Cont: Trans Women are not Women 3

[Giordano]

Moreover, the actual debates of how people ought to be treated in society concern, in almost every case, people whose reproductive anatomy is clear and obvious.

Some of the discussion about non-binary sexuality and intersexed conditions is illuminating, but when someone who is clearly possessed of male reproductive anatomy and male physique is attempting to register as a girl for the track meet, or enter the women's locker room, the existence of a hard to classify individual isn't all that relevant. That particular penis is rather obviously a penis, and the girls in the locker room would prefer that it go elsewhere.

Well we are talking about relatively rare people if we are talking about sincere transsexuals. And I doubt that many cis males would pretend to be trans women just to get into a girls shower room.

But whatever I first think that everyone deserves privacy. Shower rooms should have partitions. My dorm ones did in college, very cheap and didn’t take up any extra room. Some panels and curtains for shower and drying off. My sons’ dorm rooms were coed.

But frankly I think it is the society that suggests a glimpse of a penis should seriously traumatize a girl or a women. If it was treated more causally it would not be a problem. Half the people have them and most everyone knows what they look like. Everyone should know what they look like. In many cultures they are routinely observable and no one is made mentally deranged by it.

 

[Safe-Keeper]

I'd be a lot more sanguine if someone could explain to me what a male-bodied person who has the lived experience of a man actually means when they say they "feel like a woman", and how the f--- they know what the hell a woman "feels like" in the first place.

This is a bit like asking a gay teenager how they can be so sure they're gay, when straight teenagers are never asked this question, and never have parents who tell each other that "it might just be a phase" when they bring home their first boy- or girlfriend of the opposite gender.

Everyone has a gender they identify as (meaning it's pretty strange to me how anyone can ask "what it feels like to feel like a man/woman"), the same way everyone who's hit puberty has a sexual orientation, be it fixed or, as in some cases, fluent. With some, very few people, this gender identity for some reason does not match the body they are born into, leading to what's called gender dysphoria, and you get cases like toddlers embarrased to be seen naked because they have a penis even though they're girls.

Then you have cases of teens, apparently mostly girls, who seem to suddenly not want to be girls anymore when they hit pubery and are convinced they must be trans, particularly if they stumble into the wrong echo chambers online. That's more of a grey area I have little knowledge of.

If we figure out how to transplant a beak and wings onto my cat, does she become a duck?

Are all your analogies this far removed from what you're discussing, or is this a one-off exception ? The mind boggles.

An analogy that actually had some resemblance to the topic being discussed would be a duck missing one or both wings from birth. No wings, you say, therefore clearly not a duck. Birds have wings. But then we transplant replacement wings onto the bird's back. Now is it a duck?

Still a terrible analogy, but now at least in the ballpark. Or approaching it.

 

[Safe-Keeper]

Well we are talking about relatively rare people if we are talking about sincere transsexuals. And I doubt that many cis males would pretend to be trans women just to get into a girls shower room.

But whatever I first think that everyone deserves privacy. Shower rooms should have partitions. My dorm ones did in college, very cheap and didn’t take up any extra room. Some panels and curtains for shower and drying off. My sons’ dorm rooms were coed.

But frankly I think it is the society that suggests a glimpse of a penis should seriously traumatize a girl or a women. If it was treated more causally it would not be a problem. Half the people have them and most everyone knows what they look like. Everyone should know what they look like. In many cultures they are routinely observable and no one is made mentally deranged by it.

I agree with this -- the "segregated" bathrooms, and/or communal showers and changing rooms, are the problem in the first place.

We already allow gay people into locker rooms (not that there's be a way to avoid that, nor should there be), and I never think about that when I'm in a locker room or shower.

 

[d4m10n]

That still doesn't make it not equivocation.

I don't think the word equivocation^WP means what you think it means. Rowling wasn't using ambiguous language in order to conceal or mislead; she used the phrase "philosophical belief" in the usual non-technical sense (rather than a narrow legal sense) and reasonably expected her readers to take it in that way. To take it the other way doesn't even make sense, because the Claimant wasn't asking the judge to find that X is an X. She was asking the judge to find that a specific philosophical belief (in the ordinary sense of the phrase) was a protected philosophical belief in the narrow sense contemplated by the law.

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[Meadmaker]

The threat of assault is a little more complicated but I don’t see it as unique to trans people.

Neither does anyone else.

 

[Meadmaker]

But frankly I think it is the society that suggests a glimpse of a penis should seriously traumatize a girl or a women.

That is not, and never has been, the issue. I'm baffled why so many people think it is.

As the seventeen year old girl addressing the Palatine, Illinois school board said, "Can she put the towel over her eyes?"

Unless you understand why she said that you'll never understand the trans-access controversies.

 

[JoeMorgue]

How cultures that don't have the hang up about nudity react to / conceptualize transgenderism would be an interesting bit of data.

 

[JoeMorgue]

This is a bit like asking a gay teenager how they can be so sure they're gay, when straight teenagers are never asked this question, and never have parents who tell each other that "it might just be a phase" when they bring home their first boy- or girlfriend of the opposite gender.

If my son told me he was was gay but only ever dated, had relationships with, was only ever sexually attracted to, only had sex with women and never men, etc I'd be a little confused.

If someone tells me "I'm a man who identifies as a woman" but then I hit a brick wall that stays up no matter how hard I bang my head against as to what I'm now supposed to do differently is the same thing.

Words... means... things.

A mumbled, mush mouthed "Well it's complicated" can't be the best I'm ever going to get.

Personal "identity" simply is not this sacrosanct. You can't identify as left handed but use your right hand for everything and expect the term to retain any meaning.

 

[Strawberry]

Well we are talking about relatively rare people if we are talking about sincere transsexuals. And I doubt that many cis males would pretend to be trans women just to get into a girls shower room.

But whatever I first think that everyone deserves privacy. Shower rooms should have partitions. My dorm ones did in college, very cheap and didn’t take up any extra room. Some panels and curtains for shower and drying off. My sons’ dorm rooms were coed.

But frankly I think it is the society that suggests a glimpse of a penis should seriously traumatize a girl or a women. If it was treated more causally it would not be a problem. Half the people have them and most everyone knows what they look like. Everyone should know what they look like. In many cultures they are routinely observable and no one is made mentally deranged by it.

Sex segregated spaces don't exist to prevent women from catching a glimpse of a penis. They exist for reasons of safety and privacy.

 

[Joe Random]

I wonder if we'd see any change in the number of people saying/feeling they're trans if we somehow managed to ditch our society's stereotypes of "boys/men do <x> and girls/women do <y>"? Probably wouldn't hit the people going the full surgery/HRT route, but what about the others?

To take myself for example : when I was married I did 100% of the meal planning, 90% of the shopping, and 100% of the cooking. Often when stressed or depressed I'd spend the day in the kitchen baking stuff I never intended to eat myself. Hate beer and love wine, prefer cats to dogs, can't stand action movies and I almost feel physical pain if I have to listen to people talking about cars or sports. But I'm a man. I'm no sort of 'non-binary', or anything at all like that. I'm a man that just doesn't enjoy some stereotypical male things, and does enjoy some stereotypical female things. No confusion, no 'but I'm special', just me being a regular old indiviual.

When you get to the level of, say, the only trans person I personally met (that I'm aware of) who made zero effort to change his appearance or behavior (yes, sporting the dreaded 5 o'clock shadow), just wanted to be called 'she' and said was 'a woman'. In a case like that is it really just something like "I'm not into getting greasy working on a car and would like to wear a dress to work"?, and so the problem isn't any sort of gender identity issue, but how we stereotype the behaviors of the sexes? I'd have loved to have asked the aforementioned person just what it was that made him say he felt he was a she, but in the setting it would have been utterly inappropriate so I left it alone.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

Rowling wasn't using ambiguous language in order to conceal or mislead; she used the phrase "philosophical belief" in the usual non-technical sense (rather than a narrow legal sense) and reasonably expected her readers to take it in that way.

Yes she was. She was using something that even you now agree is a legal term, in the context of talking about a legal case, which used that legal term in order to rule whether a particular belief could be classified as that legal term. And she was using it in a way that you yourself describe as being intended to convey a different meaning to the legal term.

It's equivocation.

I notice you avoided the question of why she chose that particular phrasing, when it would be highly unusual in the sense that you believe that she intended it. You don't seem to have asked yourself whether she knew it was a legal term or not (although your answers seem to lean towards her being unaware). Instead you're contorting yourself into all sorts of weird shapes in order to find a hole to poke an excuse through and thereby hand-wave away every criticism of her words.

You should actually try to answer those questions.

Your sig has you down as someone who writes for a sceptical website (one that purports to be opposed to incentives that demean individuals on the basis of gender identity, no less). I suggest - and I'm honestly not saying this as a point-scoring exercise - that you take some time to reflect on why you are approaching this subject in the unsceptical way that you are, in order to defend someone who was advocating for someone else's right to create a hostile work environment for people because of their gender identity. I mean that completely sincerely. Don't just hit reply and edit out anything that you don't like. Look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself whether you are really rigorously applying critical thinking in your approach to this, and why.

To take it the other way doesn't even make sense, because the Claimant wasn't asking the judge to find that X is an X. She was asking the judge to find that a specific philosophical belief (in the ordinary sense of the phrase) was a protected philosophical belief in the narrow sense contemplated by the law.

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You're the one taking the position that Rowling was making good arguments. I'm not. So "but what she said can't be stupid and wrong" isn't the best tactic to get me to agree with you. If you remember, I've said multiple times that Rowling has said things which are stupid and wrong.

 

[d4m10n]

Yes she was. She was using something that even you now agree is a legal term, in the context of talking about a legal case, which used that legal term in order to rule whether a particular belief could be classified as that legal term. And she was using it in a way that you yourself describe as being intended to convey a different meaning to the legal term.

This is all true, but none of it implies that the average readers of her essay would have trouble differentiating the legal term from the usual usage of the phrase. People who don't study British law probably aren't aware that the phrase has a specific meaning therein, and those who do study British law have been trained to recognize when someone is using a legal term of art. Even the case itself explicitly makes if clear that the author is using the phrase as a legal term of art, by noting that the phrase is "pursuant to" its usage in the Equality Act.

It's equivocation.

Under what possible definition of equivocation? The one I'm familiar with requires an intent to deceive or dissemble through the use of deliberately ambiguous phrasing.

I notice you avoided the question of why she chose that particular phrasing, when it would be highly unusual in the sense that you believe that she intended it.

I cannot read her mind nor infer her intent on a stylistic question such as this. I would hazard a guess that she used the word "philosophical" to pick out deeply held and carefully considered beliefs as opposed to beliefs which are held casually or unreflectively.

Snipping the rest of your post since it's about me rather than the subject at hand. Feel free to PM.

 

[d4m10n]

You're the one taking the position that Rowling was making good arguments.

No, I'm the one asking that those who characterize her essay as a "factually inaccurate anti-trans screed" actually take a bit effort to show that the essay in question actually got at least few facts wrong.

Stylistic quibbling isn't quite the same thing, is it?

 

[Emily's Cat]

Wow. The whole point is that there is no one point when “it” goes from being a clitoris to a penis. It is a continuum, which is why I am surprised some posters here insist it must be one or another. Yes, most often the result is much more to one side of the spectrum or the other. But is is not strictly binary. It is analog.

Actually there is a point. It starts at about 7 weeks.

It is not analog. There isn't a clitoris with an attached urethra out there. There isn't a penis that has no urethral opening.

Your argument really is tantamount to saying that because nasal bulbs and pituitary glands develop from the same lump of cells, there's no real distinction between them, and that there's a spectrum between nasal bulbs and pituitary glands. There isn't. They are two different things that develop from the same starting lump of cells. But at that point, just go whole hog with it: humans all develop from a zygote, so there's no difference between my left foot and my amydala. - they're an analog spectrum!

 

[Emily's Cat]

WRT brains, there are a few studies that show results like this one. The TL/DR version is that adolescent trans boys and girls were given MRIs while stimuli that are known to induce gender-specific activity in people's brains were introduced. What was observed was that the brains of the transgender youths displayed characteristics that were more like the gender they believed themselves to be than the one they were assigned at birth.

This is another study that did something similar, and which had similar results.

There is not enough research in this field yet to draw any conclusions, and some of the research is confusing or contradictory (as is the case in anything that is under-researched), but there are certainly indications that there is a biological, brain-based basis for how transgender people perceive themselves.

The challenge with those studies is that they don't really account for brain plasticity. And they assume up front that gender-specific activity is a result of the brain being different, rather than a difference in experience, preference, and exposure.

Children are exposed to gender differentiated stimuli from the moment they're born. If you want to show that there's a real difference between male brains and female brains, you're going to need to find a way to measure a baseline from newborns, prior to any gender-differentiated stimuli being introduced, and you're also going to need to control for the effect of those stimuli on brain plasticity in older children and adults.

 

[Emily's Cat]

This is an odd request. I've never claimed that there is a strict demarcation between "human" and "not-human". In fact I've spoken many times, including on this board, about how the idea that "species" is a strict, rigid category with sharp dividing lines between them is a fundamental misunderstanding of evolutionary biology. Reality is more messy and complicated than that.

It usually is. Which is why statements such as that male and female are determined by which gametes you produce are ill-advised. It's not quite that simple.

Interesting theory. How many of these "we can't tell if this is a human or not" cases are you aware of?

 

[Emily's Cat]

The existences of rare edge cases does not turn an dichotomy into a spectrum.

Height is a spectrum because heights vary widely across the general population.

If 49.99% of the population was 5'3" or and 49.99% of the population was 7'10" and everyone between the heights of 5'4" and 7'9", 5'2" or less, and 7'11" or more made up only a tiny fraction of the population and they all had legit medical conditions that caused them to not fall into the 5'3" or 7'10" categories height would not be a spectrum, it would be a dichotomy with very rare anomalies.

 

[The Atheist]

And I doubt that many cis males would pretend to be trans women just to get into a girls shower room.

How few is acceptable, then?

 

[Emily's Cat]

This is a bit like asking a gay teenager how they can be so sure they're gay, when straight teenagers are never asked this question, and never have parents who tell each other that "it might just be a phase" when they bring home their first boy- or girlfriend of the opposite gender.

Everyone has a gender they identify as (meaning it's pretty strange to me how anyone can ask "what it feels like to feel like a man/woman"), the same way everyone who's hit puberty has a sexual orientation, be it fixed or, as in some cases, fluent. With some, very few people, this gender identity for some reason does not match the body they are born into, leading to what's called gender dysphoria, and you get cases like toddlers embarrased to be seen naked because they have a penis even though they're girls.

Then you have cases of teens, apparently mostly girls, who seem to suddenly not want to be girls anymore when they hit pubery and are convinced they must be trans, particularly if they stumble into the wrong echo chambers online. That's more of a grey area I have little knowledge of.

I don't think it's as much like asking a gay person how they know they're gay. They have a physiological attraction to people with a certain body formation. The lack of any even remotely reasonable response to "what do you mean when you say you feel like a woman" is a bit different. The current social push is to accept it as claimed, with no questions.

I, as a woman, can give you a whole slew of descriptions for what I mean when I say I feel like a woman. Everything I can come up with, however, is driven by my biological processes (mentruation, boobs, etc.) or by my lived experience of society treating me like a woman. Some of them I'm fine with, some of them irritate the hell out of me. I think almost any natal woman could give you a broad description of what it means to be a woman, and how it feels, based on a combination of biology and social interactions.

I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for a transwoman to explain what she means when she says she feels like a woman. I don't think it's out of line to ask how she knows what a woman feels like in the first place.

The inability to do so, and the insistence that it "just is" is really asking 99.9% of the world to take it on faith. It's asking that we accept the existence of an indefinable and ephemeral soul-like attribute that is definitionally "gender" and has nothing at all to do with the body and also is not socially defined gender roles or interactions.

Are all your analogies this far removed from what you're discussing, or is this a one-off exception ? The mind boggles.

An analogy that actually had some resemblance to the topic being discussed would be a duck missing one or both wings from birth. No wings, you say, therefore clearly not a duck. Birds have wings. But then we transplant replacement wings onto the bird's back. Now is it a duck?

Still a terrible analogy, but now at least in the ballpark. Or approaching it.

It was far fetched on purpose. A duck born without wings is still a duck. A gander born without ovaries (which is normal for ganders), who gets an ovary transplant... is that gander now a goose? If an asian man gets a heart transplant from a black man, is he now a black man?

 

[JoeMorgue]

For a comparison to be invalid it has to do something wrong other than "Make my argument / side look bad"