Trans Women are not Women

[theprestige]

As best I can tell, "Men can't have babies." is a bigoted statement, according to the Official Field Guide to Bigotry.

What if I say "Trans women can't have babies."

Not bigoted yet, but will be soon.

I predict that "trans woman" is on the way out, since it perpetuates the idea that there's a difference between this woman and that woman.

 

[Ron Obvious]

As best I can tell, "Men can't have babies." is a bigoted statement, according to the Official Field Guide to Bigotry.

What if I say "Trans women can't have babies."

While they can't actually have babies which is nobody's fault, not even the bigots, we can say that they have the right to have babies.

 

[caveman1917]

I didn't make it up; I observed it. It's cognitive dissidence that comes out when comparisons are made to forms of bigotry you recognize (against homosexuals, against black people) do actually connect to the reasoning you are using against trans gender people.

Nah, that which is called bigotry to transgender people is failing/refusing to participate in it (for example "misgendering" someone). The equivalent would be calling someone homophobic for failing/refusing to participate in sex with someone of the same sex.

 

[theprestige]

While they can't actually have babies which is nobody's fault, not even the bigots, we can say that they have the right to have babies.

We can, but I hesitate. A lot of people use "right" to mean "entitlement". I don't want to support the idea that men are entitled to government funding to enable them to have babies.

 

[d4m10n]

While they can't actually have babies which is nobody's fault, not even the bigots, we can say that they have the right to have babies.

Personally, I blame the Romans.

 

[Belz...]

Progressivism is not a club I've pledged my allegiance to. I'm not required to agree with about Y just because I agree with it about X.

Ooh, that's it Joe. Turn in your membership card!!

 

[Meadmaker]

For the most part the argument isn't "no, your internal sense of gender isn't what you claim it is", but rather "your internal sense of gender doesn't map to anything external, and therefore doesn't determine how to treat you in areas that depend on that external reality".

That still doesn't leave us with a neat and tidy answer to everything, of course. There's still the question of which discriminatory (in the neutral sense of the word) processes are based on external reality and which on internal image. Names I think are safe to say would be internal based, medical procedures on external. All the other stuff would need to be hammered out and I won't pretend to have the answers on all the various questions myself.

I think this is a very good description of the problem.


I, too, won't pretend to have all the answers, although admittedly I have some pretty strong opinions on a few of them.

 

[Puppycow]

It's a trademark of "progressives", perfectly OK in their effed-up world of 'moral relativism'

If you work with a Liberal voter, be nice but keep a diary of what they say. When you have the evidence, go to HR and get them fired. We have not yet made it sufficiently unsafe to be a right-wing

https://twitter.com/carolmcalliste2/status/1129980347494621184

Probably the work of a 4chan troll.

 

[Puppycow]

As best I can tell, "Men can't have babies." is a bigoted statement, according to the Official Field Guide to Bigotry.

What if I say "Trans women can't have babies."

Stop oppressing me.




You are worse than the Romans. Maybe even worse than the Judean People's Front.

 

[d4m10n]

It occurs to me, apropos of no particular post, that there exist identities which we can take off and on based on what's up in our brains, and there are other sorts of identities as well.

Xn) I believe Jesus was the Christ, foretold by the prophets.
~Xn) I'm not on Team Xn

That's one example of an identity which tracks subjective beliefs.

M) I'm the kind of person who produces sperm and must guard against accidentally impregnating someone who doesn't want my children.
~M) People who don't produce sperm.

That's an example of an identity which is located not in one's brain, but in one's body.

I've been on all of the above teams over the years, but the process of changing from ~M to M was not a matter of mental effort whereas the process of changing from Xn to ~Xn required a fair bit of ratiocination.

 

[Puppycow]

The motives generally don't matter regardless next to the merits of the argument. But people do get hung up on their own personal identity as 'a feminist' or 'not-bigoted' or 'skeptic' and it constrains their reasoning. 'I wouldn't fall for that because I'm a skeptic'. 'I wouldn't say something bigoted because I'm not a bigot.'

I understand that, yes. It's a fair point. Skepticism is a process, not an attribute, and self-identification as a "skeptic" is no guarantee against falling into the same errors in reasoning that skeptics point out in others. And I'm prone to all of these errors too (see my sig).

To be fair, I'm not taking this thread as seriously anymore because generally speaking those being trans 'critical' reject the best evidence that science (and the medical community) has. I'm not reading as closely because it's all circles again. As long as people won't incorporate the best understanding of the medical community, there isn't much of a point in discussing with them.

Could you restate the key evidence and scientific facts that have been rejected by people in this thread (and/or best understanding of the medical community)? I think I might have a general idea of what you're referring to, but I'm not certain. Is it the autogynephilia thing that some have referred to (not myself)? Anything else?

 

[tyr_13]

I have quite a lot of information if you're interested, although I'm not sure which aspects you're specifically talking about here.

You say 'both sides', and that indicates you might be talking about something other than what I thought you were. There is this widespread 'positioning' tactic, often employed in other woo beliefs, of pitting the idea one is a proponent of versus 'everything else' to create the illusion the proposed idea is on equal footing. This is seen in homeopathy vs 'alleopathy'. It's seen here in 'Blanchard's hypothesis' vs 'mainstream trans gender theory'. It also makes it simpler to straw man all of the science and debate on the subject to 'just about the feels' vs 'this science man's long really plus extra sciency words'.

At any rate, Blanchard's work and followers are one 'side' but the other 'side' actually are many competing theories and research that actually argue with each other on the details but don't even take his work as worth exploring. This is akin to evolution, just with a lot less data to work with. Specifically discrediting Blanchard isn't something most would even think to engage in because his work has simply bore no fruit to address predicatively. That said, his methods specifically have been taken apart and found not just lacking, but ridiculous. For example, using his definition of 'autogyophile' and apply it to cis women results in 90%+ being categorized as 'autogynophiles', and a more rigorous application (stricter than Blanchard uses) resulting in almost %30 being 'autogynophiles'. That means that using Blanchard's own hypothesis, trans women being autogynophiles would mean they are more like cis women than less like them in that regard. If Blanchard had decided to bother using a control group, perhaps he would have found that himself. Or if he had bothered to use samples that were not from the same clinic. Or if his results had ever been replicated. Basic scientific method issues arise from his work that would normally get any actually skeptical community to laugh his 'study' out the door as, at best, a poorly done pilot study. Here is a brief overview of many of the problems in his work, but of course the real interesting stuff is in the studies that paper cites.

Similarly, and this might interest you specifically because you are concerned about children, studies showing very high rates of desistance among children identified as trans have been shown to be very flawed as well. Specifically, they used outdated criteria to identify trans gender children. 25% or 40% of those children simply don't meet the criteria to identify as trans gender to begin with, so of course they aren't going to be found to be trans gender at a later date. Indeed, the studies showing very high rates of desistance didn't even ask the question 'are you a boy/girl?' of the participants. Therapists have actually shown a very high rate of identifying trans children over time. (If all the links before are too much to go through, this article lays it out pretty well if a little over-simplified, and seems to be the most related to your interest.)

Yes, they do actually use feedback from the subject to determine that, but that does not mean it is 'just feelings'. This quick overview from 2016 has only had more evidence in support come out after.

Notice where many of these links get published and cited. NIH, WHO, APA, Harvard...not mommy blogs. Yeah, a couple are to trans-positive pages but of course they're going to compile articles that link to evidence supporting their view.

Oh, and every time someone cites 'male pattern of criminality', know that the author herself of the work they are misquoting disagrees heavily and specifically with them. It emphatically does NOT show that trans women are as likely as cis men to commit violence against cis women (ironically it is cis lesbians are more likely too, not that this means they should be banned from locker rooms).

Now, it isn't that this topic overall doesn't have some aspects that are genuinely confusing, or debatable, or lacking enough good data that has me so 'over' trying to explain to the general poster what is going on. How to deal with some aspects really is difficult with a lot of room for valid views. What has got me that way is how such nakedly bad 'science' and reasoning is used to bolster some pretty silly positions and being taken as valid reasoning.

Blanchard's work is of no utility to the discussion besides to show what the anti-trans gender people are desperate enough to grasp at. Gender-affirmation therapy (which is NOT just to transition tomboys to men but “listen to the child and decipher with the help of parents or caregivers what the child is communicating about both gender identity and gender expression") isn't the scientific mainstream's most supported method for no good reason; it has evidence, predictive value, and repeatability supporting it.

I understand that, yes. It's a fair point. Skepticism is a process, not an attribute, and self-identification as a "skeptic" is no guarantee against falling into the same errors in reasoning that skeptics point out in others. And I'm prone to all of these errors too (see my sig).


Could you restate the key evidence and scientific facts that have been rejected by people in this thread (and/or best understanding of the medical community)? I think I might have a general idea of what you're referring to, but I'm not certain. Is it the autogynephilia thing that some have referred to (not myself)? Anything else?

I think the above post has most of the primary points I've seen that are simply not consistent with current evidence, and I'll not that the response it received was a hand-wave about how you can't apply Blanchard's criteria to cis women because...well because.

Oh, the above links don't address the 'well I identify as Napoleon!' refrain that displays, at this point, a willful ignorance of trans gender mental health.

 

[tyr_13]

It's not about 'allegiance' but the merits of the case.

Progressivism is not a club I've pledged my allegiance to. I'm not required to agree with about Y just because I agree with it about X.

I expected Belz's 'no, you!' obstinate response, but come now, you're better than this. That simply wasn't the argument I made.

The argument was that you agree with you, and in that case you only agree with me because I already agree with you.

 

[Puppycow]

I think the above post has most of the primary points I've seen that are simply not consistent with current evidence, and I'll not that the response it received was a hand-wave about how you can't apply Blanchard's criteria to cis women because...well because.

Oh, the above links don't address the 'well I identify as Napoleon!' refrain that displays, at this point, a willful ignorance of trans gender mental health.

Thanks. I took the time to check those links and while I didn't read every single word of all of them, I read enough to be personally satisfied of their quality. I think we can safely dismiss Blanchard's theories. As for ROGD, it seems that the quality of research on it isn't up to snuff yet. It may warrant further study, if studies can be better designed. I would like to see more long-term follow up on youths who transitioned medically or took hormones and/or had surgical intervention to change their bodies. This may take decades for the results to be fully known (are they still happy with the decision at age 50 or beyond, for example).

But, yeah. I can only speak for myself, but I am not dismissing any of that, and I accept it as evidence. It does not appear to have much bearing on certain issues that have been discussed in this thread, such as whether MtF athletes or XY chromosome athletes have an unfair athletic advantage over XX chromosome athletes. But I think it does have bearing on other questions that are also the topic.

 

[caveman1917]

I think the above post has most of the primary points I've seen that are simply not consistent with current evidence, and I'll not that the response it received was a hand-wave about how you can't apply Blanchard's criteria to cis women because...well because.

Your intellectual dishonesty is showing again, here is the response you actually received which is a sound refutation of the claim you made:

That reference was the best laugh in a while. Of course women will get arousal from the thought of themselves as women because they are women. The equivalent definition for the paraphilia for women is not "are you aroused by the thought of yourself as a woman?" but "are you aroused by the thought of yourself as a man?" You can't just take a definition which was specifically designed for one sex (male transsexuals in this case) and apply it to the other sex without correcting for that. By your logic I can claim that 95% of women are homosexual:

Step 1: I restrict consideration to male persons, and state a definition for homosexuality appropriate for that group, namely "are you aroused by the thought of sex with a man?"

Step 2: I now apply that definition to the other sex without correcting for that, and ask a bunch of women "are you aroused by the thought of sex with a man?" I find almost all of them say "yes."

Step 3: Profit! I've just proven that most women are homosexual.

Do you agree that 95% of women are homosexual because they are aroused by the thought of having sex with men?

 

[Puppycow]

Your intellectual dishonesty is showing again, here is the response you actually received which is a sound refutation of the claim you made:

Do you agree that 95% of women are homosexual because they are aroused by the thought of having sex with men?

I don't think your logic is sound here.

 

[caveman1917]

I don't think your logic is sound here.

It's the same logic used by tyr's source to claim that 90+% of women fit Blanchard's criterion for autogynophilia. Remember that Blanchard's criterion for autogynophilia ("are you aroused by the thought of yourself as a woman") was specifically defined for male transsexuals. If you accept that then you also have to accept that 95% of women are homosexuals because the definition for homosexuality which applies specifically for men is "are you aroused by the thought of having sex with men".

 

[caveman1917]

Here let me rewrite the abstract of that paper but using "gay" instead if "autogynophilic":

Gayness, an erotic interest in sex with men, has been described as a sexual interest of some men; the term has not been applied to women. To test the possibility that women are also gay, a Gay Scale for Women (GSW) was created from items used to categorize men as gay in other studies. A questionnaire that included the GSW was distributed to a sample of 51 professional women employed at an urban hospital; 29 completed questionnaires were returned for analysis. By the common definition of ever having an erotic interest in sex with men, 93% of the respondents would be classified as gay.

Bingo, 93% of women have been shown to be gay. See the outright silliness of this?

 

[Puppycow]

It's the same logic used by tyr's source to claim that 90+% of women fit Blanchard's criterion for autogynophilia. Remember that Blanchard's criterion for autogynophilia ("are you aroused by the thought of yourself as a woman") was specifically defined for male transsexuals. If you accept that then you also have to accept that 95% of women are homosexuals because the definition for homosexuality which applies specifically for men is "are you aroused by the thought of having sex with men".

But if the question is, does anyone besides male transsexuals experience autogynophilia, it would be good to have a control group to test that on.

Maybe the proper control group is men who aren't transsexual. I'm not transsexual or transgender. I don't experience gender dysphoria. Am I "aroused by the thought of myself as a woman"? I think I would have to answer yes to that question, because I have been aroused by lesbian porn and I can have a sexual fantasy in which I am one of the women in that porn scene. I think that you will find that a lot of heterosexual men are aroused by porn of this nature. It's a popular genre. Most of those men are not transsexual or transgender.

If the claim is that having sexual fantasies of this nature are what causes gender dysphoria, I find that theory highly doubtful in light of my own experience and things I know about the porn business.

 

[caveman1917]

But if the question is, does anyone besides male transsexuals experience autogynophilia, it would be good to have a control group to test that on.

Maybe the proper control group is men who aren't transsexual. I'm not transsexual or transgender. I don't experience gender dysphoria. Am I "aroused by the thought of myself as a woman"? I think I would have to answer yes to that question, because I have been aroused by lesbian porn and I can have a sexual fantasy in which I am one of the women in that porn scene.

What does lesbian porn have to do with this? The question is: Are you aroused by the thought of yourself as a woman? The question isn't "are you aroused by the thought of having sex with other women?"

If you (a woman) can have a sexual fantasy (either heterosexual or lesbian) in which you are the woman, then you are classified as autogynophilic by the author of that paper.