Cont: Trans Women are not Women 3

[theprestige]

Also we can, with fair regularity, count on it being made a problem if it isn't already.

I can within a metaphysical certainty guarantee that alpha males that you couldn't pay to watch a WNBA game now will be the first to post Youtube rants sitting in the cab of the trucks wearing sunglasses about how transgender players are "ruining the game" if it ever happens.

They probably won't be the first to raise the issue, though. I'm betting actual WNBA players, and the sports writers covering that beat, would be the first to raise the issue.

Also, why the ad hom? If they see a real issue and call it out, who cares what kind of truck they drive?

 

[Arcade22]

But big hands and feet, broad shoulders relative to hip width, general v-shaped torso, hip tilt, and many other elements of phenotype cannot be changed, no matter how strongly someone identifies as a woman. Because they are still male.

And yet there are females that have such traits as well, and it presumably does not disqualify them as being recognized as women. Transwomen shouldn't have to meet some incredibly high standards of feminine appearance to qualify as looking like a woman by any means, unless you are also going to subject females to such standards as well.

What you really seem to be overlooking is that there is now a strong push for self-identification alone to be sufficient for someone to gain access to all things female. And that includes people with full beards, no hormone therapy, and intact genitalia.

How many are we talking about here? Rolfe said that in Canada, that hellish place, any man can simply declare that they are a woman and proceed to sexually harrass women in changing rooms with complete impunity because no one dares do anything about out of fear of being branded transphobic.

Even more than that, I don't think it's even remotely 'progressive' for cismen to drown out our voices and call us names if we don't kowtow to the males who identify as women.

I don't care wheter you think it's "progressive" or not because really someones sex and gender presentation has nothing to do with whether I or anyone else are allowed to criticize the transphobic comments that "gender critical" feminists or right-wing reactionaries can't stop themselves from making.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Funny you should mention that. I've been wondering whether this topic is one of those areas that's impossible to discuss coherently in a rationalist materialist mindset. Kind of like the concept of sending good wishes (sometimes referred to tellingly as "not-prayers" here) to someone facing adversity. That's why questions like "what characteristic do natal women and trans women share, that aren't shared with everyone?" cannot be answered.

In a metaphysical model, there's little difficulty. A transwoman is a female soul or spirit in a male body. A woman is anyone with a female soul or spirit, usually embodied female as well but sometimes embodied male. One can argue and discuss precisely what preferences, traits, inclinations, actions, or thoughts are or are not characteristic of a female or male soul or spirit, but as long as there's agreement that some exist that are, this doesn't introduce any deep ambiguity. In a metaphysically constituted society, if there are doubts or ambiguities in individual cases, they are resolved by the deliberations of holy men or women. Which is gatekeeping, but that's going to be true for a lot of other things too, such as marriages and career choices. One must, after all, not make choices of which the spirits or gods disapprove.

At this point, I'd be tickled if we could get to the descriptions involved. Right now we don't even have that.

 

[Emily's Cat]

[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/imagehosting/263895f6086a44ecdd.jpg[/qimg]

So... there's this tendency to shoehorn everyone into a political position, which I find annoying. I'm fairly certain that almost everyone would consider trans people and trans rights activists to be "the left" and to associate them with "progressives" and "democrats".

There's also, by the way, a long running tendency by "leftists" to condemn "rightists" and "conservatives" and "republicans" as being anti-science.

And then there's this.

 

[Emily's Cat]

An outdated view of feminism and gender that does nothing but repress people.

What views of feminism do you think are outdated and repress people? What views of gender do you think repress people?

 

[Emily's Cat]

The former. Anyone that would let the ADF take up their legal case has extremely poor moral judgement. Even if your interests happen to align on very narrow issues, it shows poor character to become the poster child of a bigoted legal advocacy organization.

Okay... wouldn't this same principle hold for transpeople and trans allies that align themselves with misogynistic individuals and organizations? Shouldn't they also be condemned for showing poor character?

 

[TurkeysGhost]

Okay... wouldn't this same principle hold for transpeople and trans allies that align themselves with misogynistic individuals and organizations? Shouldn't they also be condemned for showing poor character?

I think you and I would vastly disagree on who counts as misogynistic individuals, but I'll bite. Sure. Being trans or trans-accepting is no immunity to being a ****** person in other areas.

 

[Emily's Cat]

How many pages are going to spent on the the evils of trans people? The amount of pearl clutching seen on this forum, you'd think trans people were practically the modern day equivalent of the mongol horde on the horizon, rather than an extremely small portion of the population that are seeking minor accommodation. Either it's this story of two high school track athletes in the suburbs, or the the evil of a mediocre MMA fighter, or the horror of a trans woman using a sauna at a pool. HORROR, SHOCK, DANGER, DOOM. WOE BEFALL ALL MANKIND.

Serious question here, and I'd like a serious answer.

How are you so comfortable and accepting of approaches that erase female identity, invade female-only safe spaces, increase risk of injury and violations against females, and undermine progress toward female equality (which hasn't been achieved)?

Why are you so willing to throw 50% of the population under the bus and essentially insist that they shut up and know their place? What makes that okay to you?

 

[Emily's Cat]

Civil rights protections for trans people are growing, and is already codified into law in some more civilized nations. It's only a matter of time.

You're absolutely correct. Hooray for the violation of civil rights for females!

 

[Emily's Cat]

If a female can perform just as well as a male of the same weight-range, then why should they not? I know that the weight-ranges vary between the different sex categories, even if they use the same names. Realistically speaking here i think there are very few females that can, because of physiological restraints, achieve the same level of performance as males in sports on a elite level such as boxing for example.

The whole point of sex segregation in modern sports is supposed to be because it's necessary to give women a chance to compete fairly. How can it then be fair if other women have to compete with those who have been born with the potential to achieve the performance of a man?

A healthy male and a healthy female of the same weight will have dramatically different bone and muscle density. Even if they're the same weight class, there is a substantially higher risk of real and meaningful damage to a female from a male competitor.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

Serious question here, and I'd like a serious answer.

How are you so comfortable and accepting of approaches that erase female identity, invade female-only safe spaces, increase risk of injury and violations against females, and undermine progress toward female equality (which hasn't been achieved)?

Why are you so willing to throw 50% of the population under the bus and essentially insist that they shut up and know their place? What makes that okay to you?

I don't think that trans inclusion in these spaces does any of these things, nor do I think 50% of the population feels the way you describe. It's that simple. Women only spaces remain women only spaces even with inclusion of trans women. For all ways that matter socially, trans women are women, and the differences between trans and cis women aren't significant enough to justify exclusion in the broad way you and others desire.

TERF gatekeeping of "female identity" is a fringe position. You are aware of that, right?

 

[Emily's Cat]

Now I'd argue for any 1:1 sports (boxing for instance) if the two parties agree... where's the problem?

Good points all around. I'll add for commentary here that one of the issues is that there is sometimes assumed to be agreement, when one party lacks information necessary to come to an informed agreement. I know that was an issue with one of Fallon Fox's earlier fights - her female competitor was not aware that Fox was a transwoman. I believe it has been an issue in some other sports as well (cycling and weight lifting off the top of my head), where agreement was assumed to exist on the part of the other competitors, who were either unaware that a competitor was genetically male, or were not given an opportunity to object. Even in the situation in CT, part of the issue is that the other girls on the teams did not agree to the competition - they were not consulted nor were their views taken into consideration at all.

 

[Emily's Cat]

It matters whether the majority of women feel that rights for transwomen comes at their loss.

Well, it certainly doesn't seem to matter in this thread. Virtually every female in this thread has expressed that they feel that many of the things transwomen are asking for come at their loss.

Our voices, as females, get dismissed by males. Repeatedly and consistently. We get labeled bigots and TERFs and called names and accused of being hateful.

I don't think it matter to you at all. I'm pretty sure you do not give a crap about how natal women are affected. You seem perfectly happy to sacrifice the safety and the progress of natal women in preference of males who identify as women.

 

[Arcade22]

A healthy male and a healthy female of the same weight will have dramatically different bone and muscle density. Even if they're the same weight class, there is a substantially higher risk of real and meaningful damage to a female from a male competitor.

I'm fairly certain that any female boxer would have need a very abnormal physique in order be of comparable strength of a male one with the same weight.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

Well, it certainly doesn't seem to matter in this thread. Virtually every female in this thread has expressed that they feel that many of the things transwomen are asking for come at their loss.

Our voices, as females, get dismissed by males. Repeatedly and consistently. We get labeled bigots and TERFs and called names and accused of being hateful.

I don't think it matter to you at all. I'm pretty sure you do not give a crap about how natal women are affected. You seem perfectly happy to sacrifice the safety and the progress of natal women in preference of males who identify as women.

Strange way to put this considering women tend to be more likely to support trans rights than men, and in these test cases you mention (like the UK), the majority women are sided with the trans people and not the TERFs.

The people ******** all over transphobes like Rowling tend to be women. They don't like it when feminism is used as a shield for bigotry. Can't blame them.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Here is one area where I do agree with the TRAs - I don’t think TW are a threat to women’s sports. Not because I don’t believe that men have a sporting advantage over women, but because I don’t think there are enough TW to pose a threat to women’s sports as a fair and competitive enterprise.

An actual threat to women’s sports would be ending sex segregation and integrating sports leagues. That would virtually ensure that no women would be able to compete at the highest levels of pretty much all sports. Here is an interesting website about this http://boysvswomen.com/#/

I agree that ending sex segregation would be a significantly larger threat. And I will provisionally agree that transwomen with sufficiently low testosterone levels aren't a threat to most women's sports.

I don't agree that transwomen in general are not a threat to womens sports, especially when it comes to self-id alone being the arbiter for what constitutes a woman. We've already repeatedly seen transwomen not just break, but entirely shatter, women's records in a variety of sports. Transwomen aren't winning proportionally to their representation in those sports - they're dominating well beyond a proportional level. They're winning at rates that would be expected of a man competing against women.

 

[Emily's Cat]

And yet there are females that have such traits as well, and it presumably does not disqualify them as being recognized as women. Transwomen shouldn't have to meet some incredibly high standards of feminine appearance to qualify as looking like a woman by any means, unless you are also going to subject females to such standards as well.

Many women don't meet a few of those descriptions. the overwhelming majority of women meet the vast majority of those descriptions. Enough so that taken in totality, it is pretty easy for any given person to accurately identify a person as male or female based on phenotype alone. These aren't standards, they are descriptors that represent very real differences in body conformation driven by biological sex.

You seem to be simultaneously insisting that 1) those observable characteristics exist and are easy to identify and 2) those observable characteristics shouldn't apply to transwoman.

How many are we talking about here? Rolfe said that in Canada, that hellish place, any man can simply declare that they are a woman and proceed to sexually harrass women in changing rooms with complete impunity because no one dares do anything about out of fear of being branded transphobic.

Canada is already there. UK is moving that direction (including allowing a genitally intact convicted sexual predator into the female ward because that person identified as a transwoman). CA is moving that direction.

I don't care wheter you think it's "progressive" or not because really someones sex and gender presentation has nothing to do with whether I or anyone else are allowed to criticize the transphobic comments that "gender critical" feminists or right-wing reactionaries can't stop themselves from making.

I don't care if you criticize nasty comments made by others. I do care when things that literally violate female safety and privacy and undermine female progress are touted as progress, and any females who object to being trampled get labeled as TERFs and bigots, and subjected to abuse, harassment, threats of rape and death, etc. by trans rights activists.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I think you and I would vastly disagree on who counts as misogynistic individuals, but I'll bite. Sure. Being trans or trans-accepting is no immunity to being a ****** person in other areas.

Fine - but shouldn't you be requiring that trans rights activists distance themselves from those people and refuse to make common cause with them?

 

[TomB]

I don't think that trans inclusion in these spaces does any of these things, nor do I think 50% of the population feels the way you describe. It's that simple. Women only spaces remain women only spaces even with inclusion of trans women. For all ways that matter socially, trans women are women, and the differences between trans and cis women aren't significant enough to justify exclusion in the broad way you and others desire.

TERF gatekeeping of "female identity" is a fringe position. You are aware of that, right?

She didn't say "Women only spaces." She said "female only safe spaces." I believe female is the term that's supposed to refer to sex, right? As opposed to gender?

Or do you believe there should be no female only spaces?

 

[Arcade22]

Serious question here, and I'd like a serious answer.

How are you so comfortable and accepting of approaches that erase female identity, invade female-only safe spaces, increase risk of injury and violations against females, and undermine progress toward female equality (which hasn't been achieved)?

You speak like a true essentialist. Same-sex marriage destroys the meaning of marriage. Accepting homo/bisexuality destroys the notion of family. Race-mixing and immigration is tantamount to genocide.

Why are you so willing to throw 50% of the population under the bus and essentially insist that they shut up and know their place? What makes that okay to you?

And yet, for some strange reason most women are not in arms about this and instead it's a very small minority that seeks to speak over what other women say, as if they were somehow the only legitimate representatives of the female sex.