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PaperclipPerfector  24d ago (text post)   29185 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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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.

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:

"There can be no fraud in the law, since the law is based on self-perception and contains no requirements. Those who question the gender condition I claim should be careful. We've already filed a complaint for transphobia against the National Federation of Gays, Lesbians and Trans, a woke association that criticizes us for not changing our appearance," explained, with the utmost seriousness, David Peralta, a 37-year-old Madrid "policewoman," secretary and co-founder of the Non-Normative Trans Association, to which most of Ceuta's policemen-turned-policewomen belong.

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 their fathermother? 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.

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 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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