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

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Here's a fun exercise: England's reform of the Gender Recognition Act would likely have aligned it with Ireland's 2015 Gender Recognition Act. Can anybody who is opposed to the reform and believes it is good that the Tories have now abandoned it point to any negative consequences in the past half decade arising from Ireland's Act?

To make it easier, you can also refer to Malta, Norway, Argentina, Portugal, Denmark, Chile, Uruguay, Luxembourg, Colombia, Ecuador, Iceland, and Belguim.
 
The battered women's shelter has an obvious solution, don't let an abused person's abuser enter the shelter.

What happens if a lesbian woman flees a violent home and the female abuser tries to enter the shelter? Does the shelter just throw up their hands and say "we gotta let her in, she's a woman, that's the rules" and then turn their heads as the abuser beats her victim?

The ban on men is a throwback to a more regressive understanding of the world where only heterosexual couplings were recognized as valid. The framework that "women flee violent men" is simply inadequate in providing for the entire community. It's failure now isn't a good argument to disallow services to trans women, who by all evidence are often in extremely dangerous situations and need aid.

Isn't the obvious solution to simply blacklist specific abusers from entry so long as their victim is there? "Hi, I'm Jane Doe, my abusive husband is John Doe, don't let him in even if he lies about being a trans-woman".

Is that so hard?
 
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Yes,. women's shelters are already on the lookout for female abusive partners trying to gain entry to confront the person fleeing from them. And, as has already been posted several times - research shows that trans women are no more a threat to cis women than cis women are.

In the mean time, the arduous, expensive, degrading, and non-appealable current process causes harm. Not only does it require the applicant to officially be diagnosed with a mental illness, but Amnesty International have said that it breached human rights. Because of this, many trans people don't undergo the process.

Why does that matter? https://www.medpagetoday.com/psychiatry/generalpsychiatry/85445

[...]compared with those without any gender-concordant ID, those who had their preferred name and gender on all their IDs had a significantly lower prevalence of serious mental health issues. These included a much lower prevalence of suicidal ideation (adjusted prevalence ratio [aPR] 0.78, 95% CI 0.72-0.85) and suicide planning (aPR 0.75, 95% CI 0.64-0.87), as well as serious psychological distress (aPR 0.68, 95% CI 0.61-0.76), as measured by the Kessler 6 scale.
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That's measurable harm.

I re-iterate my challenge to anybody who objects to legal self-identification to provide evidence of measurable harm that causes.
 
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Squeegee Beckenheim said:
Yes,. women's shelters are already on the lookout for female abusive partners trying to gain entry to confront the person fleeing from them. And, as has already been posted several times - research shows that trans women are no more a threat to cis women than cis women are.

In the mean time, the arduous, expensive, degrading, and non-appealable current process causes harm. Not only does it require the applicant to officially be diagnosed with a mental illness, but Amnesty International have said that it breached human rights. Because of this, many trans people don't undergo the process.

Why does that matter? https://www.medpagetoday.com/psychiatry/generalpsychiatry/85445



That's measurable harm.

I re-iterate my challenge to anybody who objects to legal self-identification to provide evidence of measurable harm that causes.
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Just like the "gay men are child predators and must not be allowed around children" panic, or the "trans women are bathroom sex perverts" panic here in the US, these positions reveal themselves to be pretexts for general animus against these marginalized communities.

TERF's like Rowling will always couch their objections in some specific, unsubstantiated worry about some danger against the majority population, but the real issue is that she doesn't want these icky trans people sullying "real" womanhood. It's bigotry masked in the language of LGBT acceptance, which makes it especially repugnant.
 
I thought the idea of these shelters was that the residents might not feel comfortable around men full stop and I think that's a reasonable request from a rape victim
 
Manger Douse said:
I thought the idea of these shelters was that the residents might not feel comfortable around men full stop and I think that's a reasonable request from a rape victim
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Doesn't seem to be an issue: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...gle-sex-spaces-whats-the-furore-idUSKBN23I3AI

Supporters of trans rights emphasise that trans women are women. Britain’s 2010 Equality Act protects trans people from discrimination in accessing single-sex spaces.

The law does provide for exclusions in exceptional circumstances, such as if a group counselling female victims of sexual assault judged that other clients would not attend the session if a trans woman was there.

A 2019 parliamentary inquiry found no evidence of this provision ever being used.
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Besides, it's not an argument against trans women, but against women who look masculine.

The woman in this picture is Lisa Appleton:

sBHGUEg.jpg


She's a cisgender woman, but is the first to admit that she's often mistaken for being trans, or for being a man in drag. Should she be excluded from women's shelters on that basis?
 
One of the consistent issues that comes up again and again and again in these discussions is that people insist that "the right wing", or "the anti-trans people", or whatever label is applied to people who oppose the various modifications about who gets to be in the shower with women, are saying that transwomen are dangerous.

That isn't what we are saying. We don't hate trans people. (Well, not most of us. Some of the evangelicals and generally backward sorts do.) We aren't afraid of trans people, at least not because they are trans. What we are afraid of, is men.

Men are dangerous to women. Is that a mean thing to say? Wait. In the spirit of the Rowling controversy that revived this thread, let me rephrase that. People who produce sperm are dangerous to people who menstruate.

That's reality.
 
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Meadmaker said:
One of the consistent issues that comes up again and again and again in these discussions is that people insist that "the right wing", or "the anti-trans people", or whatever label is applied to people who oppose the various modifications about who gets to be in the shower with women, are saying that transwomen are dangerous.

That isn't what we are saying. We don't hate trans people. (Well, not most of us. Some of the evangelicals and generally backward sorts do.) We aren't afraid of trans people, at least not because they are trans. What we are afraid of, is men.

Men are dangerous to women. Is that a mean thing to say? Wait. In the spirit of the Rowling controversy that revived this thread, let me rephrase that. People who produce sperm are dangerous to people who menstruate.

That's reality.
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I don't think most are disputing this. It's also an unambiguous fact that trans people are an especially vulnerable group and need access to these facilities.

"Too bad" isn't an acceptable response.
 
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
And, as has already been posted several times - research shows that trans women are no more a threat to cis women than cis women are.
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Nobody here is saying transwomen are the threat. Why do you keep misunderstanding this point?

Some people are saying that under the proposed rule, cismen who are threats will have a significant social and legal barrier removed, that serves to mitigate the threat they pose.

Leaving aside for a moment the question of threats from transwomen (which nobody is asking), how do you address the question of what to do about threatening cismen, once this social and legal barrier to them is removed?
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
I don't think most are disputing this. It's also an unambiguous fact that trans people are an especially vulnerable group and need access to these facilities.
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I agree that trans people need access to these facilities.

The question we're debating is, what kind of access rule can we implement, that gives access to transwomen but screens cismen who wish to do them harm?

"Anyone who says they're a woman or a transwoman gets access on their say-so alone" doesn't seem like a good rule for this purpose.

Do you think it's a good rule for this purpose? Why or why not?
 
Manger Douse said:
Why wouldn't a self ID law allow that?
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Because a) there is zero evidence that it has happened anywhere where there is a self-identification law, b) self-identification laws require you to sign legally binding documents stating that you intend to live the rest of your life as the gender you are legally assuming and so aren't as simple or as lacking in consequence as detractors like to straw man them to be, and c) women's shelters can and do have the right to exclude anybody that they feel will be a threat to the women inside them, regardless of that person's gender. Someone assuming a gender that is not theirs in order to infiltrate a women's shelter would be opening themselves up to more legal repercussions than if they just tried to get in without doing so, and would almost certainly be unsuccessful anyway due to the screening process. Two reasons why it doesn't seem to actually happen, despite the hand-wringing.

It's also worth noting that the change in the law would have disallowed women-only organisations from excluding trans women purely because of the fact that they are trans. It's not currently illegal for women's shelters to accept trans women. The majority already do.

And yet, still no reports of this actually happening.

You can read this report, based on interviews with 15 professionals in the field, and the consensus is clear - trans women are already accepted by these services, that trans inclusion has been a positive thing, there has been no negative reaction from cis women in the shelters, and none of them have found cause to use the exemption in the Equality Act to deny someone on the basis of being trans.

It's also worth noting that a couple of them say that they have likely given refuge to trans women without knowing that they were trans. So it seems like at the moment an abuser could gain access without needing to legally change their gender status anyway, rendering the whole argument moot.

I'm open to opposing evidence. I reiterate my challenge above for anybody to provide evidence of meaningful harm caused by self-identification laws. I add to that another challenge for anybody to provide evidence that inclusion of trans people in women's shelters makes the cis women unsafer, or otherwise causes them any distress.

And if you can't do either of those things, with information available from many years and many countries, then you should ask yourself on what your belief that it is harmful is based.
 
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theprestige said:
I agree that trans people need access to these facilities.

The question we're debating is, what kind of access rule can we implement, that gives access to transwomen but screens cismen who wish to do them harm?

"Anyone who says they're a woman or a transwoman gets access on their say-so alone" doesn't seem like a good rule for this purpose.

Do you think it's a good rule for this purpose? Why or why not?
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Is there any evidence that this kind of problem actually exists and occurs frequently enough to be worthy of such worry?

The whole thing smacks of an imagined problem, just like the trans-bathroom panic we've seen in the last few years.
 
theprestige said:
I agree that trans people need access to these facilities.

The question we're debating is, what kind of access rule can we implement, that gives access to transwomen but screens cismen who wish to do them harm?

"Anyone who says they're a woman or a transwoman gets access on their say-so alone" doesn't seem like a good rule for this purpose.

Do you think it's a good rule for this purpose? Why or why not?
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What is the objection to cismen using the restroom, anyway?
 
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
self-identification laws require you to sign legally binding documents stating that you intend to live the rest of your life as the gender you are legally assuming and so aren't as simple or as lacking in consequence as detractors like to straw man them to be
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OK, so what are the consequences? And what actions or circumstances would trigger those consequences?
 
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