J K Rowling and the trans furore

In My Humble Opinion
4186

From the site you linked:

The so-called “homicidal girl” who is at risk of being released into the public in the next few days had the authenticity of her change of gender questioned by two separate experts, court documents reveal.

Despite the views of both experts, Gript understands that “G” nonetheless obtained a gender recognition certificate, and is now, officially and legally, a woman.

However she has undergone no hormonal or transition treatment, and has the body and physiology of a young adult male.

The teenager, who suffers from a personality disorder, has repeatedly expressed desires to rape and murder, and had threatened to murder her mother on numerous occasions.

While a High Court order prohibits the identification of the girl or specific details of her case, it is understood that she is thought to be a danger to women, and her mother has fled her home and moved to a different part of the country following safety advice from Gardaí.

This person suffered horrible abuse as a child and is obviously mentally disturbed. Putting her in a men’s prison would be problematic. But how would it not be cruel and unusual punishment to lock women up with someone who has the body and physiology of a young adult male and the avowed desire to rape and murder women?

I hope Ireland can find a way around this problem they created passing a law without proper forethought and public scrutiny.

I also saw a link to this:

Ireland’s leading endocrinologist, Professor Donal O’Shea, has warned that he believes some advocacy groups are prepping patients to fast-track their way to gender transition - without undergoing an appropriate mental health assessment.

“I have had a number of patients who have told me that they have been coached in the answers to give so that they give the ‘right’ answers to psychologists and psychiatrists who will be asking them questions before receiving hormone treatment and gaining access to surgery,” Prof O’Shea said.

“And I have been told by patients who have had hormone treatment, who have had surgery, who are now unhappy with their decision, that they have been instructed by patient advocates not to report this because it would be bad for the wider community.”

Some advocacy groups are calling for an ‘‘informed consent’’ model, which means the individual who seeks transition will be assisted so long as they state that they fully understand what is involved and agree to it. However, Prof O’Shea advocates the holistic model of care, where the ultimate decisions about treatments ranging from hormones to surgery, are made jointly with the individual once a detailed psychosocial assessment has been carried out. This will allow even the most vulnerable individuals to progress safely on their gender journey.

"I have been 25 years dealing with individuals transitioning; allowing a model where the patients would come forward and say ‘I have read about the condition and I would like the treatment’ is a recipe for multiple disasters.

“It would be like if a patient who had pneumonia came to see me and said ‘I have read about pneumonia and I would like my lung removed.’ It’s my duty of care to inform the person that ‘taking your lung out would be an over-reaction here and would be negligent on my part, so let’s try a week of antibiotics first’. Our job is to make sure that the treatment is right for that individual and that the options and implications are explained.”

This sort of thing is why I am sceptical of these advocacy organisations, and why I’m glad Rowling has drawn attention to the issue.

4187

Right now we’re talk about Ireland potentially sending a deranged rapist who ripped the eyelids off a social

4188

@AHunter3

But over and over again it seems like the folks who gravitate towards the gender critical and/or trans exclusive branch of rad fem aren’t making any attempt to reach out and negotiate

Right now we’re talking about Ireland potentially sending a deranged rapist who ripped the eyelids off a social worker and has vowed to kill people to a women’s prison—solely because of their self-ID as a woman—and you think it’s GC feminists who aren’t negotiating enough? This is quite…something. What else do you think women need to compromise on if our safety, privacy, clear health information, and exclusive claim to the word “woman” and “lesbian” isn’t enough?

History one day is going to look back at this entire affair and judgements will be rendered. I don’t think the side that has assisted the perpetration of male violence on vulnerable women is going to get the winning edit.

4189

I think our ultimate goal should be a society where we don’t have gender roles at all, and we have gone some way towards that, more so for adults than children. But we very obviously are not there yet, and not likely to get there in this generation. So I’m sympathetic to people who fit in much better with the gender role assigned to the opposite sex and feel that transitioning is the best way they can live a decent life. Not everyone wants to spend their life as an activist fighting to break down gender barriers and for the right to express their real personality.

I don’t support the sort of blind ideology that says a state of mind is more important than biological differences and lived reality, but that doesn’t mean no accommodation is possible. We can support trans people in jail without giving them more rights than everyone else and without endangering women as the California bill does.

@AHunter3, what would negotiation look like to you?

4190

I admit it was a bit of a flippant remark on my part. They are both young actors and probably felt a tremendous amount of pressure to respond given their association with JKR. I suppose I should have been more understanding of their response. Especially since my own views have been informed and changed by this thread. I had no reason to care or dig deeply into this subject before. I was happy with my laissez-faire position, never having considered the important nuances. Advantages of being a bog standard liberal hetero-dude, I suppose. That said, I came here because of a creeping annoyance with the moral scolds of the woke-bros culture. I stayed for the enlightened and compelling arguments of those who support JKR’s nuanced position.

4191

If it matters any, I agree with your initial take 100%. Unless there’d been a gun held to Radcliffe’s head, there was no excuse for him to aide in JKR’s curb stomping like he did.

4192

I’m feeling uncharacteristically charitable on the eve of Yom Kippur. :slight_smile:

4193

Coming back to this:

I agree. But I’d still prefer a solution where trans people have their own prison/wings. Then they’d be free as a group to decide what if any gatekeeping was appropriate, knowing that it would be their own members affected if someone takes advantage, and without increasing risks and harm for a different vulnerable minority who are in no way responsible and get no benefit.

4194

I was disappointed in him, for sure, and in the other actors who rushed to join the condemnation and bite the hand that fed them. With any luck they’ll be apologising to her in the future.

4195

You always have to wait for an assault to happen before you can accuse someone of assaulting you. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
This applies even if they dress funny and that scares you. It applies even if you’ve been conditioned to view people that look like them as dangerous. It applies even if you are sure that everyone that looks like them is out to get you.
I think that part is very easy.

4196

Literally no one on that side in this thread is taking an absolutist position. All, without exception, hold the position that transwomen should be treated as women in many, indeed most, situations. It’s the TRA side with so many people who cross their arms and says “Trans women are women, period.”

4197

I’ve been thinking about this statement a lot, and I’m struggling to understand it.

Ten years ago, society was a bunch more hostile to transgender folks than it is now. There were no transgender representatives in the media. There were few people cisfolks–let alone ciswomen-- marching in the streets on behalf of transwomen. Indeed, bathroom bills were all the rage. I remember driving through North Carolina on a road trip and deciding I was going to save my urine until I got to South Carolina as my own personal boycott.

Fast forward to today and it seems like everyone is on the transgender train in some shape or form. You’ve got teenagers contemplating their gender identity along with their sexual identity–something that was unheard of when I was growing up. And tons of parents are bending over backwards to accommodate their trans kids, when previously they would have kicked them out of the house or sentenced them to extra Sunday School.

Every person in this thread is in support of trans rights. No one has expressed support for discriminating against them in housing, employment, or education. No one has said trans folks are stupid for dressing the way the do or acting the way they do. Everyone here has respected preferred pronoun usage. The one sticking point is our own mental concept of gender. Some folks see gender as a mental state (one that doesn’t have to be manifested outwardly in any way) and some folks see gender as a biological state (one that does have to be manifest outwardly in some way). Some of us are OK with “woman” being viewed as a social construct, but we’re adamant that “female” be tied to biology reality, so that folks who have a female anatomy can still be spoken about in a coherent, respectful, meaningful way (cuz “people with cervixes” doesn’t cut it).

I don’t know what more negotiation you expect from folks, because it seems like folks have already compromised a-plenty. If you think negotiation means everyone must believe that all transwomen are women, then I’m sorry, but that’s not going to happen. Not as long as nonbinaries and genderfluid folks keep co-opting the trans movement. When transgender movement stopped being about helping individuals suffering from gender dysphoria and being more about turning gender into a personality trait, it jumped the shark for me. When it goes back to what it once was, I’ll start tuning in again.

Yesterday I stumbled across a reddit thread created by a transgender woman bemoaning all the non-binary voices dominating the trans movement. “Don’t speak for me!” she said. Guess what she got in response? She got called a TERF. So it’s not even just ciswomen who are the enemy now, supposedly. Now it’s transwomen. You gotta wonder who exactly is pushing the TERF nonsense, if all women are the enemy now. I’m thinking it is entitled men who don’t want to negotiate anything with anyone because they are used to getting their way.

I understand you’ve always wanted to “opt out” of manhood. That’s great for you. But women can’t opt out of our biological realities. It’s easy for you to see gender as something you can opt out of it whenever you want, but the oppressed gender class hasn’t been able to find out a way to do that for the last 2 million years of our existent. Gender identity is an idea invented by people privileged enough not to have their bodies coded as inferior. So of course they think “fuck biology!” is a reasonable talking point in this discussion. Instead of expecting my side to negotiate with yours, how about ya’ll negotiate with mine? There are billions of us to your hundreds of thousands. How about y’all stop trying to turn biological sex into a bad word and stop telling us what it means to be a woman and maybe my side will concede more than we already have.

4198

There are some men that would be model prisoners in women’s prisons, too. Since model behavior doesn’t entitle them to be housed alongside women, I’m not sure what relevance this has. Again, access to women’s spaces is not a prize for being well-behaved or looking a certain way. Its for ensuring the protection of a physically vulnerable class who is disproportionately preyed upon by members of the other class.

In reading the language of the CA bill, I’m convinced it’s only a matter of time we’ll be seeing the number of males in women’s prisons outnumbering the number of females. Here is why I think this for those unable to reason this out themselves:

  • Nationwide in the U.S., roughly 90% of prisoners are male; 10% are sex offenders. These offenders are almost exclusively male.

  • Sex offenders get the most abuse in men’s prisons because if a thug wants to beat someone up, it might as well be a rapist or pedophile.

  • Sex offenders preferentially target women. They want access to victims.

  • Male sex offenders are now allowed to call themselves women and get treated as such. So not only can they escape beat-downs in men’s prison, these foxes are given a ticket into the hen house.

  • Females comprise a wee 10% of the total prison population. 10% is the same percentage of prisoners that are in for sexual offenses.

California is either going to be sued into oblivion or it’s going to bankrupt itself with inefficiencies due to a need to expand female housing and beef up security. Just stupidity all around.

4199

At one end, there are transwomen who look and act essentially like 100% ciswomen. They’ve had the surgery, they’ve had hair removal electrolysis, they’ve been transwomen for decades, etc. It seems reasonable for them to be housed with women rather than men. But on the other end, there are men who the first time say “I’m a woman” is when the judge asks if they have anything to say before sentencing. In that case it seems totally wrong to put them with women. I could see housing transwomen in the women’s jail working out in some instances, but only if there is a lot of requirements and oversight.

But aside from any threat issue, I wonder how they’ll deal with pregnancies in prison from housing sexually male and female people together. People often seek out intimate relationships in prison. It’s inevitable that transwomen are going to have relationships with females which result in preganancies.

4200

The CA bill does have a stipulation for “management or security concerns”. So if we take the law on its face, the male sexual offenders should not be in the group transferred to women’s prisons. But we shall see.

I think there would be a serious outcry if male prisoners reached some critical number in women’s prisons. If we’re supposed to believe that TWAW, we really shouldn’t be bothered by it. But I think a lot of people would be bothered–even people for whom TWAW is a personal mantra. Because I think most people have it in their mind that transwomen will always comprise a fixed percentage of the population–a very small percentage. Which is why all the issues we keep bringing up don’t seem like a big deal to them.

The prison system won’t have much of a choice, I fear. It will be able to reject a request for transfer if the male prisoner is a serial rapist. The ACLU wouldn’t want to touch that with a 10-ft pole. But if the prisoner is a drug trafficker with no violent offenses? The system won’t have much of a choice but to transfer unless it wants a lawsuit. They can stall a little if there’s no room in the women’s prison. But eventually they’ll have to accommodate since gender affirmation is a human right.

4201

I’m not seeing any evidence of safeguards in Canada and Ireland’s prison systems. This makes me less than optimistic right now that CA will be any different.

But yes we shall see.

4202

All four of you are right. (I used to be able to read with comprehension! Really I did! It’s a long thread and I’m still getting used to this platform)

Yes, physical bodies are real things, and so are the experiences that are directly tied to be perceived as people with those bodies and also the experiences that are directly tied to having those specific bodies themselves. Gender identity doesn’t negate any of that.

I have had my own spate of headaches with transgender activists over the way they tend to subsume everything into gender. It’s like the old biology-is-destiny thing except turned inside-out.

I totally and without reservation support the right of women to organize around an identity that excludes trans women (and weirdos like me for that matter) on the basis that they’re organizing around a lifetime experience of living as and being treated & regarded as female.

I don’t have an easy pat answer for the prisons and the sports issues, other than to say shouting back and forth “trans women are WOMEN!” “no, trans women are MEN!” isn’t likely to help matters, but you’re right, you weren’t doing that. I apologize.

4203

Thanks for confirming your position. I thought this is what you had expressed earlier in this thread, so it was baffling to see what looked like the complete opposite.

4204

And Illegal immigrant murdered a women named Katy Steinle. This was one incident, An anecdote.
Yet the anti-immigration bigots believe that “Katy Steinle would be alive today if we restricted immigration “ constitutes a valid argument against immigration.
Karen White is one person. She’s fucked-up, for sure and I don’t have anything good to say about Karen White.

But it is no more valid than I’d I started mining the internet for incidents where black men attacked white women in the workplace, used those incidents to claim that workplaces should be racially segregated, then accuse everyone who rightfully disagreed with me of wanting me to be attacked.

It’s far too easy for us to let safety fears erode our civil and personal rights. We release violent criminals when the cops make procedural errors in their cases, even though we know they are guilty. People often commit violent crimes when they are under suspicion for other violent crimes, because we couldn’t meet a standard of proof.
Certainly our streets would be way safer if we could incarcerate every one that ever exhibited any sort of propensity for violent or aberrant behavior. Or anyone that was ever accused of wrongdoing.

Fear is the enemy of freedom and inciting fear is a time-tested technique for eroding civil liberties.

4205

So you would offer your own child up as bait for a suspected rapist, for example? Can’t do anything until an assault happens?