That was very well said. You’ve always been one of my favorite posters on this board, BTW.
I want to apologize if I seemed overly strident or dismissive of your sensibilities. I’m not denying that there are potential issues. I know these issues will need to be resolved. It’s just that I think they won’t be that common and that fairly simple solutions are possible, like increasing privacy in locker rooms and changing rooms and the like. Maybe fully separate units with their own facilities in prisons. And I’m good with agreeing to disagree and I don’t think we are that far apart on the underlying issues.
But I REALLY don’t like it when discussions on on social issues and public policy become focused on and driven by descriptions of potential abuses, especially in cases where the abuses aren’t widespread or systemic. Because then some people start claiming that the damage caused by these abuses is so egregious that it makes the entire program or legislation or policy initiative unworkable. This deprives an entire class of people of benefits or protections that they really need and deserve. This happens in discussions of healthcare policy, food assistance and sexual assault prosecutions, just to name a few.
It’s been an interesting discussion and I’m glad to see a moderate position so well voiced.
Sounds like you’re talking about some of the things I brought up. I don’t want the whole thing declared unworkable, or laws to be passed saying people have to use the bathroom according to the sex on their birth certificate or whatever Fox News is asking for. But when I started this thread, most people seemed to be denying that there were any potential issues. Only by bringing up areas where there could be problems, and usually being asked to give examples where it has actually happened, have people agreed that there might need to be some exceptions and issues that need to be resolved. And then they deny that anyone is trying to end these exceptions, when that is exactly what the campaigners are trying to do.
I read an article on this which really changed my mind, and I’ve been trying to find it again since I started this thread, but haven’t been able to (maybe it was a casualty of the censorship after JKR spoke out). One of the things it said was that trans people are less than 1% of the population, whereas between 4% and 16% of collage age men admit committing rape in surveys. An even higher percentage of men have sexually harassed women. Given those figures, maybe we should be a little more careful about the opportunities we are giving to the latter while passing laws to help the former.
They might in areas where women - or men - are severely underrepresented. Or if it becomes even more common for young people to experiment with being a different gender, as some posters here are hoping/anticipating.
It’s not a slippery slope. It’s an obvious consequence of this ‘free gender utopia’ people are imagining. See Dangerosa’s posts for how that will turn out in practice.
How do we adjust to the changes? I think course-correcting wouldn’t be too hard for the examples that Demon Tree gave, but I’m struggling with how we would adapt to others.
Like, let’s say we all collectively realize that gatekeeping “woman” isn’t such a bad idea given actual widespread abuses that everyone has observed.
What do we tell folks we’ve previously allowed to be in the “woman” category but who we now decide aren’t in that category anymore? Do we just tell them it’s now problematic to include them when it wasn’t problematic in the past?
Like if we were to get only a trickle of male-presenting, male-bodied individuals looking to get accepted into a special program that we are running intended to help increase women’s representation in STEM, we might not care about tossing out their applications because 1) they are just a trickle and 2) we don’t want to risk rejecting deserving candidates just to keep a few edgelords out. But if one day the trickle we have admitted into the program has turned into a gush and that gush is actually displacing more conventional women, do we continue to just shrug our shoulders and not care? Or do we make it clear that we are going to tweak the admissions criteria we use to make it so that male-presenting male-bodied individuals go back to being a trickle? If the latter is the option we go with, will there be general understanding in the world or will there be pushback over the “favoring” of one group of women over another?
I’m not worried about a slippery slope. I’m concerned that once we establish the precedence of not gatekeeping “woman”, then it becomes politically infeasible to gatekeep it at a later date. Because if I am seen as a woman today, then it seems logical to me that I should be seen as a woman tomorrow. If Person A gets to be recognized as a woman yesterday, then today Person B, who is in the same situation as Person A, should also be recognized. Otherwise the system would appear to be arbitrary and capricious with its definitions.
If I’m understanding correctly, you’re saying the following. If I’m missing anything, please let me know.
There’s institutional oppression in STEM fields against people raised as girls.
There’s institutional oppression in STEM fields against people who are identified as women.
There are programs put in place to counteract this oppression; these are designed to help women.
In theory, if anyone is allowed to identify as a woman, a bunch of gender-fluid people raised as boys might take advantage and use up the resources put in place to counter that oppression.
Is that about right?
If so, sure: modify the program so that it goes to people who were raised as girls, or so that it goes to people who have lived as women for some length of time. But solve that problem when it happens. The solutions you’re proposing seem to cause more actual harm than actual good.
I’m not understanding why gatekeeping is only harmful before some critical amount of harm has been observed, though. Why must we wait for the number of abuses to reach some threshold before we enact any screening mechanism?
I’m not even talking about “gender-fluid” people. I’m talking about men who are pissed off that they are being excluded from a program meant for women, who try to take advantage of it by claiming to be women. They don’t change their birth certificate to “F” because they know that’s not a requirement. They don’t go by feminine pronouns because they know that’s not a requirement. They don’t change their name because they know that’s not a requirement. They don’t even tell anyone they identify as a woman because they can always claim they haven’t told anyone for fear of being discriminated against. I don’t know how I feel about the birth certificate thing or even the name thing, but I do feel like some conditions should be met. I don’t think that’s harmful. I think that’s simply requiring an individual who claims to be a woman to actually show they are “doing” woman, in the socially constructed sense of the word.
There are no other models we can borrow from, since all other socially constructed identities that have special programs can be verified somehow. A white person who tries to get into a program meant for minority students might put in an application and get accepted. But it wouldn’t be unreasonable to question that person’s claim to the “minority” label just to make sure they actually belong in the program.
I understand that we’re in a brave new world here and that there probably is no 100% woke answer other than to say we’ll deal with the problem if it ever emerges. But that sounds like a cop-out to me. It seems like we’re going into this assuming that the men who are hateful and brazen enough to be a physical threat to transwomen will somehow be too stupid or scared to exploit the system designed to help and protect all women. I just can’t get behind this.
It’s not precisely the same thing, but there was (and is) a similar problem with service animals. Federal law only allows asking if a particular animal is a service animal, and what it is trained to do. Surprise surprise, there was significant abuse of the system since many people just claim that their pet is a service animal in order to take it around everywhere. Some states have passed laws to make it a crime to pass off any animal as a service animal, though I don’t know how effective they’ve been.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume that if you have only the word of the person to go by, and there are no penalties to lying (or no ability to apply a penalty), then one can expect some degree of abuse to happen.
Your last sentence is correct, but pretty much applies to your “It’s an obvious consequence” nonsense. A claim is not the same thing as an argument; and when you make it with so little evidence, I’m not inclined to spend a long time trying to refute that nonexistent evidence.
Gatekeeping is harmful, because it’s going to impose additional and disproportionate burdens on the people being gatekept. You need to show that those harms are outweighed by the harms that would otherwise occur before there’s a reasonable argument in favor of gatekeeping. That’s why the future hypothetical harms are poor arguments.
ok, yes I’m a trans female. so lets clear up some of the points raised in these responses. firstly the menstruation comment was by someone talking about women and transgender males who were still in the process of transitioning and so yes they have periods. lets then look at the toilets issue, we already have the right to use the facilities for the gender we identify with. J K wants that removed and so does our government in the UK. so what is the problem with waiting until after surgery? well let us see, in order to transition you need to live as a transwoman or transman for a minimum of three years. before hormones and at least two more before surgery. so if the law is reverted then trans women who live as women have to use the men’s toilets and vice versus for trans males. so I ask this if they are uncomfortable with transwomen in their spaces, how will they handle transmen who look and identify as men being in their spaces? Sorry J K and others you can’t have it both ways. then of course is the argument that she states that she knows we are as much at risk of sexual assault, and murder as any cis-female on the planet and that she wants us to be safe while openly denying us a safe place. what about all these trans rapist sexually assaulting female prisoners, well having worked within the prison estate I can confirm of only 1 single account of this and that person was a convicted sex offender. there is more history of trans females being sexually assaulted within the male prisons. but hey lets not spoil a good argument with honest facts. Ireland already has self declaration so doesn’t need to lobby anyone! and then on the subject of her being such a famous author, so what? Steven King has written more best sellers, has made more movies and is pro Trans women being women. yes there are trans reactionaries the same as Terfs are lesbian reactionaries. so what’s new there are BLM reactionaries etc. but we all know they are a minority part of those groups. what annoys the trans community is when she shouts about supporting us, or how she has lots of trans friends now she claims it is 1 trans female who is older than her. so who are they? why are they not supporting her if they are friends? we as a community don’t want J K to crack just to be honest. she stated "if you (trans people) were being discriminated against I (J K)would march with you, since that quote there have been several marches by trans lives matters and trans rights groups. where was she? answer at home tweeting about how some trans person wrote something nasty about her. Other victims of sexual assault have stated publicly that they support trans women and some even berated her for using her own experience as an excuse for attacking trans rights. on the subject of her not caring about the actors who came out against her, let us remember that the main character of her latest series of movies (still 3 more to go) is included in that list. also can I point out that Emma Watson has always been a women’s rights activist and a supporter of trans women. and then finally how do we police this? do we have to reveal our genitalia before entering or only when another person in the room request us to prove we are female/male etc. we could have transgender only spaces but who will pay for new buildings, every company needing to build new facilities, guarantee it wont be J K.
Great, now you can’t even explain what, specifically, you disagree with.
Look, these are real comments you made in this thread:
It isn’t a slippery slope to talk about this possibility when you specifically raised it as a probability and indeed something you support.
And to answer that question I quoted, if a significant number of teenagers are experimenting with their gender, that means we can’t get accurate statistics on who is studying what subjects at school or university, or who is suffering what health problems and needs support, or anything that differs by sex in that age group.
If they are allowed to apply for scholarships based on that temporary experimentation, then we’ll see aid meant to help women going to people who were men last week and will decide they are men again in a few months’ time. And if gender doesn’t represent anything fundamental about a person, what is the point of having scholarships (or sports) for women at all? It would be entirely reasonable for them to be removed in this scenario.
But my biggest beef with this non-binary, genderfluid, ‘58 genders’ stuff is that its totally regressive. Declaring that if you aren’t interested in makeup and shopping, it means you aren’t a woman, and if you hate sports you aren’t a man, just reinforces rigid gender roles rather than challenging them. Why can’t everyone just be themselves without slapping a label on it? That would be my idea of progress.
Here’s an article that explains it all much better than I can:
By my reading, the pie in the sky aspiration of “the future is nonbinary” presupposes the end of the patriarchy and the end of societal, institutional, and cultural misogyny as a prereq. There’s no possibility of a bright, kind, clean nonbinary society, in which everyone is treated equally and gender and sex are irrelevant except when medically necessary, unless we’ve already eliminated misogyny and the patriarchy.
Have you ever had any problems using women’s toilets etc? What do you think is the issue with the current laws in the UK?
Re prisons, I found 2 examples of transwomen accused of sexually assaulting other women while in prison. For context in Nov 2019 there were 22 transwomen housed in female jails. Something you might want to think about is that there is a big incentive for sex criminals and paedophiles to identify as trans since they are also often targeted by other inmates. Do you really want to say their identity is just as valid as yours?
As for JKR, we shouldn’t listen to people just because they’re famous, that goes for her and for the actors in her films. But did you actually read her essay? Not expecting you to agree with it, but IMO it’s important for free speech that we are able to express even unpopular opinions.
I totally agree with this, and to me people pushing the non-binary ideal right now are like those saying we should be blind to race and get rid of affirmative action - it presupposes a world we don’t (yet) live in. Look at the row over gender-neutral awards, for example:
Out of one side of its mouth, I’m hearing: “Trans are a tiny population! Why be all upset and scared about what they might do! They are tiny and will always be tiny! SHUT UP ALREADY!”
Out of the other side, I’m hearing: “Gatekeeping is harmful to the trans population! You must show that the harms outweigh the benefits before we do anything that harms the trans population!”
If we were able to show that men are evil enough to play the “woman” card to create havoc and harm against 1% of the population at any given time, but only 0.0001% of the human population is harmed by defining “woman” in a way to prevent fraudsters, at that point would you be in favor of gatekeeping? Or must we have zero harm to the trans population for anyone to care about what happens to cis women? Cuz that last thing is what it sounds like you’re saying. It’s sounds like you’re saying a tiny population’s concerns are more important than the huge population of ciswomen’s fears about men fucking with them, and we won’t do anything to address those concerns unless (yet again) ciswomen show irrefutable proof that men will try to fuck them over. Even though we know men have fucked them over since the beginning of time and will continue to do so for a long time, given the amount of sexism and misogyny we have in our world. Ciswomen will have to endure abuses imposed on them by the system until someone important enough notices it and does something about it. That sounds really regressive to me.
We don’t have this cavalier "devil may care’ attitude to other identities and for good reason. We gatekeep all other protected identities because know that hateful people aren’t above subverting those identities to destroy that protection. We don’t have to sit around and wait for those hateful people to emerge at some scary threshold to do something. We just know it’s inevitable and so we defend ourselves from jump street.
I don’t even know why we would even have women-focused programs and spaces if we can’t be arsed to protect those things from jump street. To me, not caring about protecting those things is basically admitting that those things aren’t important. And I suspect that’s the whole point. Make gender a “no big deal” in policy and then it becomes harder to justify treating it like it’s a big deal. Even though it will continue to be in the real world.