The employees and policymakers of the organizations and drug companies conspiring to make millions off of hormones.
I don’t see why the majority of employees would know or care who is donating money to who. And drugs companies are always throwing money around to try and increase their market in anyway they can. Plus it’s known how often they bin studies that don’t show what they wanted them to. This is all par for the course to them.
Its not unusual for companies to require signed non-disclosure agreements for their employees, especially for personnel at the top of the hierarchy. Look no further than Trump. What you’re treating as a conspiracy is business as usual in the Western Hemisphere.
When someone says “listen to women” on this issue, does E mean “listen to women, but only cis-women?”
We have experienced in the past that some feminists can be racist or homophobic, or anti-lesbian, or anti-bisexual. Why does the language surrounding “transgender women aren’t real women” seem to echo those past battles so much?
I don’t think anyone is “denying science” or “denying biology.” Clearly, there is such a thing as biological or genetic sex. But we are just approaching a point where we can put our statements in context by saying “biological sex” or “genetic sex,” just like I can say “I am a man,” but when context requires, I can say “I am a cisgender heterosexual man.”
Figuring out how to handle public restrooms and changing rooms is just a societal organizational issue. We can reconfigure the way we design public accommodations so that’s not a problem.
As for “what about predators and abusers?” Well, we will face predators and abusers today and tomorrow. Giving transgender people the dignity of their identity doesn’t significantly change that issue. Predators and abusers can act just as easily without accommodations for transgender people today.
This reminds of discussions about torture. “We have to allow torture because maybe someday there will be a ticking time bomb situation where the only solution is to torture.” What? No. There are too many assumptions and undemonstrated premises in that.
I’m getting to the point that if I hear someone say “biological sex is real,” then I expect em to follow up with “gender identity is also real” or I will get suspicious.
In one post, you’ve likened women to racists and torturers, all because they want to keep single-sex spaces limited to members of their sex class and don’t want the word “woman” to turn into a pile of meaninglessness or a regressive shorthand for person who engages in female stereotypes.
Don’t listen to women; listen to yourself.
I stumbled across this a couple of days ago:
This article provides fodder for interesting questions. My immediate thought upon reading this was “no duh!” It doesn’t surprise me at all that individuals who have difficult conforming to all kinds of social norms might be tempted to attribute their social difficulty to gender misidentification. This is especially true for girls. A girl who has problems with empathy might be tempted to conclude she has a male brain, since society regards empathy (or the performance of such) with femininity. And girls who struggle with empathy are punished socially more than boys who struggle with empathy. You’d have to be blind and deaf not to see this double standard.
Autistic folks also tend to be super occupied and hyperfocused on things that neurotypical folks don’t notice or care about.. It doesn’t seem crazy to me to believe there a lots of people confusing body dysmorphia with gender dysmorphia, in large part due to others telling them that’s what they are experiencing. These “others” are all over the internet, but they are also medical professionals who have a vested interest in providing treatments to gender dysmophoric patients that are not offered to patients with body dysmorphia. That is to say, no respectable psychotherapist would ever recommend plastic surgery to a patient with body dysmorphia because it is widely understood how harmful this is to a person who suffering from an obsession. But patients with gender dysmorphia aren’t treated the same way at all. They are encouraged to alter their physical appearance medically and surgically.
But there’s another hypothesis that is just as valid, IMHO. It is possible the same drivers that lead to neurodevelopmental disorders also might cause gender nonconformity and gender dysmorphia. Prenatal exposure to imbalances in maternal androgen/estrogen have been correlated with a number of neurodevelopmental disorders. A person doesn’t have to be a gender ideologue to wonder if these imbalances might disrupt a specific kind of mind-body connection–one that more neuroatypical folks tend to take for granted.
Even if we decide to go with the second hypothesis just to err on the side of inclusiveness, to me that still shouldn’t obligate us to treat all claims of “woman” or “man” with equal gravitas. People should be free to express themselves however they want to express themselves (within reason). They should be free to request whatever name or pronoun they want and others should obligate them. But an invisible, unknowable trait (“mental state”) shouldn’t be given more weight than a visible, knowable one (anatomical and physiological). “Transwoman” or “transman” are perfectly respectable categories for folks who don’t identify as their birth assigned gender. It confuses things to equate these categories to “woman” and “man” when we don’t even know how stable the trans identity is for the average trans person. If only 50% of trans folks continue to identify as such five years after transitioning, then how TWAW possibly be true?
This rhetoric over the word “woman” is really sounding like the hard right stance over the word “American” and what it means to be American.
You’ve all heard the rhetoric-
“It’s not so bad when the immigrants make an effort to look American but many of them don’t even try. The don’t dress like Americans and make absolutely no effort to assimilate. The immigrants that I know personally are usually fine people but there are so many that aren’t. And we can’t let any immigrants into our American space because it’s not safe. Look over here — an illegal immigrant killed a girl once and she had dreams, too. There are other illegal immigrants that committed crimes and we will mine the internet for them just to prove how dangerous immigrants are. I’m not a bigot, this is about my personal safety. It’s also about the essence of what it means to be American. If we let just anyone call themselves American then the word will have no meaning and I will lose a vital part of my identity. If a dark haired man wearing a serape and sombrero while eating tacos can call himself American then words have no meaning, especially since he might refer to himself as Mexican tomorrow. I’m not a bigot but this is gaslighting - if a Mexican can be an American then words have no meaning anymore and my car is a tree. How long until they start taking all the jobs and awards reserved for Americans, anyway. It’s not like this has happened yet, but it’s bound to happen in the future. Being an American is an important shared experience that is only available to people that were born and raised in this country. Without that experience, you have no idea what it means to be an American. If we start letting people without that early experience call themselves American then my life and experience has lost all meaning.” yada yada yada
I’m shaving trouble as seeing most of the arguments here as something other than straight up bigotry.
I am still somewhat sympathetic to anyone whose prime motivation in taking this position has to do with their modesty in spaces that involve nudity.
Ultimately, my stance would still be that your psychological discomfort is not consequential enough to trump someone else’s civil rights. I’m really modest myself. I would be uncomfortable seeing naked male bodies in the locker room. But I’m highly uncomfortable with group nudity involving females as well, especially if some of them are gay. The upside is that I have found it easy to find gyms and other recreational facilities that accommodate my modesty so I never have to deal with it. And I would never hesitate to report ANY inappropriate behavior in a locker room or bathroom, regardless of the sex or gender of the perp.
If your gym does not offer sufficient privacy options for your comfort in the changing room, find another gym. If they allow you to be sexually harassed in the changing room or bathroom by anyone, report them.
Ann_Hedonia:
Ultimately, my stance would still be that your psychological discomfort is not consequential enough to trump someone else’s civil rights.
What are civil rights?
Is it being able to live one wherever wants to live and can afford, no matter their gender identity? Being able to get or keep a job no matter one’s gender identity? Being able to vote no matter one’s gender identity? Being able to get married and have children, no matter their gender identity? Getting equal protection under the law?
Or is being able to enter any space a person wants to enter, no matter what? Is it having one’s governmental records reflect whatever information they want to be reflected, no matter what? Is it expecting a certain social treatment from others, no matter what?
In my view, the first paragraph lists civil rights. The second lists something else. Bigots are the ones who don’t think trans folks are entitled to civil rights–because they want to be able to fire someone just because they now go by different pronouns and wear different clothes. But I don’t think it takes a bigoted mind to have a problem with opening up the “woman” category to anyone who wants in without any conditions or requirements.
Well, I don’t think it does. I find the analogy preposterous, in fact.
That’s not my main motivation. I’m concerned about civil rights; the right to free speech and association, and women’s right to campaign politically as a group, which are being threatened by well funded activists. I’m worried that children are being diagnosed and given medical treatment according to ideology and not science, with potentially devastating and irreversible effects. I’m concerned that self-ID is being implemented even in prisons, where criminals have obvious motives to lie, and can easily be a threat to fellow prisoners. I’m worried about women’s sports, because gender identity has zero relevance to athletic ability, and yet seemingly sane people are now campaigning to set sporting categories based on it. And I’m worried about the effect on feminism, because it’s now frowned upon in many quarters to celebrate our physical bodies or talk about issues around them, and if the category of ‘women’ is so vaguely defined then it doesn’t make much sense to campaign on it’s behalf. Modesty comes somewhere after all of that.
And just to be clear, transgender people in the UK (where JK Rowling lives, and I live) already have all the civil rights Monstro lists below (though possibly they could be better enforced). What they are campaigning for is the stuff in the second paragraph.
We’ve talked about more than just privacy in gym rooms. Do you not have any opinion about allowing male prisoners to opt into women prisons? Allowing males to compete against female athletes? Turning women’s health information into cryptic nonsense about disembodied body parts?
Cops are using gender ideology to violate boundaries in the treatment of women, as this video shows. By giving men the right to call themselves women, society will be promoting more abuse against women. This isn’t baseless fear-mongering. Its not transphobia. It’s fact. No one should be vilified for having concerns about this. It is not bigoted to object to a socio-political system that would allow jerks to declare themselves women for the purpose of hurting women. Anyone who continues to call this bigoted is just asking to be ignored.
And in before someone else calls this out: yes, I know it’s not against the law for male cops to pat down female suspects. There are more problems in this clip than cops taking liberties with self-ID. It’s just an example of how easy it is to make a complete mockery of “woman=anyone who wants to be one” concept. The only people who are going to find this laughable are the people who don’t think much of women and want to see them suffer.
Tell that to girls forced to compete against biological males in sport. The Democratic party is currently engaged in denying the existence of biological sex differences in athletics. (I bet that’ll go over well in the election.)
Tell that to women in jail, who face having predators and abusers identify into their prisons, showers and sharing their cells. It’s funny how posters in the catcalling thread claim to care about women and girls, and how men should listen to what we say, but over here it’s back to shrugging over the predators and abusers and telling us how unreasonable our fears are. Makes it seem very performative.
Hey, if ‘American’ is gonna be self defined, can I sign up in time for the next election? I don’t wanna move there or anything, but I’d like to vote for Kanye.
PS. I trust it won’t be a problem if I self un-ID before tax returns are due?
These are certainly the two biggest sticking points in this issue, but there are ways to address this as long as everyone is willing to compromise.
With sports, we can recognize that MtoF trans athletes will likely have an unfair advantage, but we can limit that advantage. We could do something like how wheelchair basketball handicaps players based on their capabilities so that the teams are relatively equal even though there may be a wide disparity in the capabilities of the players. Or come up with some other way to balance the typical physical ability of an XX player in a team of XY players.
With women-specific spaces, we can recognize that there are different degrees of gender transformation. Perhaps consider the number of years and degree of medical intervention as to which spaces someone is allowed into. A boy who identifies as a girl at 15 and then does hormone suppression for 10+ years can probably go into women’s locker rooms and shelters without standing out. But someone who just recently identified as a woman and has undergone no medical transition doesn’t necessarily get access to those same space.
If we have criteria like this, it will greatly help limit the ability of bad actors to exploit the trans label for personal benefit. A boy who’s pissed that his sport was cancelled in favor of a women’s sport won’t be able to jump teams just to cause trouble. A predator who wants to sneak a peek in the locker room won’t be granted unfettered access to women’s spaces just because he says he’s a woman. A sincere trans individual hopefully won’t consider these kinds of things as an unfair burden. It’s just as problematic to have a policy that trans individuals have to always conform to their genetic identity just as much as it is to say that trans individuals can have unlimited access to everything which is typically gender segregated. Neither of those viewpoints are workable, but there is a place in the middle that we can make work.
The whole reason we have female-restricted sports is to increase sport opportunities for a disadvantaged group of people. Re-engineering their competitions to allow entry to artificially handicapped males isn’t a fair compromise because the fundamental problem still remains: athletic opportunities—which are already hard to come by for females—will be taken by males.
What you’re proposing will also erode entertain value for women’s sports. People enjoy watching competitions between evenly matched players; it’s not just whomever has the most points that matter but it’s the athletic performance itself. Watch this race from the 2019 NCAA championship. Even if Eastwood has been given a handicap so that she didn’t technically win when the final points were assessed, the whole experience of the game is altered by the sight of her trouncing the other runners. If it’s not fun watching this race, imagine how demoralizing it was for the women trailing behind her.
Is it that unreasonable for female people to have sports just for females? It just seems like such small thing to ask for when you consider that male athletes monopolize the NBA, NFL, NHL, PGA, MBL, and plenty other leagues and make millions off their athletic careers. I don’t understand why the feelings of transwomen matter more than the feelings of women who, btw, aren’t even asking for million dollar contracts. They just want trophies and recognition and maybe a scholarship. This is peanuts to what men get, so your comprise means even fewer peanuts for women. Yay?
I think it’s fair if trans athletes aren’t eligible for the prizes of the sports. The inherent advantage of an XY athlete in an XX competition is almost always going to create an unfair situation. But there are ways to mitigate that. I’ll use swimming as an example. A swimmer without a time in an event might compete with a No Time designation and a swimmer who is not eligible for points will swim with an Exhibition designation. These athletes are not eligible to get points for the team and swim in the later heats. The point-eligible swimmers swim in the top heats and are competing against each other. The NT and E swimmers are swimming against all different types of swimmers and it’s common for there to be wide differences in finish times. Sometimes boys and girls heats are combined and they swim side by side. But since in these later heats the swimmers are just swimming to beat their own times, it doesn’t matter if one swimmer is twice as fast as another swimmer. That’s totally normal in these later heats. A trans athlete could fit in this kind of competition with not too much trouble. They wouldn’t be podium or points eligible, but they could still compete on the team without significantly affecting the other athletes. They likely wouldn’t be scholarship eligible either, because they wouldn’t be points eligible. But as you point out, we wouldn’t want the XY athlete to take a spot from an XX athlete, so there would need to be limits as to when a trans athlete could be on the team. Some sports like cross country are no-cut, which means anyone who wants to be on the team can be on the team. And cross country sometimes has mass starts with both boys and girls starting at the same time. In that kind of sport, a points-ineligible trans athlete would not necessarily have any imbalancing effect on the sport.
filmore, would be interested in getting your answer to this question.
If your answer to this question is yes (it is unreasonable) then it makes to sense to me that you would be in favor of a system that would allow males to play against females in a manner that mitigated unfair advantage, even if that meant sacrificing entertainment value and other things. But I would still need you to explain why it’s unreasonable for female sports to be biologically female-only. I’m lost on that.
But if your answer is no it isn’t unreasonable, then I don’t get why you think we shouldn’t keep female-restricted sports limited to people born female. Your proposal doesn’t convince me why a compromise could be fair to women, and so I don’t even understand the rationale for proposing it.
The other and rather simpler solution would be the solution that has worked extremely well for a hundred years; have people born male compete in one event, and people born female compete in the other. How is that a worse solution than transwomen competing pointlessly at the same time as women? Why bother having someone in the women’s heats who’s swimming for no competitive purpose? If they aren’t competing, why are they even there?
I guess it depends on what your definition of “women” is 
But really, it’s recognizing that trans people are people and thinking about ways in which they can compete and participate. An XY athlete in an XX sport doesn’t necessarily have to mean it’s an unfair competitive advantage or that they take anything away from another athlete. But if it came down to it, the XX athletes should be prioritized over the XY athletes on an XX sport. If that means there’s no room for XY athletes on the team, then that’s the way it works out.
Well, it happens all the time now. A typical swim meet will have NT and Exhibition swimmers who are not swimming for points. It’s basically a non-issue. Swimmers are typically trying to achieve personal time improvements, so making the podium or the times of the other swimmers may not be as important. Some swim teams may be broken up into JV and Varsity swimmers, but there are not JV swim meets. The JV swimmers will swim as Exhibition in the swim meet. As to why they are on the team and why they allow them to swim, I assume it’s to allow the swimmers to experience the benefits of being in a sport.