If 99% of people don’t call you a “dude” and you don’t have a penis and you’re taking hormones and you you’ve lived this way for years, why wouldn’t you be eligible for automatic admission to the female prison? My checklist would establish these kind of “no brainer” cases. It would filter out the definitive cases from the more “gray” cases where some human intelligence and compassion is needed.
Only when most people do not default to feminine pronouns when they look at you would your case be reviewed in detail by a committee. If the committee determines that your presentation is too masculine for gen-pop, OK. Big rubber deal. As long as you’ve got all the other outward indicia of “woman”, you get assigned to the special cell block at the female prison. But at least you have your preferred gender recognized, which to me is a win for the trans rights for folks. And at least the females who are intimidated by being naked in front of an individual with linebacker shoulders and a mustache (or whatever masculine cues trigger them) will have their safe space, which is a win for the JK Rowling crowd.
For the two transwomen I cited (by the way, the linked pictures are of the same person), you have one who will always get admitted to the general population at the female prison. She doesn’t have to sit in front of a committee and be subjected to their questions. The second transwomen would have to go through this process so that the committee could establish if she’s someone who is sufficiently gender-conforming in apperance such that she’d not be targeted by gen-pop (maybe some in gen pop won’t take kindly to being housed with someone who looks like a dude, even if penis is absent). I mean, yeah, chances are the two transwomen will have the same outcome and both will be placed in gen-pop. But I can imagine how that might not always be the decision that gets made. If a biological male has a masculine manner of dress and grooming and she has parts that are not readily classifiable as a dick but it doesn’t look like a vulva either, I don’t think we should just toss her in gen-pop without some deliberation first.
Because I don’t know how a committee would objectively determine whether 99% of people would call someone a dude. There is no way to measure that. I understand that you think this a “no brainer”. But in terms of policy implementation, it has logistical holes in it. I’m not even looking at this from a ideological standpoint. I’m wearing my scientist/regulatory official hat now.
Only when most people do not default to feminine pronouns when they look at you would your case be reviewed in detail by a committee.
Even if all your legal identification has you listed as male? When you’re arrested and jailed, the precinct has to figure out where to put you. If they look you up in the system and see you are male, you’re saying that they should competely disregard that information just as long they wouldn’t have known this in the absence of seeing your ID?
I disagree that it should work like that. I think in a situation where we’re dealing with someone who looks like Blaire White, the inmate should be placed in a mixed-sex (3rd) space until the situation is decided by a committee. If the committee finds that this person can be admitted to women’s prison based on the objective items on your list, then off they go. If the committee rules otherwise, they stay in a mixed-sex space.
I see far fewer problems with this arrangement than the arrangement that is biased against the less pretty trans women.
@Kimstu, I’m not sure what hypothetical scenarios of mine you are referencing as you haven’t quoted anything, but it sounds like my position may not be what you think it is. Unless I’m parsing your post incorrectly, which is possible. For the record, my position has been that :
If someone claims to be a women, there is no reason NOT to treat them as such in 99.9% of everyday life situations.
People that present as fully male don’t go around claiming to be female unless they are some sort of right wing troll. There is ABSOLUTELY no need for any sort of fear or “concern” that men fully presenting as male are going to injure women in any way by claiming to be women. Not physically, not psychologically, not professionally. It’s 100% a right wing tactic and not worth indulging.
3, Even though this thread is not primarily about bathroom laws, I think the sole purpose of such laws is to shame and invade the privacy of transgender people. I do NOT believe that their is ANY truth in the idea that this is an issue of physical safety. NONE. NADA ZIP. Such laws are based purely in hate and unfounded fear and there is absolutely no defense for them
There may be a need for gatekeeping in some situations, but these are not generally situations that transgender men and women encounter on any sort of routine basis, and most of them never encounter them at all. They are prisons, homeless and DV shelters, locker/spa facilities involving frontal nudity. There may also be issues if women that were assigned male at birth are participating in competitive sports. I am not versed in the way these places and institutions work so I’m not going to be guessing at solutions to these problems.
But there is no need for any of these solutions to have any impact on any transgender people unless they are housed in the institutions or participate in competitive sports
Okay I lied, @monstro. I’m coming back to you on this because the above is why I have the position that I do.
If the two pics you showed were of the same trans woman, then how is it fair to base a policy decision on how dolled up they choose to be on the day they get arrested?
If an outcome as consequential as which kind of prison will be home for the next 15 years rests on whether you look like Beyoncé or Pharrell, then I would rather do without this criteria.
OK, that is fine. I was just attempting to show you have a scheme could work without cleaving to the “woman is an adult female” definition. You are free to devise something else. Since I don’t oversee prisons, this is all a very navel-gazing exercise for me.
No, that’s simply not a correct interpretation of that quote. In no way did anyone think Oscar Wilde literally was not a man. That’s why he was put on trial for “gross indecency.” He was put on trial BECAUSE he was a man.
You’re conflating figurative concepts with the literal definition of “man.”
You are conflating figurative terms with the literal definitions of “man” and “woman.” No one actually thinks Ellen Degeneres is not literally a woman, even though people say mean, homophobic things.
I mean, were I to hear that a guy named Tim abandoned his children, I might say something like “Tim isn’t a real man.” But of course I am not saying Tim is not literally a real man; of course he is. I am using a figurative term when I say “real man” in that context; what I mean is “Tim is failing to meet a set of extremely important personality responsibilities that I consider to be so critical that it suggests he is an adult male of extremely substandard moral character.” I’m not actually suggesting he isn’t an adult male.
In the case of Oscar Wilde, the newspaper quote literally means “Oscar Wilde is a horrible, repulsive person,” not that he wasn’t, in fact, a man. Today no newspaper would say that, but their understanding o Wilde’s being a male adult is no greater than it was in 1895.
You are conflating social expectations with absolute material reality (and your claim people felt he didn’t quality for that social category calls into question why he was put to trial for something that only made sense to charge him with if he was considered by society to be a man.) I find social expectations and stereotypes gross, whether they are forced upon men and women or whether they are, as some people apparently and inexplicably now want to do, used to define what those words literally mean.
Defining “men” and “women” as a social category is pointless, when for as long as we’ve had language the most useful and meaningful primary definitions have been male and female human beings. Anything else always ends up being sexism.
The way that I see it, what we’re talking about is exemptions for entry into women’s spaces. Not whether or not the definition for women should change.
So if I ruled the world, the definition for a woman space would be any room, facility, or sport that is restricted to biological female people in accordance with sex-segregated policies. Exceptions to this rule would be when the gatekeeping criteria would kick in.
It seems like there could be a way to statistically say that someone is 99% a dude, but it would be from looking at a lot of different characteristics. If we consider that the most typical male has something like XY chromosomes and male reproductive organs, then we should be able to look at a wide range of other biological markers, personality tests, etc. from that group of people. From that analysis, it should be possible to come up with a set of metrics for what makes up the most typically male characteristics (e.g. hormone X at Y level, bone structure like Z, etc.). We could also do the same for people with XX chromosomes and female reproductive organs. The more a person matches these standards, the more they would be classified as male or female. This way if you have an XX person with male reproductive organs or XY with female, that wouldn’t be the only characteristics that would be used to decide. By looking at a wide range of characteristics from a statistical standpoint, we could say that someone was X% biologically male and Y% biologically female. That may not have any bearing on what they feel they are mentally, but it might serve as an objective way to decide male or female for things like sports, prisons, etc.
Are you suggesting right wing trolls never try to injure women?!
But actually, pretty much every trans person must go through this stage. When they first realise or first ‘come out’ to other people, they will be presenting as their birth sex. And more particularly someone in prison, like Chelsea Manning, will have very little opportunity to change their gender presentation unless allowed. You’re not claiming Manning is a right wing troll, are you?
This culture war thing has made Americans go crazy. There are loads of ordinary people who have real fears or are just uncomfortable with what is an unfamiliar idea, and the few cases where transgender women or men have attacked girls and women in public lavatories just make them more convinced. You’d have way more chance of persuading them if you tried to address their concerns, rather than accuse them all of being moustache-twirling villains.
I’m sure during the campaign for gay marriage, we heard the arguments of both sides, and campaigners actually made an effort to persuade people to support it, addressed the arguments against it and provided evidence, rather than trying to get objectors fired and banned from twitter. That is what needs to happen with trans rights, too.
Stonewall in the UK is campaigning to make this gatekeeping illegal. This is one reason so many women have come out in opposition to them, not because we hate trans people but because we think there are some circumstances where exemptions are necessary.
I heard a wedding planner from the Midwest interviewed about gay marriage. The poor woman was terrified at thought of having to be present at gay weddings, because she thought they involved full frontal nudity and public sex acts and she didn’t want to see that. The was the crux of her opposition to the discrimination legislation.
I felt bad for the woman, she was sincere in this belief and genuinely scared. But I don’t think I could say anything but “you’re just wrong”.
I’m even sure that in some point of the history of weddings, some couple has had public sex at their wedding, there are a lot of pervs out there. Maybe even a same sex couple.
But it’s so freaking rare I wouldn’t even go there. My only response to her would be “you’re wrong”. Because if I start going on about how it maybe happens but it’s rare, it makes this unicorn a factor in the discussion -which it shouldn’t be. And then people start going on about how it may not be a thing now but how do we know that gay couples aren’t suddenly go to all start screwing on the altar during the ceremony and what about the poor wedding planners when it happens and how everyone should be concerned.
And it poisons the argument.
Now that example is more extreme that what’s going on here, but I think pretending that burly bearded cisgender men are going to start following women into bathrooms to listen to them pee and that this is a real problem that needs to be addressed poisons the conversation.
I wish the discussion would move beyond restrooms. The stakes are so low in that setting that it’s arguable we’d be perfectly fine without sex-segregation in this area.
Pretty much everything other than restrooms is where substantive debate can be had. The more the issue is reduced to bathroom access, the more we ignore the implications of allowing males to identify as women without stipulations in place.
Me too, and I’m sorry that I brought it up at all. Women who want to be able to get changed or shower without seeing a penis - or want the same for their teenaged daughters - are a whole world away from someone who is afraid of nudity at a gay wedding (seriously?!) Women who have felt unsafe being alone in a train carriage with a man are not going to be comfortable taking their clothes off in a changing room with someone they perceive to be male. And why should we? If you’re gonna go against Gavin de Becker and tell women to ignore their instincts you need to have a good reason.
@YWTF and @monstro, there’s something else that bothers me about this, and that’s statistics. I’m currently reading Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez about the lack of data collected and testing done on women and how harmful that is. Having people switching sex all over the place is only going to make it worse. I think Monstro mentioned earlier how misleading it could be about the numbers of women working in male-dominated fields, and I’m particularly concerned (and annoyed) about crimes committed by male prisoners being recorded as committed by women, because of the incentive already mentioned for criminals to identify as transgender. Especially because it’s paedophiles and sex criminals who get treated badly in jail and so have the most reason to try and get special treatment and protection.
By far more men than women are convicted of paedophilia, but we may not know it in a few years if the stats get messed up in this fashion.
I brought this up in an earlier post but no one responded to it. Keeping the sexes separated is not just about safety issues. It’s also about dignity.
As a woman, it never would occur to me to use a men’s locker room. I would be worried about the effect my nakedness would have on men and their ability to go about their business comfortably. Naked breasts and female genitalia aren’t easy for the average heterosexual male to ignore. Even the most buttoned-up gentleman is at risk of having an involuntarily reaction in the presence of a naked female. To suppress this reaction would require some amount of effort on his part, and why would I want to cause someone to go through that effort unnecessarily?
Women have similar reactions at the sight of naked men. But instead of sexual arousal, we also may experience nervousness, fear, and alarm. I think those feelings are valid because they don’t necessarily come from prejudice. These feelings may be instinctual for all we know. We are animals, with animal-like reactions sometimes, and there is no point in denying that.
So keeping the sexes separate in spaces where nudity occurs helps maintain a sense of safety, security, and dignity. A naked female causing an involuntary boner is just as problematic as a male causing an involuntary flush of anxiety.
I’m late to this discussion, and 1037 posts is a lot to even skim (I gave up around #200), but I wanna say the following. I’m trans (MTF), and while I don’t “pass” if you have a conversation with me longer than two minutes or so (although that’s mainly because I don’t modify my voice if feel safe), I pass well enough at first glance to not attract attention.
People keep talking about the demands of the trans community and “trans ideology”. I don’t recall having a vote or electing a representative. I personally know trans people who are libertarians, who are Trump supporters, and who are left-wing TERFs. I’m not any of those things, but I feel uneasy that this discussion assumes from the start that trans people all have the same beliefs.
I’m weaker than most women. I have breasts and no facial hair. Putting me in a male prison would be a death sentence. I’d like to say that I’d be OK with prison assignment being based on a case-by-case decision that involved criminal history and risk, but I see that being easily abused by the people-in-charge. I don’t have a great solution for this, but a no-questions-asked “put people based on birth sex” policy is fucked up.
I don’t want to be in a prison with Karen White either! I hate how I’m equated to the one of the worst trans people in existence. Is it acceptable to do this to other minorities? Given that one of the prominent stereotypes about me is that I’m a rapey sexual deviant, it’s ironic that hormone therapy rendered me asexual. If you’ve got a dick and balls, imagine how horny you feel one minute after you nut, and feel how off-putting the idea of sex is at that moment. That’s how I feel all the time. And the argument gets framed as though I’m going to go on a rape spree?
Trans people are people, and as people who can typically read the emotions of other people, we have the ability to sense just how uncomfortable we make those around us. I don’t like going into either restroom! Most of us don’t! We ultimately use the one that we calculate is going to cause us and everyone around us the least amount of trouble. For me, that’s the women’s, because I pass reasonably well, and everyone should be doing their business in a stall. Before I started passing most of the time, I used the men’s. I’ve tried that recently, and the men at the urinals freak out and start screaming. If I go to the spa, I use the men’s locker room/shower despite the person at the front desk initially trying to send me to the women’s, because I don’t want to upset the 60-year-old Korean women who don’t speak English by having my dick flop about. Do the men in the sauna chat with me out of male camaraderie or whatever? Hell no. They think I’m weird as fuck. What am I supposed to do? If the state of my body is such that I’m objectionable in both spaces, well that’s as much society’s problem as it is mine. I’ll be as considerate as I can be, taking into account my personal appearance and my safety, but I’m not going to not live as full a life as y’all.
Regarding “people who menstruate”: When talking about menstrual health, the phrase “people who menstruate” is appropriate. Transmen on testosterone lose the ability to menstruate. Transwomen do not menstruate. Whatever that website or bulletin had to say does not target them. Being hyper-specific in these cases is important! I’m fortunate that I know what healthcare I need. A lot of trans people do not. The majority of doctors do not.
To illustrate, let’s say you’re MTF. You started medically transitioning at the age of 25 and now you’re 60. You have significant breast development, and you’ve had a vaginoplasty. Which of the following do you need?
a. digital rectal examination of the prostate
b. PSA screening
c. mammogram
d. Pap smear
A gold star to the first person who gets this correct.
I disagree. The movement (any movement) can carry on as a minority - in fact most do. Most people don’t like heavy metal, but it’s a culture that has been strong for 40 years.