Serious question. Why do you think women are more afraid of men than of other women? Does the list of reasons include ‘gender identity’ or are they due to physical and mental differences between the sexes?
Intersex has as much to do with self-determined gender identities as diabetes, heart disease, and COVID-19 do.
So the fact that you are bringing up intersex at all shows you are trying to draw nonexistent parallels. It’s cringey as fuck.
No one has answered my question about what failed implementation of TWAW looks like.
This is how I’m calibrated:
If transwomen athletes (who compete in women’s events in the Olympics) win medals in a proportion comparable to their representation in athletics, I will feel like the fears of males taking over women’s sports are overblown.
But let’s say transwomen comprise 2% of Olympic competitors in women’s events. If 5% - 10% medalists are transwomen, I will be annoyed. I’ll probably keep rolling my eyes every time someone says TWAW. However, I probably wouldn’t see this as a sign of absolute failure. I probably wouldn’t write any sternly worded letters to the editor or march in the streets. I’ll just suck my teeth and keep it moving.
But once we go over that threshold, yes, I will feel absolutely pissed off. I will feel like I’m watching opportunities being snatched away from ciswomen for the benefit of male feelings. I will feel like my group is being put into the “inferior” category yet again, but instead of people being validating this feeling, they are telling me I should be happy that women are succeeding. When to me it will feel like I’m watching males succeeding at the expense of females. If we had an outcome like this, I would want someone to do some better gatekeeping.
I know trans activists won’t care if all the medalists are transwomen. They will rejoice in it because they are rooting for that group. I’m wondering if their allies, especially the ones who claim to be feminists, will rejoice, though. I suspect it would bother a lot of allies, but they would be too embarrassed to say so out loud. At least until a critical mass of LGBT folks came out against it first.
I know people don’t think that we’d ever have a scenario like this. What I’m asking you to do is not assess the likelihood of something like this, but rather express how you would feel about something like this. I’m not going to be convinced that people are seriously thinking about the implications of TWAW until I get an answer to this question from someone other than folks on my side of the discussion.
I agree that athletics are one place where TWAW objectively falls apart. It’s not just a matter of changing social attitudes so that transwomen and cis-women compete together. Genetically XY people competing against XX people is going to virtually always be completely unbalanced and unfair. Guidelines which attempt to address this by saying that competitors in women’s sports have to have a testosterone level below a certain level won’t be sufficient. First of all, it would be trivial for transwomen athletes to tweak their hormone regiment so that they are always at the max, which cis-women would not be able to do. But second, and probably more importantly, there are a host of other biological and psychological differences between genetically XY and XX people that don’t equalize just because someone identifies as a woman.
I’m with filmore on this. TWAW fails when applied to athletics. The presence of a Y chromosome during maturation vastly changes the human body, and athletics is all about the physicality of the human body. As much as I want transgendered people to be accepted for who they are, the underlying purpose of having a “womens” division is to give athletes without a Y chromosome the chance to gain the benefits of athletics, and compete at the highest possible level. I believe that allowing people with a Y chromosome to break those barriers would be an existential threat to the concept of women’s sports.
I’d really appreciate some further clarity on these points, specifically:
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What do the bathroom laws in these states specifically allow trans women to do? Do they apply only to single-stall toilets (as seems to be the case in California) or to bathrooms with multiple stalls? Do they also apply to locker rooms and women-only gyms? This information is very hard to find on Google, but it’s crucial to the debate.
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Most importantly, how are these states defining woman? Can a trans woman simply declare that they’re women? Or is there more gatekeeping involved and if so, what kind of tests do they apply? I’ve spent a good hour looking for this information and everything I find is vague and contradictory.
P.S. - Your first cite is behind a paywall. Would you happen to have a link to a free copy? Thanks.
My schedule has gotten crazy today, but I’ll try to find the specifics of the Mass. law from the UCLA study and the city level ordinances from the NPF study. I don’t have access to the raw data from the paywalled study, only the abstract and notes from the link.
Thanks. I appreciate it.
Millennia of oppression reinforced by violence and social conditioning.
I don’t understand why women would be afraid of gender identity, scare quotes or no. But if women are inclined to be afraid of men, they’re going to be afraid of stereotypical male-appearing transmen, so if that’s what you’re asking, then yes, gender identity is included. So it’s not “or”, it’s “and”
I agree completely.
I was responding to a post that mentioned “doesn’t believe in biological sex” as though that was the default TRA stance. I expanded on my own attitude to the importance of biological sex in the debate - that it’s not binary, and therefore (i intended to convey) I also don’t put it on a pedestal. It wasn’t a rebuttal or in reference to gender at all, it was putting a point on a continuum that already had attitudes to biological sex put on it by the person I was replying to. Who wasn’t you.
Not that you seem to think there’s any difference between sex and gender, judging by your citing…
I don’t know - is it cringier than casually slipping in mentions of attention-seeking fake suicides after an opponent mentions their very real suicide attempts?
That makes it sound like you think women today are irrational to be more scared of men. Plenty of men do think that, so lets get it out of the way now. Do you believe a woman who eg won’t jog alone because she is afraid of male violence has a reasonable fear?
Men are more dangerous because they are generally stronger, more aggressive, usually sexually attracted to women and tend to objectify us, etc. How someone identifies doesn’t affect any of that, that’s my point. Identity alone makes no practical difference.
Some of the things that usually go with that identity, like taking cross gender hormones, really do make a difference, physically and mentally, but internal gender identity alone doesn’t.
I should probably say, for the record, that I don’t give a toss about almost all sport, and don’t care how their proponents plan to arrange them. I have no objection to cis-women-only leagues, or testosterone-based ones, or any particular division anyone wants. The only sports I do play are completely unsegregated, but even there, if cis-women wanted to form their own leagues, more power to them.
Hells no. No more than a Black person has good reasons to be scared of Whites. Sorry if it came across that way. I don’t mean they’re socially conditioned to be scared in the face of reasons not to, I mean millennia of social organization has oppressed them. They are perfectly rational to be scared.
Aah, I think I see - you mean just internal identity? I don’t know - the transwomen I know were not stereotypically male (aggressive, for example) even before HRT and surgery. Where do you view cross-dressing as “making a difference”?
I appreciate you and @Cheesesteak engaging me on this.
Just so I understand, though, if transwomen were to tell you that they feel a team devoted to biological females denies them of their humanity, how would you respond? Because I have no problem telling someone that affirmation of their humanity is a “them” problem, but not a “me and everyone else” problem. I’m a cold-hearted bitch like that. It seems to me that once we go down the path of indulging those kind of feelings in one arena (public restrooms), we’re putting ourselves in a pickle if we don’t indulge them in another one (sports).
To be honest, it would depend on how the exclusion was handled by the cis-women, to me. If it was “Sorry, but we want a league where we can excel without a previous (or current) testosterone advantage” or something along those lines, that’s fine. If it’s “sorry, but you’re not real women”, that’s different.
Yes, I mean just internal identity. And cross dressing makes a difference in how others treat you, which in turn affects how you act and see yourself. Hormones probably make more of a difference here, since they have big effects on strength and sex drive.
Certainly some individuals are pretty unstereotypical and fit in better with the gender they identify as even before transition, but plenty of others aren’t - Caitlyn Jenner for example. Having a male/female gender identity by no means guarantees personality attributes that line up with it, any more than physical ones.
And I think it’s rather different to the black/white thing because even without any history or society, physical differences between the sexes will still exist and make a difference to our lives.
That’s fair.
I can’t say. I’ve never interacted with a trans person who wasn’t in some way presenting.
All the people I know who don’t are explicitly genderqueer, not trans.
I think they will still exist, but I don’t think they need make much of a difference in our lives (outside sport, it seems). At least, I don’t think women should live in fear of men, and I think that’s achievable even with the sex differences.
Although not to sound like a kook, but I don’t think those kind of not-easily-mutable physical differences between the sexes are going to last more than a couple more centuries. I think easy and reversible sex change will be an option in the posthuman future.
I appreciate that you are able to see this. Unfortunately, most trans rights activists believe otherwise. See posts from @Banquet_Bear; this is the dominant position within the trans movement. They believe a year of estrogen therapy negates the advantages the physical advantages that males have over females. They have absolutely no qualms with males going against females in contact sports, even though evidence shows this puts females at significant injury risk. They believe gender affirmation trumps female access to athletic opportunities. So when you argue for gender affirmation being treated as a human right, understand you are siding with those who want the “existential threat” to women’s sports to prevail.
So my question to you and other allies is this: if TRA’s can argue that transwomen are entitled to women’s athletic opportunities without being accused of misogyny and bigotry, then why can’t women advocate for their rights and concerns without being accused of transphobia and bigotry? Why the double standard?
When it comes to our position on trans rights (not ideological beliefs), it seems our differences are a matter of degree not kind. While you draw the line at sports, so-called TERFs draw the line at locker rooms and other spaces. This needs to be understood.
That’s not been where you or RickJay have been drawing the line.