Since “transwomen” are a relatively new thing in sports I would suggest they be banned from sports till it is shown otherwise that they have no inherent advantages.
You said trans people are a very minor percentage of the population. So keeping this tiny percentage out of professional sports makes sense. It is a new thing that can skew results. Let them play in amateur leagues and when enough data is collected we can decide if they should be allowed in professional sports.
I am as liberal as they come and I am not seeing a problem here. By your own account we are talking about a very small percentage of the population, of whom an even vastly smaller percentage would be into professional/Olympic class sports, are denied access to the very highest levels of competition (a super, super small percentage).
Given that it is hard to be fussed that one or two in seven billion people might be unfairly blocked but I find it hard to get all up in arms about it.
I’m also betting the odds, in an area that consists of all kinds of fragile people, including transpeople, so I’m hating this right along with you. Bathrooms are not my biggest concern. Grown-ups calling me an acronym is not my concern. I know what my concerns are, and fortunately so do a lot of other people, many of whom are men. I’m very grateful for those who have spoken up here and have to strongly disagree with your blanket indictment of them.
I also have a pretty good idea of the kind of fears circulating right now and a lot of sympathy for that. It’s quite a mess.
I’m trying to parse this logic - “This discriminated-against minority has yet to establish itself as a problem in any respects (other than a bunch of shrill bigots shouting about it). We should discriminate against them before there’s any chance they could cause a problem.” This is the kind of logic I expect out of the Super Smash Bros community deciding to ban a stage people don’t like, and it’s as ridiculous there as it is here, despite the relatively lower stakes. You could replace “transwomen” with “black men” in that sentence and you’d have to logic racists used a century ago to keep African-Americans out of sports.
Why not wait until there actually is a problem, then address that problem?
Yeah! Because if you’re only a half a percent of the population, who cares if you get discriminated against! :rolleyes:
You certainly don’t need to transition to claim to be a woman, so that’s not a problem. There’s a slight possibility that you might briefly face transphobia, depending on the circumstances and what you have to make your claim known, maybe. If you’re falsely claiming to be a woman, obviously there’s no dysphoria involved. So, there’s no shit to run through.
If you had paid any attention to what I was writing instead of typing huge red letters in furor, you might have noticed that I wrote the following :
Note the clear lack of transition and dysphoria in this scenario. The requirement being only a statement that you identify as a woman. We’re discussing an article where a woman expresses concern about a situation where transpeople are in a protected class and their self-identification cannot be disputed.
In other words, a situation where if anybody says “I’m a woman” you have to accept this person as a woman for all intents and purposes. For instance in one of her examples, if a person with male genitalia undress in front of underage girls in a locker room, this person just need to state “I identify as a woman” to avoid any further problem. Or in my example, in a women tennis competition with a big prize, a player who simply check the “woman” line has to be allowed to compete, no question asked. Same for women scholarships, etc…
By definition, someone pretending to be a trans won’t be one. So, any knowledge you might have about transpeople won’t apply to them and is mostly irrelevant. In my example, the only knowledge I need is that people will do quite a lot of things for money if they can get away with it.
And to answer your non question, no, I don’t know transpeople. I’m vaguely in contact with one because we share a common interest, and I knew a couple of them in my younger years, long ago, but I never talked with them about trans issues.
I never mentioned people who transition, I mentioned people who state “I identify as a woman” . Maybe you should read what I write before jumping on your big red letters.
I didn’t propose such a thing, and in fact I mentioned several times that I personally don’t give a shit about who enters in whose locker room and that if it were up to me, they’d be coed. But the wide majority doesn’t share this opinion.
In this exchange I was having, I referred repeatedly to people “indistinguishable from a man”. I was thinking of the scenario described in the article the OP linked to, where someone with male genitalia undress in front of women (in fact underage girls, in the article). By “someone they can’t tell the gender of”, I didn’t mean someone whose genitals might be male or female (and requiring an inspection) but someone whose genitals are clearly male, and who claims to be a transwoman.
My points and questions were : is it legitimate for a woman to want to avoid this scenario? And if it is, does the desire of a transwoman to use women locker rooms, no question asked, nevertheless trumps in all circumstances those ciswomen desire to not have dick owners in their locker rooms?
When you’re preparing to transition, you get a carry letter from your doctor certifying that you’re legit trans. Once you’ve transitioned, your ID shows your corrected gender. There’s no leeway for a faker to fake being trans.
Those who are legit trans have the credentials to verify it. These prejudiced imaginings about imaginary fakers are being used as a pretext to withhold civil rights from the very real trans people who are increasingly endangered by this prejudice and by the loss of civil rights.
From trans people, from intersex people, from people who don’t look “correct” based on other people’s prejudices… the people who claim to be trying to defend women from the threat of “fake trans” are the same ones who accuse any woman they find too tall of being trans (their verb).
We’re talking about a situation where there’s no requirement to demonstrate that your claim is genuine (such as with a doctor’s letter or anything else). Whether or not this is an accurate description of the proposed statute, I wouldn’t know. But in any case, nobody arguing in favor of transwomen in this thread has so far stated “but of course, there should be/there would be this or that requirement”, which would have been an obvious rebuttal of the statements made in the article linked to as well as of many of my objections and examples. I see no evidence that anybody on this side of the debate in this thread doesn’t think that a statement to the effect that you self-identify as a woman should be sufficient, should go undisputed, and should allow to be recognized as a woman in all circumstances.
The circumstances you’re worried about are so rare that they shouldn’t require a hard and fast rule for everyone. Sports might be a separate issue – but we already do tons of testing in sports for drugs and such; testing for hormones or other issues related to ensuring fair competition are reasonable to discuss but separate of the issue of whether trans people should be treated with dignity and respect in every-day scenarios (i.e. using a public restroom).
If someone is really concerned about someone else in the bathroom, they can call the authorities. We don’t need some special rule for bathrooms and locker rooms without a solid reason to believe that abuse (i.e. lewdness/perversion/assault) is occurring more frequently.
If we’re talking about restrooms with doors on the stalls, or about people in locker rooms who don’t strip off entirely while in public view (I suppose locker rooms vary, but in the ones I’ve been in it’s been optional), there’d be no other way to enforce such restrictions.
I suppose you could ban exposing male genitalia in the women’s locker room, and vice versa. But if you’re really seriously worried about people sneaking in there to get their jollies: anybody can wear a towel. So again, how would you know, without inspecting people before they were allowed to go in?
Well, I like men too. Most men I’ve known throughout my life have been honorable and kind and, well, a lot of fun. I think men get too much bad press.
My apologies to the guys here.
I didn’t want to dump on men per se, just those who are violent, and I was annoyed by those who thought they knew how RadFems should think regarding the legislation. I guess women are all spawned in a hive and we are all supposed to think alike.
I’ve been enjoying Clairobscur’s posts and was thinking that I’d like to hear his thoughts on other topics, so i’ll skim through some of the historic stuff eventually.
So, no, I don’t hate men and I also think men should get more recognition for the vital roles they play, along with their often interesting way of looking at things. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
I do hope that you are aware of the “blissful irony” demonstrated by your own post.
Whatever one personally believes, openly declaring that the “other side” is both evil and closed minded does nothing to open minds.
I agree that trying to persuade people who hold firm convictions which one opposes is extremely frustrating. Declaring that in toto there is no chance to persuade them otherwise does nothing to actually persuade them and is directly contradicted by the huge number of persons who have actually changed their opinions in recent years in such contexts, for example, as same sex marriage.
clairobscur, I admire your patience and your ability to detail the key analytical points without being emotional, biased or pushing a specific position.
You respond to emotion based arguments well while always pushing back towards the core analytical aspects of the issue (which are frequently relative and arbitrary, but not always recognized as such).
What seems to me to have happened is that this society set up public bathroom and locker room conventions under the assumptions that 1) people could be neatly sorted into exactly two categories, A and B, and everyone would fit easily and obviously into one category or the other and 2) people in A were sexually attracted only to people in group B, and people in group B were sexually attracted only to people in group A.
If we go with those two assumptions, then it makes perfect sense to have restrooms and locker rooms used jointly by people in group A, and another separate set used jointly by people in group B. Nobody will be undressing around anyone who might be sexually attracted to them, and, as a bonus, you get to speed things up a bit for one group and save space and money for the designers by putting fewer stalls and mostly urinals in half the rooms, while it’s only necessary to put tampon/pad distributors in the other half. (Baby changing tables used to be also only in half the rooms. We won’t get into couches to lie down on if your cramps got too bad; modern public restroom designers seem unwilling to allow enough room to close the stall door without banging your knees, they’re certainly not going to allow enough room to lie down.)
Problem is: neither of those two assumptions is true.
We’ve mostly admitted that, yes, gay people exist. (And there was indeed some commotion about the idea of straight people being expected to share restrooms, locker rooms, and dormitories with gay people who might – gasp – be turned on by them! I haven’t heard much of that lately, though.)
Now we’re having to admit that trans and intersex and genderfluid people exist. Maybe we ought to stop trying to fit people into only two boxes?
I can think of several possible ways to try to deal with the current mess:
Try to jam everybody back into the boxes. I don’t think we ought to pick this one. It does damage, and it doesn’t work. In fact, for one of the major purposes of the original division, it can’t work. There’s no way to draw up two boxes that doesn’t include in each box some people who might be turned on by other people in the same box. (And, unless we’re going to reintroduce strict gender-based dress codes with matching genital inspection, and probably not even if we do, there’s also no way to draw up two boxes that doesn’t result in some people in each box looking like they belong in the other one.)
Re-design all the restrooms and locker rooms so nobody has to be unclothed around anybody else. This one would work; and in fact is the solution already in place in a lot of places, including in particular places that were never designed any other way (such as on airplanes) and small venues that basically had one restroom labeled M and one labeled F and all they have to do is change the signs on the doors and put a wastebasket, and maybe a tampon dispenser, in what used to be the men’s room. However, for places that have a whole lot of people coming through, it would get expensive; and, for many already existing buildings, it would likely reduce the number of spaces to the point at which lines would get way too long; at least, if better doors on the stalls to make it harder to see into them doesn’t count and entirely separate rooms are needed.
Change all the signs to just say “restroom” or “locker room” and everybody just get over it. That might well be a long-term solution – pretty much all of the USA has adapted just fine to expecting to see people of other genders barely technically short of naked on the beach, after all – but I don’t think it’s going to happen any time real soon. (And, of course, nobody has to go to the beach. But everybody has to piss.)
For places that already have single-use rooms, just change the signs. For places with multi-use rooms: Put better doors on the stalls; split one of the current gender-labelled multi-use rooms in half, and label one half male and the other female; and label the remaining large one as for anybody. This requires some physical renovation, but not as much as converting the multi-use rooms into standard individual-use rooms; and it doesn’t require as much additional space. Because the gender-labeled rooms will be significantly smaller than the ‘anybody’ room, significant numbers of people who fit in the boxes but just don’t care will use the anybody room to avoid long lines in the others, and those who don’t fit in the boxes won’t be made to stand out (and maybe made into prey by those who want to know where to find them.) This won’t solve the ‘somebody might be leering at me’ problem, of course, because there will still be gay and lesbian people in the gender-labeled rooms as well as in the anybody rooms. But maybe it would calm people down.
I am as I said cis, so there may be significant problems with 4) that I’m not seeing (aside from the fact that, while it would be cheaper than renovating all the multi-use rooms into single-use ones, it would cost something. Whatever way we do it costs something, though; if not necessarily in direct cash expenditures.) So if I’m out of line, somebody please tell me.
I’m stating it, monsieur. I who know a thing or two about the subject. You clearly don’t even know what you’re talking about. All you can do is repeat prejudiced imaginings, which I have now refuted with facts.
Speaking as a fellow cis woman, I think it’s unreasonable to expect anybody not to have opinions about how RadFems or anybody else “should think”. Especially here in the Great Debates forum, where lecturing other people about how they “should think” is built into the framework.
I personally think I know how RadFems “should think” about trans people, for example: I think they should accept trans people as the gender they identify as, and shut up with their silly moaning about how transwomen are oppressing them.
Now, that doesn’t mean that RadFems or anybody else can’t disagree with me about that. But it’s got nothing to do with assuming that all women must “think alike” because we are “spawned in a hive” or something.
No, this is an absurd exaggeration. Obviously, for example, a statement to the effect that you self-identify as a woman is not sufficient to get you a Pap smear in a gynecologist’s office if you don’t actually have a vagina or uterus. There is no need to pretend that transwomen are biologically indistinguishable from cis women in all circumstances, and especially not when it’s their specific biological characteristics that are under discussion.
However, there is zero need for people using gendered restrooms to “dispute” other people’s gender identification. Most people are very uncomfortable using public restrooms designated for a different gender than the one they identify as. So if somebody is using a women’s restroom, the overwhelming likelihood is that she identifies as a woman.
The incidence of people who don’t identify as women entering women’s restrooms for nefarious purposes is, as has already been pointed out, relatively very small. And even if it weren’t, “disputing” the gender identification of non-nefarious women because you’re worried they don’t look feminine enough won’t do a damn thing to address that problem.
This is one of the irritating things about this debate - it seems to start from the assumption that one side is or is going to become extremely stupid, and uses that as a baseline. As if we’re fundamentally incapable of telling a bad-faith lie when we see one. Or as if it makes any sense to let someone with zero history of HRT take part in women’s sports.
Like, this:
In order for this scenario to take place, every single person involved would have to take stupid pills, spend a few days beating themselves across the skull with the stupid stick, and finally fall out of the stupid tree, hitting every branch on the way down and cracking their skull open on the roots. If this is the kind of hypothetical you need to reach for to justify your position, there’s a problem.
In fact, I remember back in 2014 when this shit was first happening, people were making the same nonsense hypotheticals. “How can you tell if someone is lying if they just go into a women’s bathroom and pretend to be a woman?” In fact, this wasn’t merely hypothetical - there was a case, I believe in Oregon, where a man went into a women’s bathroom and claimed to be transgender to make a political statement. Except, as it turns out, we’re not all collectively stupid, and it was clear that he was not, in fact, trans. And at no point did anyone who actually advocated for these laws stand up and say, “hang on, this guy has every right to be here”, because, again, we’re not all fucking stupid.
In fact, this is fundamentally a problem with anyone trying to “fake it”. If you’re trying to show that these laws are bad, you have to be unconvincing. You have to obviously present as male. Otherwise, the only point you’re making is that the system doesn’t work with convincing bad faith, which isn’t a very strong point to make. But the people in charge generally aren’t completely stupid, so when you show up making no effort to present as female beyond saying “I identify as female” and there’s something obviously fishy going on, you’re going to get your ass busted, because we’re not collectively idiots.
God dammit Velocity, this is why we don’t link right-wing propaganda pieces; someone might fucking believe them. As pointed out upthread, this just ain’t true. Like most such stories, almost every aspect of this story is fabricated or misleading - as is pretty typical of right-wing anti-trans smear pieces.
