Cont: Trans Women are not Women II: The Bath Of Khan

[Roboramma]

I'm a vet. I think about these things, for some odd reason. I can't think of a species where the male is able to overpower the female physically so that he is able to penetrate her when she doesn't want that to happen. I'm not a dolphin expert though. How do they manage it?

My VPN is having trouble today so (living in China) I can't get on google, but as I understand it gangs of males will team up to rape females. That does seem to be at least relatively unique to Dolphins, though.

There are some quite fundamental differences between menstrual cycle mammals (us, pretty much) and oestrus cycle mammals (pretty much everything else) that make comparisons both difficult and interesting.

Did you know that no other female mammal, so far as I know, has a hymen as part of the normal anatomical structures of the female reproductive tract? That no other mammal menstruates like we do? (There are non-human primates with "menstrual" cycles, but they don't bleed visibly.)

I wasn't aware of quite how unique humans are in that regard, but do have some knowledge of concealed ovulation and as you say I can see that it would create a unique situation with respect to human sexuality and the female experience.

 

[Rolfe]

I didn't see how a single dolphin could possibly manage to rape a female. Ganging up? Well I suppose the more intelligent a mammal gets the worse the behaviour of the males gets too.

 

[Ziggurat]

I didn't see how a single dolphin could possibly manage to rape a female. Ganging up? Well I suppose the more intelligent a mammal gets the worse the behaviour of the males gets too.

Don’t imagine there aren’t also peculiarly female pathologies which come with intelligence.

 

[Meadmaker]

I ran across a transwoman of just the sort that Rolfe talks about all the time today.

She was a very nice person. Very popular where I was at, and very well known. No one seemed to mind her presence at all. I spoke to her briefly. She was talking when she came in (I was at a public event. I don't want to say too much just for anonymity's sake, just in case the description might be recognized.) about her choice of clothing for the day. She had a skimpier skirt that she really like better than the more modest one that she chose. She wanted something more "family friendly".

Ok. Now, I've been saying "she", but this person had a deep voice, stood about 6' 1". I'm guessing she weighed around 300 pounds. She was flabby, but not obese. In other words, there were some pretty big upper arms, that didn't have much tone, but those were muscles, not fat.

What really struck me was something Rolfe talks about all the time. She was going out of her way to talk about her experiences as a woman. Nothing about her was in any way feminine. Even her outfit looked more like a drag queen than a woman, but not a good drag queen. Not someone who would win the contest. More like some anti-trans parody of a drag queen, but she described, at length, the difficulty of choosing an appropriate skirt and how she looked better in the smaller one, but she didn't want to be too revealing. She wanted to be "family friendly".

She was a nice person. No one seemed to mind. But it wasn't the sort of place where people had to take a shower, either.

 

[TomB]

I don't know. It's just something I have observed with interest. In all my anatomy books, there is no normal structure labelled "hymen" (although "persistent hymen" is a recognised developmental anomaly). There is no structure in a maiden female that obstructs the passage of the penis, except in homo sapiens (OK I'm not an expert in non-human primates so there is that). There is no way to tell whether a mare or a bitch or a sow or a ewe has or has not ever had sex. While some females do react as if the sexual act has caused pain (female cats - queens - are in this category), there is no species in which first-time penetration appears uniquely painful or to necessarily cause what appears to be an injury.

Having said that I have not made a study of a particularly wide variety of mammals, but the ones I do know about all fit that pattern. Laughing hyenas are so bloody weird though anything is possible.

Several species of mammal have hymens. Including horses:

Through the vulva, we proceed inward to the vagina, which on average is 7.1-9.1 inches (18-23 cm) long and 3.9-5.9 inches (10-15 cm) wide. In the properly conformed mare, the floor of the vagina should rest upon the pelvis, and the walls should be collapsed and apposed (touching each other). The hymen membrane, if present, divides the vagina into anterior (cranial, or nearest the head) and posterior (caudal, or nearest the tail) sections.

https://thehorse.com/151625/the-inner-mare/

Apparently, breeders often break the hymen on horses before breeding:
http://www.equine-reproduction.com/board/messages/9305/26217.html?1178752262

 

[Rolfe]

Not according to Sisson and Grossman, the absolute bible of equine anatomy. And horse breeders are among the most woo-woo people I have ever encountered. I sense some projection there. Both of these links are to layman's articles, and the second one is someone pontificating on a forum.

(As I said, a "persistent hymen" is occasionally encountered as a developmental anomaly in many species. It's not normal, but someone who has encountered it may get the impression that it is.)

 

[kellyb]

And horse breeders are among the most woo-woo people I have ever encountered.

That makes so much sense, from what little I know about horse-obsessed people. LOL

 

[Rolfe]

It's one of the reasons I didn't go into horse practice after I did my PhD in equine biochemistry. These people actively want to be scammed. They are gagging to give people money for useless products. I just couldn't cope with the mindset. They didn't want me to tell them that they were being told a pack of lies by the people selling the supplements, they wanted the feel-good of spending their money on the useless crap.

And the anatomical rubbish you can find in their books. My all-time favourite is "Arab horses have fewer vertebrae than other breeds." That beats the nonexistent hymen by some way. I mean, think about it. It's all one species. How many vertebrae does a half-Arab have? Unless it's a whole number you have a crippled foal. How does the half-bred foetus know how many vertebrae it's supposed to be developing? It's complete and utter crap, but there it is. Want a reference? I can quote it. Is it true? No.

 

[Rolfe]

I ran across a transwoman of just the sort that Rolfe talks about all the time today.

She was a very nice person. Very popular where I was at, and very well known. No one seemed to mind her presence at all. I spoke to her briefly. She was talking when she came in (I was at a public event. I don't want to say too much just for anonymity's sake, just in case the description might be recognized.) about her choice of clothing for the day. She had a skimpier skirt that she really like better than the more modest one that she chose. She wanted something more "family friendly".

Ok. Now, I've been saying "she", but this person had a deep voice, stood about 6' 1". I'm guessing she weighed around 300 pounds. She was flabby, but not obese. In other words, there were some pretty big upper arms, that didn't have much tone, but those were muscles, not fat.

What really struck me was something Rolfe talks about all the time. She was going out of her way to talk about her experiences as a woman. Nothing about her was in any way feminine. Even her outfit looked more like a drag queen than a woman, but not a good drag queen. Not someone who would win the contest. More like some anti-trans parody of a drag queen, but she described, at length, the difficulty of choosing an appropriate skirt and how she looked better in the smaller one, but she didn't want to be too revealing. She wanted to be "family friendly".

She was a nice person. No one seemed to mind. But it wasn't the sort of place where people had to take a shower, either.

That's an interesting description. I know someone I thought was like that too. That size, obviously masculine, but wafting round in a kaftan in his case. More recently tailored suits. A parody of a performance of a drag act. But nobody seemed to mind. Of course nobody minded in public spaces where both males and females mix and interact freely. But did I want to be in the ladies at the same time as him? No. Not because I had any reason at all to feel unsafe, but because a male body, especially one of that size, makes me and many if not most women uncomfortable in an intimate space.

I didn't like him for other reasons entirely unconnected with the LARPing of womanhood. I thought he was a jerk. But I also felt sorry for him because if he imagined that anyone in a million bloody years was going to take him for a woman he was deluded beyond help. And that seemed a shame.

Then I discovered his blog. Actually it was one of the first results that came up when I googled "cotton ceiling" because I'd heard the term and I didn't know what it meant. His essay on how it was unacceptably transphobic for any lesbian not to be open to the possibility of sex with a man who said he had a lady brain was a bit of an eye-opener in more ways than one.

So I've kind of stopped assuming that apparently innocuous and well-liked men in dresses are probably perfectly nice really (apart from maybe being a jerk for unconnected reasons) and nothing to worry about and it's surely the kindest thing to smother your discomfort if you encounter them in an intimate space. I still don't think he's going to attack anyone, I don't believe he ever has, but the feeling that we have to be kind and put up with these guys sort of evaporates when you realise what's going on behind the scenes.

 

[Rolfe]

Someone said something on twitter which I thought was relevant.

You see, when it comes to being female, we tend to base our safety on the most extreme examples. It's why we have protections as a sex.

That's why I and some of the other women in this thread have been pointing out what are indeed the worst case scenarios. Because these are the contingencies we need to take into account when we plan for our safety. We've had some people objecting to this, and saying "you're accusing all transwomen of [insert particular problematic behaviour]" and of course we're not. We're pointing out that this is the behaviour we need to legislate for. We have no way of telling which males are harmless (and merely making us feel acutely uncomfortable) and which are dangerous, until something happens. We have to describe that behaviour.

Others have said, but if this behaviour is very rare then why are you concerned? But it isn't very rare. We know that sexual harassment from males is common, and we know that a trans identity doesn't make a man any less likely to behave like that. We're also conscious that if the trans advocates get their way then any man at all can enter an intimate female space and we have no way to object to his presence per se. Indeed, we are seeing that many authorities and organisations are getting round this difficulty by simply opening up every intimate female-only space to both sexes without any stipulation about trans identity at all. This is something that we know is dangerous for us.

Yes we are describing the more extreme examples of problematic behaviour. Because that is the behaviour we need to be able to protect ourselves against.

 

[IsThisTheLife]

Can we cram any more alt-right white nationalist talking points into this thread about sex and gender?

" ... alt-right white nationalist talking points"? That's putting it quite politely.

 

[William Parcher]

Does the animal rape topic fit into this thread or is it more like a derail that deserves its own thread?

Are we limiting it to mammals? Because ducks are notorious for rape and even to the extent that hens can be killed and the drake proceeds to have intercourse with the dead body. Drakes that simply find dead hens will sometimes have sex with the dead body. This is not a constant universal but is still regarded as common.

 

[TomB]

Not according to Sisson and Grossman, the absolute bible of equine anatomy. And horse breeders are among the most woo-woo people I have ever encountered. I sense some projection there. Both of these links are to layman's articles, and the second one is someone pontificating on a forum.

(As I said, a "persistent hymen" is occasionally encountered as a developmental anomaly in many species. It's not normal, but someone who has encountered it may get the impression that it is.)

Really? Because I don't only see the reference in horsebreeding stuff. I also see it in veterinary material from sources such as Merck (Merck Veterinary
Manual):

Perineal conformation should be evaluated. A manual vaginal examination should be performed to confirm the hymen is patent.

https://www.merckvetmanual.com/management-and-nutrition/management-of-reproduction-horses/breeding-soundness-examination-of-the-mare

Or this book, written by two veterinarians:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781118904398.ch6

Not horses, but This paper talks about persistant hymen in alpaca and llamas. The discussion section describes the normal hymen:

The hymen is formed from the epithelial lining of the paramesonephric ducts and the urogenital sinus at the vestibulovaginal junction (3). Canalization of the hymen is usually complete at birth and leads to communication between the lumen of the caudal vagina and vestibule (3). Persistent or imperforate hymen has been described in camelids, but heredity has not been established (4).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2572097/

The point is that a hymen is present in other mammals. The very fact that there is a condition called "persistent hymen" indicates it's existence during the development stages. From the artical above it appears that in the species discussed, it normally "canalizes" so it likely doesn't have the same effect as the human hymen unless there is a defect. But it does exist.

One last (non-authoritative) reference is this from straightdope:

Just one problem: Morris to the contrary notwithstanding, retention of the hymen is not unique to humans. It occurs in horses, whales, moles, mole-rats, hyenas, and perhaps other animals. (In the great fin whale, in fact, the hymen is not completely destroyed until childbirth.) Why? We haven’t got a clue. “Such adaptations [i.e., retention of the hymen] are explicable only if the male of the species finds it to his advantage to seek a virgin,” Bettyann Kevles observes in Female of the Species (1986). “But there is no evidence that mammal males seek inexperienced females, and no evidence that females with this peculiar anatomical feature remain monogamous. … In whales, one can explain the resealing of the vagina as a means of keeping water out of the reproductive organs.”

https://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/919/what-is-the-purpose-of-the-hymen/
The Morris he is referring to is the author of The Naked Ape (1967) who describes it as exclusive to humans and attributes its function to discouraging young females from having sex too early/encouraging monogamy. I don't think that's consistent with the evolutionary biology I learned in college, but I had more of an environmental focus.

But what is the point of this anyway? Is it to separate human sexual behavior from that of animals? To emphasize how much more traumatic intercourse is for human females than for other species? Or to imply that men are genetically coded to hurt women? Maybe it was just an aside, but asides usually have an implication.

As for animal behavior, animals have different social structures than we do. In ethology, I was taught that it's a mistake to try to ascribe motive to animal behavior, so I would say our understanding of those social structures is mostly empirical: who does the hunting, which males get to mate with what females, mating rituals, etc. The whys are often speculations that run the risk of assigning anthropomorphic traits, motives, and feelings.

So do animals rape? I don't know. Do male animals on occasion appear to be mating or trying to mate with females who are not interested or unwilling? I'll assume that such has been observed, but we don't know how animals of either sex view it. It may be completely insignificant or it may be traumatic. Or it may be just how life works for that species. So ascribing a concept as traumatic as rape to another species with which we cannot communicate is tricky. Adding hormonal signaling into the mix complicates it even further.

My point is if you wish to explain human behavior, looking to other (particularly non-related) species is tricky.

 

[Delphic Oracle]

Then there's traumatic insemination

I'll shield the description for those who may be eating when they read this.

where the male stabs another through their abdomen and injects their ejaculatory fluids directly into the body cavity.

In many cases, they don't even bother to distinguish the sex of their...errr...partner.

"It happens in nature, so it's all fine and dandy."

 

[Archie Gemmill Goal]

What I was objecting to was what seemed to me to be the idea that because Rolfe said some things that most of us disagree with, that the rest of what she is saying can be ignored.

I don't want to personalise this to Rolfe so I will talk in general. None of the below is aimed at Rolfe or any other individual on this thread.

If we are talking about some person X who says bigoted and prejudiced things then I think that, yes, you can pretty much ignore what that person has to say.

Not because, as some people seem to think, that calling someone a racist or a homophobe or a bigot wins the argument. Not because it means that the rest of their argument is incorrect but because it shows that they aren't really arguing in good faith.

If people are arguing in bad faith, using lies, using bigotry, then why should I bother to engage them as if they are not? They might have good points? Well great then make them without bigotry. I'm pretty sure if those points are good enough to be taken seriously then someone else will make them. Someone else who is arguing in good faith. Then I can have a discussion with them.

But I am not going to do all the work of trying to counter someone who is simply lying or relying on bigotry, or who shows that when called on a lie they will simply lie more or double down on it or simply reassert their bigotry.

Because quite frankly, racists don't deserve to be engaged with seriously on topics of race, homophobes don't deserve to be engaged with seriously on topics of sexual orientation and transphobes don't deserve to be engaged with seriously on trans issues. If you approach an argument with bigotry then you lose credibility, and if you have lost your credibility then yes I am happy to ignore you or not to engage with you. I will deal with the argument as I see fit and I don't think I will be missing anything worthwhile.

Meanwhile if there is something of value to be discussed then people can discuss it without the bigotry. And that will be far more productive.

 

[Archie Gemmill Goal]

The first question is an absolute prerequisite for the other questions. If your answer to the first question is "no", then none of the other questions are even relevant.

Yes, but those 3 questions aren't the be all and end all. And the answers may actually change based on your answers to the later questions as well. As I said 'it's more complicated than that'

It's key in the sense that this is where most of the disagreement is. But again, it's irrelevant if the answer to the first question is "no".

I have yet to hear you say what your answer to the first question is. Much of what you have said suggests your answer is "no", but you seem to be deliberately avoiding answering the question directly. Rather curious.

If I've avoided answering the question directly it's because it's a complicated question that doesn't sit well with a simple yes and no answer.

My honest answer would have to be 'I don't know'. And I say this based on 2 things. In terms of 'is there a need for segregation' I am not convinced there is. Not in general anyway. And I think the default should be no segregation unless there is a reason for it. But on the other hand I also appreciate that there are preferences for segregation in some cases and, in so much as satisfying those preferences doesn't harm anyone then I don't see why we shouldn't go ahead and do that.

Just in a thinking aloud way I wonder how much of the attraction of female changing spaces, voyeurism etc is the fact that these places are off-limits and how long they would take to disappear if non-segregated spaces became the norm. Ditto the 'discomfort' factor.

 

[Archie Gemmill Goal]

Perhaps so. But you intimated that this applied to every public setting. Do you think it applies to malls?

Well before we put words in mouth i intimated your logic should apply to every public setting.

There were two factors at play here:

1. That male-bodied people are stronger than female-bodied ones. Without going in to specifics on individuals vs groups then we can say OK, in general.

2. That male-bodied people have penises. Again, we can grant you this.

Notice though than both of these 2 things apply in EVERY single situation. Not just in bathrooms or changing rooms.

So if the concern is sexual assault as you argued then the risk is there in every single situation. not just in bathrooms or changing rooms. Then you added the element of vulnerability. Ok fair point. Someone is unlikely to rape someone in the middle of a busy shopping centre in the middle of the day. And I would argue it's equally unlikely to happen in a busy shopping centre bathroom in the middle of the day too.

But that still leaves a hell of a lot of 'vulnerable' situations. So what I am asking for in your argument is consistency.

Is your concern about women and men being placed together in situations where a woman is vulnerable to sexual assault or is it about women and men being segregated in places where there may be nudity?

Because you seem to be arguing for the latter by using arguments for the former.

It also occurs to me that if the situation is as grave as you say and the risk is significant then we need to do a better job of making women less vulnerable in these spaces beyond a little sign on a door. Proper security, cameras, lighting, alarms, whatever might actually make all sorts of spaces safer - including empty trains, late night buses, dark streets or whatever.

But in the absence of concern for these other spaces and a focus on spaces and solutions which are a focus for trans people can you see why I am not convinced that a real objective discussion on the risk of sexual assault is what is driving the discussion here?

 

[William Parcher]

I'm finding citations for hymens in chimpanzees, elephants and manatees. There could be others beyond these and those also mentioned in TomB's post.

 

[Archie Gemmill Goal]

I ran across a transwoman of just the sort that Rolfe talks about all the time today.

She was a very nice person. Very popular where I was at, and very well known. No one seemed to mind her presence at all. I spoke to her briefly. She was talking when she came in (I was at a public event. I don't want to say too much just for anonymity's sake, just in case the description might be recognized.) about her choice of clothing for the day. She had a skimpier skirt that she really like better than the more modest one that she chose. She wanted something more "family friendly".

Ok. Now, I've been saying "she", but this person had a deep voice, stood about 6' 1". I'm guessing she weighed around 300 pounds. She was flabby, but not obese. In other words, there were some pretty big upper arms, that didn't have much tone, but those were muscles, not fat.

What really struck me was something Rolfe talks about all the time. She was going out of her way to talk about her experiences as a woman. Nothing about her was in any way feminine. Even her outfit looked more like a drag queen than a woman, but not a good drag queen. Not someone who would win the contest. More like some anti-trans parody of a drag queen, but she described, at length, the difficulty of choosing an appropriate skirt and how she looked better in the smaller one, but she didn't want to be too revealing. She wanted to be "family friendly".

She was a nice person. No one seemed to mind. But it wasn't the sort of place where people had to take a shower, either.

I genuinely wonder what anecdotes like this are meant to tell us.

I mean Google 'female bodybuilders' and you will find hundred of pictures of women who you could say pretty much the same things about. But we wouldn't.

 

[Archie Gemmill Goal]

By the way, chapeau to the fact that a trans issues discussions has morphed into dolphin rape and chimpanzee hymens. It never gets boring here at least.