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Wake up babe, the definition of woman just dropped.
The year was 2020, trans issues have already made their way through our social consciousness, and some women were getting frustrated at the inability to congregate without trans women showing up, and - in the minds of the TERF inclined - spoil the party.
Enter Sall Grover, a bold enterprising spirit, that recognized two facts:
She quickly joined the dots, and thus the Giggle app was born. In order to register you had to upload a selfie, which would be run through a sex-recognition AI, and non-females would be automatically rejected. The AI was deliberately calibrated to minimize false negatives, wanting to spare cis-women the humiliation of appealing the process, Grover figured it's better to let a few false-positives through and deal with them manually. For a while, the whole system worked wonderfully, and the women congregated, giggling happily.
But, as we all know, there is no Giggle without a Tickle... In February 2021, Roxy Tickle uploaded a selfie to the Giggle app and the AI was so amused at the word pun, it forgot it was supposed to be an image recognition algorithm. Roxy got through! Her joy lasted for several months, until she was caught by manual review as she was applying for premium features of the app. After a short and unsuccessful appeal attempt, she decided that the only way to resolve this dispute is in court.
Roxy Tickle argued that this was an outrageous injustice, that she was being discriminated against for being trans, and that this constitutes a violation of the Sex Discrimination Act of 1984. Sall Grover argued that this is nonsense, that Giggle does not discriminate against trans people, it merely excludes people on the basis of sex. The law hasn't outlawed sex-segregated spaces over the 30 years it was in effect, Roxy Tickle was treated no different than any other male-sexed individual, and therefore no illegal discrimination has taken place. The judge had to rule if Giggle excluded a man, and was well within it's rights, or if it excluded a woman and indirectly committed discrimination against a trans person. He was therefore forced to settle that ancient question - what is a woman? Last week we finally received the verdict, and the way I understood it is "a woman is anyone who the state identifies as a woman". It turns out that sex is mutable, and that Ms. Tickle is a woman because she has a state issued document saying so. Australia's legal system seems a bit complex to my eyes, but at first glance that seems to also boil down to "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman".
The consequences of the verdict might be more interesting than the verdict itself. After all, if an app for women cannot keep an AMAB out, how can all the other controversial spaces like sports, prisons, waxing salons, etc.? We've covered enough of these cases over the years that I think it should be clear this isn't a hypothetical, and as connoisseurs of TERF content will know, hacking "gender violence" laws has become a pretty regular occurance in countries that lean on the self-ID side of the debate. More importantly, and/or ammusingly, normie men are deciding all that male privilege just ain't worth it, or perhaps the Spaniards are just more cheeky than average. In any case, if any such self-ID laws / rulings are to be maintained, I think they'll require some major qualifications.
The vigilante (vagilante?) approach would be to reinstate Tickle's account with a 'YWNBAW' flair and let the TERFs bully him mercilessly until he gets the point -- this is kind of how unofficially segregated spaces have been maintained for ages.
What are the cyber-bullying laws like in Australia?
Cyber-bullying laws in Australia are strict and getting stricter all the time. I bet YWNBAW will fit under the 'anti-discrimination' part of the legislation. Even random commenters can get publicly funded human rights commissions sicced on them, though they may prevail: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/nov/04/qut-computer-lab-racial-discrimination-lawsuit-thrown-out
Furthermore, the app is all but dead now, due to the litigation. I'm pretty sure they know that there'd be a little too much thoughtcrime on the internal forums, the eSafety Commissioner or someone would eviscerate them so they shut up shop. This is a country that routinely bans the import of doujins and tried to globally censor away images of a terrorist stabbing, they'd find something to charge Giggle with.
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While I was responding to @ChickenOverlord and @ControlsFreak, I noticed something weird about the whole case.
This opinion is surprisingly unconcerned with defining a woman. It depends on the gap between two existing definitions. Technically, it would have been the same if Tickle had been FtM. Even more technically, it doesn’t actually privilege the Queensland definition.
When Giggle used visual inspection as a proxy, they defined “sex” as sex-assigned-at-birth. Since Tickle didn’t look feminine enough, she was probably assigned male at birth, so she could be legally excluded, since sex is not actually a protected class*.
This case said no, you’re actually proxying for gender identity, which is. Queensland’s definition of “sex” is sex-as-recorded-in-our-registrar. They allow legal sex changes, but for obvious reasons, they’re (almost?) entirely done by people with particular gender identities. Punishing someone because her sex-assigned-at-birth doesn’t match the sex-recorded-by-Queensland is punishing a protected class.
In other words: disparate impact. When the only people hurt by your policy happen to fall in a particular category, and that category is protected, you’re liable. There was no other way to read this law.
* No, I still don’t understand how the Sex Discrimination Act explains that.
This might seem petty, but 99% of the transgender debate is about the meaning of words, so I have to object to your usage of the phrase “sex assigned at birth”:
They most certainly do not, because radical feminists like the ones behind Giggle do not believe in ”sex assigned at birth” at all. Rather, they believe in biological sex, as a property of the real human body a person inhabits, and as it exists before medical interventions are taken to turn healthy boys and girls into transsexuals.
Google confirms that sex assigned at birth as a term did not exist before 2014. It is a neologism invented by transgender activists to downplay or outright deny the existence of biological sex.
The term is nonsensical because sex is never assigned, it is simply observed, not just at birth but on many occasions through a person's life, the first time often long before birth, as part of ultrasound screening. In the overwhelming majority of cases sex is determined at conception, based on whether the sperm that fertilizes the egg cell carries a Y chromosome or not.
What commonly happens at birth is that a doctor or midwife performs a visual inspection of a newborn baby, makes a diagnosis, and records the observed sex on a birth certificate. But that's the map, not the territory, and sometimes the assessment is wrong (as in the case of intersex males born without visible external genitalia), and sometimes it is not recorded at all (increasingly, western countries allow omitting the observed sex from the birth certificate).
Of course, the absence or incorrectness of government records has no bearing on reality. Humans have a biological sex whether that sex is recorded or not, and this is what the Giggle moderators try to assess, imperfectly, using photos and other metadata as proxies. They certainly don't believe in a nonsense concept that human sex is assigned at birth.
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.
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I used that phrase because of something the judge wrote at the start of page 3:
While I’m sure Ms. Grover would not use my phrasing, especially the word “assigned,” I needed a way to distinguish the immutable view from the legal one which Queensland embraced.
You could just say “biological sex”, “medical sex”, “natural sex” or “real sex”.
Even “sex of a person at birth” is preferable to “sex assigned at birth”, in that it acknowledge that sex is a property of a person, rather than being assigned to that person.
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That is not true, as a Google Books search can easily demonstrate. It was mostly (though not entirely) used to refer to intersex people.
Yes, “sex assignment” was used to describe cases where the biological sex was indeterminate, and thus some judgment must be made because biological sex was unclear. But “sex assigned at birth” to describe a person's natural unambiguous biological sex was unheard of until recently.
In 1995, absolutely no person wrote “Abraham Lincoln was assigned male at birth”. As in: I claim nobody on the planet has written that combination of words throughout that entire decade. Do you disagree?
Meanwhile, I could easily imagine that line being written today, and rather than being considered weird, it would be considered quite woke.
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
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Thanks for getting me to take another look at it fresh.
Questions about yardsticks are back on the table. The Status Games are alive and well in Australia. What an absolutely incoherent mess we keep getting ourselves into.
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Even without legal sanction calling oneself a woman was merely (and literally) a box ticking exercise. Despite living in the relatively unpozzed east, LGBT being a woke thing means the western dating apps are filled with self identified women. My lesbian friend showed me her filters and her preference matches, and she still gets flooded with dicks on the apps. Its all feminine penis stuff for the pozzed, and shameless 'you lesbos just need a REAL dick to know your place and this app lets me superlike you without review.' I understand the Chinese gay app Blued is just pure degeneracy and transphobia, and all lesbian apps whether western or eastern have been infested.
Singapore has a unique case where identity and sex are actually distinct: you can freely change your gender at will on official documents, but sex is based only on birth certificates. Since there are no legal protections for gender save for medical requirements, self declaration has no practical value here. Penises are conscripted regardless of presentation, and declaring oneself trans gets you out of conscription only because it is classified as a mental illness. Being homosexual used to be an excuse to get out of conscription too, but the army realized that actual gays will be the ones bullied in the army so they did not pose a threat to the integrity of a unit.
In this thread: “I can’t believe systems accept government ID!”
Also in this thread: “I can’t believe systems accept self-ID!”
Obtaining legal sanction—as Tickle apparently did—is a strictly higher bar than checking a box on the app.
Giggle’s method is something like an insurance company which ignores marriage certificates in favor of requiring a hand photo with your ring. Maybe they should be allowed to do so, but it’s hard to be surprised that the government definitions favor government-issued documents.
Self identification and Government identification are both shams.
Identity is an intersubjective concept negotiated with the people you interact with on a case-by-case basis.
Indeed, the Giggle women do not believe Tickle to be one of them and Tickle has no power to change this. All Tickle can do is forbid them from acting according to their conscience by force of arms using the State.
It is perfectly fine to reject fiat coming either from an individual or from a government, and decide yourself how you choose to identify people. And I'll go as far as to say it's a natural right, which we either call "freedom of conscience", "freedom of speech" or "freedom of association" depending on how it manifests. A right that indeed is routinely trampled by Civil Rights law everywhere and its consequences.
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How is checking a box on a form for a new government ID a higher bar to clear than checking a box on an app?
What's so hard to understand about "'man' and 'woman' are words describing material reality, and not someone internal sense of identity, and that's the definition the government should be using when applying their laws"?
Hey, I didn’t say a high bar.
In Victoria, it appears to require a “statutory declaration” plus a “supporting statement.” The latter means you need to convince at least one person you’re applying in good faith. There’s also a cooldown period, $140 fee, specific requirements for prisoners, and you have to return the previous document. That’s a good bit more commitment than downloading a new app.
It also attaches something resembling legal liability. Unlikely that you’d fall afoul of that, but it’s more than an app checkbox will do.
Oh, I think arguing against the government criteria is fine and coherent. I was thinking of IGI’s response blaming the very concept of government records. It was funny to see that alongside the more common, exact opposite concern. The duality of, uh, man!
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Maybe I am too law brained but this outcome seems obvious? When governments draw distinctions between people they need a way to adjudicate who is classified how. For demographic markers they often issue some kind of identification that contains those markers and are considered authoritative. Sometimes (often?) there is a general process for updating those documents and markers when they are incorrect. When one undergoes the process for changing ones markers then, legally, one has changed classification.
This case was not lost today it was lost when, in 1994, Queensland started permitting one to change one's legal sex (if I read the opinion correctly) and, in 2013, when Australia amended the Sex Discrimination Act to cover gender identity.
Yeah I agree. The judge read the law right, it's what the law says that is the problem.
Queensland is headed for a landslide LNP win soon, it'll be interesting to see if the new parliament is game to change this. I think probably yes - both sides of politics seem to agree that trans issues are working for the right currently (with Labor trying to downplay them), and QLD doesn't have an upper house to get in the way.
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This simply pushes the problem to the question of, "When are they correct/incorrect?" The silly version of this is that my driver's license has height on it. Suppose that for Person A, there was a genuine flubbing, a fat fingering. Their height was listed wrong. Presumably, they could request to have it changed on the document. On the other hand, Person B thinks that he's gotta be 6' tall for the dating apps, which in the future year of verified identity for everything, actually take in your driver's license information and use that in the algorithm. So, Person B waltzes into the DMV and says, "Well, obviously, you have a general process for updating these documents, so you need to list me as 6' tall." 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".
If you can point to a single example of a biological male who grew into becoming a biological female or vice-versa, we can perhaps have a conversation about what to do in that case.
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"Correct" and "incorrect" are relative to the government's purposes in having the mark on the document. Often this is to aid in identification of the person presenting the document but the marks can serve other purposes. In the case of height, having a listed one dramatically different than your apparent one would be a problem for using it to identify you. So they try to keep the height listed on your document close to your apparent height (as determined by yardstick).
In the case of gender, I would argue that it’s at least in part about safety. Men are orders of magnitude stronger than women, and given that most instances of stranger rape occur in private spaces, keeping natal males out of women’s restrooms, changing rooms, and sleeping areas is simply the best way to prevent rapes in those spaces.
Height and weight are more about proof of identity in general. If you match 5/5 of the identifying characteristics listed on your ID, it’s pretty clear it’s your ID.
No, they're not 100x stronger. Did you mean multiple standard deviations stronger?
Yeah, misspoke, sorry. But the point being that unless a woman is basically a semi-pro athlete (let’s say that she’d be competitive in a small school college sports program) her chances of successfully defending herself against a minimally athletic male in a one on one situation is fairly small. It’s why I basically laugh at the “learn self defense for women” programs. Unless you’re seriously training and competing in combat sports you aren’t going to have enough skill to win out against a male with enough extra muscle mass to manhandle her.
Isn’t ‘self defense for women’ basically ‘don’t be shy, kick him in the nuts and run away’?
I’ve heard that ‘kick him in the nuts’ is very bad advice because they aren’t vital (unlike eyes, say) and the pain is basically washed away by adrenaline and just makes him angrier. Works against a dweeb who’s being pushy, but not against somebody accosting you in an alley.
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The governments purposes for tracking sex should not be about the feelings of the individual being tracked, but about keeping accurate records for the census, crime, and other statistics. I'd say that having a listed sex other than your apparent (actual) one is a major problem.
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What are the purposes of such marks when it comes to private service providers, say, like amusement parks and emergency rooms?
It depends on the private service providers own policies and what kinds of obligations the government may have created for them.
The only reason the above case exists is because the government created a legal obligation for private service providers to treat people a certain way based on the mark on their official documentation. As far as I know there is no similar legal requirement to treat people a certain way based on their height. If there was, then a similar lawsuit against an amusement park may very well be successful!
In the emergency room context the only purpose a sex classification serves is as a shorthand for certain other biological facts that may be relevant for treatment. If you already know those other biological facts it's not clear to me what further information one is getting from someone's legal sex classification. In any case doctors should determine medical treatments on the basis of the relevant biology, not the legal sex classification. Indeed it's easy for me to imagine a scenario where a doctor denying someone treatment on the basis of their legal sex classification, rather than their biology, would be the basis for a sex discrimination lawsuit! Imagine a trans woman goes to a doctor and requests a prostate exam. Perhaps she has or hasn't had bottom surgery but in any case still has a prostate. The doctor refuses on the grounds her relevant identity document says she is female, though the doctor does acknowledge she has a prostate. I think such a doctor would likely lose a sex discrimination lawsuit. After all, if she had shown up as someone with "male" on their identity document and with a prostate the doctor would presumably have performed the exam. She was denied a treatment relevant to her biology because of her legal classification. Sounds like sex discrimination to me!
One could just as easily say that in a digital app setting, the only purpose a government sex classification serves is as a shorthand for certain other biological facts that may be relevant for treatment. If you already know those other biological facts it's not clear to me what further information one is getting from someone's legal sex classification. In any case apps should determine digital treatments on the basis of the relevant biology, not the legal sex classification. Where does your argument fail?
What is the "treatment" in this context and what is the relevant biology? In the medical context treatments very straightforwardly interact with a patient's biology. That's the point. What's the app analogue?
Don't need an analog, at least not according to the standard you've set forth. You just said that the "only purpose" a government sex classification serves is as a shorthand. They saw the shorthand, they determined that other facts were known, and they used the other facts. Amusement parks did it, emergency rooms did it, and digital apps did it. Unless you have some extra, currently hidden government purpose, these cases seem precisely analogous for the test you've set forth. There's nothing in your current test that says that some sorts are okay and other sorts aren't.
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I’d be loath to assume the government uses a general process when a laundry list of specific ones would do. When I had to get my corrective lens requirement dropped, there was a specific office and form. I think I had to bring a doctor’s note from the optometrist? So the specific height-change form probably says “please stand by this ruler.” If you disagree with that, tough.
I think you might be sounding like a transphobe. Tests, forms, doctor's notes, medical gatekeeping?
But no worries, I think @Gillitrut's position can come to your rescue. See, you don't have to actually make any decisions about what test/forms/notes/gatekeeping will occur. You can sit back, remain completely agnostic about any underlying Big T Truth, and just be law-brained enough to observe that different jurisdictions will make different choices. Some jurisdictions, we can call them the Transphobe Jurisdictions, have rulers and tests and stuff like you might want. Other jurisdictions, the Nontransphobe Jurisdictions, don't. Australia happened to choose already that they are a Nontransphobe Jurisdiction, having no rulers, no tests, no nothing. They have a much simpler process that lets you quickly and easily change the authoritative document, which declares, with authority (thus the adjective), how the law views the situation. One can then just sit back, be law-brained, and see that the conclusions follow from the premises.
...but now, Person B is considering going to a local amusement park, a private service provider. There happen to be two amusement parks in the area. Amusement Park Z is run by young, hip folks. They have electronic controls everywhere. You can scan your driver's license and swipe your credit card at the entrance, and then just use the nifty electronic system to access any rides you desire. Amusement Park X is run by old fogies, practically boomers. You have to hand physical tickets to the white guy standing next to the ride, and he points to the sign that says, "You must be this tall to ride." Can Person B sue Amusement Park X for not caring about the authoritative document and simply observing, "Your head don't touch the top of the ruler, dawg"?
After riding a ride that mayyyyyyyyyybe wasn't super safe for short people, Person B isn't feeling so good. B makes his way to the emergency room. B tells the doc everything about what's happened in the time period leading up to that moment. B's last physical act is to pull an insurance card out of a pocket and hand it to the doc, but since it was right next to B's driver's license in the pocket, both are grabbed and passed to the doc. (Can insert/remove a hypo here about B's last words being, "Please help me doc; do anything you need to.") Then, B passes out.
The doc runs a bunch of tests. In the process, they strip off B's clothes and replace them with a standard hospital gown. They can't help but happen to notice B's genitals in the process. The hospital bed automatically provides B's weight. Maybe even in the future, there's a ruler built into the bed, too. The tests come back, and they happen to include chromosomes and other indicators. All of the medical indicators correlate perfectly toward B having a particular sex, height, and weight. But the doctor noticed that B's drivers license disagrees on some/all of these things. The only problem is that the next step that the doctor has to take depends on one or more of those things. Perhaps it's just a dosage selection; perhaps it's an even more significant change in the course of treatment.
Suppose the doc, a private service provider, proceeds according to the authoritative document and not the measurements, and B happens to die. Is that a successful lawsuit by the estate, according to pure law brain? Suppose the doc proceeds according to the measurements and not the authoritative document, and B happens to live. Is that a successful lawsuit by B?
I'm pretty law-brained for a lot of things, but when it comes to these issues, I cannot escape the phrase, "Live not by lies." If we bake lies into the premises, the principle of explosion surely follows. It is utterly unsurprising that if we start off with baked in lies, then attempt to simply close our eyes to the entire realm of truth and try to proceed purely by law-brain, contradictions will follow.
The nice thing about having specific processes is that they aren’t all-or-nothing. Giving up one doesn’t mean going full postmodernist and rejecting all empirical measurements. The ruler can stay.
Same goes for your rather convoluted hypothetical. There’s no discrimination lawsuit in using the actual indicators for a treatment.
Rulers for thee not for me
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Why should the ruler stay, but not this app's restriction based on biological sex?
Because there’s a specific law calling out gender identity discrimination. (Sex discrimination, too, but I still don’t understand why that doesn’t apply.)
If short kings get a law passed, then the ruler might have to go. But that law won’t be passed, because trans activism doesn’t generalize to every possible category.
If you're going to split hairs here then how about this (in addition to what @ControlsFreak said): a FtM trans wants acne medication. The medication is known to be harmful to pregnant females. The patient is visibly pregnant. Were they biologically male, the acne medication would be the right prescription with minimal side effects. The patient's government issued id says they are male.
Can the patient sue the doctor for discrimination if they refuse to give them the prescription? If the doctor relents and her baby is born with birth defects can they sue the doctor for that?
And if you're going to nitpick about pregnancy status being different from sex, then imagine a drug that has significantly different effects on women vs. men, or that she isn't visibly pregnant. Use the "Least Convenient Possible World" to avoid easy outs and address the meat of ControlsFreak's argument.
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I don't follow. Here you said that "[t]here’s no discrimination lawsuit in using the actual indicators for a treatment". So, I must ask again, given that there's a specific law calling out gender identity and sex discrimination,
Suppose the doc, a private service provider, proceeds according to the authoritative document and not the measurements, and B happens to die. Is that a successful lawsuit by the estate, according to pure law brain? Suppose the doc proceeds according to the measurements and not the authoritative document, and B happens to live. Is that a successful lawsuit by B?
We have a specific law. It is applied to private service providers. The document is authoritative.
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I don't have anything to add here, but I had a flashback to a bad Tinder date. Halfway through a coffee the girl accused me of lying about my height, because 'her brother is my stated height and I'm shorter than him'. I said we should go find a measuring tape straight away and see who was wrong. May as well have thrown some gas on a fire. Kept accusing me of lying but wouldn't let me prove her wrong so I just shrugged and left.
I don't know what @IGI-111 is talking about. This is a great argument for the existence of government IDs, height on said IDs, and felony charges for anyone who lies about their government measured height.
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One of my online dates.
Her: "Are you really 6 foot 2?"
Me: "Well not exactly, I'm 6 feet 1 and 3/4"
Her: "I could tell, you shouldn't lie about your height"
Me: -_-
Wow, just wow. The audacity on your part to attempt such a brazen rape by deception. Thank goodness she caught onto your machinations early; could you imagine the trauma she would have experienced had she only found out afterward that she got defrauded into lying with a sub-6'2.00" "man"?
6'2" is an accurate representation of your height to the nearest inch. It's not like you were 6'1.25" and ceiling'd it to 6'2" (which is still within the realm of acceptability), much less added 1-3" to your barefoot height as is NBA tradition. Women regularly and guiltlessly lie about their weight and bodycount, but I guess at least for this woman, men accurately rounding their height to the nearest inch is a bridge too far when it's upward.
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YTA for insisting on a measuring tape instead of being a decent person and believing her emotional truth as a woman that you were lying about your height.
What an epic coffee moment, in more ways than one. At least you turned 360 degrees and bounced, leaving the sunk costs be.
Since thot-patrolling sisters is verboten nowadays, that could be a genius brotherly tactic to passively cockblock guys from banging your sister: Understating your own height to your sister so that she thinks all guys she encounters are shorter than they actually are, thus increasing her chances of getting the ick.
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I hope you started carrying a measuring tape on dates after that.
Measuring tapes are the greatest aid to bavarian fire drills known to man.
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“I’ve got six feet of rope in my truck. Want to see?”
Part of the Tinder starter pack along with chloroform, rag and breath mints.
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Indeed. The slope was always slippery.
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Agreed. If there is a legal status, the government will treat people according to the legal status the government recognizes them as. Not only is that a convenient dodge for what the status 'should' be, it's about the only way for a government to consistently apply said status. If the government did NOT address people by the government-identified status, paradoxes occur.
I'm fairly sure this is what the US military already does, but I'll leave it to any of our posters to vouch for that.
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I advocate for having trans women use waxing salons that service minority populations who don’t buy into all that. Just to see what happens. Prisons I don’t think anyone cares, but sports is probably going to solve itself eventually.
A minority of women seem pretty angry about other women getting raped in prison by male sex offenders who have had a revelation that they're actually female..
I'm pretty angry about it too, for the record.
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I think that was a reference to Jessica Yaniv, who tried to get scrotum waxing from estheticians that sold labia (etc.) waxing services. She launched a human rights complaint against the (independent, immigrant) people who denied her, claiming that they offered female genital waxing, and therefore were discriminating by not waxing her female genitals.
She lost the case, eventually.
He was simultaneously - too early, hitting another group in the progressive stack and too unsympathetic (read weird/non-passing/masculine aggressive). If memory serves he did get to use the full weight and support of whatever Canada's Human Rights Division is called and they independent business had to defend themselves.
I'm curious how that case would go now?
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It's worth mentioning that Yaniv lost that case only because of his blatant racism against Asian immigrants, not because the court took a principled position supporting the right of female workers to refuse service to males.
(If the court has to dedicate four pages of the conclusion to the “racial animus” of the plaintiff, that's usually not a good sign.)
This fragment sums up the position of the court:
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Trade. Off.
Either "woman" means something, and men ain't it, or "woman" means whatever men want it to mean. There is no Panglossian halfway point where heckin brave transerinos get to be court ratified Real Women and shitlord chuds have to validate them despite their sexist patriarchal "facts". Either transgenderism is epistemically empty and futile or we're all men and women in nothing more than as much as it suits our personal agenda in the moment.
As the incentives to play this word game and the disincentives not to do so continue to stack up the remaining barriers will continue to be eroded. And if people will play it for the sake of joining a no-stakes casual chat app you can bet they'll play it for the sake of preferential treatment in the courts, but I repeat myself.
I think the silly word games is a feature and not a bug. They want to create a situation where the application is law is contradictory because they get to fill the gaps according to how it best serves their interests in the moment.
This. Its classic 1984 style "Newspeak." Putting people in a state of forcrd contradiction makes them confused and helpless.
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1:
Quillette published an article about the verdict, too:
https://quillette.com/2024/08/27/tickle-vs-giggle/
2:
The verdict didn't surprise me because I'm already working from the sad assumption that in the woke West, biological sex is no longer recognized as real by anyone in a position of power. What was once a woman is now a “uterus-haver”, a “pregnant person” or a “chest feeder”, but such people have no collective rights. Those collective rights now belong to those who merely identify as women, even if they have penises and testicles, which means that there is no longer any legal basis for having female-only spaces, online or offline.
What confuses and angers me is that the judge will not even explain that state of affairs in clear terms, instead insisting that this was a case of discrimination based on gender identity. But that's literally impossible! Giggle is an app for women, and Tickle identifies as a woman, so whatever discrimination Tickle faced cannot have been based on gender identity (and it wasn't: it was based on biological sex).
That's also clear from the paragraph here:
Again, the decision was based on the fact that Tickle did not look biologically female, not that they looked insufficiently woman-identifying. In fact, Tickle looks exactly like a male who identifies as a woman. So the Giggle moderators, correctly, clocked her as a male and banned her for that reason. That is sex-based discrimination, which may or may not be illegal, but definitely not gender-identity discrimination.
So de facto the situation in Australia is as follows:
I don't agree that this should be the law, but this is what it is in practice. Then why can't the judge explicitly say so? Is he that stupid? Or is banning discrimination based on biological sex while claiming you are banning discrimination based on self-identification some elite power play that I'm too unsophisticated to understand?
3:
As for normie men increasingly identifying as female for the benefits:
I suspect that a lot of these benefits in practice are only afforded to biological females and to males who make enough effort to signal that they are serious about their gender identity.
The normie dad who changes his legal sex in hopes of getting custody of his children will be sussed out as faking it and will not get the benefits associated with women and real transwomen.
This all reminds me of an old but good article by The Last Psychiatrist, The Nature of the Grift, where (in section IV) he explains that to get asylum because you are persecuted as a homosexual, it's not sufficient to declare yourself homosexual, you have to play the part too. Officially there is no rule on how gay you must act to be considered homosexual, and in practice many people fake such a claim, but it's still a requirement that you fake it convincingly.
I blame the whole concept of gender. We didn't always have gender, it's a recent invention. We used to have sex and civilization ran pretty well with that alone.
Did it? Constant wars and plagues and famines and the rise and fall of empires over and over again, slavery, misery, death from disease. Childhood mortality at 50%, giving birth a 1 in 10 crap shoot of the mother dying. I don't think a lack of gender was helping that much.
Childhood mortality at 50 % was a good thing because it purged suboptimal genes from the genepool.
That isn't how it worked. Often is was just the one that was malnourished or late in the birth order, or unlucky in what crazy disease they caught. It wasn't some kind of fight to the finish. The smartest people haven't been winning some darwinian struggle to improve the human race since....ever.
Yes it is.
Ah, then why aren't Congolese the smartest strongest healthiest people on the planet then? Maybe because natural selection doesn't always select for the traits we want, maybe it just selects people that will have the most people born to them. What a crazy stance to take, so "optimal" human life for you is just the ability to pump out 10 kids that can live in poverty?
...because tropical diseases and animals are infinitely less lethal than their fellow men ?
You really think you'd rather be exposed to Steppe Nomads than elephants ?
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Still likely a correlation between being the feeblest and not surviving childhood, versus these days in which serious conditions are extended ad infinitum for no particular benefit to society.
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This is almost certainly not true. Historical birthrates were high enough that an absolute majority of women would have died in childbirth were this so. The historical record does not seem to support this, and it’s biased towards elite women who probably had higher maternal mortality rates because they married younger.
I took a moment to look this up. An example of an old-timey rate, In Sweden and Finland in 1800, for example, around 900 mothers died for every 100,000 live births. That's about 1% per birth, so if you had more than 10 pregnancies (which a married young rich woman might as you say) maybe you could get lifetime risks around 10%.
There are still countries in africa where more than 1 in 20 women can expect to die in childbirth.
https://ourworldindata.org/maternal-mortality
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What? Maternal deaths were a mainstay of life for most of human history. What are you talking about?
The comment above yours has actual numbers- .9% per birth in Napoleonic-era Scandinavia, highest in the world right now is (predictably)South Sudan, at 1.2% per birth. There's no doubt been times and places slightly higher, but even the really crappy parts of sub-saharan Africa don't break 2% per birth.
Natural fertility ranges from 4-10 children per woman, depending mostly on female age at marriage. That would mean childbirth is a common, possibly the most common, way of dying for women in historical societies, but pretty far from a majority. And that checks out with deep third world numbers- no African country has a double digit percentage of women dying in childbirth.
Maybe you're right, certainly right if you did a bit of googling here, this is a nit and a pick, my overall point was that life was much much worse for most of history. Do you disagree with that?
P.S.
I also said one in ten, perhaps I was thinking over overall odds which are exactly in line with your research
Yes, one in ten certainly seems like a reasonable approximation of total lifetime risk of premodern maternal mortality. And of course childbirth before the Victorian era was orders of magnitude more dangerous than it is today.
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I'm waiting for a non-self-referential definition of gender that doesn't just mean 'sex'.
So far, nobody has answered me.
Historically, the distinction was "gender"= social norms for manhood and womanhood, while "sex"= biological X/Y/ gamete status. A child raised in a distant lab by sexless robot aliens, with absolutely no conception of human society, might not have a "gender"; but they would still have a "sex."
That version of gender did have real uses as a rhetorical countermove against the sex-determinist appeal-to-nature fallacy, which runs: sexual dimorphism is natural, therefore (a) all sex-specific social expectations and privileges are also "natural" and can never be changed because duh, biology doesn't change; and (b) a society's sex-specific stereotypes are "natural" and nature is good, so women should try to perform their society's conventional stereotypes of womanhood (and men: manhood), and those who less closely match those stereotypes are unnatural and bad.
Basically, trying to circumvent the fallacies in "But you have to dress your XX baby in pink because pink is naturally for girls!"/ "Sorry Jill, I can't offer you the same salary as Bob because he supports a family, that's just the nature of things."
Unfortunately, I think this usage ran afoul of the trans folks' desire to deliberately re-conflate the natural and the social in order to argue that their social performance of gender stereotypes was, indeed, "natural," therefore biological, unchangeable and good. So whether there's a definition distinct from "sex" on that side of the aisle, I couldn't say.
If blank slateism is true, yes.
That's kind of the problem. The ideological fortress is of use to larger groups than just the trans activist segment that captured it so now people don't have a way to disentangle themselves from ridiculousness like Tickle without losing their motte entirely. And they haven't found it because
If they were only attacking the fallacious version of that argument then trans activists would have a thinner wedge to work with. You can accept that it's ludicrous to assume static or totalizing gender roles without accepting that gender has nothing to do with sex (which is where we are) or the sort of doctrinaire blank slateist/anti-sex-based role position that came to dominate.
Simply having the sex-vs-gender distinction implies nothing about the relationship between the two, just that they're different things worth analyzing separately, like genotype vs phenotype or wealth vs. income.
I also think doctrinaire blank-slateism as you describe it is a bit of a strawman. Most of the instances I'm aware of sound more like (entirely reasonable) calls for for agnosticism or at least extreme skepticism about the precise extent to which biology determines culture (since everyone opining has serious skin in the game and we're certainly not at the point of making controlled experiments that could falsify our guesses). Similarly, there's an extremely good case for a presumption of blank-slatism as the best working approach to prevent grave injustice on an individual level.
Moreover, liberal modernity certainly works much better with fully interchangeable workers/citizens; and runaway gender-performance competition (like the kind the US saw in the 50s, or arguably is seeing today) is a costly Moloch-style trap that is hard to escape without externally-enforced change. So at a societal level I can fully understand advocating for periodic centrally-enforced sex-stereotype detoxes or elimination diets, just to reset to minimal levels.
Strawman or the bailey?
If that view is a strawman then what is 'all sex-specific social expectations and privileges are also "natural" and can never be changed because duh, biology doesn't change'. How many American conservatives explicitly state this belief?
If it was mere agnosticism or even skepticism people like James Damore wouldn't be anathematized for trying to provide empirical evidence that challenged the blank slateist ideology.
Yes, everyone knows the caveats to the statement "men and women are the same". But it's hardly my fault that we continually allow some people to turn the ratchet in one direction until we're now arguing about men in women's sports. If there was any example even blank slateists should laugh off...it used to be this. But, seemingly, what one generation knows but considers too obvious or impolite to say somehow stops being common knowledge and you have to fight about it.
"Everyone knows" is true until it's not. The slope is slippery. I don't consider it a weakness of my argument so much as the point itself.
As @ArjinFerman asks: in what sense? It certainly has certain Darwinian implications. The liberal societies that have adopted this viewpoint are facing the basic problem of being unable to reproduce themselves - which probably won't be helped by telling men and women they can swap sex and dope themselves to make it stick. The flight may feel smoother but the plane hasn't landed yet.
My other retort is that this view is simply just false, and it only appears not-false insofar as people employ a bunch of hotfixes and participate in the very sort of doctrinaire "see no evil" blank slateism you're writing off as strawmen.
There are plenty of places where it's clear people are not interchangeable widgets and we solve it by various forms of redistribution that are intended to push them to look and act more alike (enforcing equal parental leave in European countries) and the deployment of a vast bureaucracy to root out sexual "bias" or "discrimination" across both employment and education and the burning of a witch every so often that points out this truth.
As a child of this period, it's hard to escape the view that this is much preferable to the alternative (certainly it's in my interests when we come to the racial version of it) but it's hard to argue it doesn't impose all sorts of costs.
Even if I accepted this as some worthy goal, I don't see how what's happening is some sort of stereotype of rationalist ChiCom planning with ten year plans to tap and reduce standard sex stereotyping (you'd think, if people were interchangeable widgets such totalitarianism would be unneeded).
Some of the tools used are products of the center but I don't see any retrenchment. Just various groups of people seizing Title IX or this or that handle of a ratchet and taking us further and further.
There's no, as far as I can see, cultural movement in the center that goes "maybe we don't need female Marines so leave standards as-is" or "maybe get male Secret Service agents, cause we're all fucked if the bullet skips past someone's 5'6 head into their principal's chest". Nope, some moral entrepreneur will find some new thing to be the first to diversify, and then we go from mere detox to imposing things like gender identity on schools.
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I don't know about that. Ever since we bet on interchangeability of men and women, we can't seem to reproduce ourselves and have to make up for the shortfall by importing people from more fertile parts of the world, hoping that interchangeability works out this time.
What's the upside it's supposed to have brought us?
If we saw it in the 50's and we're seeing it today, I have to ask if the term has any meaning.
Industrial processes work best with other industrial processes, so I guess it's a race to industrialize that biology as we have various other forms of organic production. I'm not saying I'm a fan, but it's weird for a community as virtualized, urban and seemingly techno-optimist as the Motte to come down so hard in favor of artisanal methods in this single area.
The interesting and under-discussed thing is that male roles got liquidated by modernity way before female roles did. Watch some living-history documentaries about preindustrial farm life, or read about crime in early cities and roads, and it becomes extremely obvious why it would be helpful to have someone around who's taller with a lot of upper-body strength and greater potential for physical aggression, and why a smaller-bodied person might willingly relinquish a certain amount of autonomy to retain that alliance. Once men deliberately technologize themselves out of the hard-labor-and-physical-defense game, to which their biology is naturally suited, it becomes much easier for women to look at their desk-jockey vidya-playing husbands and brothers and ask why they get to demand so much and give so little in return.
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Although the sex/gender distinction is still useful even in the real world where blank slatism is true. In a sane society (i.e. one which sets up a default where men are gently steered towards being Real Men TM and women are gently steered towards being Real Women TM) gender is a structure built on top of biological sex. Some of that structure (like war being for men and child-raising for women) is close to the root and necessary, and therefore conserved across cultures. But "blue is for boys and pink is for girls" is an accident of certain western cultures.
Yes. That would be the fallacious version.
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I don't think that's accurate. There were different social roles and expectations for men and women, but no one referred to them using words "man" and "woman", nor were the words "male" and "female" used in any sort of contrast to "man" and woman", nor was there any sort of confusion if taking on a different role would make you a different "gender" (an anthropologist asking one of the famed "third gender" tribesmen if they consider themselves something other than a man, and hearing "are you retarded?" in response, is a thing that actually happened in real life).
Ironically it turned out that it was far less fallacious than the genderist argument. For all the attempts at "gender neutral upbringing" girls still tend to zero-in on girlie princess stuff, and boys on trucks and whatnot. Despite "Sorry Jill, I can't offer you the same salary as Bob" being cancellable and outright illegal, women still earn less money than men, etc.
I mean, I'm aware of many of the checkmate-libtard! style memes on these topics, but a couple weirdos failing at their halfhearted attempts to raise ungendered children in a very gendered social world, or some women continuing to lose out in pay negotiations despite their bosses' professions of fair treatment, says virtually nothing one way or another about the optimum extent to which a well-run society should embrace, enforce or renounce differential treatment of individuals by sex. I don't really know what the "genderist argument" is, since that's not how anybody seems to label themselves in these conversation.
The "genderist argument" is that these differences are a result of socialization, and that the appeal to nature is a fallacy.
I agree, but that seems irrelevant to the discussion.
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You can't just drop something that funny without citing your source.
Here you go. Turns out I misremembered it, and they guy still hangs on to the sex/gender distinction, but also insists the way these obscure tribes understand it does not match how the activists are potraying it:
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The problem is that the source is a bit of a pain in the ass to cite. It was an interview with Paul L. Vasey, who originally documented the "third gender" phenomenon, and got frustrated with the way his research is brought up by trans activists. Somewhere in this or this podcast, he drops the anecdote. I can give them a relisten and ping you when I have the timestamp if you want, though I also recommend just listening to the whole thing, they're good interviews.
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(Hello! I'm new here and this is my first post, so apologies if I'm messing up any social norms here. Please feel free to call me out! :))
That seems like a pretty easy challenge. Here's my definitions:
External Gender: When people greet me, they say "ma'am" instead of "sir". There's a wealth of subtler behaviors, but the basic idea here is that people perceived as "female" get treated differently than people perceived as "male".
Internal Gender: I prefer being called "ma'am", and am happier when my external gender is "female". In a lot of magical stories, a character has their sex transformed by some magic. "Internal Gender" is when a character wants to transform back, which is fairly common. "Internal Gender" is the idea that if you body-swapped with your mom, you'd still want to be called "him" despite the uterus.
Sex: the biological reality. A messy mix of chromosomes, hormones, and anatomy.
This is the 'gender role' terminology: The social role played by a particular gender.
And this is the 'gender identity' or 'gender performance', depending on the exact thing being discussed: Either that internal feeling of what 'gender' you are or the behaviors that feel natural to you on account of your felt 'gender'.
But here is the hard part: What is 'gender' separate from all of those individual nouns? What does the modifier 'gender' alone mean in front of all of these?
The truth is that it's an empty signifier unless you treat it as as synonym for 'sex'. But that has a whole lot of implications that aren't like by the kind of activist theorists who invented 'gender' as something different: Someone with a 'gender identity' discordant with their physical sex has a body dysmorphia, for example, and not something more deeply psychologically central. If that's true, the drive to 'affirming' care runs up on the rocks of evidence based medicine, where it's not entirely clear that that paradigm is actually the best. And it also means there are only really two genders, because sex and gender are the same thing and there are, in humans, only one big gamete and one little gamete and the machinery to produce each (which may or may not actually work in any particular implementation). That means that the 'nonbinary' clique is a philosophically incoherent trend, rather than anything more meaningful (not like there is anything wrong with that -- there's a reason punk ranges from anarcho-communist radicals to skinhead Nazis: there's something at a the heart of punk that doesn't make sense or, more likely, there's really nothing there but loud, angry music).
But these results are disturbing, so the desperate pretense must be continue.
Now that I've learned a bit about the definitions here, this actually seems even easier:
The basic idea behind trans ideology is that sometimes you get a person, a trans woman, who is born as a guy. Despite this, they feel a strong desire to modify their body to have breasts and a vagina. When they modify their body in this way, they become much happier - it is one of the most successful medical interventions, on that axis.
So, a woman is someone who prefers to have a vagina rather than a penis, and vice-versa. But of course "prefers" is really hard to confirm, so let us instead say: a woman is someone with a vagina.
Tada! Nothing circular, and nothing referring to any sort of immutable biology.
I'm totally aware that plenty of trans activists want to go beyond this, of course, but it seems pointless to discuss anything past this point without first agreeing to this point. If you reject this, then obviously you reject anything more radical, and I'm more curious where the possible middle-ground is. I don't like the modern trans "grab as much privilege as we can" attitude at all; I just want to pee in peace, and that requires at least some willingness to compromise.
(I am less familiar with trans men, I will admit. I get the impression their goalposts are more "remove boobs and grow a beard", which still doesn't refer to anything immutable or circular)
Hi! I was skipping a lot of the conversation you started, because I didn't want to contribute to the "explain yourself now, trans person" dogpile, but my ears perked up at that one.
My understanding is that this view is pretty outdated. WPATH seems to outright reject it, and to only use it cynically as a foot-in-the-door thing in countries with lower trans acceptance. They hold that it's all about "authenticity" and self-expression, and that doctor's empashis needs to be on removing barriers, and on patient autonomy. They don't even think it's about transitioning from man to woman, or the other way around, and are happily endorsing "non-binary" surgeries.
Would you say they are out of line, or is it that you're more old-school and no longer representative of the community?
I think a lot of trans women genuinely fall into the older, classic model like me. It's really hard to say if it represents the actual community, because there's some loud voices that want to make the newest ideology the only one, but I do think there's a lot of people like me, and still are, even if we're no longer the majority within the trans community. I think there's a lot more of us than you'd guess, simply because we tend to be quiet: we already got what we want, as long as we don't draw attention to ourselves.
I have a bit of trouble taking someone seriously as a "trans woman" if they just want to self-identify, don't have dysphoria, and aren't even taking HRT, but... I'm asking people who don't believe I'm a woman to call me "she/her" anyway, so I'm at least fine with names and pronouns even there.
If we accept the idea that I want to have a cis-woman looking body despite not being born with one, it doesn't really surprise me that some people might want "non-binary" mixes. I don't really understand the category well myself, though. I think a lot of non-binary is much more about abolishing gender roles entirely - most cis women I meet who identify as "non-binary" just seem unhappy with society's concept of "female", or are viewing that concept through a fairly narrow lens. All that said, if you're actually going out and getting surgery, I'm going to take you seriously.
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I note that this is an empirical statement, not a normative one (like "adults have the right to modify their body however they please, and it's none of your damn business whether you think it's a good idea or not"). Hypothetically, if you were presented with persuasive evidence that the majority of trans women who fully medically transition later come to regret their decision, feel markedly less happy afterwards (according to, for example, a PHQ-9 or HAM-D survey), or feel that their quality of life has declined as a result of their transition - would that persuade you that trans ideology is a bad thing on net?
Well, keep in mind: I know thousands of trans women online. That's a lot of evidence that it is successful. So any study has to overcome my prior, and explain why there's a huge cluster of visibly-happy trans women, but I never meet any of these people who regret it. I'm the sort of trans woman who wanders onto The Motte and TERF forums and so forth, and I have yet to encounter any such cluster. (There's certainly a few, of course)
I'm also referring to actual studies when I say we feel happier, so you'd have to reconcile why the two studies disagreed.
But, yeah, if 10% of trans women regret it, I think we maybe need to tighten up the gates a little bit, or at least make that warning a LOT clearer within the community. If 50% regret it, I think I'd have to spend a few days seriously reconsidering my world view.
This is all assuming actual regret, too. Right now, "happiness" is a bit tricky to measure: Maybe someone gained 100 happiness points from transitioning, but lost 150 because now they're subject to a lot more bigotry. I think in that case, the right solution is to fix the cultural bigotry, not to block transition.
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If "trans woman" was defined as "a male person who has undergone a surgery to change their penis into a neovagina", I think that's a definition I could get on board with: it's straightforward, non-circular and trivial to verify. Perhaps we could be even a little bit more generous and define it as "a male person who has undergone a surgery to change their penis into a neovagina, or is actively seeking one (has applied to the relevant medical practitioners etc.)".
I'd just like to gently point out that such a definition excludes almost everyone who identifies as a trans woman: only 5-13% of trans women have undergone genital surgery. Even if we allow that for every trans woman who has undergone genital surgery, there's another trans woman who has applied for it but is stuck on a waiting list (or even two such women), your definition still excludes anywhere from 61% to 90% of males who consider themselves trans women.
This is not intended as a "gotcha", it's a completely sincere question (echoing @Amadan, I'm genuinely grateful to get the input of someone with "skin in the game", so to speak). You're a trans woman who has medically transitioned. Supposing you're having a conversation with a visibly male person who has told you that her name is Samantha and her preferred pronouns are she/her. During the course of the conversation, the topic of medical transition comes up, you start talking about your own experiences, and Samantha mentions that she hasn't undergone bottom surgery. She also mentions that she has no interest in undergoing it and is perfectly happy with the configuration of her genitals as they stand.
Once she's made this clear to you, do you continue referring to her as a woman? Or no?
I mean, personally, I'm not harmed at all by her. I personally have no objections to this. I'll call her "she/her" and Samantha, because it seems rude to do otherwise. My mental classification will be "female" because to me female just means "person I refer to as she/her".
Other women have expressed that, for instance, they would not be comfortable dating Samantha because of it. I think that's reasonable.
If Samantha goes on a rant about how people are transphobic for not dating her, just because she has a penis, I will think she's full of shit and making the rest of us look bad.
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Yes, and this is a body dysmorphia, like phantom limb syndrome.
It may well be that the best treatment for gender/sex dysphoria is some form of physical transition surgery. But, if you can acknowledge that that is what is going on here, the only thing we really might disagree on is where exactly that line is on various axes of treatment.
Of course, you're no longer talking about anything like 'gender' as separate from sex. Trans women are natal males who are born with an intense desire to be female and vice versa. This desire can cause such serious stress that it becomes clinical and they must be treated in some way, possibly (and, honestly, probably, once the evidence base catches up) including surgical transition.
Yes, and they're the people I have a problem with. At heart, they're communists or the useful idiots of communists and their whole ideology destroys everything it touches, intentionally.
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Hello, welcome to the Motte.
Putting cards on the table here, I was a little suspicious of you (not many people just independently "discover" us, and announcing yourself with a username guaranteed to set off a lot of folks here is a little suspicious), but I appreciate the discussion you have generated so far, and I will go with my presumption of good faith. Genuinely, I would like to see more posters like you.
So as you have probably figured out by now, the majority of people here are... not very friendly to trans identities. This ranges from "Thinks trans women are men but don't feel a need to start fights over it" to "Believes trans women are all AGP perverts who should be mocked and shunned and they really want you to know it."
Our rules require everyone to be treated civilly, so no is allowed to directly insult you just for being trans or advancing trans views, but nonetheless you probably will receive some vigorous challenges, so I hope you are prepared for that and have a thick skin. I am being sincere here - I would like you to be able to stick around despite what you will probably perceive as an adversarial environment. Because this is also one of the few places on the Internet where people are allowed to say "Trans women are men" without being banned.
Which, bringing this around to my point, is part of the reason even many more moderate folks like myself have become, if not radicalized, then rather more hostile to trans people than we once were. Putting cards on the table again, my own personal opinion is that gender dysphoria is real and I think people should be allowed to live and identify as they wish, but they shouldn't be able to force other people to accept their internal identification as biological reality. More concretely, I think people should address you as "Ma'am" out of politeness and people who go out of their way to "misgender" you are being hostile assholes. But most people don't really believe you're a woman and you shouldn't expect them to feel obligated to update their mental model on demand, nor should you try to sniff out signs of heresy (i.e., clues that they don't actually think of you as a woman, for which you would then try to socially punish them). I am not saying you do this - but many trans people do do this, and that is the cause of the much of the present hostility towards trans people.
In my opinion, until a decade or so ago, most people (at least on the liberal side) were much more accepting of trans identity because trans people sold themselves the way gay people did - "We just want to be left alone to live our lives in peace." Which is no doubt true of most trans people! But then we started seeing increasing pressure not just to accept, but to validate. Increasing demands to proactively affirm that we really, really see you as a woman, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a hateful bigot. Then came trans women who used to be mediocre middle aged male athletes suddenly joining a woman's sports league and crushing lifetime competitors. Trans women who were men until five minutes after their conviction for a violent sex felony, whereupon they discovered their female identity and a need to be housed in women's prisons. Trans women who really want to show off their erections in women's locker rooms and force low-wage immigrant women to wax their female balls. Trans women who transition after a lifetime of being a husband and a father and dress like minimal-effort clowns while representing the US government. Trans women who want you to be fired if you won't put pronouns in your email signature.
These are undoubtedly a tiny minority of trans people. But it doesn't take very many bad actors to cause a lot of disturbance and distress, and more importantly, the reaction from the trans community has been largely, not acknowledgment that there are bad actors and maybe it's appropriate to not assume "good faith" on the part of every single man who suddenly realizes he's a woman in his 50s. Not to allow us to apply some... gatekeeping and to acknowledge that biological sex is a thing and you can let trans women live as women and be polite to them without letting them compete against women in the Olympics. But instead, to double down on all these issues and say "No, a trans woman is a real biological woman and should be able to show off their female penis in front of teenage girls, should be able to beat up women in sports, should be able to share a cell with women in a prison."
And that... is why I personally have lost a lot of my sympathy for the trans movement. I still am polite to trans people I know personally. I would use your preferred name and pronouns in person. Even though I would not actually think of you as a woman. And I would treat you as a very dangerous person to interact with, socially and professionally, on the assumption that a slip on my part would result in you trying to bring down sanctions upon me.
I am interested in your thoughts on this. Do you think the trans community has "gone too far"? Or do you think this is an exaggeration and we just see the worst and most extreme outliers? Do you think people should be required to actually think of you as a woman (to the degree that you can police someone's thoughts)? I won't demand you defend trans women in women's sports or prisons, though I am kind of interested in that, but that's a very familiar discussion we've had before (albeit rarely with trans people actually participating).
I've hung around the Slate Star Codex space for a while, if it helps. I lurked in /r/TheMotte for a while, but that's been dead for a while.
I figured if I was going to poke the bear, I might as well be open about my identity; I've got skin in the game.
It is indeed a thick skin. I'll admit I'm mostly disappointed with the response; I was hoping for more light and less heat. Your response is a lot more interesting than most :)
I think a lot of people are more open-minded than you think. I think the vast majority of people I interact with either genuinely think I'm a cis-woman, or don't care. I've encountered people that DO care, and they tend to react much differently. Obviously there are many areas of the world where that would be different, but I've done a fair bit of business travel and I feel confident in saying most people just don't notice.
At the end of the day, if you're trying to treat me with respect, I think that's what really matters. When I first changed, it was clear some people struggled to update my pronouns even though they clearly respected me. I'd have been offended if anyone tried to sic HR on them.
Oh boy, that's a complex one...
First off, I don't think anyone is going to transition just to cheat at sports - you're making life long changes to your body, and also we have tons of known cheaters who chose much easier routes.
Second, the evidence I've personally seen (and I'm hardly an expert), suggests that when people do this, they're usually placing middle of the pack, which suggests that transition and hormones and all of that really does have a negative impact on performance.
Conditional on "this person has completed hormonal transition, and performs in the cis-female athletic range", I don't see a strong argument for excluding them from the league - they're going to get trounced in the male league, and aren't exactly setting records in the women's league, so... that seems like a fair competition?
Look at the other direction of transition: If someone is taking testosterone, and performs in the male athletic range, do you really want to keep them in the women's league just because they were born with a uterus?
But to bite the bullet, yeah, IF trans women DO have a clear advantage over cis women, then that defeats the whole point of gendered sports leagues. I just don't think this is nearly as decisively established
(and it does follow that any law made before we've actually established the science is probably premature, although I also can't think of a better way to collect data - run this experiment for a few years and if trans people keep ending up at the top, we made a mistake. If trans people generally end up in the middle, well, what's the problem?)
I think the USA has a really weird culture around nudity. There's plenty of cultures where seeing grandma and grandpa naked at the hot springs is just a normal part of life, and everyone grows up well adjusted. Seeing a penis in the locker room shouldn't be so traumatic. But then US culture acts like any nudity OUTSIDE of a locker room is horrific, which just doesn't make sense to me. If you think seeing genitalia is so bad, we should clearly have single-person gender-neutral locker rooms.
You've got a row of men showing off their penises at the urinal in the men's room. If seeing a penis is so horrible, why are you so comfortable making people endure that?
And, I mean, do you really feel more comfortable in a bathroom full of bearded trans guys? What if they've had surgery and have penises?
But the whole problem is because the US can't decide whether nudity is a normal part of life or some horrifying thing. If nudity is a normal part of life, then seeing a penis in the locker room is nothing. If nudity is some horrifying thing, then get rid of communal locker rooms and urinals and all these other disgusting locations where guys feel free to show off their dick.
I simply don't get the idea that women are UNIQUELY scandalized by penises, but guys should all be totally okay with it.
(and as a trans person, the answer is "I change in a bathroom stall because no matter which choice I make, people seeing me naked are going to get upset", which sucks)
Aww c'mon, that's heat, not light.
Amusingly, pronouns in email is actually something a lot of trans people hate too. Making it mandatory means everyone in the closet has to actively submit the wrong pronouns, and it's usually done in a way that just calls attention to the most androgynous / badly-passing trans people in the group.
So, going the other way: I think one could reasonably say a lot of anti-trans voices are also acting in bad faith. For instance, JK Rowling recently called out an Argentinian boxer as "trans" with... basically zero evidence? And on the "not actually trans" evidence, we've got the fact that she's from a country where transition is illegal, we've got childhood pictures of her, we've got the IOC tests that every other athlete does, and we've got said boxer suing JK Rowling (not exactly a clever move if it really is all a fraud!)
Do you have ANY examples of an openly trans person winning the gold metal in a Women's Olympic event?
I'm still not sure why penises are uniquely traumatizing to teenage girls, but have no harmful effect on teenage boys. I'm still not sure why only penises have this uniquely traumatizing effect, but men can handle vaginas just fine. Again, there's plenty of cultures where nudity is common, and everyone seems to do just fine seeing a penis there. But if you think seeing a penis is this horrifying traumatizing event, why do you keep inflicting it on little boys?
I think this really depends on where we are in the world. There's plenty of countries that make my existence illegal, so I think overall trans people are in a lot more danger than you are. If you meet me on my home turf, I've probably got some ability to make things awkward for you, but I really doubt I could get you fired or cancelled or anything.
"Rates of inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization in the previous 6 months were highest for female inmates (212 per 1,000), more than four times higher than male rates (43 per 1,000)." - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2438589/
If someone wants to be put in with the more dangerous group, I'm not really clear what the controversy is?
There's clearly a huge sexual violence problem to solve here. I'd think solving that would take priority, and then in a few decades we can discuss the 1% of the population that's trans?
Similar to bathrooms, either nudity is a normal and OK part of life and you need to stop being scared of penises, or else you need to stop forcing people to get naked together.
I'm pretty firmly anti-thought-police and anti-censorship.
That said, I'd again assert that most people that meet me don't give it that much thought, and really do just think of me as a woman.
Thanks, it was nice getting a juicy reply that was more than just "no, you're not a woman" :)
I don't think the concern is trauma. Exposing a male sex organ to a girl/woman is seen as defiling her due to women being traditionally considered sexually "pure". There's no need to worry about defiling boys as they are inherently defiled.
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Amadan touched on this, but I feel it's worth joining in: men very much do not show off their penises in the men's room. The norm is to give other men as much space as you can (leaving at least a urinal between you, especially in the case of urinals without privacy barriers), and to politely refrain from looking at other guys' penises even if one might catch a glimpse. In fact, someone who is showing off his penis (or deliberately looking at someone else's penis) is considered extremely rude and subject to social consequences for it. I'm not sure if you meant this claim literally or just as a rhetorical flourish, but either way reality is the exact opposite of what you describe.
We're talking about, like, 100 out of 300,000 trans women misbehaving. Do you really think there are not 100 men in the UK that have waved their penis around and tried to make people uncomfortable? Or are just socially oblivious and therefore always take the closest urinal instead of spacing out?
My personal experience with locker rooms is that if you take 100 guys, there'll be at least one that Really Clearly Does Not Mind Showing Off. Maybe they're not actively strutting around with an erection, but they're making zero effort to hide it, they're taking their sweet time changing, and they're more than happy to walk over for a conversation with it danging right there. Congratulations on you not personally being a victim of all that, but as a victim... I find it really weird that everyone here just wants to ignore that and reassure me that no, unlike my experience, everyone ELSE gets taken seriously an there's consequences when it happens to THEM.
But also, if the standard is purely "subjected to social consequences", then... what's the problem? It still feels insulting to me to say that cis women are utterly incompetent and can't even handle a simple disruption like this, but somehow it's absolutely zero problem for men to handle it. In what other areas are women too psychologically frail to handle things that don't affect men? If women can't even handle one person behaving inappropriately in the bathroom, why in the world are we trusting them to be police officers and politicians?
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With regards to sports, I don't think anyone disputes that estrogen has a negative effect on athleticism and testosterone a positive. The dispute is over the "performs in the cis-female athletic range" part. I would probably put trans women and men in the men's category, in that testosterone is probably not going to give enough advantage to a trans man to really matter.
As for seeing penises, I guess it's one of those things where you probably just have to say America is prudish and you are an exception. Short of Amazon tribes, even less prudish places like Japan that have penis festivals have segregated restrooms.
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Thank you for the response. Apologies if I don't cover every response (a lengthy quote-and-respond chain can get very lengthy), but let me address a few points where I think we either disagree or you misunderstood my objections.
I will take your word and your lived experience for it on this, but my own impression is that (a) most trans women think they pass much better than they do (because most people are polite and aren't going to go out of their way to tell you they know you're trans), and (b) most people are open minded, but you probably think "Accepts my identification and agrees with me when I talk about trans rights means they really think I'm a woman." You might be disappointed if you knew what everyone really thinks. I don't really know, any more than you do, how many people who say TWAW really, truly believe it - neither of us can read minds or hearts. But my own suspicion is that it's less than would admit it.
About trans women athletes: I haven't studied the issue enough to produce statistics, and trans women are sufficiently rare that there probably aren't conclusive statistics yet. We all know the high profile cases like Rachel McKinnon and Lia Thomas and Laurel Hubbard, et al - the cases of mediocre male athletes who suddenly blow away their competition after transitioning are pretty numerous at this point. The response from trans rights activists is always similar to yours: "Trans women don't win every competition they enter!" And what seems to me like a lot of handwaving to deny that having a male-sized, male-muscled body with testosterone (even if reduced post-transition) is a major advantage in pretty much every athletic competition. I mean, if 10 years from now we have solid evidence that trans women do not, on average, perform at a higher level than women of similar age and experience, that would be interesting, but I have to say from the small sample sizes we can see now, I am very skeptical. Certainly every time I see a trans woman standing next to women in a rugby or a boxing match, I cannot understand how anyone can claim there isn't an obvious problem there.
I think as a matter of legality, it would have all go the same way, one way or the other: either trans women compete with women and trans men compete with men, or everyone competes with their birth/biological sex.
I am not aware of any trans men who after taking testosterone have become competitive in a men's sport. Are you?
The fact that (a) we don't see a lot of trans men trying to join men's teams and it hasn't been an issue because (b) any trans men in a men's league would be crushed and everyone knows it, is evidence of my point, that biologically, you are still going to compete with the body you were (mostly) born with.
About locker rooms: look, I agree that in theory, if we had a more open culture around nudity, maybe this would be less of an issue, but my problem is not that I think teenage girls will be traumatized by seeing a penis. (Nowadays, they've probably seen one about five minutes after they first got a smartphone.) My problem is explicitly the bad actors who want to show their penis to women in a locker room, knowing that it will make women uncomfortable. They are, to put it bluntly, exhibitionists if not worse, and saying "Well, if we were all just more comfortable about nudity" is missing the point. Again, I know these trans women are a minority, but I have read enough stories to know they aren't singular incidents either; there is a very small but very aggressive minority of trans women who really seem to get their jollies by making women (and girls) feel uncomfortable in female spaces. Whether it's because they think this is some sort of sitting-at-the-lunch-counter stand for trans civil rights, or just garden variety harassment and exhibitionism, it is definitely doing nothing to convince me they are acting in good faith. And I can't say I am impressed by an argument like this:
Dude (I say with tongue somewhat in cheek), as a penis-haver (past and/or present), you know damn well that we don't "show off our penises" at the urinals. You have to kind of go out of your way to see another guy's junk in the bathroom, unless he's waving it around.
Which is also unfortunately the pattern I have heard from these penis-in-the-women's-locker-room stories. Men and women will both walk around naked in the locker room, but generally speaking, they don't like... display themselves, or go so far as to stand in front of another person giving them a belligerent full-frontal display. How often have you seen that, honestly? If someone walked up to you buck naked in the locker room and just stood there trying to engage you in conversation from an arm's length away while letting it all hang out and no effort to cover anything up, would you not consider that... strange? Especially if they are a stranger? Come on now.
I mean, leaving aside the whole sexual assault survivor thing (some women probably genuinely are freaked out by seeing a penis in what is supposed to be a woman's space), I can say I was at a convention recently that decided (because everyone there is super-woke) that all the bathrooms would be "agender." Most people, of course, still used the "men's" and "women's" rooms as appropriate for their equipment, but while I was standing at the urinal, one woman (who I happen to know is one of those super-woke people and probably calls herself non-binary or something) walked out of a stall and past me. And you know what? I felt uncomfortable. Not threatened or anything, just -- neither of the bathrooms were crowded, so she decided to use the men's room to make a point. And it annoyed me.
Well... I will cop to being a little snarky there, but honestly, Admiral Rachel Levine really does strike me as someone who is cosplaying a fetish. Maybe she really, truly does identify as a woman and has always felt female, but I am pretty skeptical, because her entire presentation is that of a man who knows she looks like a man and wants everyone to know it and dares you to say something about it.
As for Rowling and Imane Khalifa, I honestly don't know enough about Khalifa's status to pass judgment. To my knowledge, Rowling didn't say she was trans, she said she was a man. Which may or may not be true, either biologically or legally. I have defended Rowling in the past because I think a lot of the attacks on her are made in bad faith, but I think Khalifa's case is, at the very least, complicated and she probably spent the first part of her life believing she's a girl, which makes me less hasty to call her a man myself and I wish Rowling had reserved judgment as well. But I'm not a famous billionaire who's made this my personal cause (nor been subjected to attacks over it for years). I think someone who is (most likely) an intersex person with chromosomal abnormalities who grew up as a girl is a pretty edge case and a distraction from central trans issues.
I live in the US so that's where I am talking about, not someplace where you could be killed for being trans or gay. I can't say I find it reassuring that you basically say "Well, I probably couldn't actually threaten you" but it seems like you would if you could.
Okay, I skimmed this paper - can't say I read it in detail, but it sure doesn't make it easy to separate out sexual victimization by staff compared to sexual vicitimization by other inmates. Let's say that women do prey on other women in prison at a higher rate than men prey on other men. I can think of a number of explanations besides "Actually, women are the more dangerous group," but it definitely doesn't suggest that a trans woman being put in a woman's prison is in more danger from the other female inmates than she is to them. Especially if said trans woman used to be a violent rapist and has undergone no physical transition. Yeah, I saw that Orange is the New Black episode where Laverne Cox gets jumped by a bunch of other women. Let's say I was not persuaded of its verisimilitude.
Forgive me for only skimming this discussion, but is there some other comment that gave you this impression? I don't get it from what you quoted.
It's hard to talk about threat in the capabilities sense without any subtext of threat in the intentions sense, but I don't perceive any deliberate subtext.
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On trans athletes: honestly, I think we largely agree here. I think a few high profile cases don't provide as much evidence about the average result, but I'm certainly open to the idea that it's unfair.
I'm not sure what about this reply made you think I would want to get you fired/cancelled. Could you elaborate? I already said I was against siccing HR on people who used the wrong pronouns for me at work, so that seems like a pretty big disconnect
Presumably we should treat that person like a criminal? Sure, it's a hard problem, but so are the bad actors who want to show their penis to little boys. We still let gay people use the bathroom, though.
Oh, I found that super weird when I was growing up. Quite a few guys discovered I was not comfortable with that, and would go out of their way to make me uncomfortable. But no one seems to want to do anything about that. So... again, why is it okay to expect little boys to handle this, but grown women can't?
It really depends - those big trough-style urinals at stadiums don't leave much to the imagination. Certainly, I've seen penises while using the bathroom numerous times, while I have seen a stranger's vulva exactly zero times. And your whole concern was exactly the sort of guy who is "waving it around."
... okay? What's your point? People feel uncomfortable when I use the men's room, for exactly that reason. If my trans-masc friends show up in the women's room, it makes people SUPER uncomfortable. If it makes you uncomfortable, why do you want more of it?
I mean, presumably we have methods for handling violent rapists in prison? I'm sure there's at least one lesbian violent rapist out there.
The prison thing has a lot to unpack. If you can show some strong evidence that trans women are reasonably safe in male prison AND are a threat to cis women in female prison, I'll have to seriously reconsider my world view. So far I've not seen much evidence of either.
See, the goalposts for everyone else is "uterus". If we change the standard to "vaginoplasty" I definitely feel better. The idea of throwing someone into male prison, despite them having a vagina and breasts, just seems insane on the surface.
If you're willing to bite the bullet and say "anyone with a vagina is female"... I mean, I could still quibble and debate, but I'd honestly consider you more of an ally than an enemy in today's political climate.
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I don't really think this definition is accurate. The only definition of "sex" which really makes sense is "do your reproductive organs produce small or large gametes?" (substitute "or did they ever" for menopausal women, women who've had their tubes tied, or men who became sterile after undergoing chemotherapy; add in "before you removed them" for men who've been castrated, or women who've undergone oophorectomies; substitute "or will they" for prepubescent children; substitute "were it not for some kind of birth defect, would your reproductive organs produce small or large gametes" for the congenitally sterile). This satisfactorily answers the question "what is your sex?" in 99% of cases. Bringing in secondary sexual characteristics adds nothing to the conversation and does nothing to demonstrate that (as so many trans activists have claimed) sex is a "spectrum": a male with functioning testicles but who incidentally happens to have breasts becomes no less male as a result; a woman with narrow hips and small breasts is not "less female" than a woman with wide hips and large breasts. Yes there are intersex people, but no one thinks that the existence of people born with one leg (or, more rarely, three legs) invalidates the definition of "human" as a bipedal species. And even as far as "intersex" goes, it doesn't complicate our understanding of sexual dimorphism as much as trans activists would like us to believe: if there has been an intersex person with functioning testicles who has also been impregnated, I would love to read about it.
Why does it make sense to include menopausal women, people with birth defects, etc. in that category? "People who menstruate and can be impgregnated" seems like a perfectly natural category, but you're adding all sorts of exceptions in. If we're going to add a whole bunch of exceptions, why not also "Trans Women who have undergone SRS"? If we can create an artificial uterus in the future, does that make transition valid?
Menopausal women's bodies once produced large gametes, but no longer do. That is a historical fact about their bodies. Just because someone has one of their legs amputated doesn't change the historical fact that they were bipedal from birth. Just as we consider prepubescent girls females because in most cases their bodies eventually will be capable of producing large gametes, we consider menopausal women female because their bodies once did produce large gametes: the arrow of time points both forwards and backwards.
Women with birth defects rendering them infertile have all the relevant "equipment" associated with the production of large gametes, but something went wrong in the development process and they're essentially being included as honorary members in the set, as they possess every characteristic associated with the set except for one specific thing that went wrong. (Another way of looking at it is that "X, which is broken or defective" is generally considered a subset of "X". If someone owns a car, but the engine isn't running and it's sitting on blocks, they still own a car: the owner still belongs to category "people who own at least one car". Barren women may not produce large gametes, but they still belong to the set of "people with ovaries". Trans women neither produce large gametes nor possess even defective examples of the organs which produce large gametes.)
By contrast, essentially all trans women's bodies had all of the characteristics associated with the male sex since puberty, including the key rule-in criterion (the ability to produce small gametes). SRS does nothing to change this: from the perspective of "what sex are you?", all it does is remove the ability to produce small gametes without doing anything to aid the target body in producing large gametes. Trans women who undergo SRS have not really "transitioned" from the male sex to the female sex: from the strict definition of sex outlined above, all they've done is desex (or emasculate) themselves and gone to greater or lesser lengths to approximate some of the secondary sexual characteristics associated with female people. SRS doesn't involve implanting ovaries or a womb (even defective ovaries or wombs) into the recipient's body. A male body which cannot reproduce is not functionally equivalent to a fertile (or even infertile) female body.
A memorable and evocative analogy I once encountered is that motorcyclists wear helmets that cover their entire head and leather clothes in case they have a bad fall, while cyclists wear lighter clothes for aerodynamicity and smaller helmets. But it's the vehicle you're riding (literally, what's in between your legs) which determines whether you're a motorcyclist or a cyclist, not the ancillary clothing choices incidentally associated with it: a cyclist wearing leather clothes and a helmet that covers his entire head is not "on the motorcycle spectrum" or someone who has successfully "transitioned" from cyclist to motorcyclist. All that FtM medical transition does is add the leather and removes the bicycle without replacing the bicycle with a motorcycle.
Maybe, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Seems like a real armchair hypothetical given the current (decidedly primitive) state of the art in gender reassignment surgical procedures.
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Sure, but what does ‘female’ and ‘male’ mean?
Ultimately, it comes down to biological sex. The actual definition of a trans woman is ‘a biological male by sex who performs a social role or set of roles associated with women’. The question thereof comes down to ‘why should we care’. Like the social roles associated with women that aren’t on some level arbitrary are the ones a male-sexed person can’t perform anyways.
It's worth noting that there isn't broad agreement about what these differences in gender roles are. As far as I can tell, the entire war between trans activists and radical feminists happened because a specific sect of feminism denies that there is (or ought to be, at least) a difference between those gender roles. If women can be, say, fire
menfighters, there isn't a distinct "men" gender role to mismatch with your mechanical parts, and so from their perspective the entire idea is nonsensical.I've always found it odd that radical feminists hold some of the strongest objections to men who voluntarily emasculate and feminise themselves while it reads as a rad fem fantasy.
If the choice were between encouraging men to emasculate themselves at the cost of sharing the label of "woman" with them versus the essentialist position of telling men that they'll never be women so stop trying I would have assumed they'd choose the former.
I don't always find myself agreeing with the most radical egalitarian types, but I can at least accept their viewpoints. We've largely broadened the definition of "woman" to include anything a man can do (specific corner cases, maybe not). But they weren't really successful, as far as I can tell, at broadening the definition of "men". We haven't really increased the acceptance of men in caregiving roles, or even wearing traditionally women's attire -- the reverse pant suit, as it were.
I'm not planning to do it myself, but "I'm not a trans woman, I'm a man wearing a perfectly egalitarian dress. Don't assume my gender. " would at least be an interesting wrench to throw into the debate.
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In my experience, TERFs tend to be a lot more chill with trans women who've undergone bottom surgery than with those who haven't. They tend to find males with fully intact male genitalia but who still want to be considered "women" much more aggravating/threatening than males without, for understandable reasons.
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They're clusters that were originally based around sex, yes, but plenty of cultures use the categories without referring back to sex these days. It's like how "2024 AD" means "two thousand and twenty four years after Jesus died"; you're making a fairly simple error if you think our calendar system relies on the existence of an actual biological Jesus.
I mean, every word has multiple definitions, especially a controversial phrase like that. But also: that wasn't the question that was being asked.
This seems like a fundamentally flawed analogy. The choice of the year 1 as the starting point of the Gregorian calendar was arbitrary, meaningless and didn't refer to any actual historical event (even most historians no longer believe Jesus Christ was born in that specific year), but changing calendars is an enormous hassle, so we're stuck with this one even if it's based on something which is ultimately arbitrary and irrelevant. With you so far.
But the "clusters" that are based around the words "male" and "female" are not meaningless and arbitrary. In fact, the concepts associated with these words have more predictive power than almost anything in the biological (never mind social) sciences. For instance: 100% of human babies born via natural birth or C-section were gestated in the womb of a person whose body produced large gametes i.e. a female person. Conversely, 100% of the human people who impregnated another human person were people whose bodies produced small gametes i.e. male people.
Of course there's loads of ancillary, arbitrary and irrelevant nonsense associated with these two categories of human being (there's no reason that people whose bodies produce small gametes shouldn't wear pink clothes or dresses). But pointing out that there's loads of ancillary irrelevant nonsense associated with a given category of entity doesn't mean that the category itself is meaningless, or that the category doesn't "cleave reality at the joints" in a manner demonstrative of underlying physical laws. Boats still float on the water even if they are given a male name and no one gets around to smashing a bottle of champagne against the hull. "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
If you're measuring by gametes, then post-menopausal women are a third gender, and the same gender as a eunuch. Does that really seem like it cleaves reality at the joints?
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Those cultures are wrong. Not in the way that using AUC dating instead of AD dating would be on a sufficiently different page that answering '2777' to 'what year is it' would functionally be wrong, but wrong in the sense that it doesn't actually tell us anything. Pink skirts being associated with femininity doesn't have a particular reason behind it; skirts being associated with masculinity still exists in certain contexts, such as kilts or fustanella(this garment is even frilly). Pink is for girls and blue is for boys was the other way around in (barely)living memory, and in fact I can readily imagine a counterfactual world where girls wear blue because Virgin Mary and boys wear pink because that's what blood looks like on a white shirt. On the other hand, uteruses being feminine is obviously biological. Most historical cultures defined, and most cultures today define, femininity as uterus having, and the claim of transwomen is that in every way except having a uterus they are more like having one than not. This is functionally self-defeating for any claim to separate the biological fact of sex from the cluster 'women'.
Yeah. Just since the points of measure are arbitrary it's still an absolute distance that is being communicated whether you do so in Meters or Feet.
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If you remove the uterus, does someone stop being a woman? Are you really excluding anyone who, via birth defect, didn't develop a uterus? If we figure out how to grow artificial organs, does that mean trans people become acceptable?
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Welcome to themotte!
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. In math, there is no particular reason why the particular words are used. Math could be done with random words as long as the relationship between the words is the same relationship as in our real math. This kind of person is over-represented in this forum many times more than in real life because of this forum's genetic history. Go back 15 years and some of the people on this website were reading a systematizer systematizing things
The reason why they would say these definitions are circular is because these definitions revolve around the use of the literal word "ma'am." If we played the randomize-the-word-keep-the-relationship, it starts to look kind of empty to say something like
So what is the meaning of the word "ma'am?"
In any case, I'm not sure "circular definitions" are the true objection to following trans-activist policy and culture proposals. You have a reasonable desire, which is for people to treat you a certain way. I think "transphobia" really is the best word for the reason why people don't treat a trans person like they desire.
Likewise, widespread shortphobia among straight women is the reason why society doesn't treat short kings like people.
A circular definition is just not useful. It breaks down and is only tethered to reality by the lingering remembrance of a rooted definition. A tether that will only fray and disintegrate over time like a plant pulled from it's soil.
There are ways to define trans that aren't circular, they just would cleave off one or another group of the trans coalition or make some asks carry less weight. My current model of trans(I'm going to give the MTF case but assume a symmetrical FTM case) is that it is a feature of some male brains that they are able to be in a state where they genuinely believe that would be happiest if they had as close as possible the experience of being female. This belief can be true or untrue, suppressible or unsuppressible those are their own questions. This belief is genuine and following the principles of freedom of form these people should be allowed to pursue body modifications and ask those around them to treat them as if they were female in whatever ways are reasonable to accommodate. Polite people should humor them and there should be a general understanding that this is an acceptable way to live. However we should not blind ourselves to the reality that this is fundamentally a truth about male brains, that there exist no gendered souls and that a brain cannot be in the wrong body.
I think this is basically the truth of the matter combined with the most reasonable course of action to take in response to it. A circular definition doesn't let us solve anything, it says nothing about the state of the world and is evidence of poor reasoning.
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I've noticed people do not at all share my intuitions about these terms, so I'm curious to explore this a bit more:
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?
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?
For the present, English pronouns do "just mean" sex, but it doesn't have to always be that way. In the far-future, pronouns could easily be just a normal thing people choose, eventually divorced from its accidental history of indicating sex. I think most realistically, we would rid language of gendered pronouns altogether to reduce social friction. Why memorize two identifiers for everyone in your life? That someone wants to overhaul language but chooses to keep gendered pronouns around indicates to me they have an agenda.
I have no problem, personally, with language moving that direction. Personally I try to use any trans person's preferred pronouns (for fear of social censure). I have no problem, personally, with decoupling all connotations and emotions from "she" and "woman." Because most of my social circle is progressive, I already do that in my head.
In 2100, Rule 30 of the internet will apply to real-life and also be amended -- that all women are trans women unless she proves it. I nominate the rule text "women are trans women."
You say that like it's a weird, nefarious thing, but it seems like everyone who wants to change anything is obviously going to have an agenda?
I'm certainly not adverse to "abolish gender entirely" but it seems a lot easier to slot trans women into the existing system -vs- getting rid of the whole thing.
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Are you arguing that common definitions of gender (e.g. "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman") aren't circular? Or are you being sarcastic and I'm too drunk to pick up on it?
I was explaining arguments without endorsing them because my personal opinion isn't that important.
"a woman is anyone who identifies as 'woman'" isn't circular exactly, but it is empty and silly. To engage in malicious compliance, you should just agree that a woman is someone who identifies as 'woman' but then play stupid whenever anyone ever says anything interesting about a woman. If playing semantic games with "woman" is beneath you, then I'm not sure why you'd care if [silly progressive definition] is circular or not -- it would be silly to you either way.
There is a coherent definition hidden inside the woke agenda: A woman is anyone who wants to be treated like a ciswoman adult human female. This is obviously the correct description for the category that progressives call "woman." Naturally, they are allergic to saying the quiet part out loud.
Edit: (Unsurprisingly, the natural definition reveals that ciswomen is a more fundamental category than woman. Ciswoman is like "red" or "purple" -- you just vaguely gesture at examples from the senses -- you know obviously what I'm talking about)
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We can obviously agree, empirically, that there are two major clusters in how people get treated, male and female. "Ma'am" refers to one of those two clusters. The "ma'am" cluster includes both people with penises, and people with vaginas. This all seems like a basic objective observation of reality to me.
Given that, I don't get how this is any more circular than any other subjective category, like "nerd" or "tall" or "centrist"?
If you mean to argue that the way people treat trans women is functionally indistinguishable from the way they treat cis women - well, no. Indeed, even trans activists don't believe this - essentially every complaint made by trans activists (including Tickle, which started this debate) seems to ultimately boil down to "I wish people treated me as a [sir/ma'am], but they don't. Even when I can see that they're trying to treat me as a [sir/ma'am], I can tell they don't really see me that way and are just playing pretend in an effort to mollify me." And that's not even getting into the people who complain that "people keep treating me as a sir, even though I would prefer to be treated as neither sir nor ma'am and this should be obvious to outside observers even though everything about my appearance and comportment is entirely consistent with my being a sir" even though our society never created a script for how to interact with people who are neither sir nor ma'am because those two categories covered 100% of people until some teenagers spent too much time having their narcissism reinforced and encouraged on Tumblr, and now here we are.
I get called "ma'am" and don't see any particular difference in how I'm treated. Plenty of trans people "pass"; it's not exactly an obscure topic. It shouldn't be surprising that trans people who fail at passing complain more - the ones who succeed are already getting treated how they want, so there's no really much to complain about personally.
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The supposed circularity of woman is just whenever people use quotes to say something like identifies as "woman." You sidestep that by changing the word to "ma'am" but what if someone says, "err, but you're not a ma'am"? Then you need to define ma'am and then you might run into some circularity.
If you don't want to define ma'am then it turns out woman is just a cluster unified by an arbitrary desire to be called a certain word. Realistically, it's also an arbitrary desire to be treated a certain way in general.
With tall and nerd you don't need to make reference to "quoted" "labels" and self-ID, so you are unlikely to run into any circularity.
I will re-iterate that the supposed circularity is not really the objection to trans activist policy and culture proposals. A significant part of the population thinks the trans desire is unreasonable. The circularity of the new woman definition is a strategy to give trans people what they desire (certain social privileges and connotations).
That would seem like a weird thing to say, since "ma'am" is how most people refer to me, and it'll confuse other people if you refer to me as "sir".
I mean, isn't that how names work? What's wrong with wanting to be called a certain word? I'm not forcing anyone to use it
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Yes we can.
No it does not. The ma'am cluster- otherwise known as women- includes people who have vaginas, xx chromosomes, uteruses, etc. Larping males don't belong there even if it makes them sad, any more than the various schizos who run for president on the platform that they have a chip in their brain belong in the oval office.
Having male genitals or xy chromosomes is disqualifying from being a woman. There are some people who don't fit into either category, for no fault of their own, and we call them intersex.
You can say that this way of drawing the line is arbitrary, but you would simply be wrong- my way, and the old way, is better because it gets at the information people actually care about. I don't find you wearing skirts to be some fundamental aspect of your identity because you can put on a pair of pants with, presumably, the same level of effort that I can. But you can't change your biological sex. It takes major surgery to change your anatomy- and artificial vaginas are not functional in the same way as natural ones in a variety of ways. It is impossible to change your genetic makeup. Transwomen having female-typical hormones requires constant intervention.
It is possible to be wrong about your own identity, even if you disguise yourself.
You're really claiming that not a single trans woman has ever been referred to as "ma'am"? 😂 That's a pretty amazing claim, so I'm assuming you have some pretty amazing evidence for it?
But, you know, people have called me personally "ma'am", totally unprompted! They do it all the time, in fact. If I try to explain that I'm a guy, they get confused. So... I mean, I know for a fact you're wrong. I'm pretty sure you can find other trans people with similar experiences.
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This is self-referential. "The meaning of female gender is treating a person like a female, and a person who is of female gender is one who wants to be treated like a female."
So are you saying all subjective categories are self-referential? "Republicans are people who vote for other Republicans" and such?
To me, I'm looking out at the world and seeing "Objectively, society classifies people into two clusters, which it calls male and female."
For historical reasons, these clusters tend to correlate with biological sex, but are clearly independent of it - even cis people get misgendered. I think we can both agree that gender does exist as something independent of sex? In the classic case, gender seems to be something like "best guess as to your genitalia", but people can still guess wrong. In trans-positive spaces it's more like "my best guess which pronouns would make you comfortable", which removes the legacy connection to genitalia entirely
This all sounds perfectly sensible - until you apply it to literally any other trait based on a biological substrate, at which point the reasoning collapses and the motivated reasoning is exposed.
One of the things people most frequently say about my physical appearance is that I look much younger than I am: people from all walks of life consistently place me at about four-five years younger than I actually am (and I've gone to no especial lengths to bring about this state of affairs other than regular exercise and moisturising my face when I remember to). Does it therefore follow that I have an "age identity" which is wholly distinct from my physical age? In the classic case, "age identity" seems to be something like "my best guess as to how much time has passed since you were born", but perhaps in trans-age-positive spaces "age identity" is more like "my best guess as to which age you would feel most comfortable if people thought you were that age". Which implies that Madonna's "biological age" is 66, but her "age identity" is 21. Perhaps it would be trans-age-phobic of me to remind her of her biological age (like sending her out an automated email urging her to get checked for breast cancer, as her age puts her at high risk for that condition), rather than "affirming" her age identity at every turn.
You don't have to be Rachel Dolezal to be mistaken for someone of a different ethnic group. I've had people start talking to me in Finnish unprompted, even though I'm not Finnish, have no Finnish ancestry and have never even set foot in Finland. I have Mexican friends who get driven up the wall by people thinking they're Brazilian. Does it therefore follow that everyone has an "ethnic identity" wholly distinct from their actual ethnic background?
Sometimes you think someone's skinny, then you weigh them and it turns out they're heavier than they look. Does it therefore imply that...
Rather than having to invent this whole elaborate set of epicycles around gender as a trait wholly distinct from sex, I would propose what I feel is a more elegant solution. "Humans are constantly observing and categorising other humans. Over time, they build up expectations of what a typical member of a given exclusive category looks like (or acts like, or sounds like etc.). Because everyone's training data is different, no one's training data is perfect, and there is huge variability in what the members of a sufficiently large category will look, act or sound like - inevitably some amount of humans will miscategorise Person X as a member of category A when they are in fact a member of category B. It does not therefore follow that Person X really is a member of category A in some kind of mysterious ineffable spiritual sense which transcends mere biology. The above is true of any category with a sufficiently large number of members - for any given sex, ethnic group, sexuality, age, height, mass, disability status, annual income, profession, dietary restrictions, level of educational attainment, criminal record etc. there will always be some amount of people who get categorised into the wrong category by one or more people. This is a normal human error, and the appropriate response is a simple 'oh sorry, my bad': we are not required to invent elaborate ancillary concepts and entire academic disciplines to explain and elaborate upon this discrepancy between individual expectation and observable reality."
People routinely get surgeries to try and look younger. There's a rather huge industry around catering to people's "age identity" and trying to "pass" as a younger age than they really are. It is in fact considered rude to go around pointing out that people are older than they look.
No one is going around calling women in heels "deceptive" even if it does make them seem taller.
Given all that, why should I feel bad about taking advantage of your classification errors to get myself called "ma'am"?
I really don't get how this analogy is anti-trans. Presumably if someone has transitioned and grown breasts, we should acknowledge that reality and send them emails suggesting they get checked for breast cancer now that they're at risk? And equally, I don't think a trans guy who has had a double mastectomy is at huge risk, here.
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That is a volitional category, not a subjective category. With volitional categories you can give the appearance of circularity with statements like "Christians are those who believe in Christianity" or "Military families are families where a father/mother has enlisted in the military." This superficial circularity is resolved by defining the second term. "Christians are those who believe Jesus of Nazarath (0-33 AD) was the son of God and his teachings result in eternal life for those who follow them." "Military families are families where a father/mother receives a salary from the government to train in the use of weapons and fight in the event of war."
This cannot be done with "A female is someone who wants to be treated as a female". Even if female is understood to be volitional, the second term goes undefined.
With the exception of grammar? No. If gender is not sex, it is incumbent on gender theorists to provide a non-circular definition.
"External gender" is your term for "gender roles", which can be defined as the manners and expectations society has for the male/female biological sex. If you want to say "gender roles should be abolished", you have a coherent position. But trans advocates do not (usually) want this; they want the gender roles to remain even as they deny female/male (the real, definable concepts) as meaningful categories.
Then why do people keep expecting me to act like a woman? I didn't grow a uterus, but everyone is calling me "ma'am" and they get upset if I go topless and show off my breasts.
It seems pretty clear to me that "gender roles" aren't based on my biological sex at all, but my gender presentation.
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Or, in D&D terms, you'd want to find a way to get that cursed Girdle of Masculinity/Feminity removed, since unlike the Helm of Opposite Alignment, it doesnt update your brain to make you happy with the situation.
Exactly :)
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Appealing to random niche cultural sex-worker and/or designated eunuch roles to establish historical precedent seems to be the most common.
Honestly surprising nobody's tried to recast the Catholic Priesthood as a third gender.
The Catholic priesthood refers to itself as an uber-masculine vocation and explicitly excludes women. Priests in the roman rite aren't allowed to be married but the Catholic church does have Byzantine and Syrian rites with very similar theologies of the priesthood and married priests.
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Monks and nuns would make an even greater example. Even today, it’s not at all uncommon to come across brothers who adopted female saints’ names and sisters who adopted male saints’ names. There’s definitely a case to be made that “Father Mary Patrick” and “Sister Boniface” are at least a little gender-bendery.
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Gender was just a synonym for sex because people wanted to avoid saying sex because of the fucking connotation. We were then gaslit as if they were different.
When I was a kid, I still had French and Latin textbooks that said that "gender" was a technical term in linguistics and genders were groups of things that used the same pronouns, noun declensions, verb conjugations etc. In English, grammatical gender is only relevant to pronouns. But in languages where grammatical gender is a bigger deal, it is obviously a separate concept from biological sex or the social roles around it that managed to acquire the name "gender" in English in the 2nd-wave feminist era. (At least in correct French as promoted by the Academie Francaise, grammatical gender is a property of the noun and does not change based on the biological sex of the referent, hence "Madame le Ministre" as the honorific for a female government minister).
Googling suggests that the technical grammatical sense was the only meaning of "gender" in English in the first half of the 20th century. Resources on both sides of the political fence seem to agree that the modern use begins with notorious genital mutilator and paedophile enabler John Money in the 1950's, so depending on how you define Money's views (I don't recommend going there) there is a pretty strong case that the trans movement was using the term before the feminists were.
I wonder if part of the acceptance of the modern use of "gender" is that educated English-speakers are less likely to be familiar with the grammatical meaning because formal grammar (and particularly formal French or Latin grammar) is no longer taught in schools.
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It's really obvious when you're not a native English speaker. In most languages the word for (biological) “sex” doesn't mean fucking, the same word for sex is used for grammatical gender, and there isn't a word for “gender” (these languages are now importing “gender” as a loanword to refer to the foreign concept of gender identity as distinct from biological sex, which has absolutely no basis in the native language).
Similar with the idea that male and female refer to sex while man and woman are something else (which genderists are walking back now that that battle has been won). In most Germanic languages the words male and female are literally man-like and woman-like with no implicit distinction between sex and gender identity.
It's pretty apparent even in English: the retcon split the adjectives male and female as "sex" from the nouns man and woman as "gender". There isn't really a way to describe a "gendered" person with a specific job -- "woman doctor" doesn't roll off the tongue.
I suppose this is excluding grammatically gendered nouns like actress or aviatrix that are becoming increasingly archaic at this point, although that may be the result of the proto-wokeness of last century.
Funnily enough, "beangarda" is one of the few Irish words still in common usage even among Irish people who profess utter ignorance of the Irish language.
The Irish police force is called "Garda Síochána" (guardians of the peace) and an individual police officer is a "garda". "Bean" (pronounced "ban") means "woman" - hence "beangarda".
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In my dialect of English 'actress', 'hostess', 'waitress', etc are in common use, with a masculine generic form, and 'woman doctor' merely sounds old, not awkward. 'Woman cop' is in common use. 'She preacher' would mark you as a bit of a reactionary, but 'she-demon' is a less obscene term for bitch.
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I wonder how true this is. In Russian the word for grammatical gender is род while the word for biological sex is пол (I don't know if people these days are using род in other ways). Male/female (самец/самка) are not used for people except in a derogatory sense, instead мужской/женский (lit. manly/womanly) is used for that. I suspect there may be a variety of approaches in different languages.
I wouldn't say мужской/женский translates as "manly/womanly". More like those two words are "male/female (adjectives)" and calling someone самец/самка would be "a male/a female (noun)".
You're right about the parts of speech, but the point I was making is that you wouldn't call someone a самец/самка unless you're looking to insult them.
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I've only seen someone use род for gender in the translation of C.S. Lewis' Perelandra (where the divine beings are sexless but gendered), but all modern discourse uses a calque, гендер.
That's interesting because I was going to bring up Lewis as a counterargument to the "gender/sex distinction recently invented to undermine gender norms" POV. Lewis discussed it extensively in both fiction and non-fiction and certainly didn't intend it to undermine gender norms. In multiple places he argued that God is infinitely masculine although not male, and that biological sex was in fact only the expression at the biological level of a more ultimate reality.
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Looking forward to Russia breaking open the third axis in gender identity space.
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I see what you did there.
And yeah, the whole gender studies "gender has always been different from sex, we have always been at war with Eurasia," thing is just retroactive claiming. I don't doubt that wacky gender idealism has been cooking in the academic pot for a long time, but the smarmy way in which progressives like to start talking about how "actually gender is different from sex and This Is Known" like we're describing electron orbitals and not human constructs is quite annoying. There's definitely a motte and Bailey going on where gender is a social construct when they need it to be and a totally reified pure science of raw material fact when that's more useful. And certainly different people believe different things on that note, each gets sold the propaganda that will convince them.
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According to Spiked:
I think it's reasonable to assume that a male who's unwilling even to change his name to signal his commitment to his newly discovered gender identity is unwilling to remove his testicles or undergo hormone therapy.
The author of that Spiked article has a hilariously large blind spot. She claims it is outrageous that men can change their legal gender to get around 'gender-based violence' laws and to get higher salaries and pensions. She apparently has no problem with laws that give women arbitrarily higher pensions and salaries, and which protect only female victims of domestic violence and only if the aggressor is male.
A lesbian abused by her partner (bearing in mind that lesbian relationships are the most abusive type of the three male-female pairings) has no such protection, neither does a man victimised by a male or female partner.
Well, of course not. Why would she? Feminists believe that women are oppressed by living in a patriarchal society, and publicly mandated higher pensions and salaries are a band-aid intended to ameliorate the differential treatment women receive as a result of their sex. When male people claim to be women to take advantage of these policies, they're taking something which by rights they aren't entitled to, no different from stolen valour, or malingering to receive disability compensation you don't deserve. You might disagree with one or more points of her worldview (is it accurate to characterise the way women in the West are treated as "oppressive"? are Western women worse off than Western men, ceterus paribus? are higher pensions and salaries a fair or effective way of remedying this treatment? is the way Western society treats trans people qualitatively and/or quantitatively similar enough to the way it treats female people that trans people deserve the same compensation? etc.), but it's far from inconsistent.
I've heard this asserted so many times, but I've seen precious little hard evidence to back it up, and the more I see an assertion being made without any supporting link (e.g. "there are parts of the US where it's literally not a crime to murder trans people!") the more uneasy I get. I'm not saying this claim is false or made in bad faith, I would just really like to see some actual evidence in support of it rather than taking it for granted.
This article gives victimisation numbers of
66%61% for bisexual women, 44% for lesbians and 35% for straight women. It does cite its sources but when I crtl+F for 66 I can't find anything, frustratingly. I think its citing this study. Pages 1&2 have the headline figures which match up.Thanks for the link, this is really helpful. Unfortunately, the second link suffers from a limitation I suspected the last time this topic came up: not specifying the sex of the perpetrator.
This is obvious in the case of the proportion of bisexual women who've been victimised (i.e. that finding is perfectly consistent with 100% of the bisexual women who reported victimisation having been victimised by a current or former male romantic partner). But less obviously in the case of lesbians reporting victimisation: just because you currently identify as a lesbian doesn't mean you always did, or that you were never in a romantic or a sexual relationship with a person of the opposite sex. There's no contradiction between currently identifying as a lesbian and previously having been in a relationship with a man who beat you up or stalked you. There's even a hypothetical causal mechanism worth investigating baked into the finding as it stands: if a significant proportion of lesbians are "political lesbians" who decided to swear off men after being abused by an ex-boyfriend or ex-husband (and straight women are disproportionately likely not to have been abused by an intimate male partner), then you would logically expect the proportion of lesbians who've been abused by a male partner to be higher than among straight women. Given the wording of the question as it stands, it's entirely possible that many of the bisexual or lesbian women surveyed have never been in a romantic or sexual relationship with a woman.
Going even further than the above, I've met more than one woman who called herself a lesbian despite currently being in a romantic/sexual relationship with a cis male boyfriend. There are probably plenty of women in relationships with trans women who still consider themselves "lesbians" (while being penetrated by their "girlfriend's" feminine penises, but that's neither here nor there). The wording in the study is sufficiently ambiguous that I can't even be confident that the set of "women" surveyed doesn't include trans women: maybe some of the lesbians and bisexual women reporting abuse in that study were trans women who'd been abused by a current or former romantic partner who was also a trans woman (in other words, male-on-male domestic abuse).
None of this is to argue that female-female romantic relationships aren't more likely to be abusive than male-female romantic relationships: the data you've presented are entirely consistent with that hypothesis (which I'll call Hypothesis A). My point is that the data are equally consistent with the alternative hypothesis (Hypothesis B) outlined above, in which many of the lesbians and bisexual women who report intimate partner violence were actually abused by current or former male partners. To properly disambiguate which of the two hypotheses has better explanatory power, you would need to ask followup questions like:
Minimally ambiguous language like the above would give us a more accurate impression of the relative sizes of the four populations (females abused by female romantic partners, females abused by male romantic partners, males abused by female romantic partners, males abused by male romantic partners) and give us better insight into whether Hypothesis A describes reality more accurately than Hypothesis B.
A caveat to the above: if I'm reading table 5 on page 20 correctly, zero lesbians reported being forcibly penetrated by a current or former romantic partner, which is far more consistent with Hypothesis A than with Hypothesis B.
I would say that the data are potentially consistent with your hypothesis, but I certainly wouldn't say they are equally consistent. If you're determined to find an explanation for lesbians reporting the highest rates of domestic violence victimisation, without accepting that lesbians might be perpetrating the largest amount of domestic violence, then your hypothesis can seem plausible. To me, it looks like an isolated demand for rigour.
I don't see why it's an isolated demand for rigour. If we lived in a world in which:
then the statement "X% of self-identified lesbians report having been abused by at least one romantic partner" would be synonymous with the statement "X% of female people who exclusively date other female people report having been abused by at least one romantic partner, who was female". But there are lots of ways in which people using language in sloppy or careless ways complicates this simple definition:
In fact, it's not "isolated" at all: I think essentially any survey of this type suffers from the lack of specificity described above. If you carried out a survey on what proportion of people with or without mental illnesses had been victimised, the self-diagnosis trend would make the data trivial to contaminate: you've no way of distinguishing between people formally diagnosed with depression by a qualified healthcare provider vs. people who diagnosed themselves (because they feel sad sometimes). Without knowing the relative rates of the truly mentally ill vs. malingerers, your data tell you essentially nothing.
Either design a survey with better questions, or collect hard data. Healthcare providers can make inaccurate diagnoses, but as a rule, statistics on how many people have been diagnosed with depression cannot be contaminated the specific way surveys can. Likewise criminological data: if I was shown evidence that the proportion of female people who've been convicted for battering a female romantic partner was twice as high as the proportion of male people who've been convicted of battering a female romantic partner, I'd be satisfied. (If such evidence was presented, someone would probably make the counter-argument that police and directors of public prosecutions look the other way when a man batters his wife, but come down like a tonne of bricks when a lesbian playfully slaps her girlfriend, because Muh Patriarchy™. I would not be the one to make that counter-argument.)
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Possibly because the number the article claims is 61, not 66? Might also be some rounding going on, or combined numbers, which'd foil ctrl-f.
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Ex-Dudes Rock. Southern Europe, particularly Spain and Italy, has an unusual combination of bureaucracy gone mad and extremely ineffective architects of bureaucracy. I hope the entire Spanish Army catches on to this grift.
I absolutely expect half of the men from my region to instantly convert to the female gender if gender switching is introduced and being a female let you pay less taxes or whatever.
Lot of gypsies in Slovakia split up after child benefit was capped at three kids...
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Somewhat related: I know a few couples for whom legal divorce and living together filing separate taxes would be a decent federal income tax break (this can be the case for dual-moderate-income families). But I know nobody who has actually done this, even if it has come up in conversation, and even if only on paper and remaining "married" in a common-law and spiritual sense.
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Isn't this just the truscum/tucute divide?
FWIW, it does seem like the truscum side is at least coherent and it's possible to make meaningful policy based around their demands. Gender dysphoria (regardless of its etiology) exists, and adding a bureaucratic process to classify people as truly trans or not seems like a bare-minimum requirement if you want to have any social institutions that take into account sex/gender.
As someone who has become deeply radicalized (and the truscum types lost anyway so who cares?) I'm not sure that their position is attractive either.
Gender dysphoria existing doesn't necessarily justify turning everyone into, essentially, a care provider to people with that condition by affirming their identity. Or being forced to deal with the inevitable externalities that come with allowing such changes to their perceived sex. They simply aren't women, even if they have a condition that makes them want to be and acknowledging it is dangerous.
Arguably the attractiveness of the "truscum" position is partly because it coincided of both low visibility of transpeople and also just a lower level of ability in legally enforcing their claims. One of these is intrinsic, the other contingent.
And, of course, there's the argument that the sort of society that wants to Be Kind^(tm) in this way simply will not/cannot maintain that sort of sharp distinction.
We only have a couple of examples but...
Two years ago I wrote an article (https://open.substack.com/pub/firsttoilthenthegrave/p/pay-no-attention-to-that-opinion-banner-open-in-app; scroll down to section VI, everything prior is about motte-and-bailey fallacies) which included an argument that society might consider housing trans women convicts in women's prisons conditional on their undergoing an assessment by a qualified mental health professional to determine whether or not they legitimately suffer from gender dysphoria. As much as I might complain about the absurdities of gender ideology, I am sympathetic to trans males who legitimately suffer from gender dysphoria, and you don't have to be a genius to see that a small fragile male like that is going to absolutely get his shit ruined if he serves his sentence in a man's prison surrounded by violent, sexually frustrated men. Of course there will be false negatives and false positives, but I feel like a certain amount of medical gatekeeping would go a long way towards separating violent opportunists like Karen White and Barbie Kardashian from the harmless men in genuine psychic distress who wouldn't hurt a fly. I feel like this is a compromise most well-meaning trans activists could get onboard with (particularly as it's dramatically less restrictive than the other popular gatekeeping proposal: making access to women's spaces conditional on having undergone bottom surgery).
I agree, you're right that policy is based on tradeoffs not ranking holy victims who get all that they want. My argument would be that sex segregated prisons (like sex segregated sports) are that compromise and the new versions don't actually cause significant improvements for the problems they cause.
I don't see how we've even put aside the "absurdities of gender ideology" because at least three of the questions above seem to be responding to a view that depends, in some sense, on gender ideology. I do not see why transwomen should be treated as fundamentally different from other men with issues and women specifically should pay the price of fixing said issues unless gender ideology has some substance and truth to it and they are, in some sense, women. It feels like the ratchet gets turned by people who believe the absurdity and attempts to helpfix their problematic policy still grandfather in their assumptions despite us recognizing the absurdity.
I also just don't think it's politically viable. The very argument - vulnerable men can get raped and women should give up some of the public good of a prison that excludes males - that drives the argument will lead to people suggesting that maybe less men should be raped and standards will drop.
All excellent points which I hadn't fully considered at the time of writing.
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The entire question of what to do with trans people in prison feels mostly like minority religious groups trying to help imprisoned co-religionists practice in prison. Kosher food, that kind of thing.
The entire small, vulnerable thing seems strange as a reason to be placed in women's prison. If a segregated unit for wusses is necessary, it can be created. But it isn't the women's prison.
Ironically, kosher food in prison is mostly served to non-Jewish inmates.
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Of course you'd then run into the question "if you can create a unit for wusses, thus tacitly admitting there is unsanctioned violence in prison, then a) why is it there? b) why are you isolating only some prisoners?".
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Having a bureaucratic process for transitioning is still better than the alternative. You've got to prove, to an outside observer, that you're "real." That gets rid of transparently opportunistic schemes, as well as empowering people to reject pure attention seekers as jokes.
It doesn't solve any of the root conflicts around "trans policy," but it makes them less salient and something you'd be less likely to have to deal with in your daily life.
The other thing that does this is let people transition socially if they want but simply insist that the only protected characteristic is sex.
The problem is that this danegeld has been paid once, and the outcome was predictable but not encouraging.
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Related, but subtly different. The truscum/tucute debate is about who is allowed to call themselves "really" trans: truscums think that the category should be subject to medical gatekeeping, tucutes that it shouldn't.
I'm not debating whether or not these Spanish men are "really" trans, merely pointing out that it's reasonable to assume that they haven't medically transitioned, given that they've made only the most token effort at social transition. One would logically expect the set of trans women who have medically transitioned to be a subset of those who have made a full-fledged social transition (new name, pronouns, wardrobe, hair etc.).
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Yes, and the tucute side has won through sheer exercise of social power. Now, we must suffer the consequences of the incoherence of their position.
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I wrote a little more about that here. tl;dr: I think those are temporary aberrations that will not survive in the long run.
In the long run those men will have to justify themselves, but note that it will not require removing testicles. The idea that women cannot have penises and testicles and testosterone levels over 10 times the 99th percentile of cis-women is hateful bigotry spread by far-right domestic terrorists, after all. Instead, these proud transwomen must defend their gender identity in woke terms, with an oppression narrative, and of course plenty of political virtual signaling. A pre-op transsexual with a beard that would make Santa Claus envious, but who supports Kamala Harris, has more claim to the female sex than a post-op right wing chud like Blaire White.
Or, when it comes down to it, Cathy Young or Christina Hoff Sommers (both women-born-women), c.f. Peter Thiel is not gay. You want the good identities, you gotta get with the program, otherwise you might as well be a cis-white-male.
Luckily, our Constitution bans titles of nobility. In Constitutionalist America, no one is allowed to be black or gay, only the subaltern white or straight.
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It's easy enough to just eat the L and start having uterus-only restrooms, which is open to anyone who has ever had a uterus. Intersex women who have never had a uterus due to developmental issues can use the non-uterus restroom. Same with uterus-only sports leagues, and uterus-only settings on dating apps.
Strategies like this won't work because the goal of trans women is to be accepted in all the same spaces that real women are, and if you give up the older definitions of "real women" and retreat to new ones, the trans movement will attack the new ones too. This is not a conflict that can be solved with clever wordplay.
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That doesn't work, because the right to discriminate based on sex to protect women is grandfathered into law, while discrimination based on anything else is not, so if you declare your restroom uterus-only, then you will be sued for illegal discrimination based on medical status.
And if you didn't get sued, there would be no way to adjudicate cases, because you can hardly inspect each person personally, and the government isn't going to put uterus-possession on government issued ids as they used to do with biological sex.
And even if you somehow managed to overcome those challenges, everyone who has any power in society would agree that only bigoted nazi scum worse than a trillion Hitlers could even conceive of such a vile concept as a uterus-only restroom, which clearly have no purpose but to oppress poor innocent transwomen who just want to pee, so that absolutely no government or corporate institution would create them, nor would any private person who likes having a job, friends, family, or just being able to walk the street without angry antifa gang members throwing tomato sauce over their head.
The upshot is that approximately 0% of restrooms in the Western world will be uterus-only, so they might as well not exist for all practical purposes. If there is any hope for preserving female-only spaces (in public) then it must be by re-asserting that the legal protections for women are for members of the female sex, and not anyone who identifies as a woman. There really is no other way out.
There should be no hope for preserving female-only spaces or legal protections. The west has adopted "equality of the sexes" as foundational and women should have to bear the cost of that as much as men do. They shouldn't get to simultaneously claim equality and special treatment as it suits them.
EDIT: Grammar.
There is a lot to be said for that. After all, feminists (both liberal and radical) have relentlessly attacked male-only spaces to the point where they have all but disappeared, so abolishing female-only spaces too seems only fair. I do have some other views though.
One is that if you abolish female-only spaces entirely, then they should be accessible by all males, not just the ones that happen to identify as women. Instead of allowing transwomen into women's bathrooms, make bathrooms unisex. Instead of allowing transwomen to compete against women in the olympics, abolish the women's division. Instead of allowing transwomen into women-only train compartments, abolish women-only train compartments. And so on. Currently we are not seeing any such principled attack on women's spaces. Instead, it's all about letting males in provided that they identify as women, which is not the same as abolishing female-only spaces, it's just redefining what “female” means.
The other view is that maybe feminists are just wrong. Maybe it's good for society to have both male-only and female-only spaces. I think a lot of boys would benefit from male-only spaces and not in ways that are detrimental to women. And obviously women benefit from female-only spaces too: when it comes to sexual harassment etc. the most common configuration involves a male perpetrator and a female victim. Rather than accept the naive liberal feminist frame that the sexes are indistinguishable, we could embrace the idea that the sexes are equal but different, and support sex-segregated spaces for both.
Radical feminists are particularly hypocritical on this topic, in that they defend female spaces, but attack male spaces. I don't see why I should accept their frame entirely, even though I agree with their view on sex as being defined biologically.
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Until they figure out how to clone organs, and transgender individuals start getting new reproductive systems installed....
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Click the other link (about hacking the gender violence laws), it's working so far, or at least is giving them enough trouble that they have to go along with it for now. Also:
I think the key phrase here is “so far”. I think long-term, two things will happen.
One is that direct legal benefits based on self-declared gender-identity will be gradually abolished. I live in a country where the age of retirement used to be lower for women than for men (which was always dubious considering the higher life expectancy of women, but whatever). In recent years, two things have happened: the law was changed to allow people to declare their own sex, and the age of retirement for women was raised to the level of men, removing the obvious direct benefit of changing your legal sex for financial benefit. This makes a lot of sense: if you allow people to choose their legal sex they are just going to pick the most beneficial one, so you might as well make the benefits equal.
I know other countries are behind the curve. They stupidly believed the lie that nobody would change their sex just for practical reasons. They will find out soon enough that human opportunism knows no bounds, and they'll eventually abolish sex-based privileges too. (The alternative, abolishing unconditional gender self-identification, is no longer politically viable in the west.)
The second thing that will happen is that gender identification will be adjudicated by the public. We have already seen that with race: Shaun King gets to claim to be black, but Rachel Dolezal is vilified for the same thing. Buffy Sainte-Marie gets to claim to be Native American, but Elizabeth Warren is ridiculed for it. All of this is decided on the whim of the public.
We've seen this also with the Olympics: Imane Khelif gets to claim to be a woman because Russians claim she is male, and we currently hate Russians, so if they say A we will say B. It doesn't follow that an obvious male like Muhammed Ali (if he were still alive) could just hop into the ring and knock out some women; he needs to earn that right by having a sob story of being raised as a poor African girl who had to collect garbage to pay for school, and if someone hateable like Donald Trump says it's not fair to allow Muhammed Ali to beat up women, that would help his case a lot. Then Muhammed Ali gets to beat up women. But he needs to put in the work. Notably: he doesn't have to actually look or act female. The idea that females look or act in any way different from male is bigoted sexism. Instead, Ali has to demonstrate conviction that he believes he's female despite not looking or acting like it in any way whatsoever.
So that brings us back to the father who changes his legal sex to be able to see his kids. Is the court going to take pity on him? Again, it depends. Can he spin a convincing yarn about how as a kid he kept untying his nappies which proves conclusively he always had a preference for wearing skirts from a young age and is therefore female at heart, and that his marriage failed only because as a lesbian unfortunately born in a male body he was resented by his heterosexual wife, the evil TERF shrew, who poisoned the children's minds by reading them Harry Potter at bedtime, and now, to add insult to injury, wants to take
hisher kids away from theirfathermother? If so, the court will take pity on him and grant him custody. But again, he needs to sell the bit to them. He cannot expect to get female privilege just because he filled out a government form online which anyone can do.The emerging problem with this is the inevitable backlash. The Culture style gender equality can't happen, because if too many men take up the offer to become women because they are treated better it will be declared not fair and do over.
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I'm curious why you'd expect the latter to come later. There's already a whole circuit of the United States where the ADA requires transwomen be treated as women in every single one of those spaces, despite explicit text in the ADA disclaiming such. It's been two years. SCOTUS shrugged. It's done; just a matter of how long until the rest of the courts join in.
Well, these are different countries we're talking about, so I don't know if talking about sequences of events here makes much sense.
But to answer your question - it's a basic sales tactic to get someone to agree to something small so they'll agree to something big, so assuming things would happen in this particular sequence seems like a pretty safe bet. Though I guess you'll also find exceptions.
That's fair, though I think it applies there, too.
I get how the small-ask-big-ask theory works, but I think there's a useful to notice that's not really how things have been going. In many cases, the big asks come first, in no small part because they're (perceived as: trying to get actual numbers on how many people are effected by these policies is like pulling teeth) much more important.
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I just want to say, on behalf of all the kooks that said that government issue id cards were a slippery slope, that we fucking told you so.
It starts with one bit of information on a piece of paper and eventually you have administrations forced to adjudicate the metaphysics of identity.
We can't have nice things, because nice things always turn into the Total State.
I don’t disagree, but if you have mass (illegal) immigration you must also have government issue IDs, because otherwise there’s no way to tell who is a citizen and who is not.
I mean there's always the libertarian solution of not having benefits instead. But sure, once you embark on the road to serfdom all the next steps seem logical and needed.
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