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In any legal system, the ability to effectively apply laws hinges on our capacity to establish clear definitions for the concepts and situations they govern. If someone is to be prosecuted for murder, it's necessary to define what constitutes "murder" - this is referred to as the "elements" of the crime. Quickly googling, in murder, we have: 1. Criminal Act (killing a human), 2. Criminal Intent (purposely, knowingly), 3. Harm (death).
To take another case, if a law declares that certain considerations apply to "married" people, criteria must be set to determine under what conditions two (or more?) people can be considered 'married'.
However, the boring process of defining and categorizing has been thrown into turmoil as we deal with gender identity. I recently encountered an article by a trans writer who strongly objected to the idea that "other people" should be able to "decide" whether a person who self-identifies as trans is "really" trans. The author seemed to believe that denying someone's self-identified gender is offensive in a metaphysical sense, as it amounts to denying the existence of the trans person.
It's fine to not want trans people to feel wrongly identified, but this issue becomes legally significant when there are laws that apply differently to "men" and "women." Concretely, a person convicted of murder may be sent to a different prison, depending on whether that person is categorized as a "man" or a "woman". In these situations, clear definitions and categorizations become necessary to uphold the law. I don't think it serves anyone's interest to simply apply the slogan "trans women are women" in such a case; it seems a perfectly reasonable compromise to apply a hierarchy of cases. An example hierarchy might be:
anyone who self-identifies as a woman can be referred to as "she"
almost anyone who self-idenfifies as a woman can use the ladies' restroom
a basic evaluation should be applied to a self-identified woman before she is allowed to play on a woman's sports team
a strict evaluation should apply to a self-identified woman to determine whether she goes to a women-only prison
I'm happy to argue about how strict we ought to be in a given situation, but I'm not happy to accept that there should be no hierarchy of situations at all. We can't take a shortcut on considering the potential harm caused by a false positive vs. a false negative by simply declaring that we will always affirm the dignity of trans people. Furthermore, any system that attempts to identify people as a belonging to "category X" will inevitably produce false positives and false negatives. It is unrealistic and untenable to demand that the false negative rate must be zero (i.e. we must never incorrectly say that a trans woman is not really a woman), especially when being categorized as X has legal ramifications.
I guess this all seems pretty basic, but I don't know that I've seen anyone state the "different situations, different criteria" case, and the alternative seems to be that people are tarred as "transphobes" for suggesting that someone who self-identifies as a trans woman should not be treated as a woman in some specific situation.
A complex taxonomy of who is a woman in what situation satisfies no one and makes everyone's life more difficult. Society should either go full TWAW or stop playing pretend.
That would never be accepted by the trans activists. Trans women are treated like trans women when convenient, and trans women are treated like women when convenient.
Namely, trans women = trans women when people want to amplify any injustice (perceived or otherwise) committed against a trans woman as an injustice committed against all trans women. For example, the murder of a couple months back of Brianna Ghey in the UK (despite the fact that one of the attackers was a trans woman herself, and there is literally nothing to suggest that it was a hate crime, rather than a fight that got out of hand). In this case, if Brianna Ghey was truly a regular woman, I doubt the case would have made headlines. Therefore, it would be very inconvenient for them to treat Ghey as a woman, instead of a trans woman.
Conversely, trans women = women when people want trans women to have access to spaces usually reserved for females, such as sex-segregated restrooms and sports teams. Sure, the discourse might (d)evolve into hurling accusations of transphobia (in which case it's back to trans women = trans women), but nominally, the conversation always starts with a claim that trans women are women in this respect, therefore they should have access to women's bathrooms and be able to get on women's sports teams. And I've never seen the option of a trans-only sports team or bathroom be much popular with the trans activist crowd. (Although, all-gender restrooms seem to be well-liked by them, but that's not trans-only.)
They want to have it both ways, and hate sticking to one side, because that would mean having disadvantages like everyone else.
I don't think this is an accurate description of what leftists (profess to) believe. I think the correct version is that gender is determined solely by self-identification as a man or a woman (or something else entirely), while biological sex is a private issue that should never be the basis for public policy (which I find problematic but they don't). Biological sex only matters for medical treatment and to label people as "cis" and "trans", but nobody should ever treat anyone differently because their sex doesn't match their gender identity.
Consequently "trans" and "women" are orthogonal concepts. It's no different than race: black/white and man/women are independent. Black women are still women.
It is true that the media likes to emphasize different categories to reinforce certain narratives (this is true on both the left and the right). For example, in the mainstream media a black man is black first if he is killed by a cop, but a man first if he kills a woman. But I don't think that implies leftists can't decide whether a black man is a man or not.
The way it works is that the more minority groups the victim is a member of, the more salient the news becomes. Without the trans angle the story could still have made headlines: "Teenage girl murdered" is still pretty salient, definitely more so than "adult man murdered". None of this implies that leftists think that trans women aren't really women, just that they believe trans women are a particularly vulnerable subset of women, just like black women or lesbians.
No, it's always both. Trans women belong in women's rooms because trans women are women, and denying them access implies you think they are not women because of their transgender status, which is transphobic. (Remember: biological sex is not to be mentioned, so it's always "transgender status" even though that itself is a trivial function of sex and gender identity.)
Again, if you have trouble understanding this just substitute race and it makes perfect sense: if you want to bar black men from the men's room, anyone would point out that black men are men and saying that someone doesn't belong in the men's room because they're black is racist. Those aren't separate arguments; they're part of a single argument.
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What's the source for this? I tried looking it up and couldn't find much information about the attackers (beyond being fifteen year-olds).
Sadly, only hearsay on social media like this LiveJournal and a bunch of TikToks, supposedly originating from kids living near the area who couldn't keep their mouth shut. There's no official source confirming this because official sources are prohibited from naming minors (and places like Twitter keep taking down their names), but it does line up with them being a boy from Leigh and a girl from Warrington who are both 15. In any case if there was a prediction market or something that their names would be revealed to be Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe when they turned 18, I would bet on it in a heartbeat.
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I disagree with your heirarchy because I think it will always naturally fall apart under even a modicum of pressure. Over time I have become convinced that the extremist position of just repeating "No" to every trans person or advocate's claim is the correct position. No you can't change your pronouns, no you cannot use the other restroom, no you cannot get hormone treatments and other such "care" covered by insurance, etc. This is, I think, the only position that doesn't lead to random fellas opting into women's prisons. If not for the chances to rape, simply because I assume its probably just a better environment to be in. If I embezzelled $20 million and then got 10 years, I'd totally consider it just to get away from a bunch of skin heads and MS-13 cartel members.
I do wonder, to what degree do big white-collar criminals have to be exposed to gangs and the like?
If you are more liberal/progressive on the political spectrum, there is basically no principled reason to imprison white collar criminals at all. You just should fine them and impose a levy on wages to try and make victims whole.
If you are more reactionary, the exposure to other people of equal moral turbidity is part of the punishment. They suck, you suck, we don't, go hang out with those people.
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There’s at least one prison that is famous for hosting white collar criminals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Correctional_Institution,_Otisville
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For prisons: there is basically a hierarchy of strength where if men and transwomen share a prison, the transwomen will get raped a whole bunch; transwomen with cis women will result in the cis women getting raped a whole bunch by the trans women; and trans men with men will result in the trans men getting raped a whole bunch.
Which means as far as i can tell the whole discourse around this is just about shuffling around who is doing the raping and who is getting raped.
The core problem here is obviously that prisons either cannot or will not stop prisoners from raping each other. If it weren't for that fact none of trans prison discourse would even matter.
The sad part is, apparently many prisons do stop most rapes from happening. It's entirely feasible, but many don't make the apparently not-too-large effort. I'm sorry, I don't have my source handy for it, but it's something that's been looked into.
It's maybe weird -- my only real reason not to support the death penalty is that the justice system makes too many mistakes -- but I really think it's barbaric that this is such an issue in US prisons, and we should be able to do better.
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What's wrong with this alternative where such people are tarred as "transphobes?" I mean, you and most people here on this forum might not like that situation, but the only people who have control over whether or not people are tarred as "transphobes" - i.e. the people who tar others as "transphobes" - don't seem to have a problem with it. They tend to be pretty open about their belief that the false negative rate really must be zero, and anything that makes room for deviation from that is "transphobia" to them. And this makes sense, because most people most of the time don't think of their sociopolitical preferences as having trade-offs. So an argument like this wouldn't be particularly convincing to the only people who would need convincing.
I think that if you go to an average person, picking someone who leans left, and ask them "is it possible to lie about being a trans woman in order to get into a women's prison", they'll say "sure, it's possible", and if you tell them about an actual case they'll say "could very well be a liar". Activists don't believe such liars exist, but they're not open about it, because they know very well that if they were, they would face backlash even from their supporters among the public.
Sorry, my wording was ambiguous in "they tend to be pretty open about their belief that the false negative rate really must be zero." What I intended to convey was that they are open about desiring policies and standards such that the false negative rate of identifying trans people - eg calling a transwoman "sir" - become zero when those policies are enacted. Not that the true rate of people who falsely identify themselves as trans is zero. Their usual go-to for that is that such people are so negligible in population that spending even a moment considering them instead of the trans people suffering oppression must be a form of transphobia.
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Another excellent reason why there shouldn't be such laws.
Frankly, I'm not even sure there should be sex-segregated prisons in the first place. A prison is a place where privacy is suspended and the rule of law can and should be total. The rate of prison rape should be zero.
In reality, of course, people don't really care about prison rape and abuse when trans people aren't involved. "Don't drop the soap" is a harmless jest, unlike all other rape jokes. But the possibility that a trans person might perpetrate such a crime?
I'm extremely sceptical of the notion that the law should discriminate on the basis of sex or gender at all (isn't Justice blind?), but this particular controversy is missing the key issue.
Sex-segregating the prisons is part of how you keep the prison rape rate as close to zero as possible. This is like "frankly, there shouldn't be seatbelts or airbags. Cars should just not crash". Well, they don't not crash, so seatbelts and airbags are useful. And the rape rate in sex-segregated prisons is still nonzero. If you have some idea about how to make the rape rate zero without sex-segregation ... feel free to propose it.
At the same time, it is true that 'trans rape in prison' is an extremely noncentral objection to trans issues as a whole.
I think "you have standards which allow such things as trans rape in prison" is a fairly central objection, however. The objection is to the unworkable standards; the example of how the standards don't work is not the only case where they don't work.
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Oh sweet, another descent down the slippery slope. From "it's not going to happen" to "we should have never allowed it to not happen" in record time.
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America not being the world, most people do care about prison rape which is why biologically male rapists in women’s prisons is causing so much ire in Scotland.
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It's not just about rape, what happens when a woman serving a long prison term gets pregnant, and the biological father is also serving a long prison term? The solution to this problem is obvious, separate prisoners by biological sex.
Prisoners having sex, especially unprotected sex that leads to childbirth, also isn't a thing that should happen. If it does, there are already procedures for state care of children of unfit parents.
Criminality is heritable, so sex segregating prisoners is a pro eugenic policy. Please don't remove it and add to the foster care system now, and a worse society in the future
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At least the 'just prevent all rape' is somewhat realistic. Keeping men and women in the same location and allowing them some forms of interaction without consensual sex occurring is quite difficult, people really like having sex, unless you sterilize them or forcibly apply birth control and abortion.
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It is simply easier and less burdensome to prevent this in the first place and make this scenario completely impossible to happen, by segregating prisons by sex.
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Abortion.
Sadly no one ever seems to like my legal abortion up to the 360th trimester solution in those cases.
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The level of totalitarian control that would be required for that might mean having to increase the population of prison security guards by multiple orders of magnitude, to the extent that maybe you'd have to have a single guard for each and every prisoner. Engineering that kind of situation seems like a non-trivial economic/political problem. Perhaps with development of AI and robotics, we could use non-human prison guards to make up the numbers, but that's a non-trivial technological problem.
Most countries don’t have prison rape. It’s trivial to fix. Convict the rapist. Allow the taped prisoner to sue the state (why isn’t that happening?). Fire governors who can’t fix this.
How sure are we of that?
A simple google would confirm it. Wiki lists about 5 countries and the other 4 are dictatorships except Turkey which has notoriously bad prisons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_rape
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Us is anomalous in many ways - e.g. the large black and hispanic population, to the relative lack of funding of police forces, etc.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/01/united-states-underpoliced-overprisoned.html
/images/1679220790917088.webp
For example, a news article from Czech Republic, saying there have been 52 cases investigated in the last 6 years. It also notes that there's supposedly a lot of trust inside prisons between the inmates and the staff, which seems odd but what do I know ?
Could be the case. E.g. with police forces, there are relatively strict psychological testing requirements that filter out a lot of applicants.
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Can’t you get most of the way there with one prisoner per cell and CCTV in communal areas? I agree that is incompatible with the levels of overcrowding in the typical American prison, but it doesn’t require significantly more guards.
Depends on what you mean by "most of the way there," I suppose. If the standard is zero prison rape among all the millions of prisoners in the American system such that even a single rape in there is a failure, that's going to require that those CCTVs have complete coverage of all areas, never break down, and always have competent guards watching. Most likely, you'd also need guards to be watching the guards so that they don't get bribed to look the other way or otherwise compromised. And guards for those guards as well, etc.
Zero is just a very difficult standard to achieve.
Literally exactly zero isn't necessary - it just has to be a rounding error, like "it happened because the CCTV camera just happened to explode while all the guards were sneezing" or whatever, as opposed to the current rate of "who cares".
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I would actually dispute this.
(1) laws can be effectively imposed where there is no common or clear definition if the subject has no ability to resist.
(2) laws can be legitimate and meet with popular approval even when there is not exact definition on the terms, but instead a general common expectation about the character enforcement will take.
(3) in some cases, enforcement is more effective when there is not a clear definition; then the enforcer can arbitrarily act as they think best.
Of course, none of this does much to make laws or law enforcement popular with the public, or spur exact compliance, but that's a different question.
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Applying different metrics to different cases seems reasonable, but I'd put more thought into failure modes. I am not at all confident that this sort of tiered system would be resilient against societal pushback--either from those wanting strictness in more cases, or complete self-ID in more cases.
Regarding the article you read by a trans writer, that take accurately reflects the status quo in the trans activist community. There was a debate, but it was resolved.
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When a transperson undergoes medical treatment, which gender do they choose like for medication, dosing, etc.? The new one of the old one when it's a matter of life or death?
This is a good question. Men typically have higher levels of alcohol dehydrogenase than women. Are sex differences in liver enzymes determined by the genetic code of the liver cells themselves, or is this somehow hormone mediated? My guess would be that it's genetic, but eukaryotic gene regulation can be pretty complicated.
No, I didn't. I'm not an expert on genetics, but it seems plausible that there could be some gene on the Y chromosome which enhances ADH gene expression. However, after doing more research, I changed my mind. I think its more likely that sex differences in ADH expression are hormone mediated. Apparently it's stomach alcohol dehydrogenase which causes the sex difference in alcohol metabolism. The key quote:
Looks testosterone-mediated to me.
Men also just have larger livers. Taking hormones isn’t going to change the size of an adults liver.
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I've heard of anecdotal cases of doctors having to do averages of male and female dosing guidelines for certain medications when treating trans people. My guess is that it would have to be per medication, with some using the natal sex dosing, some using an average of some kind, and some using the dosing guidelines for the transitional sex. It's also not inconceivable that some might end up with wildly different dosing than either male or female because of something special about the particular set of medical interventions a trans person has.
We already know that hormone therapy often leads to increased risks in certain things (i.e. trans women have higher risk of breast cancer than cis men, but lower than cis women), so it's not surprising that there's going to be a lot of different answers around this.
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That’s cart before horse. The trans movement has been saying that “trans women are women” for a long time now, which is why there can be, for them, no hierarchy. If you firmly believe TWAW then you no more exclude trans women from sports, prisons, and other typically sex segregated spaces than you can exclude red haired women, black skinned women, tall women, short women (etc.) from such places. It is that belief, along with the idea of self identification that makes the belief system so radical. However there is a logical consistency which you lack.
If on the other hand we say that trans women are trans women, allowed in some but not all spaces that were once exclusive to natal women, and that this isn’t based on their self belief but a diagnosis of adult gender dysphoria then that would be ok with exactly zero trans activists, since that’s where we were 5-10 years ago depending on the country.
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I think honestly, since “transition” as a set of medical procedures requires lots of affirmation of that identity including visits to doctors, consenting to various drugs and procedures, and legal name changes, it seems like you could establish a reasonable point in this process at which you can make a reasonable case that this person is so seriously committed to becoming a member of the other gender.
I could make a case for a couple years of treatments and a legal name and gender change on legal documents being pretty definitive here. For me, if you’ve been in the process of becoming female (including hormones) for five years, and have changed your legal name and gender on your major legal documents (birth certificate, drivers license or state issued ID, passport) that level of commitment should be considered enough.
But my major concern re bathrooms and changing rooms is that if we make “identity as a woman” too easy to get, that cisgender men will abuse this to enter pretty intimate female spaces where they can use their power to rape women. This is, for me the trust issue, not that transgender people want to rape, but that cis men will use transgendered women as a loophole.
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That's the worst way to phrase that particular part.
Let's put ta few scenarios out, see if you can tell the difference:
1: Saying that Ukraine isn't a real country, there's no such thing, ergo no such thing as Ukrainians.
2: Killing Ukrainians.
3: Marking your business "no Ukrainians allowed"
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Your political opposition thinking you should not exist and thinking a category you identify with does not exist is very importantly different. When you use this language about "existence" you are implying gas chambers are in the works and this is a ridiculous thing to imply. The Nazis did not start off denying the existence of the jews.
Perhaps if the Nazis had stumbled upon the option of calling them "people of jewishness", the whole thing would have blown over.
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I don't think this is quite "nobody", because North Carolina law does appear to allow for the sex on a birth certificate to be changed if:
ref. https://www.ncleg.gov/EnactedLegislation/Statutes/PDF/BySection/Chapter_130a/GS_130a-118.pdf
So this sounds more like an example of bathroom use being set to "strict evaluation" rather than self-identification.
I'm pretty sure it indicates the dumbness of the false choice you set up. "people sometimes dressing in ways that make other people a little uncomfortable" is an extremely minor cost to bear vs establishing a regime of birth certificate checking, true - but not versus nothing even remotely similar to that happening, which is what we have seen in reality.
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The libertarian position on trans people, that one has no legal right to force others to go along with your claims of your identity, isn't something I have seen trans activists champion. Thus this appeal to less government intrusion rings hollow.
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