It is necessary in the same way that weight segregation is necessary. Or age segregation.
It is due to certain physical attributes conferring a massive advantage and so segregation is required to maintain competitive fairness and safety.
Ultimately of course, all of those segregation categories could be done away with, they aren’t an immutable law of the universe, but if you do away with sex-based categorisation you would have to tell biological females that they would have to make do with never, ever being able to play at the top tier and make a living from the sport they love.
Serena Williams is recognised as one of the greatest female tennis players with riches and adulation beyond count.
If there were no sex-segregation you would never have heard of her.
She’d be down in a tenth-rank tournament being watched by one man and his dog. She’d have no hope against even the junior males.
yes, and sprinting, throwing, jumping, cycling, swimming etc. etc.
no, it isn’t. Look at athletics. Look at the competitive depth of both males and females. We are dealing with sample sizes from the ability tails of the sex distributions and the gaps are massive and irrefutable.
what rules, right now, stop females from competing at the top level of sports? i.e. the NBA or the premier league. If they were good enough, they’d go where the prestige and the rewards are. They aren’t so they can’t.
That is only a problem if you want to keep female sport with the necessary gatekeeping based on certain physical characteristics. If you don’t care about female sport then sure, tear it all down, open it all up and watch zero females achieve success and people like Caster Semenya (one of the most notable atheletes with DSD) come precisely nowhere. (for reference, her best ever time at her best distance, 800m, would not even win her a race at the male events in many UK amateur athletics clubs.)
I will fully and freely admit to being an old cis male.
My point of view is (leaving off some nuances)
If you have an outie and you derive pleasure from your outie, you’re male.
If you have an innie and you derive pleaser from your innie, you’re female.
If you have an outie and it feels wrong, you think you should have an innie, you’re trans female
if you have an innie and it fieels wrong, you think you should have an outie, you’re trans male
if you have an outie and derive pleasure in observing innies, or if you have an innie and derive pleasure in observing outies, you’re straight
if you have an innie and like other innies, or if you’re an outie and like other outies, you’re gay.
if you like both innies and outies, you’re bi.
I admit - I have a hard time conceiving of “non-binary”. I cook. I sew. I have done cross stitch. I sing. I like musicals. I have no doubt whatsoever that I’m a man. Just because many of my habits and pleasures do not coincide with the societal “standards” for “manly” or “maleness” doesn’t make me any less male.
That being said, I do understand that people who identify as “non-binary” have emotional pain, and I will respect that. I might not understand your pain, but I realize that you are in pain.
If I had grown up in a world without any sexist notions about how male and female people are different – a world that didn’t make generalizations of that sort, even the most non-malicious type – then I don’t see how I would have formed a gender identity. I mean, I might have grown up thinking of myself as clever, or introverted, or compassionate or whatever, but no personality characteristic or constellation of personality characteristics would slot me as fitting in with one sex instead of the other, not in the absense of a bunch of socially shared beliefs and expectations about what the sexes are like.
With me so far?
I didn’t grow up in that world, and neither did any of you folks. You don’t have to be a sociology major to understand that most people in our society carry around “group identities” that are part of how they think of themselves, how they evaluate themselves, what they aspire to, and all that. You should not have to be a psychology major to realize that if you do that for years and years, it’s going to shape you. You’ll develop some strengths in areas that are valued and praised for the groups you identify with, and you’ll have deficits and weaknesses in areas that no one expects or values for the groups you’re a part of, and one of the big groups that for most people is of strong emotional importance as part of their identity is this gender thing, the notion of being at least normative and ideally a credit to your sex, an admirable and remarkable and sexy person who embodies all the good characteristics and flavors of that sex.
Well, I’m a minor exception to one part of that: the gender I internalized starting around 2nd grade or thereabouts was girl instead of boy. It’s still totally based on socially shared sexist notions of how male and female children are different, so if you want to be dismissive of gender, go right ahead. But realize that nearly everyone was embracing a gender identity. Our society reinforces the notion that it’s relevant and important. If you wish to claim that it didn’t happen to you, that you grew up measuring yourself against other humans and never gave a fuck whether you measured up specifically against folks of the same gender, I won’t contradict you. I’ll be in awe of you a bit. But I do suspect that some of the people who think they’re like that aren’t really. You can call me biased about that, I suppose. Or dubious at least.
That has the exact same issue. Would you say it was confirmation bias when I say I feel happy?
No. Confirmation bias doesn’t make sense when one is describing their internal mental state. It’s as stupid as when people say “you don’t really hate X.” At most, I may inaccurately describe my mental state, but I cannot be mistaken about my own personal experience.
No, I’m not. Happiness is a feeling that is distinct from simply not feeling miserable. At no point do I have to think “this feels better than I did when I was miserable, therefore I must be happy.”
There is no logical process going on when determining one’s internal state, and thus confirmation bias doesn’t exist.
And, finally, many if not most people have had the experience of feeling more masculine or more feminine at different times. It’s usually a range. It’s just that, for gender fluid people, that range is either quite wide or positioned very much in between.
That’s me. If I were 20, i’m sure I would identify as non-binary. I’ve identified as a woman all my life, so I guess I’ll keep doing so. But… it doesn’t mean anything to me. Honestly, it feels like it doesn’t quite fit, and I HATE being asked my pronouns, because I like to be thought of as me, a person, first, and not as “a woman”. But I don’t have any better pronouns to offer up than “she”. (I’m also old, and stuck in the grammar of my youth. And while I am working at referring to people with the singular they – heck, “they” is the preferred pronoun of my son’s spouse – it doesn’t come comfortably, and I really don’t want to ask people to use it to refer to me.)
I’m really mystified by people who are transgender. I just don’t GET it, emotionally. But I have a lot of friends who ARE transgender, and I observe that it matters a lot to them. For that matter, my husband and my daughter both have a strong internal cis gender identity. So… I just have to acknowledge that my experience of the world isn’t the same as everyone else’s.
Gender isn’t the only thing where my internal experience is different from other people’s. I hate being drunk. It makes me sleepy and anti-social. I don’t enjoy being “buzzed”, I find that an actively unpleasant sensation, although not as bad as being outright drunk. And yet – it’s patently obvious that lots of people DO enjoy the effects of alcohol. People vary.
This is important, and well put, so let’s start here.
You do know how you feel, and you can contrast it to how you have felt at other times, making that comparison. So far, nothing social is involved; so far, you have not extrapolated to (or from) other people.
But the moment you label it “happy” you’re doing that. It’s a word that other people use, you grew up hearing it in speech and read it in books and obtained, from outside observation, a sense of what “happy” means. You may have been told by other people at various times that YOU were happy. So you were labeled “happy”. Together, these occurrences caused you to connect that internal feeling you described above with a socially shared concept that is labled with the English word “happy”.
When it comes to gender and “feeling masculine” or feeling “that who I was was one of the boys” or whatever, not only has yonder transgender man never been a cisgender male so as to know that how he feels is basically how they feel – and that’s true enough – he also has never been one of the other people who were assigned female when they were born, so as to compare with them and know that how he feels about things is different from what they feel.
But that’s true of the cisgender kids too. The boys, each of them, have never been any other boy, so they don’t know from firsthand experience that they are like the other boys inside. The girls, likewise. We only know such things from outside observation, from extrapolation.
Which is what trans people and other gender-variant people do also.
I am not that kind of person and am honestly insulted at being described that way. As anybody who knows me can attest reality is, at best, a nodding acquaintance.
As DocCathode (humorously) pointed out, this distinction is transphobic bullshit. Transgender people are not refusing to “accept reality” by identifying as transgender.
FFS, as I keep saying, transgender people know what genitalia they were born with. They know that biological sex is real. They know that they are routinely identified as being of their birth assigned sex because of their physiology. These are all realities that transgender people are not trying to deny.
What transgender people are doing when they identify as transgender is acknowledging an additional reality that you (and I) can’t perceive: namely, the cognitive impression of one’s birth assigned sex being somehow incorrect or mismatched for their sense of self.
Nobody yet knows exactly why transgender people have the experience of that cognitive impression that cisgender people don’t have. It may be due to differences in brain structure between transgender and cisgender people, perhaps because of hormonal environment in utero or for some other reason. More research is needed to understand the physiological influences on gender identity, just as more research is needed to understand the physiological influences on sexual orientation.
But just as gay people’s experience of feeling sexual attraction to members of the same sex is a reality, transgender people’s experience of identifying as a gender different from their birth assigned sex is a reality. They are realities that we heterosexual cisgender people don’t personally experience or intuitively understand, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
This whole fucking attitude of “because transgender people have this conscious awareness of gender identity that I don’t have, then they must be delusional flakes who’d be equally willing to believe they’re a banana or something” is just gobsmacking to me in its complacent obliviousness.
I mean, do you make the same dismissive assumptions about everybody who’s got some kind of perceptual awareness that you don’t have? Many people with chronic joint pain, for example, can physically sense atmospheric changes associated with changing weather that I’m completely incapable of detecting. People with absolute pitch capability (“perfect pitch”) are able to detect not just whether a given sequence of notes is in tune or out of tune (relative pitch), but also whether it is based on a given absolute sound frequency. (This, I can confidently say as a choral singer devoid of absolute pitch capability, is because they are freaking alien witches.)
There are all kinds of subjective cognitive experiences that are familiar to a minority of people while being a total closed book to the rest of us, which are nonetheless genuinely real. AFAICT, there is no rational reason why so many people reflexively refuse to accept that the experience of conscious gender identification is a similar kind of “minority reality”.
And to be clear, it’s not just transgender people who have that conscious awareness. I know a large number of cisgender people who also have an awareness of gender identity that is totally foreign to my experience. They just are aware that their gender matches their sex assigned at birth. Some even feel incredibly strongly about that. I’ve seen a woman proclaim, “i wasn’t assigned female, i am female”.
Yeah, I’d be dumb to ignore that this is real to a lot of people.
Some of it is just the fact that femininity and masculinity are in essence circular definitions and don’t really have an objective metric one can point at as a standard. So when the actual concept is fuzzy and people’s own thoughts are fuzzy it’s not unreasonable for folks to feel that they don’t quite fit a particular category that others feel they ought to. This is a problem in many of these discussions. The words people use don’t mean the same in each person’s mind. That’s one reason I find it so humorous when the leftists/woke-ists are so adamant that some things are intrinsically offensive. They can’t even keep the concept of in-context meaning with language consistent from one argument to the next.
Where I think folks have a legitimate complaint is when they are forced, by whatever goofy means of coercion available, to deny their own perceptions. That level of attempted dominance is what leads to societies that burn witches and enact reigns of terror all in the name of supposed virtue.
True, which is another reason why we should generally default to individuals’ own identifications rather than prescriptivist standard definitions when figuring out how to describe people.
Sure, some people who call themselves “transgender” may not mean exactly the same thing by it as some other people who call themselves “transgender”. But that’s okay; some people who refer to the color “blue” may not mean exactly the same thing by it as some other people who refer to the color “blue”, and yet humans still manage to communicate.
Again, though, I think it’s important to distinguish between recognizing one’s own perceptions and insisting on prescriptivist language.
For example, if someone declares that a transgender person’s identified gender is the same as their biological sex assigned at birth, that is (in the overwhelming majority of cases, at least) a denial of factual reality. I don’t care how supportive you’re attempting to be of transgender people’s chosen identification, you can’t deliberately contradict the physiological facts of their birth anatomy without stating a falsehood.
On the other hand, if someone declares that the terms “woman” and “man” intrinsically mean biological sex assigned at birth, and that therefore it must be treated as acceptable for them to describe transgender men as “women” and transgender women as “men”, then they are deliberately using linguistic prescriptivism as an excuse to misgender transgender people.
That’s not about their “own perceptions”, that’s about their trying to impose on everybody else their own refusal to accept linguistic flexibility and change. (And whining about unfair “dominance” and “coercion” etc. when they’re not allowed to get away with it.)
That’s exactly what I’m saying – it’s bullshit. I know it’s bullshit, you know it’s bullshit, and transphobes know it’s bullshit. But will they ever ADMIT it?
Honestly, do people really think they’ve never used a bathroom with a trans person before in their lives? Are they honestly that naive? I know part of it’s bigotry, but c’mon. You can’t be that stupid.