Attacks on the reality and importance of sex is baked into the gender affirmation movement. You can’t maintain sex-based rights while simultaneously allowing males to self-ID into female-exclusive spaces. We wouldn’t be talking about males occupying women’s locker rooms, prisons, and sports if there wasn’t an agenda to make sex-based distinctions porous and ill-defined.
You may not readily come across a TRA who will explicitly say that sex doesn’t exist, but you will find plenty who claim sex is a social construct based on arbitrary criteria. You will find plenty calling women “breeders”, “bleeders”, “vagina-havers” and the like. You wouldn’t see so many people objecting to the idea that only females become pregnant, if the importance of reproductive anatomy in organizing humanity was properly respected.
Just curious. What do you think this movement would need to look like for you to agree it’s trying to subvert mankind’s understanding and respect for sex classes?
You “don’t understand” what I’ve just described as a deliberate and concerted effort to cancel or erase JKR by trans-activists. Do you need me to provide you a cite for this as well?
You know, it’s this sort of slippery disingenuous rhetoric on your part that makes me think engaging with you on this subject is an exercise of diminished returns.
What? Of course they’re trying to “cancel” her (meaning to damage her public reputation to reduce her influence)! What, you thought I was denying that this was an attempt to “cancel” JKR? What did I say that could possibly lead you to believe I was saying this? You weren’t being clear at all.
We had this conversation in a thread about “cancel culture”. There, you denied that she was being cancelled or could be cancelled, therefore no real harm was being done. Here you’re acknowledging that there is at least the intent of harm.
Unless my memory is way off, I didn’t deny that there were attempts to cancel her, I denied that she was facing any real possibility of real harm. I don’t consider maybe losing some influence to be real harm for someone so wealthy and influential.
And I recall that nobody was concerned about whether JKR would lose financial security or influence. The conversation was about whether or not cancel culture is an extant threat to a long standing tradition of liberal value of free speech, including speech that some did not like. I believe you, among many others, disagreed that such a threat exists or is being fairly characterized as such.
Bringing this back to the subject of this thread; Is JKR’s characterization of “sex is real” an attempt to erase trans people or is she being mischaracterized as transphobic?
I’m not surprised that the people in your social circle are against the thing in bold. Polls consistency shows this is true for most of the public.
So isn’t it crazy that transwomen are routinely competing against female athletes, against almost everyone’s wishes? And they are breaking women’s records. This is happening around the world, at the high school level and up.
I don’t how it’s possible to square all the above with the belief that only a fringe minority is trying to delegitimize the concept of sex. If it’s a fringe, it been a hugely influential fringe.
Rather than relying on what things “look like”, I would prefer to practice a modicum of scientific discipline.
As a good start, it would be worth paying very close attention to any series of carefully worded surveys of randomly sampled participants. It’d be best to work from there, depending on how people answered.
I’m not saying you’re wrong. Having an opinion contrary to pretty much everyone I interact with on a regular basis doesn’t automatically make you wrong. But it does make bare assertions less persuasive.
It happens all. the. time. that a small minority with outsized preferences are able to achieve influence greatly out of proportion to their actual numbers. The vast majority of political corruption works in exactly this way, where a very small number of highly informed and interested parties are essentially the only people providing “information” about certain legislation to lawmakers.
The people making poor decisions could be dealing with just a couple thousand crazies nationwide, a few dozen locals, coordinated by the internet. High volume, high rage. Squeaky wheel gets the grease. On the other side, crickets. No coordination because there’s no mass movement to just… keep things sensibly the same. Again: I don’t know that this is how it’s working here. But it does mimic how an awful lot of other things work in our society.
I believe that gender dysphoria is real. I came to this believe not by studying gender issues, but by reading about other types of dysphoria. I believe the brain is the most important organ in the body. When I cut my hand, the sensation I feel comes from the brain. When I have an orgasm, that sensation exists entirely in my brain, no matter what illusion my brain creates. Although my brain maps sensations so I feel like it’s coming from the associated body part it really isn’t. My hand has no consciousness. My genitals are unaware.
There is a virtual map of the body draped over the brain, as it were - called the homunculus.
People with certain types of dysphoria sometimes have damage to this body map. They may feel that their arm or leg doesn’t belong to them. The limb works and responds perfectly, but the person has a persistent belief that the arm doesn’t belong to them, that it’s this weird thing attached to their body. This causes them great distress and the frequently seek illegal amputations.
I believe that gender dysphoria is real in that the cortical homunculus in at least some of those affected is that of a different gender than the physical body.
I know that genitalia are real. But I believe that biological sex is determined by a combination of the physical genitalia, the gender of the homunculus and the balance of brain and body chemistry. I do not believe that only the genitalia counts and that the other biological factors are insignificant.
Yes, when you are born your doctor makes a determination of your gender at that moment. That is because at that moment you are naked and there are no other indicators. They are making that judgement based on the physical characteristics that they observe
But socially, in my day to day ordinary life, I also make a snap calculation as to the gender of people I meet. I base that calculation on the outward physical appearance of that person, much as the doctor did at birth. But I make that calculation based on physical appearance such as dress and mannerisms. I don’t stare down their crotch looking for a bulge. I don’t try to play “guess the genitalia”. In fact, I try not to think about their genitalia at all and I find it a little disturbing that apparently so many people do.
The words “day to day ordinary life” are important here. I have identified what I think are the three biological indicators of gender. In some situations, mostly medical, the physical form factor and chemical balance of the body take precedent.
Despite all the histrionics in this thread, I still don’t know exactly what you are advocating for. You guys seem to spend a lot of time on fringe websites mining for horror stories and you certainly think this is an overriding societal problem, but what is your solution?
Seriously, what do you want? How would you legislate this, exactly. How would these new laws be worded. Exactly what law that isn’t on the book right now would allay your fears? How would it be phrased? How should these new laws be enforced in a way that’s not invasive?
Not trying to be difficult, but I don’t know what to distill from this.
@RickJay said there is a concerted effort to erase the concept of sex using language manipulation.
You have denied this is happening to any significant extent, and you mentioned how everyone you know understands that sex and gender should be separate distinctions. You specifically bring up trans inclusion in sports as an example of an issue everyone you know disapproves.
So to counter your perception that there isn’t a sweeping effort to disregard sex, I described all the ways the larger gender affirmation movement is undermining the separation of sex from gender. TRA campaigns to have the latter legally treated as equivalent to the former are happening worldwide. Women’s sports—which you said all your friends and associates are against— are being impacted because TRAs have prioritized this arena for gender affirmation.
And your response to all of that is the above?
Okay, lets agree that you are right. A hugely powerful fringe is acting in contravention to the wishes of the larger public. How does this counter @RickJay’s belief that sex-specific language is under serious threat? Can you walk us through your thought process here? From where I sit, it doesn’t matter if a million TRAs are trying to do this or if it’s only a few influential ones. Sex-specific language is under attack.
This conversation is making me feel the same way I did 10 years, when I was trying to convince people that cops were systemically abusing black people. “It’s just a few bad apples” was the prevailing view. “I just don’t see it happening”. “None of the cops I know are racist”. “That’s an isolated incident”. You can guess that very few black people went around saying this.
I pretty much agree with your points about gender dysphoria and objective identification of people’s genders. I guess for me, I think it’s worth hashing the minutia out because we can’t always count on reasonable people doing the objective identification or trans people being reasonable about what gender-specific areas they should have access to.
I do think many of these problem areas could have solutions which could be reasonable and legally solid. In essence, having the laws reflect what reasonable accommodations should be. I don’t think it is unreasonable for trans individuals to reasonably conform to gender norms and be denied access if they can’t make that effort. If someone’s dysphoria is so bad that they can’t consider living without being trans, then it doesn’t seem unreasonable for them to conform to the gender norms they are identifying with (e.g. a transwoman conforming with typical female body hair norms). So along those lines, here’s some ideas of how I could see it working:
Bathrooms and locker rooms can always be used by people who genetically correspond to the gender without restriction. So all XX can use the women’s room and all XY can use the men’s without restriction. But intersex usage would require objective and visible conformity with gender norms. So a transwoman would need to conform to body hair norms (e.g. no beard), wear clothes which were generally identified as women’s, perhaps even have longer hair or other external changes which clearly signaled they were making an effort to conform to gender norms. In addition, they would have to make an effort to minimize obvious masculine markers, such as a beard, deep voice, and typically-masculine behaviors. A genetically XX person can have short hair, facial hair, wear a heavy metal t-shirt and 501 jeans, and “man-splain” to everyone she sees and still use the women’s locker room. But if a genetically XY person wants to use the womens locker room, they have to visibly and obviously appear to be making significant efforts to appear as a more typical woman. These kinds of requirements would not be opinion based. If someone complains that there’s a “man” in the women’s locker room, the gym manager can make objective identifications about their body hair, clothing, etc. to use as a determination.
I want to point out that I totally believe a sincere transwoman can look and act completely masculine and I don’t think she has to change. However, I feel such a woman should not be granted unrestricted access to traditionally women-only spaces because she is not making an effort to fit into those spaces. If she wants to use women-only spaces, I feel it’s not unreasonable for her to meet typical feminine characteristics.
I believe dysphoria is real. Maybe sometimes it’s based on a homunculus, but I don’t think it always is, because there are people who had dysphoria and no longer suffer from it. And I believe there are brain differences between men and women, whether inborn or due to nurture, but that’s one of the reasons I don’t believe in TWAW.
I’d like an end to the ‘affirmation only’ model and an end to pressure on medical professionals to endorse an ideological view of transgender people that isn’t actually backed by research. Therapists need to be free to explore non-medical treatments before proceeding to social transition, drugs and surgery, particularly in adolescents with no history of gender non-conforming behaviour. Researchers need to be free to investigate how previous sexual abuse, internalised homophobia or misogyny, peer influences, autism, OCD, etc can impact on gender dysphoria, or look at any other avenue that seems promising, rather than having their agenda set by activists. I’d like to see some research on the effect of early social transition on desistence rates, much more caution prescribing puberty blockers, and for ‘gender confirmation’ surgery to be banned for children under 18.
As for trans rights, I’m mainly concerned to avoid the situation where sex is entirely replaced by gender identity in law, thus making it a human rights issue to treat trans women differently to cis women in any way whatsoever, no matter how absurd or awful the result. I think trans people have a right to safety and security, to not be discriminated against in jobs, housing, etc, but I don’t think they have a right to validation. If validating their identities doesn’t affect anyone else, all well and good, but when it affects women’s rights to safety, privacy, fairness in sports etc, that needs to be recognised, and compromises made on individual issues, preferably backed by research. I also think it is essential to have accurate data collection, for which purpose both sex and gender need to be recorded.
Oh yeah, and I think people can self-define however they like, but no one else should be forced to recognise their identity, any more than we are forced to recognise someone else’s religion.
My solution would be to treat gender identity separate from biological sex. A male wants to feminine pronouns? OK, it would be jerkish to deny their request. But if they want to be legally considered a female, they need to alter their biology in permanent fashion. This is not an unreasonable expectation for someone truly suffering from gender dysphoria. If they are fine with their body and just want permission to wear a skirt, then they obviously aren’t suffering from gender dysphoria. They are suffering from something else.
I also believe we need to be moving towards mixed-sex spaces. Maintain sex segregated spaces but also provide third spaces for all the folks who feel like they stick out like a sore thumb. Third spaces are the perfect testing ground for all the gender ideology assumptions everyone expects women to be the guinea pigs for. If third spaces wind up being just as safe as women’s only spaces for both ciswomen and transwomen, then the gender ideologues will be vindicated. But I fail to see why women and girls who wish to be segregated should have to be the test subjects for this experiment.
I think the status quo should be upheld for women’s spaces. Currently, transwomen who pass as females are using these facilities. I think transwomen who don’t want to play this game because they love their masculine male bodies should stay the fuck out. Their need for gender affirmation is not more important than women and girls’ need for safety and security. I believe entitling males to women’s spaces will degrade safety and security of those spaces. We not should have to run this particular experiment for us to understand why. The history of our species shows what male entitlement will get women. So we should continue to give a variance to males who play by women’s notions but keep out the males who want to have their cake and eat it too. We can still be friends with them and respect them. But we shouldn’t be afraid to tell them no and close the door in their face when need be. Not even if they cry and threaten to commit suicide. If men don’t feel guilty for having violence spaces, then women should not feel guilty for not having spaces that welcome literally everyone. It should be perfectly acceptable for a gender class to be exclusive and to gatekeep who is allowed inside its doors.
In summary, I don’t want any male claiming a woman identity to be entitled to anything. And I definitely don’t want the “female” card to handed to anyone who wants it. I want “woman” and “female” to mean something besides a nebulous, unproven mental state. “Woman” is not something that should be reduced to clothing or behavior, and we need to stop supporting this bullshit notion.
Saying “I don’t know that this is actually happening to a significant extent” is not remotely the same thing as saying “I deny that this is happening to a significant extent.”
Saying “Here is a plausible alternative hypothesis” is not remotely the same thing as saying “This alternative hypothesis is definitely true.”
These points have been made multiple times in this thread already. It’s like we’re going around in circles.
We should treat gender affirmation as a social courtesy, not as a constitutionally protected characteristic.
We should retain sex-based protections such as single-sex accommodations and sports. Special needs associated with transgender can be met through the addition of gender neutral provisions. When space is an issue, the room that should be rendered gender neutral should be the men’s room. Females deserve to keep their privacy and safety unthreatened, since they are a vulnerable group based on biology.
Still allow a pathway for trans people to get legal sex changes, but self-ID alone is not the way. To prevent abuse and/or destroy the meaningfulness of legal sex classifications, a person going from M to F must be objectively and permanently altered. (Exceptions can made for people whose genitalia was ambiguous at birth).
Strong gatekeeping is needed for dysphoric children/teens. Prior to the trans movement, the vast majority of gender dysphoric kids eventually outgrew their distress when left to their own devices. Many of those same kids now are encouraged to see their bodies as wrong and in need of medical or surgical intervention. This has implications on their mental health, physical health, and sexual health. It is also a disparate impact on homosexuals.
Here are some nice-to-haves that I ask of the trans community and it’s allies:
** Consistency**. Take gender dysphoria, as an example. It’s usually the first thing someone will point to when explaining why they believe there is an organic basis for transwomen being women (and vice versa for transmen). But what about the huge proportion of transgender persons who aren’t dysphoric? Some people consider themselves trans because they simply want to express femininity, masculinity, or nothing at all. If they are women just the same as the person with GD, then why even point to the existence of GD as if it means anything special?
And if, by chance, an ally doesn’t consider non-GD to be “real trans”, then how should the law discriminate them from those that are real trans? If it’s not feasible and yet gender affirmation is going to be treated as a human right, then this means accepting a large number of people misclassified as trans will be entitled to be treated as the opposite sex in the eyes of the law. It becomes impossible to argue this doesn’t impinge upon sex-based protections, as shown by the infiltration of women’s only shelters by trans imposters. It is unreasonable to ignore this.
Integrity: Why do we keep talking about transwomen and transmen when the movement is also pushing that gender is a spectrum? If gender is a spectrum, then what are the sex-based analogues of all of these infinite “in-between“ genders? I mean, this is how it should work if we extrapolate from the “born in the wrong body” model, right? If allies feel comfortable ignoring the tetrisgender et al identities because they seem wacky or whatever, fair enough. But it is intellectually dishonest to not acknowledge that the gender identity concept, as promoted by TRAs, is not limited to male, female, and non-binary identities. The concept has no limits because it lacks a clear definition. I would like allies to be honest about this rather than acting as though tweaking the binary concept is all that is on the table right now. It really isn’t.
“Coherence”: There are way too much internally contradictory concepts comprising gender theory. I spelled out the two biggest divergent viewpoints thousands of posts ago, but there are many more on top of that. It
At the (high) risk of rehashing more points made earlier in the thread, I think this could use some more probing because here’s where ISTM things get logically (and legally) problematic.
You seem to agree that a transgender woman should be accommodated in her request for feminine pronouns, because it would be “jerkish” to insist on calling her “him”. But in that case I don’t see how it’s not-jerkish to insist on calling her “a male” even when you’re not referring specifically to her birth biological sex.
I don’t think it’s really going to be feasible in the long run to keep half-assing transgender-identity acceptance this way. If we’re willing, for instance, to use feminine names and pronouns for transgender women in deference to their female gender identity, while at the same time we insist on calling them “males” or “men” in defiance of their female gender identity, that’s just a pointless muddle of simultaneously patronizing and disrespecting them.
ISTM that a better and more consistent approach is to use the descriptors “women” and “female” in a broad social sense for both cisgender and transgender women, while still drawing distinctions where necessary between cisgender and transgender women on the basis of biological sex.
Here’s where the muddle starts to look potentially legally iffy as well (although, again, IANAL), with these vague criteria about “pass[ing] as females” and “play[ing] by women’s notions”.
Are you advocating that “women’s spaces” should be restricted to
(a) people born with biologically female genes/genitalia, irrespective of whether/how much they socially conform to gender stereotypes of female appearance, or
(b) people who socially conform adequately to gender stereotypes of female appearance, irrespective of whether their birth genes/genitalia are biologically female?
ISTM that this question really needs a clear answer in order to figure out whether or not such policies would result in unlawful discrimination on the basis of sex.
Another question that needs answering in that context is whether the same sort of restrictions would apply in the counterpart case of “men’s spaces”.
Because ISTM that your ideal solution here is a situation where biologically female transgender men would voluntarily stay out of women’s spaces in favor of using the men’s spaces that they prefer, while biologically male transgender women would be officially banned from using the women’s spaces that they prefer. (That is, unless the transgender women comply with some unclear-to-me criteria for “passing as female” which would require what, exactly? surgical and hormonal transitioning? always wearing skirts? something in between?)
I can’t see how such a situation would possibly avoid the discriminatory result of mandating that transgender men can use whichever spaces they want but transgender women can’t.
And if you get around that inequality by mandating that transgender men are barred from men’s spaces, just as transgender women are barred from women’s spaces, then you inevitably end up with transgender men in women’s spaces. Since a lot of transgender men are strongly male-presenting as well as male-identified, that’s going to give a strong appearance of having men in women’s spaces.
You may argue that that doesn’t “really count” because those male-appearing male-identifying transgender men with their he/him pronouns are “really” biologically female. Okay, but I’m not at all convinced that that’s going to do anything in practical terms to counteract the strong appearance that there are men in these women’s spaces.
We’ve discussed this dilemma several times before. But nobody yet has proposed a persuasive and specific way of enacting such restrictions that will be both equitable in terms of avoiding sex discrimination and effective in ensuring that everyone who uses women’s spaces will adequately “pass as females”.