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I would propose an alternative framing of the question: "Can people who have official government documents that document them as women, involve non-consenting members of the public in their use of spaces for women?" To which the obvious answer is: yes. Just like my driver's license is valid whether you think I should have one or not.
What is your proposal for how trans men (biological women) who have medically and legally transitioned should be dealt with? Do you think most women who are scared of men would be comfortable with this guy sharing a bathroom with them? While I certainly could imagine a standard that looks like:
I can't see how you could actually write or enforce the laws and social norms around that in a consistent way that actually works out in pratice. The only two reasonable standards are "biological" or "legal documents" in my opinion. Either standard will involve some women sharing a bathroom with some people that they might read as "men", so that can't be the deciding factor.
How far are you willing to take this? Should we systematically look at how certain rooms are used, and if it would ever be the case that there's a woman alone in the room with a man, should we relocate activities or force the man to stand outside or something? Should we have far more women's only spaces than we currently do in society? What rooms besides bathrooms should we be sex-seggregating?
My answer is no.
Males do not belong in women's spaces.
Whether those males identify as transgender is irrelevant, because my view is based on sex, not gender identity.
Whether those males have government-issued certificates recognizing their gender identity is also irrelevant, because my view is based on sex, not gender identity.
The only way government records could be relevant if they accurately record a person's sex, but governments of all developed countries have decided to stop doing that.
Your government-issued driver's license mostly prevents that same government from putting you in jail for driving a car on the public road. Nobody else is compelled to accept it as proof that you are a competent driver.
In practice, driver's licenses are widely accepted as evidence of baseline driving competence, but that's because the government requires you to prove it before issuing your license. If anyone could get a license simply by self-declaration, even contradicting a professional's judgement, then the value of that license to determine driving ability would plummet.
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I feel like this is the unofficial rule for everything, or at least it should be in our intuition. Like the NBA is not the men's basketball league, it's the open basketball league and no women are good enough to play there. So we have 2 leagues, open (NBA) and women (WNBA). At my college there were two kinds of recruiting events for computer science majors, job fairs for all and job fairs for women only.
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You'd have to codify the actual-but-unspeakable moral intuition that most people have, which is something like: the only sacred/protected category is femininity, and once it has been tainted with masculinity it forfeits its protections. Gender segregation, discrimination and reservations all only serve the purpose of elevating "pure" females.
This is why the anti-trans faction is primarily concerned with MtF as an intrusion upon female privileges and FtM as a threat to impressionable girls, while the pro-trans faction (to a lesser degree) exhibits a preference for focussing on MtF rights as something that men must be compelled to grant and FtM rights as a freedom that women ought to have (and why radfems are a massive nuisance that they would rather forget about). Both sides understand that "protect women" is the only widely shared moral foundation.
Well, it’s certainly a shared moral foundation among traditionalists (anti-trans) and progressives (pro-trans), to the point that “man bad woman good” is the root of both positions. Liberals don’t do this as much, but they have their own problems and aren’t as dominant as they once were.
The fact this is maladaptive and contrary to reality (for traditionalists, bad TFR means women are shirking their duties; for progressives, they’re just being turbo-selfish about equity since if their ideas were applied correctly they’d lose all social license) doesn’t generally enter the picture for either one. That said, it’s only been 100ish years since that came true and humanity has evolved in the natural state for 3 orders of magnitude more time, and old habits/instincts die hard.
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In some ways, I kind of want to reject the idea that all of our social policies should be aimed at minimizing female deaths like an autistic actuary.
As a simple example from another domain, I kind of don't care if the facts on the ground are maximally unfavorable to me in, say, the gun control debate because I am pro-liberty and am willing to bite the bullet on this. Even if an angel came down and gave me divinely inspired tablets that showed with 100% certainty that we could reliably remove, say, all ~40,000 gun deaths per year in the United States by repealling the 2nd Amendment (and the vast majority won't convert to knife deaths or whatever), I would still say we should prefer 40,000 annual deaths to the infringement of liberty that would involve.
I don't want to empower the government to enforce any kind of bathroom policy, and so I'm willing to put up with a few women falling victim to men and ex-men in the name of liberty. My opinion wouldn't change if an angel came down and gave me divinely inspired tablets showing that such a policy reliably leads to X female victims of violence each year.
I feel the same way about casual sex with strangers, and a number of other issues. I'm willing to bite the bullet on the idea that freedom often comes with negative consequences for part of the population. I still think the government should enforce contracts that turned out to have been bad bets (which is why I was angry when Scarlett Johansson was succesfully able to cow Disney during the pandemic when they shifted movies to streaming where she got a worse deal - she made a bet, and it turned out to be a bad bet. If Disney wants to smooth things over with her, they can do that outside of the context of a contract dispute as a show of good will, but in an ideal world Scarlett Johansson should have been forced to live with the original bad deal, because that's what contracts are for.)
I agree with this, with the quibble that I thought the point of contracts was that either party is free to break a contract if they feel like they aren't getting what they want, they just have to deal with the consequences of breaking said contracts. Real-life contracts tend to have escape clauses and ways of dealing with breaches.
(Failing that, you can always just go the Westinghouse-Tesla route and just burn it.)
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As in, you're opposed?
No, for. My position is that freedom sometimes makes people worse off, but in the vast majority of such cases we should still let people be free and have the bad outcome.
To tie it back to the trans issue. I would be okay with the government banning kids from transitioning, but against the government preventing adults from transitioning - even if reliable information emerged that medical transition lead to worse outcomes than the alternative. People should be allowed to sterilize themselves, allowed to cut off their breasts, and be prepared to face all consequences of it.
This is also why I favor tattoos and piercing being legal, even if I personally dislike them and suspect they have long term effects on employability and life outcomes.
Gotcha.
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Yes. Although this is not a stable equilibrium either. A society that enshrines "protect women" but doesn't enshrine "respect men" ends up becoming horribly biased against men.
Example #1: Ukraine. Women flee the country and are living their best life clubbing with rich Germans. Men are press ganged against their will and go die in a ditch somewhere.
Example #2: Men perform nearly all the dangerous jobs in the U.S. (Probably 99%+). These jobs, which have high rates of death and dismemberment, often pay more. However, any time men make more money than women, there is talk of a "wage gap" which must be corrected.
The recognition that sexes are different must come paired with the recognition that both sexes have special needs and duties. Women are not inherently morally superior, but we've evolved as a species to see them this way because of the intense demands and vulnerability of motherhood. In an anti-natal society women might as well just be weak men.
I'm not sure we have "evolved as a species" to see women as morally superior. Plenty of societies in antiquity (and even more recently than that) treated women as basically defective (morally, intellectually, and physically) men whose sole redeeming quality was babymaking. Even when Christianity (with a much more egalitarian attitude, at least on the "morally" front) became widespread, it took a long time to purge those ideas from the zeitgeist, to the point that you can find them even in some early Christian writers.
Yeah, the Romans were pretty misogynistic, but where did all the "protect women" stuff come from if not evolution?
‘Protect women’ is not actually a historical norm, and societies which are not western today often have no problems harming women.
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I was objecting to the implication that we're evolved to see women as morally superior, not to the corresponding claim that "protect women" is to an extent hardwired.
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How is that an obvious answer?
Why do you think we even have "man" and "woman" as a legal category? I never got the impression they're a permission to perform masculinity / femininity the way a driver's license is a permission to drive, or an arbitrary badge of honor like knighthood in the UK. I always thought they're meant to reflect physical reality. If you're saying that giving a man government documents that document them as a woman necessarily implies that they get to use women's facilities, and take advantage of all the special rights and privileges we grant women, that just sounds like an argument for never giving a man government documents that document them as a woman.
This argument worked great.... right up until the point that the issue gained more prominence and people got a good look at what trans men actually look like, rather than when they're photographed or filmed from flattering angles and favorable lighting. The majority look like manlets, have a funny voice, and distinctly feminine mannerisms, they might pass as a gay man on a good day.
To your question - unironically yes, even with non-zero amount of transmen passing convincingly IRL, I think fewer women would end up uncomfortable with trans men in women's bathroom, than with trans women in women's bathrooms. Especially when everyone is aware the law only allows females to use them, and a male would be penalized for trying to slip in, if caught.
You kind of bury the lede here, but this is an equity question.
The problem with ex-men and ex-women are that they double-dip in an extremely and intentionally obnoxious -> harmful way.
Ex-men retain the biological specialization for toil while claiming the social benefits we give the people whose sex enables them to birth children. (Men's specialization is general toil, women's specialization is childbirth.) This is why "it's ma'am" and the male schoolteacher with fake breasts so large they'd be a serious medical condition were they real are problems, and it's the root of why their using the wrong bathroom is a big deal (sure, it pattern matches to being a sex pest, but this is the root of why we [can] instinctively only treat men as sex pests when they do this).
Ex-women are a reflection of this, but importantly, not a mirror image- because they become a problem when they assert the advantages men have don't matter, and then can't perform. The mirror image of the obnoxious ex-man screaming "wax my balls, it's ma'am" is not the self-aware/competent tomboy, or even the average ex-woman [that's what the steroids are for], it's the "I'm just as strong as you, that's why I belong on the front lines, there's nothing special about this ability, therefore womankind should not honor men but men should continue to honor womankind".
This is why, instinctively, it's not really an issue for ex-women to use the men's room (especially the ones on steroids), while it is an issue for ex-men to use the women's room. The problem comes from refusing to negotiate this problem in pairs (because we don't understand that men and women are different, or our sociopolitical standing is contingent upon not understanding it).
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I think we do it for similar reasons to why we track whether people are married, whether they've adopted a child, etc. Because it gives the otherwise blind goverment a way to see what's happening with its citizens.
I also just don't take the bathroom argument too seriously. The best case I've seen people come up with is that one high school bathroom assault, and that involved a couple who had met up for consensual trysts several times in the same bathroom. To put it bluntly, no woman who is afraid of this sort of thing seriously fears that it will be someone they knowingly meet up with for sex that will assault them when they change their mind and say "no" this time.
I'm about as okay with trans women using the women's restroom, as I am with fathers using the women's restroom to change their baby's diaper when there is only a changing table in the women's bathroom. Both cases involve biological men in women's restrooms, and both have plausible ways they could be abused (men using realistic baby dolls, or men cross-dressing), but I don't think any of that kind of thinking is necessary. If women are vulnerable in restrooms, then men will use whatever attack vector society leaves open. On the marigin, I don't think anti-trans bathroom bills make women safer.
And besides, the object level question in this case is "should congresswoman Sarah McBride be allowed to use the women's restroom?", and I think it is reasonable to answer, "She should have the same right that an XY androgen-insensitve cis woman should have to use the restroom, based on the government's tracking of her as a woman." Certainly, I don't think anyone's fears that Sarah McBride would sexually assault someone in the bathroom are super justified.
I just don't see it. We're talking about the kind of hysterical women who would answer "bear" to the infamous "Would you rather meet a man or a bear in the woods?" I think even a manlet would trigger such women. Or do you think their answers would change if the questions was changed to, "Would you rather meet a 5' 4'' man or a bear in the woods?"
I think there is also the problem that there are far more "mannish" biological women than there are either trans men or trans women. I don't pretend to have any way to independently verify it, but this is an example of a story about a butch lesbian getting negative confrontations from her use of the women's toilet. I'm not sure how policing bathrooms in this way doesn't end up harming "ugly" women and non-gender conforming women, which seems to go against the stated goal of helping women.
That's not how rules or heuristics work. If a person is volunteering at an event and there's a possibility that they may have to supervise children, the person is generally required to undergo police vetting to ensure that they can be trusted to supervise children. It's irrelevant if the person truthfull says "I shouldn't need to go through the police vetting, I'm not a child molester" - an actual child molester would say the same thing. That's what the police vetting is for: to determine who is a bad actor and who isn't.
Likewise if a woman is walking home alone at night and notices a lone male person walking some distance behind her, and begins to form a suspicion that said person may be following her. I doubt very much that she would be consoled if said male person yelled out "don't worry, I'm not a rapist!" And even if the male person yelled out "don't worry, I'm a trans woman!", I don't think she should be consoled by this either - trans women commit violent crimes at the same rates as cis men, so this male person revealing how he "identifies" has provided the woman with zero additional actionable information.
And you might scoff "maybe some trans people are creepy perverts, but surely a high-ranking politician would know better". Think again.
David Cross came up with a jingle to properly communicate this notion over a decade ago.
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As an aside, you reminded me of a lecture I once listened to about the brilliance of Odysseus' first words to Nausicaa after washing up on the beach naked.
He's an older male addressing a young girl, and he can't say something like, "Don't worry, I won't rape you," since that will just make her more worried by bringing the possibility out in the open. So instead he says, "I beseech thee, O queen,—a goddess art thou, or art thou mortal? If thou art a goddess, one of those who hold broad heaven, to Artemis, the daughter of great Zeus, do I liken thee most nearly in comeliness and in stature and in form."
This immediately does a few things:
Clever. I wonder what the modern equivalent would be. Asking a woman if she's X, where X is an Instagram influencer famous for demonstrating self-defense techniques women can use to escape from dangerous men?
How about "I think I know your father, he is a police officer, right?"
Good one.
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That just sounds like an implication you're a gangster who isn't afraid of cops and likely has a blood feud with one, to me.
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I don't think this answers my question. When they keep track of marriage, they're keeping track of which couples have entered a specific relationship with sweeping implications on rights to each others' property, and duties to one another. When someone adopts a child they're declaring they're assuming responsibility for them until they come of age, which grants them power to make decisions for that child until they grow up. What are they keeping track of when they designate someone a "man" or a "woman", and why is it important to not remain blind about it?
Alright, then why are you arguing for letting men-documented-as-women into women's bathrooms instead of just abolishing sex segregated facilities?
These kinds of laws aren't about specific people, they're broad rules.
I can only pity the fool that took that meme literally (as opposed to seriously).
I'm saying most of them could tell a difference between a trans man, and a 5'4" male, and the event where they couldn't would be less frequent than the event where they clock a trans woman.
Personally I'm pretty sure it's a temporary state resulting from the ambiguities that come from blurring the category of "man" and "woman" to begin with. Once it becomes clear that men entering women's bathrooms are penalized, people will be more likely to trust that whoever entered a woman's bathroom is a woman.
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When I wrote my post criticising Freddie deBoer's stance on trans issues, I admitted that, of all the demands made by trans activists, "using our preferred bathrooms" is the one I find least objectionable, even though I understand why it makes some women uncomfortable.
Many feminists appeared in the comments of the Substack article providing sources which suggested that my agnosticism on this issue was misplaced, and in fact women are at far greater risk of sexual assault in gender-neutral bathrooms than in single-sex bathrooms:
Unisex changing rooms put women at danger of sexual assault, data reveals:
As I also pointed out in the post, it's no good saying "we're not advocating for gender-neutral bathrooms - we just want trans women to be able to use the ladies' room". There is zero practical difference between the two. After all, trans women don't owe you femininity, so if you're a female person in the ladies' room and an obviously male person walks in, you're not allowed to kick up a fuss about it even if said "trans woman" is making zero effort to pass and has fully intact male genitalia.
"How dare you say that trans women are rapists?!" trans activists will howl. No - a policy of gender-neutral or trans-inclusive bathrooms poses obvious risks for female safeguarding even if literally every trans woman in the world is just a delicate little flower who wants to use the stalls in peace. (At least some demonstrably are not.) If you're taking the stance that
an inevitable byproduct of that is that perverts will exploit trans-inclusive policies for their own nefarious ends. It is literally unavoidable under this rubric.
Hell, trans activists even acknowledge that "genderfluidity" is a thing, and one can "identify as" a man at some times and identify as a woman at other times, perhaps hopping back and forth multiple times a day. What's to stop a pre-transition male person from "identifying as" a woman just long enough to go into the ladies' and sexually assault someone, then walk out and immediately resume "identifying as" a man? (I say "what's to stop" like it's some far-out hypothetical; obviously I'm sure this has already happened somewhere.)
One thing to note is that, for at least some men identifying as women, part of the fetish appears to be that women are made uncomfortable by their presence. That is, they don't want to be accepted as women, but rather they want women to be intimidated into pretending to accept them as women. If people actually just perceived them as women without a second look, then it would lose some of the appeal. I think any man who wants to go into the women's toilets should need to disclose their porn consumption habits. If they did I am quite sure, in most cases, women wouldn't even want them on the same planet never mind in the same bathroom.
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My preferred standard is based on legal status, not mere identification. That's what stops your "just long enough self-ID" hypothetical scenario.
That's just kicking the can down the road. No bathroom has a bouncer stationed outside checking people's IDs to ensure that their legal sex matches that of the bathroom they wish to use (and if such a policy was proposed, you and I both know that trans activists would be the most fervently opposed to it). Once you've established that at least some obviously male people are permitted to use the ladies' room (because they've legally transitioned), inevitably perverts will take advantage of this by trying to pass themselves off as people who've legally transitioned when they haven't.
Addendum to my "genderfluidity" hypothetical: an obviously male person walks into the ladies' room, gets some funny looks, and falsely asserts "don't worry, I've got a gender recognition certificate". The women in the bathroom aren't entirely satisfied by this, but what can they do? It's not like they can demand that he produce his gender recognition certificate on the spot. Shortly afterwards, the obviously male person sexually assaults someone/spies on someone without their knowledge etc., then walks out of the ladies' room and goes about his day.
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Transgender woman, 18, sexually assaulted girl, 10, in Morrisons toilet
Here, now you have a better case.
Here are a few more.
Fair enough, my mental model was not that trans women are perfect little angels who never do anything wrong ever. (Though investigating one of your second link's cases at random showed that the assailant, Hannah Tubbs, hadn't transitioned until after the assault. So it's not exactly a central case of what I argue for - which is legal sex seggregation, not self-ID or biological sex.)
I'm also not convinced that the fig leaf of "(bio)sex seggregating" bathrooms makes much of a difference here. A quick Google search was able to show there are some cases of cis men sexually assaulting women in bathrooms without the need of cross dressing. The problem seems to be more a function of having a semi-private space, than anything involving society leaving specific openings. I would be against turning every bathroom into a Panopticon, even if it would make people safer, and I would be against banning fathers from using changing tables in the women's restroom if they need to. Why would I be against trans women in women's bathrooms?
I don't think it nudges women's safety much in either direction.
To quote myself:
You'll never get sexual assaults in bathrooms down to zero, but as argued in my other comment, there's some evidence suggesting that they're more common in gender-neutral bathrooms compared to sex-segregated bathrooms. A common understanding that male people are not supposed to be in a particular space (and hence that any male person who violates that rule is up to no good) seems to go a long way towards preventing sexual misconduct.
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If the question was changed to "would you rather meet a boy [as in, non-adult male human] or a bear in the woods" the answers change, because boys are by definition not capable of being a physical -> sexual threat.
This is the reason why some women accept/welcome ex-men in their bathrooms. They, at least figuratively and sometimes very literally, cut off the part of their body that makes them capable of being a sexual threat- they're no different than a 3 year old boy who needs to use the women's room for pragmatic reasons. Historically, [male] eunuchs had the same kinds of privileges, for the exact same reasons; women have a more limited version of this for gay men.
Women who understand this are currently incentivized (through a bunch of other social mechanisms) to use this knowledge for the purpose of bullying other women who haven't yet figured this out. The cost to their safety, as you noted, does not exist.
Bizarre and patently false claim.
All evidence suggests trans-identified males have the same level of criminality as other males, i.e., much higher than females and much higher than 3 year old boys (the main source is a paper by Dhejne et al, though generally gender activists taboo this kind of research for showing undesirable results).
And besides, over 90% of trans-identified males opt to keep their penis and testicles. So unlike their female counterparts, trans males are almost always physically intact. They are very much capable of raping women and have done so on many occasions.
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Depends on where you draw the man/boy line honestly. There’s lots of women who would call most teenaged boys who would not find it a physical challenge to subdue and rape them ‘boys’, and a smaller but still substantial number who would call most college aged men boys.
A boy is a male of an age such that, if a Karen saw them walking into town alone, would call the cops and report it as child abuse.
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