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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34910 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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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.

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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