In this, as in all things, remember that America is Unique™.
You notice that I haven’t engaged you very much in this discussion? It’s because just about everyone else been able to engage me respectfully, without acting like I’m over here eating trans babies for breakfast.
To be honest, once you admitted that you don’t care what happens to ciswomen, I stopped reading much of what you have to say. Without ciswomen, your gender class would cease to exist. This is true on multiple levels. Just think on that for a minute.
Can you suggest a standard that isn’t accessible solely to the wealthy and able-bodied?
Sympathy? Sure. However, the presence of a single person with an intact penis does not inherently make a space so unsafe as to represent a violation of a woman’s rights. Yes, if men were routinely parading through these spaces for prurient purposes, that would be a failure of the system. A person sincerely using these spaces for their intended purposes is a far different thing, even if they happen to have a penis.
Respect is earned, and you have shown time and time again that you don’t respect us transwomen (not men, WOMEN), so why should I extend the same courtesy? There are people here I engage with more respect, but I’ve dealt with TERF ideology before, and I have no respect for people who start with the premise that we aren’t who we say we are. I don’t see any positive discussion with someone who holds that view, I’m just tired of you and your allies pretending like you care about anybody but yourselves.
Can you? Not being snarky, but its not on me to propose anything. Those who are making demands are responsible for coming up with a reasonable plan. It needs to show a balanced consideration for all of society, not just trans community.
A plan that has stipulated not requirements is not reasonable. I see more a lot more problems that benefits.
OK, that’s where you lose me, @Cheesesteak. Why are you assuming it will be a single person? Why should we ever assume that it will always be a single person?
We shouldn’t amend a policy under the assumption that only a tiny number of people will take advantage of the change. We should amend a policy assuming there will be lots of people seeking benefits. If allowing a single intact male in a women’s prison is acceptable to you but a women’s prison full of intact males troubles you, then guess what? That means you didn’t really want with the single intact male inside. You just couldn’t be worked up enough about it to tell that person “no”.
I think a lot of folks are like you. They think that if a policy is abused, we’ll be able to fix it with no problem. If a lot of males start using the women’s restroom, we’ll know TWAW is being abused and we’ll put an end to it. If a lot of males pop up in women’s prisons, we’ll know they are abusing TWAW and we’ll figure something out. But how many women must be harmed before the alarm bell is sounded? And how exactly do we figure something out after the fact? Some things are very difficult to roll back once you institutionalize them. See every government entitlement of the past two centuries
One thing that is not being addressed at all is how to handle low-level male-presenting creepers in the women’s locker room. Men creepers currently exist in the men’s locker room. I don’t see why they wouldn’t do the same in the women’s locker room if they were over there. Even if they are sincerely transwomen, if they are into women, I would assume they would check out the naked women in the locker room just like most males would if in that situation.
I would describe the male locker room creepers behavior similar to how men checkout women in public by looking, catching their eye, staring, and looking them up and down. Just like you can’t get someone thrown out of a coffee shop for that, you can’t get them thrown out of the locker room for it either. But as a guy, it’s just a nuisance to me and I generally ignore it. But I would imagine that women would feel very threatened by this behavior if a male-looking person was checking them out in the locker room. If I had to guess, I would guess that 1% of the men in the locker room exhibit this kind of creeper behavior. Some are major creepers who are just doing laps between the locker room and showers, and others are minor who just check out the scenery while changing.
Talking to the manager would likely not be able to fix it. The manager would say that person is allowed in the locker room and they weren’t doing anything illegal. If the behavior doesn’t rise to the level where they would get thrown out of a coffee shop, it won’t get them thrown out of a locker room, either.
I would tend to think that medically transitioned people would be more likely to exhibit behaviors similar to their gender identity, so I would guess that transwomen with HRT would not be exhibiting the stereotypical male behavior of checking out naked women. So I could see a legitimate reason for at least a transwoman to be on hormone therapy in order to use the women’s locker room. But even in that case, the cis-women have a legitimate reason to be fearful of being checked out while naked by a male-looking person. I don’t think they should be told to just suck it up.
So why not let men in? My husband would never hurt a fly. Why doesn’t this entitle him to undress in the ladies room? Why should women object to his presence but not a trans woman’s?
The logic for one works for another.
This is why I’m not understanding why folks aren’t arguing for the abolishment of legal sex designations and sex-segregated spaces. Without any reserved boxes and spaces, we could all identify how whatever we want with no gatekeeping. If letting intact males be housed with women is that important, then why isn’t anyone calling for “co-ed” prisons? All the seasons of Real World, Big Brother, and Survivor have shown us that the sexes can be captive together without killing each other.
Seems to me that if we don’t want women’s spaces to be transformed into mixed-sex spaces, wherein males are numerous and plentiful, then we’ve got to be prepared to do some gatekeeping from the very beginning, even if it hurts someone’s feelings. If we’re OK with these spaces eventually evolving into mixed-sex spaces because we can’t stomach the idea of doing any enforcement, then we need to stop calling them women’s spaces.
Sure, but this is just as true in the opposite direction - a policy that’s too strict is going to end up harming people, too, and will be just as hard to undo. Your worried that too much liberty will allow creepy men to overrun women’s locker rooms. I’m worried that too many restrictions will allow actual bigots to effectively exclude trans people from public life. The difference is, your scenario is hypothetical - my scenario is historical.
Because we also support keeping single-sex areas as they are. Transwomen have the same concerns about men that ciswomen do, and we don’t want them around us in locker rooms or restrooms (and certainly not prisons) either. I can see non-binary people who don’t clearly fit into a specific gender identity being a kind of gray area, but that’s why I go by their gender expression instead in those cases.
I’m just not getting how I’m advocating for anything that would exclude trans people from public life. Not having an “F” on your driver’s license does not deprive you of access to “public life”. It just means not everyone is entitled to an F on their driver’s license. As long as you have access to fair employment, housing, education, healthcare, and safety…what more do you want? Are you saying that having these things isn’t enough for happiness and security and self-fulfillment? Explain to me how is sentencing a fully intact male to a “gender and sexual minorities” block of the men’s prison a form of oppression and injustice? I’m just not getting it, @Miller. I’ve tried my damndest, but I still don’t understand why you and others are giving so much weight to gender affirmation.
The only reason why my scenario is hypothetical is because we’ve never done the experiment you’re demanding we do, where we legally classify males as females based solely on their word. If you don’t think this is a super radical idea that is deserving of a lot of thought and consideration, I don’t know what to tell you. But as I keep saying, if this plan of yours fails, it will not be you who suffers the cost. It will be me and people like me. You will have the luxury of standing on the sidelines as a spectator while people like me suffer from something they didn’t want and didn’t agree with. So you can afford to be idealistic. Naturally I’m going to be more cautious because I actually have some skin in the game that you don’t have. I also work in government. I know how stupid government can be. I don’t trust people to implement slogans with nuance and common sense. I always assume that slogans will be taken literally, so that’s why I’m trying to figure out how TWAW will be implemented. So far, I’m not convinced people even know what failure would look like because all they care about is a feeling of a tiny number of people. As long as those people are happy, fuck whatever else happens, amirite? I just can’t with that.
Let’s not do that. I’m persuaded by the studies @CheeseSteak linked to that there is still a benefit to single sex spaces even under self-ID. For one thing, how many would-be predators even know about it? And co-ed prisons in particular are a terrible, terrible idea. This is one area where I am convinced we need much stricter rules as the potential for abuse is so obvious and there are already several examples of policies causing problems.
I really disagree with the bolded part. An overly-strict policy could indeed harm people in the meantime, but it would be much easier to liberalise more later than it is to go in the opposite direction and take something away from people. And if it’s conceptualised as a pure civil rights issue, I’m worried it will be impossible to maintain exceptions even in areas where it’s essential, like sports.
This isn’t a bad idea, it could protect gay prisoners as well since they are also at increased risk of sexual assault according to the report linked earlier.
Because they are gender essentialists.
In their view, women are women—not because they are in the same biological sex class—but they have in common a female essence that makes them similar to each other.
Similar with respect to what, you might ask?
We’re thousands of posts into this thread I still don’t know the answer.
I haven’t drawn any lines on rules for bathrooms or locker rooms.
As plenty of other people have pointed out, this isn’t some experiment that has never been done before. Self-ID laws are in a number of countries, like Norway, Denmark, and Ireland with no major issues. What will actually happen if the UK adopts a 'self-declaration' gender recognition law? | PinkNews | Latest lesbian, gay, bi and trans news | LGBTQ+ news
I get this, I guess. But it sure seems like folks are being selective in their essentialism.
Are there are any nonbinary activists who are demanding for the right to have “N” on their driver’s license? Or gender fluid demanding “M/F”? Are there any agenders who feel they are being denied public access because their driver’s license does not have a big ole “A” on it? What prisons should we put agender people in so that we don’t deny them their humanity? Equating legal sex with gender identity sounds great when we’re just moving electrons around on a Discord server, but I don’t see how it can fairly and reasonably implemented.
@DemonTree, I hope you don’t think I really want co-ed prisons. I do not.
I would not support segregationist policies like that, and now you also want to segregate gay people as well? Wtf?! I wouldn’t allow them to do that to me in the military, despite plenty of people arguing it should be done because we gays “can’t be trusted”. This is why these arguments dovetail so nicely with the religious right.