeing their fiftieth birthday. This was not an inherent, unalterable law of the universe; it was the result of our not yet having discovered the three ___caftors.
When the United Nations was founded, almost everyone contracted measles before they reached adulthood. This was not an inherent, unalterable law of the universe; it was the result of our not yet having developed the measles vaccine.
When the first airplane flew, infected wounds were often terminal conditions. This was not an inherent, unalterable law of the universe; it was the result of Mr Fleming not yet having invented antibiotics.
When the first telegraph cable was laid across the Atlantic, that events in Halifax could be known to Dubliners within the hour, anyone bitten by a rabid animal had no possibility of survival. This was not an inherent, unalterable law of the universe; it was the result of M. Pasteur not yet having developed the rabies vaccine.
Our inability for someone born with small-gamete-producing organs to produce large gametes is not an inherent, unalterable law of the universe; we just haven't figured out how. (Yet. Growth mindset!)
"For every problem the Lord has made, He has also made a solution." --Thomas Edison
If the PIN for my bank card was tattooed on my forehead in 60pt characters
And if a frog had wings, it wouldn't bang its arse on the ground.
You can't always tell what gamete-producing organs someone had at birth. If you saw this woman in a crowd of women, and were not previously familiar with her, I highly doubt that you could clearly identify her as the one individual among them who was born with small-gamete-producing organs.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
5d ago
it's still as applicable now as it was then.
I agree with you on that point.
It wasn't applicable then, and it isn't applicable now.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
5d ago
I don't know what this is supposed to mean.
The planes that came back with bullet holes in certain places correspond to trans individuals whom you can tell are trans. The planes that were hit in other places and didn't come back correspond to the trans individuals who, if you aren't told that they are trans, you never suspect that they are anything other than cis.
Some concrete examples or citations would be appreciated.
Mansour, M., Fattal, A., Ouerdane, Y. et al. A 35-year-old father with persistent Mullerian duct syndrome and seminoma of the right undescended testis: a rare case report. surg case rep 7, 271 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40792-021-01354-w
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
5d ago
I am curious how you arrived at the conclusion that sex-segregation is the best way to protect female inmates from harm amounts to "treating people as things".
It's more the conclusion that protecting the identity!female natal-gonads!male inmates is too expensive to bother with.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
5d ago
That just means the best data you have to support the existence of gender identity roughly rivals the data we have to support astral projection. It's not skin off my nose if you want to believe in it, but if you're demanding a sweeping reform of society, I think you need to back your demands with something better.
If society were built to tell anyone who believed themself capable of astral projection, constantly, day-in, day-out, "You aren't really capable of astral projection, that isn't a thing, you are Delusional and Wrong.", and never let the matter rest, I think that that would justify 'demanding a sweeping reform of society'.
If you, as a result of some preternatural phenomenon, woke up to-morrow in a body of the opposite biological sex, how motivated would you be to reverse the change?
I just meant that he'd be allowed to take advantage of any benefits stemming from "identifying as a woman".
Precisely what benefits are those, and why ought we not extend them to identity!men?
what exactly has Mr. Mustache Twirling Villain done wrong in the exact same situation?
That depends on whether he is harming anyone with the latitude given him.
Either he is, in which case recognising the wrongness of his actions does not depend on a rejection of his claimed gender identity, or he isn't, in which case he hasn't done anything wrong.
Telling someone they're supposed to use the other bathroom is not harassment.
I was referring to the oft-invoked spectre of 'cis-man claims to be trans-woman, goes into women's toilet, does Harvey Weinstein impression', which is equally bad if the perpetrator is a cis-woman.
I don't recall phrasing "free rein" in terms of harm. I just meant there'd be no barriers to entering into women's spaces.
And? If they aren't harming anyone....
If it's a compromise then it's not a definition.
It's not a definition.
There are multiple pairs of categories into which human beings can be divided
These categories are strongly correlated, such that the members of one category will have a >90%/<10% distribution of any other pair; thus we refer to all the categories in column A as 'woman', and all those in column B as 'man'.
The pro-trans maximalist position is that the 'gender identity' category ought be used for all purposes, and none of the other categories should be acknowledged under any circumstance.
The anti-trans maximalist position is that the only categories that are relevant are those which do not change, and that any category which places trans individuals with their identified gender ought be ignored.
What I am offering as a compromise is "Default to using gender identity, use others if you have a Very Good Reason, 'we've always done it this way' doesn't count.".
how that they're having a terrible time when all of society is not forced to buy into their belief system.
...and yet demands that they buy into its beliefs.
Alice, and a mostly left-leaning coalition, believe that Alice is a woman. A mostly right-leaning coalition believes that Alice is a man.
I see no reason why it is more justified for the latter group to demand assent to their beliefs by the former than vice versa; 'it's always been this way' strikes me as a very flimsy premise, given how many times it has been used to support things which are now widely considered indefensible.
An honor system + resolving corner cases with government ID's with sex-based markers, sounds like more than enough to me.
That would last about five minutes before a woman with PCOS or endometriosis and a Maine or Minnesota driver license tries to take a leak at the same time as a TERF with an opinion and a mood disorder.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
7d ago
Why is that trans activists' attempts at "gotchas" always reside solely in the realm of the hypothetical?
Firstable, that question was not an attempt at a 'gotcha', so much as a request for clarification of your particular definition of 'sex'.
Secondable, it is not necessarily hypothetical; any chirurgeon will tell you that human organs never look like the diagrams in medical textbooks: there are always variations, and sometimes they can both be very weird and go unnoticed until the body is scanned or opened up for some other reason. I have even heard of men who were born with all the visible male parts, never considered that they were anything other than men, fathered children, and then went to hospital for some procedure and found out that they had been carrying around uteruses for seventy years!
Thirdable, I believe that the Rightful Caliph has written a defence of the use of hypotheticals in argument.
I continue to insist that asserting that one's sex ought to be kept "private" is a meaningless demand when, in 99% of cases, it can be reliably inferred at a glance.
א, cis individuals outnumber trans individuals by such a degree that, given a sample drawn from the population at large, one can get past 90% just with their gender identity.
given how many trans people will openly announce "I am a trans [woman]/[man]"
I am not claiming that biological sex be kept private at all times; I am saying that the choice should be left to the individual. If Alice wants to declare her transness to everyone, Betty wants to keep it a closely guarded secret, and Carol wants to tell her friends and the readers of her blog but not strangers in the shops when she wants to empty her bladder, their decisions should all be respected.
Returning to the analogy with other forms of medical confidentiality, if Daniel wants to post his entire medical history on his website for everyone and their brother to peruse, he is welcome to do so; other people are disallowed from making that decision for him.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
7d ago
If you continue to insist that my opposition to gender ideology is rooted in some kind of voyeuristic desire to know the genital configuration of everyone in my vicinity
I do not insist that your inquiry is voyeuristic in nature. My point is that, even though it is not born out of sexual perversion, it is still not any of your business.
I also acknowledge that you have stated that your concern is not with penis/vulva but with testicles/ovaries. (Does this mean that you would consider someone born with a penis and two viable-egg-producing ovaries to be female, and someone born with a vulva and two viable-sperm-producing testicules to be male? What about someone born with one testicule and one ovary, each producing viable gametes of its associated size?) I disagree with your claim that either of them is something which you are entitled to be told by someone who would prefer to keep to themself.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
7d ago
Someone who has a mental illness causing them to think they are Napoleon
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
7d ago
Well, that's not how any sensible person would define sex
It's how they define it when a baby is assigned male or female.
when I use the term "sex", I'm referring to whether a person was born with the organs associated with the production of large or small gametes, even if faulty.
To the best of my knowledge, when parents ask whether they had a boy or a girl, doctors and midwives do not generally take biopsies from the gonads of infants and culture them to see what size gametes they produce.
They usually look between the legs to see whether they find a sticky-outy bit or a hole.
medical technology currently admits of no way to transform organs which produce large gametes into organs which produce small gametes, or vice versa. If you were born with functioning testicles, the only kind of gamete you will ever be able to produce throughout your life is a small one
Skill issue.
Your continued insistence on trying to imply that, by virtue of being gender-critical, I'm therefore a sex pest obsessed with the genitals of complete strangers
I do not accuse you of acting out of carnal desire. However, the fact that you are not thus motivated does not change the fact that other people's organs are none of your business. The reproductive system is considered especially private in most societies, but you would still be out of line if you insisted that people use bathrooms corresponding to the configuration at birth of their heart or kidneys.
If someone wants access to your medical records, do you think they should need a Good Reason, or is the fact that they are not touching themself sufficient justification?
If some wants to know the PIN for your bank card, not out of an intention to use it for fraud, but because they think it relevant whether it is a prime/square/triangular number, does the fact that they are not technically a thief mean that they are justified in prying it out of you?
your contention that the configuration of the genitals belonging to [trans-women] are some kind of jealously guarded secret
I do not contend that all trans-women keep the state of their genitals secret, so much as that an individual trans-woman ought to have the right to decide for herself whether and when to disclose it.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
7d ago
So in your ideal world, where no compromise was required with people like me (or those uppity women who would prefer not to be raped during their prison sentences if it's all the same), how would inmates be housed?
One inmate per cell, all interactions between inmates supervised by guards sufficiently numerous to intervene in the event of violence of harassment having the potential thereof.
trans activists cannot dredge up even one example of a trans-identified male being murdered in a British prison in the last twenty-five years?
'Trans-woman murdered' isn't the only bad outcome we are trying to avoid; there is also 'trans-woman beaten up by low-life with extremely retrograde Views on gender roles as a warning to anyone else assigned-male-at-birth who might be thinking about getting in touch with their feminine side'.
I'll be more than happy to stop, if you'll stop implying that I'm a pervert for disagreeing with gender ideology. A simple trade.
I do not believe that you, personally, are motivated by sexual desire in your opposition to trans-inclusivity. That does not change the fact that other people's organs are none of your business, even when your interest in them is not sexually motivated. This is especially the case for the sexual organs, including the gamete-producing organs. If someone starts digging through your medical records willy-nilly, should the Data Protection Act only apply if they are touching themself?
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
7d ago
I was more referring to the tolerance for peaceful dissent.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
7d ago
But the people reporting it's existence aren't any better at defining or describing it than you are.
Well, they're closer to it, so they have a better view, and their statements are the best data I have.
Isn't that forbidding trans women from what we allow cis women to do, rather than forbidding cis women from what we allow trans women to do?
I reread your comment, and I apparently mis-interpreted it. I apologise for the error.
None of the drama is related to trans women being allowed to do what cis women aren't
Then whence the concern about a man claiming to be a trans-woman 'being given free rein', if he is not doing anything wrong with the acceptance given to him?
We don't, or at least shouldn't, tolerate cis-women harassing other cis-women in the restroom; thus, if trans-women aren't allowed to do anything cis-women aren't, then trans-women, or cis-men claiming to be such, are not being given 'free rein' to harm anyone.
And if you meant the former, didn't you just say you would exclude them from sports, prisons, etc.?
Those are circumstances under which I would compromise from the pro-trans maximalist position. That is not the same thing as endorsement of the anti-trans maximalist position.
Your original definition made no mention of hormone levels, nor did you say it's context dependent.
For most purposes, a woman is someone who either (a.) is of the gender identity found more commonly in people born with vulvas, or (b.) has no gender identity and has a vulva.
"For most purposes" means that some contexts might call for a different definition.
At this point your approach is just more complicated and confusing, while offering no benefits.
Other than being fairer to certain people who, to be honest, are having a terrible enough time of it already.
("Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?")
But trans activists want to keep the segregation
Then argue for the abolition of segregation entirely
Are there trans activists who have rejected offers of 'gender-neutral bathrooms for everybody, as long as the wash their hands'?
I, on the other hand, have literally never even heard of Karens demanding genital checks.
I don't know how else one would enforce the bathroom bills being proposed in the red states, given the overlap between, at a minimum, the most female-presenting quintile of trans-women and the least female-presenting quintile of cis-women.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
7d ago
I favour Granny Weatherwax's definition.
You are quite welcome to disagree with someone else's Views. However, if you tell someone that they are wrong, and they tell you that they'd rather not discuss the matter right now, should you follow them around with a sign that says 'you are wrong', and constantly wave it in front of them?
I do not condone these. If your employer fires you for Poasting on this forum, or writing a Disgusted-of-Tunbridge-Wells letter to your local fish-and-chips wrapper, I will condemn his or her actions, and wish more people on the left would do the same.
In that case, it appears that you do not have a gender identity, and have thus defaulted to living as whichever biological sex you were born as.
Some people identify very strongly with their biological sex, and in that hypothetical, would be very motivated to restore it; these people have a gender identity that aligns with their biological sex.
And if that is 'go into the women's lavatory, do his business, wash his hands, leave', then he isn't doing anything wrong.
Some of us don't consider Minority Report or Psycho Pass to be an aspirational ideal.
Offer accepted. Gender neutral WCs for everyone!
I mean that it is not a single definition.
'Biologically female' can refer to
people with XX chromosomes
people born with vaginas
people who currently have vaginas
people born with ovaries
people with high estrogen levels and low testosterone levels, or something along those lines
WRT human beings, 'female' is the adjectival form of 'woman'; using it as a noun is rather impolite. For the concept to which you are referring, the more appropriate nomenclature to attach a modifier referring to whichever biological aspect you consider relevant; thus 'genetically female' excluding both trans-women and those with androgen insensitivity syndrome, 'natal-anatomical woman' including AIS but excluding trans-women, 'anatomical woman' to exclude trans-women before chirurgery but include them after, 'aspiring anatomical woman' to also include those planning to have chirurgery or who can't access it but would if they could, 'hormonally female' to include those taking hormones.
All the other possible ways, nothing could ever be changed until the mountain is worn down by the bird sharpening its beak every thousand years.
It should be enough to demonstrate that the proposed changes are an improvement over the status quo.
If it has been working perfectly well, yes, but usually when people demand change, it's because the previous ways weren't working for them.
...which not everyone has; e. g. the cis-woman from a blue state who whenever she has needed ID has never had any trouble using her driver's licence before, and doesn't expect to need a special document just to empty her bladder in a red state.
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