Cont: Trans Women are not Women 3

[TurkeysGhost]

Wow, you jump to some pretty extreme conclusions.

You ain't seen nothin yet

 

[Manger Douse]

Ah so it is about competitive victim-hood.

Yep just like your feminism comes at my cost. Yet for some reason that does not bother you.

Patriarchy? Never heard of it

 

[ponderingturtle]

Patriarchy? Never heard of it

And you never considered it a source of discrimination for all women not just cis? The patriarchy hates trans women much more than cis.

 

[lionking]

Wow, you jump to some pretty extreme conclusions. I realize now that whatever hope I thought you might have to understand us was misplaced.

Breathtaking non-response.

It would have been easier for you to say “you’re just a TERF”, as others have done. Fewer keystrokes.

 

[Manger Douse]

And you never considered it a source of discrimination for all women not just cis? The patriarchy hates trans women much more than cis.

The fem in feminist stands for female - it's not your word to hand out

 

[d4m10n]

Yep just like your feminism comes at my cost.

What has her feminism cost you?

 

[Boudicca90]

And you never considered it a source of discrimination for all women not just cis? The patriarchy hates trans women much more than cis.

Yep, because like I stated before (that got all the men riled up here), we tend to be perceived as a threat to their masculinity and sexuality.

The patriarchy is why I always have to be extra careful around men, because I am extremely afraid of what they would do if they found out I was trans. I just started dating and it's a constant fear of mine.

 

[Meadmaker]

You're kidding, right? There's been plenty of studies that are specifically looking for differences in male and female brains, with the objective of being able to show that transwomen's brains are more similar to women's brains. They make a point of stressing that last point... even though it's extremely small differences to begin with, and that the majority of noted differences are literally due to the size of the skull which is directly related to body size. Males are bigger than females. Once those differences are accounted for, the remaining differences in brains are minor, and are largely a result of either plasticity (very likely reflecting experiential differences) or are differences directly traceable to sex. The fact remains that the marginal differences noted in the brains of fairly small selections of transwomen are not materially different enough to be meaningful. What gets "overlooked" pretty regularly is that the hypothetically noted brain differences are not even significant enough for a blind hypothesis test - you can't show a researcher a brain and ask them whether it's a female or a male brain, they won't be able to tell the difference.

On the other hand... there's a significant risk of abuse for any of those studies in once again setting women to a second-class status. Here we have brain science (!) that shows that women's brains are just different... that must be why there are so few women in politics, they simply don't have the brains for it!

But that very real risk, the kind of argument that has held women back for centuries... well, that's just not an important consideration. Definitely not as important as making sure that some male people who identify as women don't feel put out.

I am happy to be an ally for transgender people. It would be awfully nice if those transgender people were willing to be an ally for females in return.

I've never looked deeply into the studies. To my way of thinking, you can't say, "The differences are too small to matter." because we don't know enough to know what matters. If you can see it, maybe it matters.

However, if what you are saying is correct, then you can't see it anyway. If a researcher can't look at a scan and say that this brain is female and that one is male, then how could they possibly say that this one is more like a female brain than that one?

 

[Manger Douse]

Yep, because like I stated before (that got all the men riled up here), we tend to be perceived as a threat to their masculinity and sexuality.

It certainly made me laugh

 

[Emily's Cat]

The clarion call of reactionaries since the dawn of time.

Would you support increased entitlements for gay people, if it reduced safety and rights for black people?

 

[Emily's Cat]

Yep just like your feminism comes at my cost.

What does it cost you?

 

[Emily's Cat]

Wow, you jump to some pretty extreme conclusions. I realize now that whatever hope I thought you might have to understand us was misplaced.

What part of that is an extreme conclusion?

 

[Boudicca90]

What part of that is an extreme conclusion?

The physical structure of the brain doesn't differ from person to person, but our development during our lives wire our brains differently. Creating and pruning synaptic pathways to direct the development of the brain in a more masculine or feminine way, and that creates gender.

There are no inherently male or female brains. We basically start off without gender and start to differentiate from there.

 

[d4m10n]

The patriarchy hates trans women much more than cis.

I'm not sure how to even translate this into a testable factual claim.

 

[theprestige]

What does it cost you?

Male privilege. Isn't that the whole point of feminism? My vote is diluted by women's suffrage. My opportunities for career advancement are curtailed by allowing women to compete for those jobs. Etc.

Now, I happen to believe that all of those costs to men are good and proper costs, and that women have every right to an equal share of those things.

But I don't happen to believe there are no costs.

 

[theprestige]

I'm not sure how to even translate this into a testable factual claim.

That's an easy one: Conduct a survey of upper class men, asking if having or having had a penis is a factor they consider when pursuing a romantic relationship with a woman.

Also, conduct a survey of upper class men, to find out the ratio of interest in cis-callgirls to interest in trans-callgirls.

I don't think anyone will be surprised at the results. Whether this maps to "patriarchy" and "hates" is probably a question of personal worldview, though.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I've never looked deeply into the studies. To my way of thinking, you can't say, "The differences are too small to matter." because we don't know enough to know what matters. If you can see it, maybe it matters.

However, if what you are saying is correct, then you can't see it anyway. If a researcher can't look at a scan and say that this brain is female and that one is male, then how could they possibly say that this one is more like a female brain than that one?

It's a case of statistics being... misleading. Perhaps not intentionally so, but it's very easy to form conclusions based on "statistically significance" that are also immaterial. It's one of the more challenging things to learn as an actuary. It's entirely possible for there to be a measurably statistically significant difference between a rate of 0.023 per 1000 incidence rate for kidney cancer in group A and a 0.025 per 1000 incidence rate for kidney cancer group B. But when you step back and see that the rate of all other cancers is 0.72 per 1000 for everyone, that minor difference in one specific element is immaterial. Especially if their distributions have significant overlap. They might have means that are statistically different, but they might also share 80% overlap in their outcomes.

As an example...
Distribution of foot size between men and women:

Versus distribution of test scores between men and women:

Both of those are bimodal distributions, but shoe size has a lot less overlap, it's very strongly bimodal. Test scores, on the other hand, are weakly bimodal. They have different means, and different distributions, but the overlap is so large that taking a test score at random isn't really much help in predicting whether the tester was male or female. It might have slightly higher probability of one or the other, but the predictability is immaterial.

 

[Emily's Cat]

The physical structure of the brain doesn't differ from person to person, but our development during our lives wire our brains differently. Creating and pruning synaptic pathways to direct the development of the brain in a more masculine or feminine way, and that creates gender.

There are no inherently male or female brains. We basically start off without gender and start to differentiate from there.

I agree that differences are largely due to brain plasticity - the effect of experience and environment on the patterns developed by the brain. I agree that there are no meaningful differences between male and female brains.

So I'm at a bit of a loss as to what you think is extreme about my post?

 

[Meadmaker]

Male privilege. Isn't that the whole point of feminism? My vote is diluted by women's suffrage. My opportunities for career advancement are curtailed by allowing women to compete for those jobs. Etc.

Now, I happen to believe that all of those costs to men are good and proper costs, and that women have every right to an equal share of those things.

But I don't happen to believe there are no costs.

I don't even believe that those are costs.

It's true that my vote matters less if women are allowed to vote, but the value of the vote is that it represents the will of the people, not just my will. If some people are left out, that means there is a societal benefit to everyone being represented.

My opportunities for career advancement are made greater by economic growth, and more workers means more economic growth. Women starting businesses means more employment opportunities. (As an aside, the economic growth of the 80s was strongly advanced by a huge influx of women into the workplace. It wasn't Reagan's tax policy. It was women and computers. By the end of the decade, there were more people working more productively.)

I can't think of any way that I have been impacted negatively by feminism.

And on top of all that, "Women's Studies" departments at Universities have provided numerous hours of entertainment disguised as research.

 

[Meadmaker]

It's a case of statistics being... misleading. Perhaps not intentionally so, but it's very easy to form conclusions based on "statistically significance" that are also immaterial. ...

Both of those are bimodal distributions, but shoe size has a lot less overlap, it's very strongly bimodal. Test scores, on the other hand, are weakly bimodal. They have different means, and different distributions, but the overlap is so large that taking a test score at random isn't really much help in predicting whether the tester was male or female. It might have slightly higher probability of one or the other, but the predictability is immaterial.

I've heard it said, though, that there are measurable differences between certain brain characteristics in men and women, and that transgenders are generally more like their adopted gender rather than their biological sex.

If the first part isn't true, i.e. there are not observable differences between men and women, then the second part can't be true.

If the "observable differences" are more like the shoe size thing, ie strongly bimodal in some characteristic that can be measured, then I would find it significant if the transwoman distribution was more like the women's distribution than the men's distribution. At the very least, it would be worth looking into. However, if it was the weakly bimodal thing, like test scores, I would say that it's not significant if transgenders were closer to their chose gender than their biological sex.