Every time I’m asked to put up an example of trans gone wrong, I feel guilty. It is not my desire to turn this thread into a rap sheet for the trans community. But Demon Tree, monstro, and I are pretty much forced to do that every time y’all dismiss or deny the reality we’re living in.
So how about if you choose to engage with me, engage with me. Give me the benefit of the doubt that for every scenario I express concern about, I can readily find an example to show it’s happened. Rather than dismissing what I’m saying out of hand or ignoring it like you’ve ignored the op-ed about self-ID that I cited.
If you’re bringing her up to say that some trans activists are real assholes, I 100% agree. If you’re bringing her up to say that trans activists and society at large are uncritical of all claims of any single activist, or that our gatekeeping measures are inadequate, I disagree.
The other claims in the article are interesting, as they involve two different people–Yaniv and Nussac, both of whom claim that the other one is impersonating people and making fake accounts online. My gut tells me that Yaniv is really awful and should be investigated just like anyone else who sexually harasses kids or adults, but that’s predicated on a sense of her general awfulness. If the investigation reveals that Yaniv is telling the truth, and that someone else was impersonating her, that person should be prosecuted.
I guess you missed my later post, where I added that Yaniv lost the case against the waxers (though not before driving several out of business), but there is still a lesson here for other countries contemplating similar anti-discrimination laws. You asked what legal hurdles are in place to address men using a trans identity to gain access to vulnerable women (or a predator who is genuinely trans doing the same, I don’t know Yaniv’s mental state). So in this case, the law stopped the predator, and that’s good, but it shows there are issues that need considering beyond the mantra ‘transwomen are women’.
@YWTF mentioned Karen White, and UK law (for now!) allowed her to be returned to a male prison (although she never should have been moved to a women’s prison in the first place). Other countries do not have laws that allow this; I gave Argentina as an example, which was widely praised by trans activists for its Self Id law. This law allows any male criminal to sign a piece of paper and then it is a legal requirement that ‘she’ be housed in a women’s prison, even if there are no suitable facilities. Even if ‘she’ was convicted of raping women, is extremely violent or an escape risk.
So I guess my point is, we can change the law to improve rights for trans people, and make their lives easier, and we should. But we should not go into it blindly, assuming there will be no consequences for anyone else, and when people raise concerns we need actual data showing it won’t be a problem, and/or evidence that issues have been considered and addressed, not dismissal or accusations of transphobia.
Since I typed that five years ago my militant feminist (queer) daughter has become my militant feminist Marxist queer youngest child (some things - like Marxism are a result of going to a very Liberal Liberal arts college. They won’t outgrow the queer, they’ll probably outgrow the Marxist.) We both still find drag queens problematic, but I also find banning artistic expression problematic, and I find defining art problematic, so I’d just like it to be acknowledged as such - I don’t think we need to engage in cancel culture over it. We both still find it annoying when a transwoman suddenly discovers its more difficult to get published in scientific journals or discover they don’t get taken as seriously at work than they used it its news - while the rest of us women who have lived as women are whole lives are like “duh! We’ve been trying to say that for a hundred or so years now. You should have had my ninth grade Algebra teacher. If there was a STEM interested girl in that class in September, her confidence was crushed by February.” Possession of a penis (even if you have since given up possession of a penis) seems to grant voice regardless of your gender. On the plus side, according to the transmen I know, presumption of a penis also grants that privilege - they don’t check.
I am definitely not saying it “matters most” how you are perceived by others, or what you look like, or what’s in your pants, and on the contrary would counsel people to be cool with themselves before nail-bitingly worrying about what every single other person thinks. Now, one knows that with something like what clothes you put on, you can dress tastefully without standing out, or with a superior sense of cutting-edge style, or eye-poppingly garishly, or in what passes for rags, etc., and each version will induce a different reaction in observers, even if people are too polite to comment.
What I am saying about perception is pretty basic. There are, for example, languages in which the speaker must account for the gender of the addressee. Even English, to some extent, since there is a difference between “he” and “she”. It could be that many or most strangers will guess wrong, and then the perception of others will matter to the extent that you will be annoyed at constantly having to correct people.
As for this shower business, I don’t know what to tell you, it seems impolite to check people out in the locker room or to start some chitchat.
I own a women/minority owned small business. As such, my business partner (also a woman) and I get some preference on getting on big corporation’s vendor lists. We qualify for certain small business loans that are not available to business started by white men. These programs have been put in place because women/minority owned businesses are harder to get and keep going. They are there because its hard for a woman or minority to get on a big company’s vendor list without programs like these. Because we are more likely to get turned down for a bank loan.
So yes, being able to choose any gender on a form can matter. If you are a transwoman living your life as female presenting, then you are certainly a woman owned business. If you are male presenting, that’s not the purpose of the programs.
Is one of the things that those who disagree with me are trying to say is that there’s some level of privilege from being raised as a boy, and (for some trans women) spending some of their adult life treated as a man? If so, then my answer would be “yes, obviously - who do you think is denying this?” Of course there’s also some privilege to being cis that trans people lack. Which makes this discussion a bit complicated… But such is the intersection of the many various forms of discrimination in our society and culture.
I bring this up because ISTM that so many of the responses to my posts have been ignoring at least some of my actual words and subbing in assumptions, and I’d really like to drill down to the real focus of the disagreement.
Well, the question was about the USA. Yaniv lives in Canada.
Jonathan Yaniv - I will not deign to pretend that piece of shit is a woman - is a sexual predator, a nutcase, and a scumbag. In that case the law did not fail; it worked the way it was intended to. It’s always going to be true that people can throw ridiculous lawsuits around until they’re classified as a vexatious litigant (which Yaniv hasn’t yet been, but is well on the way.) That did not start with the transgender movement; it was something that took place before Yaniv was born. A smarter person might actually have been able to win a case like that, but Yaniv is a complete dumbass who left an online trail of vile, racist abuse on the Internet so wide that Stevie Wonder could have followed it.
This is why I totally get why JK Rowling of all people would be speaking out. Why does JK Rowling go by her initials? Why does she write under the pen name “Robert Galbraith”? Because she knows she would have a harder time being published if she went by “Joanne”. “Joanne” is discriminated against not because people named Joanne say they are a woman. They are discriminated against because people who look they could be named Joanne aren’t taken seriously. When boys and men see a book has been written by “Joanne”, they are programmed to go “ew” and search for a writer with a name like “JK”.
When someone says that anyone who says they are a woman is a woman, of course a woman that has lived JK’s reality is going to push back on that. I would expect a woman that has spent her whole life experiencing sexism to not be eager to hop on the slogan which implies her mental state is what causes her to be stigmatized and othered. Nor would I expect such a woman to be eager to accept the idea that womanhood is about what a person wears or how they act, irrespective of how they are perceived by others. JK Rowling can put on a suit and walk with the manliest strut and stick a sock in her pants to make it look like she’s packing. She’s still going to be perceived as an overly entitled “Karen” as soon as she speaks and as long as she looks like she inhabits a female body.
I get that everyone feels confident and secure in their feminist identity. I just wish people would stop acting like JK Rowling is being an anti feminist when she pushes back on gender ideology rhetoric. If anyone deserves to be able to push back on ideas that have a potential to harm women, it’s JK Rowling. If people want to cancel her, they have that right. But they should stop implying she’s not really down for feminism just because she can see the abuses and pitfalls of gender ideology. That ideology should be subjected to critical thought just like anything else. Lord knows feminist theory is scrutinized to hell and back.
I agree. Here, the issue that needed to be clarified is that refusing an intimate, genital-related treatment on the basis of the genitalia involved is not illegal discrimination. I’m glad that got clarified. If I’ve said something that could be interpreted as not wanting such issues to be clarified, I apologize; it’s certainly not been my intent.
As for the prison examples, I think it’s helpful to consider what you’d do with a cis woman in a similar situation. If one of the rapists described here is imprisoned, how do you keep other female inmates safe from her?
As for the worry about men impersonating women in order to get into the women’s prison, sure, that’s a possible worry, and sure, there have been a couple of cases where it looks like that’s what’s going on. The entire prison complex is deeply fucked, and I’m tempted to say let’s fix the structural problems that enable this; but you gotta stanch the bleeding before you repair the broken machine. Prisoners who lived as men before identifying as women can perhaps be asked to show other ways they’re living as women before they’re able to live as women inside of a woman’s prison. Maybe there needs to be a facility for folks who are transitioning.
A day or so ago you linked to a deceitful image that conflated a transwoman’s angry post about what happened in the bathroom with a picture of her from a different post, holding a fencing foil. It was deliberately designed to increase fear of transwomen in bathrooms. You called her “a suspicious male”, presumably because she’s masculine looking. I don’t think you apologized for linking to something so dishonest, or for misgendering her.
We’re no longer at the point where I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt. Other people? Sure. But you don’t get it.
Of course boys get the privilege of being boys. Particularly white boys (I think black boys are a completely different matter.)
And this leads to some interesting interactions. My youngest roomed with a bunch of gender queer students last year. Two grew up as boys. Five grew up as girls. I spent a number of days watching them…and the kids who grew up as boys have…they take up more space in conversations, they expect to be deferred to, they even expect to be served. They treat each other differently than they treat the female identified at birth- i.e. they treat each other with respect, but there is little respect for the others. And yet one of them actually had the nerve to complain to me that my kid didn’t treat her with enough respect (drilling down, it turned out mine doesn’t like to lose intellectual arguments, and she expected to be capitulated to).
The female identified as birth kids lived up to their programming. All the disrespect is written off as part of the process of transitioning. (Which is a difficult process, and requires support). They were supportive and conciliatory. They avoided conflict. Well, until it sort of blew up last year. Now mine and two of the other female identified at birth have moved into their own apartment. Cause women treat other women like shit all the time - but we don’t put up with that shit from other women. (Stop what you are doing and get me a beer is not something women do to other women as a generalization).
I find this to be a pedantic quibble. Replace “any given day” with “when the feeling strikes”; doesn’t change the bottom line absurdity. We as society have decided that a male person who identifies as a man during time X is not permitted to enter women’s spaces. During time Y, when “she” starts feeling their inner womanish come out. society says that the very same male is able to enter previously restricted spaces. Then time Z occurs, he’s back to identifying as man again, and abracadabra, he suddenly doesn’t belong in the women’s room anymore.
Throughout all these gender fluxes, he’s physically the same person. The body doesn’t change, only his self-concept. How does a changed “mental state” suddenly warrant them to sharing dressing rooms with women? What are we supposed to assume about this “mental state” that negates the significance of his primary and secondary sex characteristics?
To justify allowing a male with a female “mental state” to enter women’s spaces—while denying the same male the right to enter into women’s spaces on days he identifies as a man—you have to assume that their “gender mental state” determines their risk to women. Isn’t this sexist? Like, really really sexist? At least when it comes to segregation based strictly on biological sex, we’re not implying that some people are less risky than other people if they have the right “brains”. Everyone with a certain kind of plumbing is treated the same way.
Like monstro has been pointing out, if gender is so ephemeral that it can come and go like a mood, then why should we assign any importance to it? Every day, men are thrown out of a buildings or arrested for trespassing if they are caught in women’s room. If all of that can happen simply for crossing into a sex-segregated space, it suggests sex/gender is really important. But gender ideology presents it as though it’s a personality type, an aesthetic, or a emotional mood—none of which should earn a call from the cops if trespassing occurs. Can’t have this both ways.
I think if transwomen and their allies were content with defining rules for transwomen, then we would be having a different discussion.
But we’re having this discussion because the question isn’t “Who gets to call themselves a transwoman?” The question is “Who gets to be call themselves a woman?”
You’ve got a bunch of people who think that anyone should be able to weigh in with an answer, irrespective of their gender, their experiences, or the amount of skin they have in the game.
And then you’ve got a bunch of people who think that women should be able to decide who gets to call themselves a women. Because “woman” isn’t just self-identity. It’s a very important sociopolitical group. People in this camp want that sociopolitical group to mean something besides “women are people who say they are a women”. When speaking of women, we don’t want people to say, “Well, what do you mean by that?” The people who in this camp want “women” to be equivalent to “adult human beings who are shaped by experiences stemming from a specific suite of social and biological factors stemming from their membership within or resemblance to the female sex class.” They don’t want “female sex class” to mean “anyone who says they have a female body has a female body”. They want “female sex class” to always have an objective, testable definition and not have to worry about indulging someone’s butthurt if they are said to have a “female body” rather than a “biological female body”.
So yes, privilege matters here. If you don’t have a female body but you are up here telling someone with a female body that having a female body isn’t important enough criterion for being perceived as “woman”, why wouldn’t that person be able to side-eye you and say, “Um, what gives you the right to tell me that?”
It would be like me, a Christian-raised woman, lecturing you on who gets to be a Jewish man. I don’t know how it feels to be a Jew. I don’t know how it feels to be a man. I don’t know what kind of abuses would arise if we opened the door to “Jewish man” because I am not steeped enough in Jewish man history or politics to even wager a guess. If a friend of mine told me they are depressed because they really and truly want to be a Jewish man but no one at the local synagogue is willing to accept that identity, I will probably be sympathetic. But I’m not going to beat down the door on their behalf. Why? Because I am privileged enough for it to be a pure navel-gazing exercise for me. I have the luxury of saying, “‘Jew’ is just a label. It is not really important now that the gas chambers have been shut down and everything.” I have nothing to worry about if the gas chambers were to be reactivated. So of course I’m going to defend my friend and not give a fuck about what those “old-school robots” in the synagogue think.
So, iiandyiiii, that’s how the gender ideology discourse feels to me. It seems to be fueled by a bunch of rabid “friends” yelling at people who are sincerely worried about the gas chambers being reactivated. The friends are telling them that they are the ones who are anti-Semitic and hateful…that they are the ones who are the problem, not the people actually operating the gas chambers. And when those people dare to speak up for themselves, those rabid “friends” try to cancel them and silence them. They don’t try to sympathize with them the same way they sympathize with their friends. They just beat them other the head with rhetoric that sounds “woke” but really isn’t, not when it is actually scrutinized.
I think a lot of progressives just sign off on what gender activists are pushing because they don’t want to bothered. I was once like this. I don’t like thinking about gender. I am have never felt eager to wave the feminist flag. My exposures to formal feminist discourse have all been rather unsatisfying. So I say I’m “down” for stuff just because I want to be the kind of person who says they are “down”. But this thread has made me realized that maybe I should be more critical and not be so go-along-to-get-along. I don’t have to swallow every gender notion or idea, just like I don’t have to swallow all black identity politics. I can accept the theory of transwomen being a part of the sisterhood while also being prepared to bar people from the sisterhood when doing so makes perfect sense.
Kimstu, not a strawman at all…really common in my experience among gender queer youth. They have a LOT of definitions to choose from, and aren’t really sure which one fits. So one of my youngest roommates has switched pronouns and names so many times that even their best friends aren’t sure on any given day what name/pronoun to use (and if using the wrong one is going to set them off). One of my girlfriends has a daughter identified male at birth who has transitioned back and forth (non surgically) three times. She’s 21. And while you see that I’m respecting her choices and pronouns, I’m not going to be at all surprised when I’m readapting myself to refer to her by a different name and different pronouns. Neither of these individuals see themselves as genderfluid or non-binary - its a binary thing for them (from what I can see, though I think my youngest’s former roommate may settle on genderfluid, my friend’s daughter has long expressed disgust for the non-binary and genderfluid).
I think there’s an unspoken part of “women are people who say they are a woman” (at least by my reading) – it’s more like “women are people who say they are a woman and have made a serious and long-term effort to live their lives as women”. So no, some asshole redneck who says “oh I’m a woman now, show me to the naked ladies in the women’s locker room!” doesn’t qualify. Predators don’t qualify. I think it’s still probably courteous to give folks the benefit of the doubt when there’s nothing at stake, but feel free to call the authorities if some hulking bearded person is peering into stalls in the ladies’ room.
Reducing the problem to “angry rednecks in the restroom” is missing the actual problem by a million miles. I’m not worried about angry rednecks in the restroom. JK Rowling isn’t worried about just this.
You can see the weakness of this “anyone who says they are a woman is a woman” notion, but instead of saying that, you are saying that OF COURSE that’s not what anyone is really pushing. You seem to be implying that everyone believes that the “have made a serious and long-term effort to live their lives as women” stipulation is an important criterion for “woman”. But that is not what everyone believes. People would not be reducing to “woman” to a mental state if that’s what everyone believes. I wouldn’t be here arguing if everyone believes that.
If it’s “unspoken”, we need to make it “spoken”. Because as long as it remains “unspoken”, then we’ll have people coming up with whatever definition of “woman” speaks to them, with actual women feeling like they can’t say anything about it without incurring the wrath of the angry mob.
I think what I said goes for the vast majority of trans activists (and the cis women feminists whose writing I’ve found convincing on this). But I’m sure there are exceptions. I’m happy to make this part “spoken”, and I’ll let you know if any of the trans folks I talk to have a problem with this. I suspect they won’t.
I don’t believe this would satisfy JKR, though, at least by my understanding of her writing. I don’t think she accepts any transwomen are actually women, no matter how long and how serious they’ve been living as women.
Karen White is bad. But what happened to Tavoy Malcolm is also bad. I think I have a legitimate concern that a rush to prevent more Karen Whites is going to do real harm to a lot of Tavoy Malcolms.