So because you think some subset of the trans population has sexed brains—even though there is no definitive science supporting this and no testing strategy that allows us to diagnose these individuals—you’re in favor of divorcing “woman” from any fixed meaning so that any man can call himself one and be recognized as one in the eyes of the law.
Ok.
Depends what you mean by “dealing with”. Sure, you can treat all intersex people as just a more or less deformed version of normal male or female, and modify their bodies at birth so they appear to conform better to one of the two allowable categories. That indeed does not necessitate any changes to the conventional process of categorizing people into rigid binary sex classes.
But it’s also giving pretty short shrift to the biological reality that intersex people are born with.
A lot of other “states” are, in practice, equally unfalsifiable. We don’t require gay people to provide any evidence of their same-sex sexual attraction before taking their word for it that they’re gay, for instance.
You think I’m making a prescriptivist argument. I am not. I’m making an argument of logic.
“A woman is someone who says they’re a woman” doesn’t mean anything; it is circular and meaningless. All circular definitions are meaningless. It’s not that I want the definition to be something else; it’s that it isn’t a definition at all.
When a person - as you say happens - uses the word “woman” to mean both women and people who identify as women, that definition is nonsense. People are certainly capable of nonsensical, illogical positions. If it’s not, well, fine; explain to me how a biologically male human being is actually by definition a woman with some reference to ANY definition that doesn’t wrap around in a circle, rely on some sort of sexist stereotype, or inadvertently include men anyway.
The entire “trans women are women” thing is so intensely sexist it’s just nuts, but that’s another matter entirely.
It’s not based on what I think about “sexed brains”, if by that you mean what my cite called “significant biological contribution to the development of an individual’s sexual identity”.
It’s based on what AFAICT is currently considered the best scientific evidence, although I readily concede that the current state of the evidence is not “definitive”.
I’m in favor of recognizing a social gender category “woman” that includes both transgender and cisgender women, although I don’t think that requires pretending that transgender women are identical to cisgender women in all respects.
And I think that category should include anybody who consistently, persistently and insistently identifies as a woman, irrespective of their genitals, chromosomes, or gender conformity.
No, I don’t think it’s correct to apply the “woman” label to a man who insincerely pretends to identify as a woman for malicious purposes or just for shits ‘n’ giggles, any more than it’s correct to apply the “lesbian” label to a straight woman who pretends to be a lesbian for malicious purposes or just for shits ‘n’ giggles.
Does that mean it’s always possible to readily identify such a “fake transwoman” or “fake lesbian” pretender? No. Is there really a high threat level from such pretenders if we generally accept transgender people or gay people on the basis of their own self-identification? Not according to any evidence I’ve seen about it, and many people have been doing their darndest to collect as much evidence of it as possible.
All prescriptivists say that, and I have a lot of sympathy for their attitude, because I like logic too. The fact is, though, that real-life language use very often manages to successfully convey meaning via technically illogical statements. We all laugh at the illogic of Casey Stengel’s “Good pitching will always stop good hitting and vice-versa”, but we all see what he meant.
Because, as repeatedly stated, the veracity of a person’s claim of homosexuality is unimportant in the eyes of the law. Two people of the same sex can legally get married. Although we think of this as a gay right, the government doesn’t care whether these two people are truly gay or just posers.
If a man is using a claim of female gender identity to gain access to a space he wouldn’t otherwise have, veracity matters. This is something that you either get or you don’t get, @Kimstu.
If you don’t think it matters whether a male prisoner is genuinely trans when he’s trying to be housed with women that he can easily prey on, there is absolutely nothing I can say that will convince you.
Gosh, it’d be nice if we had some actual transgender people in here to comment.
Powers &8^]
Why can’t transwomen be transwomen and leave it at that? I don’t get the insistence on fabricating a social category that lumps together biological females and a subset of biological males. Linguistically this doesn’t work, and functionally it doesn’t work, if the two populations aren’t treated the same way and their bodies function completely differently.
It’s like watching gay men try to portray homosexuality as simply being a kinky variant of straightness. No dude, gay sex is gay sex, and that’s ok. Just because heterosexuals also have anal intercourse doesn’t negate this.
None of these crimes relate to civil rights. But thanks for the reminders that criminals are willing to say and do anything to gain access to victims.
Now remind me again why I should be okay with letting the same population lie their way into the rooms me and daughters are undressing in? For some odd reason I feel worse about this prospect than I did when I first entered this thread.
I’m not the arbiter of how transgender women refer to themselves, of course, but I personally am fine with using the specifier “transwomen” or “transgender women” as distinct from “ciswomen” or “cisgender women”, and acknowledging that there are differences between the two groups so specified. And maybe in the future, probably largely due to the existence of nonbinary/genderfluid/etc. people, we’ll have a more diverse set of social gender categories that are commonly recognized and people won’t be contesting so hard about the “M” and “F” labels because those are the only two labels we’ve got.
But in social-gender-category terms, using a stronger category-claim distinction like “women and transwomen” to mean “ciswomen and transwomen” feels rather disrespectful to me, like talking about “Americans and naturalized Americans”.
Yes, I get that somebody in that second category is different from me in some ways; yes, I get that many people feel that I’m objectively more of a “real American” because I was born here and grew up in American culture and so forth; but putting a modifier on only the second category still feels like telling the second-category people that they’re second-class citizens.
Wellup, if we as a society keep vehemently insisting that there are two and only two admissible social gender categories, and all that that entails—two and only two restrooms, two and only two high school soccer teams, two and only two boxes on the government form, two and only two shoe departments, two and only two human nominative singular pronouns, two and only two possible nouns for the birth announcement, etc.—then it’s hard to blame transgender people for insisting on their right to inhabit the one of those two categories that they feel they belong in.
Which is exactly why we need to push back on calling transwomen women. TWAW is creating expectations that can’t be realistically met by society.
Society is organized around sex classes, not new fangled concepts of gender identity created in the 21st century.
If by “the same population” you mean violent criminal men, I don’t think anybody at all is telling you that you should be “okay with” their lying about their identities in order to commit crimes.
What I personally have been telling you is that I honestly don’t see any feasible way to avoid some increase, even if only a minuscule one overall, in “normalizing” the presence of male-appearing people in female-designated spaces.
If you say that people with vaginas have to use the women’s space and people with penises have to use the men’s, you get some male-appearing transmen using their male pronouns in the women’s space. If you say that people get to use the space of the gender they identify with, you get some transwomen in the women’s space, some of whom will look more or less male-appearing. If you say that both transmen and transwomen need to stay out of the women’s space, welp, court challenge.
I’m not saying this because I want you to be frightened about predatory men possibly using such “normalization” to enter women’s spaces, which I hope and infer (based on the evidence available so far) is not a high risk statistically speaking. I’m saying this because AFAICT that’s how it is, and nobody has presented a convincing argument to refute it.
And it’s not just transgender people that are involved in this issue of gender-conformity-uncertainty, as witness this news story about a 100% cisgender lesbian getting threatened by two security guards because she looked too “male” to use the women’s restroom in a bowling alley. Same thing happened to this other restroom-using cisgender lesbian in a concert venue. And this other restroom-using cisgender lesbian in a restaurant.
Fears about encountering predatory men in women’s spaces, while also not wanting to falsely accuse non-predatory male-appearing women (whether cisgender or transgender) or male-appearing transgender men in women’s spaces, are real, and I don’t see anybody telling you that you should just be “okay” with them. All I’m saying is that AFAICT there are inevitably going to be some male-appearing people who have the right to use women’s spaces, no matter how that right is defined.
“Male-appearing people” is not the issue. You keep making this be about appearance, when that is not the argument that I’m making.
Entitling adult people with M on their birth certificate access to spaces reserved for women is the issue.
If given a choice between a policy that permits this to happen versus one that doesn’t, I’m in favor of the latter. I’m willing to bet most women are too.
If you don’t think enforcement of our preferred policy will change the makeup of the population using women’s locker rooms, then great. It means it’s just window dressing and no one should get their knickers in a twist over it.
ISTM that it’s the insistence on that old-fashioned organization around a rigid sex/gender binary that is “creating expectations that can’t realistically be met by society” in the 21st century.
A social expectation of a women’s space where everybody always looks unmistakably female and nobody ever has a penis, in a society with only two recognized sex/gender categories, is not realistic in an age that accepts different types of gender expression and gender nonconformity. Even if all transgender and intersex and nonbinary people magically didn’t exist, there would still be those aforementioned cisgender butch lesbians getting kicked out of women’s restrooms for “looking like a man”.
You are the only one between the two of us hung up on looks. Seriously. It says a lot that you are even bringing up butch lesbians right now. It’s just one more group you have to “other” to defend shoehorning males into the category of woman.
? If what you’re worried about is facilitating the deceitful entry of predatory men who are NOT entitled to use women’s spaces no matter how you slice it, then why are you more concerned about birth certificate data than appearance?
Nobody’s checking your birth certificate or other ID when you walk into the women’s restroom, AFAICT. What’s being screened for, to the extent that anything’s being screened for, is appearance.
Well yeah, for the exact reason I just mentioned. If predatory men are getting away with walking into women’s locker rooms unquestioned, it’s because women are becoming more used to seeing people in women’s locker rooms who look like them, not people who have the same box checked on their birth certificate.
We did. I think they left.
No one is screening anyone when they go to the locker room, so what are you even talking about?
Again, as it’s been repeatedly explained before, policy enables a person to be ejected from a room on the suspicion of them not belonging there. They would be subject to ejection if their ID showed them to be the wrong sex. Policies that enable this kind of ejection also act as a deterrent.
A man that is dawdling in the women’s locker room may not be committing an arrestable offense but he will be creating a nuisance for any woman nervous about dressing in front of someone that pings as an intruder.
This:
Emphasis added. What produces “the suspicion of them not belonging there” in the first place is not their ID data but their appearance.
Also, I’m kind of puzzled that you seem to think that a predatory man who would deliberately and falsely lay claim to female identity in order to be able to enter a women’s locker room for nefarious purposes wouldn’t manage to get a fake ID that says “F” instead of “M” on it in case his claim was challenged.
Once again, I think fears of encountering predatory men in women’s locker rooms are valid fears to have, but nobody has presented any realistic and rational scenario where merely banning anybody from women’s locker rooms unless they have an ID that says “F” will effectually reduce the risk of that.
You have not answered my question. The same mental block seems to be keeping you from reading it.
I shortened my quote to show what question I asked. And then there’s what you reduced it to. They are not the same.
I asked “who is saying to see them as women with the same experiences as you?” You ask “who is asking you to see them as women.” Those are two completely different questions.
I’m asking you why you think that the only way to be a woman is if you have experienced the same thing you have as a woman. I pointed out that someone is black because of the color of their skin, even if they grew up in a country that doesn’t experience racism.
You work under a misconception. When we say that you should treat them as a woman, we are not saying that you have to treat them as having the same experiences. We’re saying you should just internally think of them with the proper pronouns, because that’s how you should talk about them.
I won’t bother responding to the rest of your post because all of it is based on the same mental block. You keep thinking people are asking you to do something they are not.
You’re so, so close to getting it. If you’d just realize that all “thinking someone is a woman” means is that you mentally think of them with the right pronouns, there would be no more division between you and the trans/ally community. (Well, no more than there is internally. It’s not like we all agree 100%.)
That’s why I push. Because I don’t think you’re a transphobe. I think you just have one mental block that keeps you from being on board.
I will say this, though: Things are not going to move to being less inclusive in the future. That’s not how progressivism works. We’re going to keep pushing for more and more minorities to be equal. Any push towards excluding people–other than bigots or other bad actors–will be on the wrong side of history.