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One of the ways in which sex differences are real and important is in regards to paedophilia. Male paedophilia is a much bigger problem than female paedophilia in terms of both how prevalent it is and in terms of how harmful it is. Using female pronouns for a male paedophile rhetorically downplays the seriousness of the situation.
Language comes with connotations, which are neither explicit nor objectively necessary inferences. Nonetheless spreading those connotations and that framing is the first step in winning a broader argument, which is why you get so many fights over what language to use.
I don't agree. I think that at least nominally, pro-pronoun people would consider it serious regardless of the pedophile's sex. Obviously, there are the usual caveats (humans can think one thing and feel another, etc.).
Maybe so, but when the average person hears "Sarah is a paedophile - she has openly admitted to a sexual interest in children", they make a number of reasonable assumptions:
These assumptions are true of female paedophiles. These assumptions may not be (likely are not) true of Sarah Nyberg.
Until the average person has fully internalised the idea that the pronouns a given person uses are wholly uncorrelated with their sex, affirming Nyberg's transgender identity carries with it the unavoidable side effect of downplaying the risk Nyberg poses to young children in the mind of the average listener. It's undeniably true that an adult female molesting a small girl is bound to be deeply distressing for the victim, but there's still a vast qualitative difference between that scenario and the scenario in which an adult male physically overpowers a small girl, penetrates her with his penis, infects her with an STD and possibly impregnates her.
I concur, but this sounds to me like an attempt to ensure Nyberg isn't allowed to escape the instinctive feelings associated with male pedophiles. Which is a goal you have to actually declare, otherwise I'm going to assume you don't think people's feelings should decide how pedos of either sex are treated.
In an extremely literal reading of this statement, it's trivially true: Nyberg is a male (i.e. biologically sexed male) paedophile, and it is appropriate to treat Nyberg the same way any other member of that group would be treated owing to their membership within.
I'm not really talking about "feelings" so much as risk calculus. All other things being equal, parents are right to be more distrustful of a male stranger than a female, both in terms of probability (how likely is a male stranger to sexually assault my child compared to a female stranger?) and impact (in the event that a male stranger sexually assaults my child, how much harm can they do to them/are they likely to do to them?). It would be profoundly unwise for a parent to leave their children alone with any self-declared paedophile regardless of sex, but it's a simple factual assertion that male paedophiles are more likely to act on their urges than female, and can cause far more harm (quantitatively and qualitatively) than female paedophiles. No child in human history has been impregnated by a female paedophile, and the number of children who have contracted sexually transmitted infections as a result of being abused by female paedophiles must be vanishingly small, if not literally zero. Even though female paedophiles are just as capable of severely injuring or killing prepubescent children as are male paedophiles, I feel extremely confident in asserting that the number of children severely injured or killed as a result of being assaulted by a female paedophile is a fraction of the equivalent number for male paedophiles. In some kind of weird trolley problem situation in which a parent is forced to leave their pubescent female child alone with one of two paedophiles, and the only thing the parent knew about the paedophiles in question is that one is male and the other is female, leaving the child with the female paedophile would be the rational choice.
If I knew for a fact that Nyberg had undergone gender reassignment surgery and no longer had a functioning penis and testicles, I think it would be appropriate to treat Nyberg with the same contempt and wariness afforded female paedophiles (which is still a distinctly lower amount of contempt and wariness than that afforded to male) - being bereft of male reproductive organs significantly (but not entirely) changes the risk calculus. If Nyberg has not undergone gender reassignment surgery, then the risk calculus for Nyberg is the same as for any other male paedophile, and Nyberg's declared gender identity is an irrelevant fact about her which doesn't factor into the risk calculus at all (any more than Nyberg's taste in music or preference for strawberries over blueberries would). If someone presented me with very strong evidence that the offending patterns for trans women were more similar to cis women than cis men, that might persuade me to adjust my risk calculus regardless of whether Nyberg had medically transitioned or not - however, all evidence I've seen to date has demonstrated the opposite, that trans people commit criminal offenses at the rate we would expect based on their natal sex.
I'm not really sure what this means. Treated by whom? By the state? By the courts?
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