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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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I don’t think the license itself never created a legal requirement for anyone. The 1984 SDA did, but only by criminalizing “less favourable” treatment. In social media, that means access to your app. In medicine, though, it means some combination of desired and correct care.

I could imagine why waving your license would get you back into an app. It was harder to figure out how doing so would get you a particular treatment.

I think it’s kind of a moot point, because I misunderstood how the license was actually used in this case.

“less favourable”

I think you're resting a lot on this, but the court document only mentions this once, with reference to CEDAW (not SDA), saying that it

refers only to discrimination that places women in a less favourable position than men. It therefore does not cover the kind of discrimination that Ms Tickle alleges in this case, which is discrimination that placed her in the same position as men.

They don't really say anything about SDA having some form of "less favorable" test; they talk about "disadvantaging", and they don't really grapple how that would really work WRT a claim of gender identity. What is the set of possible "gender identities" in question? What is the reference class? It's a conceptual mush. I know it's approaching a reductio, but what if someone gender identified as an attack helicopter (substitute less ridiculous, but still nonbinary or whatever), but appeared male, then tried to access Giggle. Indirect gender identity discrimination?

Perhaps @Gillitrut was completely barking up the wrong tree when claiming that the 'authoritative document' had anything to do with it, but we're still left with a different kind of mess... and one that I point out, still leaves yardsticks on the table. You can fit almost anything into "other status".

It also reopens your hypo:

a breastless transwoman desperate for a mammogram, or something. I could see that happening. But I’m reasonably confident our medical jurisprudence allows doctors to decline providing frivolous care. It certainly lets insurance opt out.

I don't see why, with this ruling, it would be considered frivolous or allow an opt out. Could even have one with implants or just barely large enough 'moobs'. The only way would be to say, "Mammograms are for the female sex," but then we're exactly back in the same position Giggle is. There's no reason to disadvantage MtFs in terms of getting to see imagery of their chest, if that's what they want. We don't actually have a reference class to compare them to, anyway. In order to show that Tickle was disadvantaged in comparison to some other reference class, I'd want to know what that reference class is, and once we know that, then maybe we can check to see if denying MtFs mammograms does/doesn't disadvantage them WRT the same reference class.

If there's anything I've learned from learning about BIID, it's that people can be very very serious about demanding a treatment that others may see as kind of silly or potentially even harmful. Are you going to import some "someone might think it's actually silly/harmful" exemption? Like, if a doctor simply asserts, "I think this would actually be silly/harmful, for whatever reason," then they're okay? Well, sure, Giggle can simply say that they think that someone who looks that much like a man is being silly or actually going to harm themselves, because they're gonna like get made fun of or something. I don't think it's easy at all to surgically (heh) slice out the cases that you personally think are silly/unlikely, because that's a ridiculous ad hoc test where the rule is that every time something comes up, we have to ask you whether it's silly or not.