Cont: Trans Women are not Women 4

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I can't even wrap my head around that. They want to make it so that females are not allowed to request intimate care only from females... but that transwomen are allowed to demand intimate care only from other transwomen? WTF kind of sense does that make?


I don't know, better ask them.

Stonewall seems to have transformed itself in its entirety into a pro-trans lobbying group (mainly pro-transwomen, although with a nod to the medicalisation and sterilisation of gender-nonconforming children of both sexes), which was a decision made in 2015, quite explicitly, in pursuit of funding.

Homosexual rights have been achieved, in law. All that remains there is to keep up the pressure for the law to be enforced and for public acceptance (already pretty favourable) to be consolidated. You don't get huge grants for six-figure executive salaries for that. The organisation faced either downsizing into a minimally-funded pressure group whose goals were essentially achieved, or finding a new cause to rake in the money.

They went for the latter, with "trans rights" as the new poster child, and there we are. They've been raking in a huge income for operating "training sessions" for organisatons and authorities, in which they presented their own desired legislation as if it were already the law of the land. They've been funded by governments as advisors, and they've given the advice that their goals should be enshrined in law. And there we are.
 
MEN: Everything you can do, we can do better.

WOMEN: You can't do being a woman better than we can.

MEN: Hold my beer and watch this.

I believe it was Titania McGrath that asked, if women are the weaker sex, then why did Rachel McKinnon only start winning competitions after she became a woman?
 
This, with genuine respect to you, seems like an exercise in gerrymandering (if you can excuse my imperfect use pf that word, it seems to fit my point best) .

Hmmm, I'm not sure I follow. I assume you mean something along the line of trying to draw lines around groups of people in a way to produce a desired outcome. That wasn't my intention.

My intention was to point out that if you remove contentious terminology, the lines that both sides draw are pretty similar.

If you translate the terms used by the sides:
Side 1 Side 2 Term in Example
Cis Women Women Subgroup A1
Trans Women Trans Women Subgroup A2
Women Social Women* Group A

Cis Men Men Subgroup B1
Trans Men Trans Men Sub group B2
Men Social Men * Group B

All I'm doing is translating the terms. The concept behind the terms and who are members of that concept are unchanged.

(* I'm not aware of a universal name for an inclusive group, but the concept exists as something along the line of "people who are to be considered as men/women in the majority of situations. I used social, but it's not really a good term.)

Unfortunately, what lined up well as a table in the editor did not translate to the post. Sorry. There should be three columns with three rows.
 
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Intimate medical care (e.g. cervical smears, prostate checks)

...the right of women to perform sanitary functions and sleep in a single-sex environment, and to have intimate care functions performed by a woman, does indeed exist.

I'd be surprised to learn that anyone here is lobbying to take away this specific right. It seems a rather uphill case to make that any medical practitioners should enjoy the legal right to perform non-emergency procedures on non-consenting patients.
 
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That traditional standard has changed now. You don't have privacy from transpeople necessarily. If that's a problem for someone then their right to privacy can be accommodated by giving them a separate private space, right?

That traditional standard is in the process of changing. If it had fully changed, it wouldn't be a topic of debate.
 
I'd be surprised to learn that anyone here is lobbying to take away this specific right. It seems a rather uphill case to make that any medical practitioners should enjoy the legal right to perform non-emergency procedures on non-consenting patients.


Oh, you'd be surprised. There was a case in Sussex where a woman who was a rape victim and had, because of this, specifically requested a female nurse to do whatever procedure she was in for, was shocked to find a man with 5-o'clock stubble and wearing a female nurse's uniform coming in to carry it out. She protested. She later checked the hospital's web page to find out their exact policy before going for another appointment, to find the letter she had written on the previous occasion on display as an example of the sort of transphobia the hospital deemed unacceptable.

The BMA has very recently published a paper declaring that all medical and nursing staff should be permitted to carry out intimate examinations of people of the same gender as their self-identification. The political row about how this was accomplished is still going on.

A woman who was in some minor trouble with the police and about to be searched, looked at the male policemen in attendance and said, I hope you have a female colleague to carry out the search. The response was, how do you know none of these officers identifies as female? This was probably a joke, but it's the sort of thing that could easily happen if self-ID was allowed.

There is a sub-group of transwomen whose trans identity is fuelled by fetishism, and what they get off on is being involved with female bodily functions. You bet your bottom dollar they're lobbying for this, and as the politically correct view is that transwomen are the most oppressed and marginalised beings in creation and should be deferred to in everything, they're getting their way. Women will not be allowed to refuse their "services" on pain of being branded transphobic bigots and potentially being reported to the police for a hate crime.

Elderly women being helped to toilet and bathe by granny fetishists who identify as women? Transwomen mammogram technicians? Transwomen fitting teenagers' first bras in department stores? We already have a transwoman head of a rape crisis organisation in Scotland who is very vocal about his right to insert himself into women's most traumatic experiences. It's all coming if the present trajectory is maintained, so thank goodness for Liz Truss, for once.
 
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That traditional standard is in the process of changing. If it had fully changed, it wouldn't be a topic of debate.


As I said, it's very doubtful that it has changed. It certainly has not been legally changed, and when the actual meaning and implication of what's being proposed is explained to people the "oh sure I'm a nice person I won't say I don't want a transwoman in my loo/changing room/spa/dormitory" answers magically start to disappear.

The recent announcement from Westminster shows that the push-back is having an effect, and this may well continue.
 
All right, I'll take these questions at face value. So, you started with "even if I accept your position that transwomen are men"....That's important, so let's make sure we're on the same page. For the sake of argument, we will assume that transwomen are men.

For those following along, that doesn't mean that we are agreeing that transwomen are men, we are accepting it "for the sake of argument". That means we are looking at the implications of that statement. If that statement is true, what follows from that statement. We aren't agreeing it's true.

So, why do women have a right of privacy from "this particular group". I'm not sure if you meant that the group is transwomen, or the group is men. We'll do it both ways, just to be sure. I'll start by assuming that "this particular group" is men.

You go on:



There are two basic lines of argument. One is the one that gives you a horrible feeling. Women feel uncomfortable around men, and I do believe that it is related to women feeling threatened by men, whether that gives you a horrible feeling or not.

The other line of argument is just to simply note that there is no demand, and I do not even hear such a demand from you, that we end man/woman segregation of places where we are disrobed. The number of people who want to end it is very small. Perhaps it's not important, but almost all of those who want to end it are men. Trying to explain why that is would probably give you a horrible feeling, though.

So, what it comes down to, for me, is that women have a right to privacy with respect to "the particular group" of men because society has decided that they have that right. That's the status quo, and if you want to argue against maintaining that right of privacy with respect to men viewing women when the women are naked, be my guest. I haven't heard you make such an argument yet, but by all means proceed.

Personally, I wouldn't mind ending that segregation. In my youth, I certainly enjoyed "clothing optional" settings, and I would still enjoy them today, but I think the nature of my enjoyment actually holds the key to why so many people, especially women, would like to maintain separate spaces where there are no men present.

Summary: We honor the right of privacy of women with respect to men, because both men and women seem to want it that way. We think this is related to the fact that women feel threatened by men, but I won't try to prove that right now.

So, what if, instead, "this particular group" was transwomen?

The first and most obvious observation is that there is literally no one who thinks that there ought to be a right of privacy that is specific to transwomen. There are lots of people, like me, who think that transwomen are a subset of a class that ought to be excluded from women's private spaces, but no one who thinks that transwomen, specifically, should be excluded as a result of some characteristic that is unique to transwomen.

In other words, we think that women ought to have a right of privacy with respect to men, and we think transwomen are men.

And that's it, really. We don't think that there ought to be an exception made for one specific set of men. You think they aren't men, so you don't see it as an exception.



There's no simple answer, because your question seems to be based on some assumptions. One simple answer is practicality. How would you do it? How would you identify the lesbians? How would you accommodate two lesbians? It gets complicated.

More importantly, it's not really necessary. Let's unpack the assumption.

It seems to me that the assumption is that people feel uncomfortable undressing in the presence of someone who might be sexually attracted to them. That's correct. There is some discomfort there, isn't there?

However, when men are attracted to women, there's generally a sexual response to the visual stimulus of a naked woman. That's considerably less true for homosexual attraction. On the other hand, it's not completely absent, either. What I'm saying is that your assumption isn't ridiculous. The presence of gay people in a shared locker room is going to cause a little bit of discomfort. (I think that's why people younger than me are always covering themselves up in locker rooms. When I got into the habit of throwing my towel over my shoulder, it was in a world where we had heard of homosexuals, but certainly didn't think there were any in our locker room. The younger generation was more aware that yes, there were gay people, and suddenly felt compelled to wear a towel around their waist.)

So, got a solution to that? I don't. Eventually, we weigh the specific situation, and we decide that, realistically, there's no threat associated with being near a gay person of your own sex. Your discomfort is largely in your head, and there's nothing we can do about it, so deal with it.

You might think the same thing is true for a transwoman in a women's locker room, and I cannot say you are completely wrong.

And so, we're back at exactly the core problem. i say transwomen are men. I say it's reasonable for women to want privacy with respect to men. Lesbians aren't men, so it doesn't apply. Black women aren't men, so it doesn't apply.

Why should men be special? Biology. Pregnancy. Rape. Reproduction. We had all of those things before we had society. Society shapes them but doesn't invent them. (It occurs to me that eroticism isn't on the list, and it doesn't belong there.) However, if the majority of women say they don't mind the presence of transwomen, then things will change. For me, I decided some years back that I would support what women wanted. If that becomes trans-inclusion, then I'll eliminate my objections. Right now, I don't think that's what they want.

This is a long post and again it'd probably be unhelpful to respond to every line. I can't tell if we are getting closer to a resolution and maybe we never will. I think there are some areas where we fundamentally disagree and it feels a lot like your answers are just coming back to 'well that's just the way it is' which is fair enough but not really going to be enough to change my mind.

A few sticking points for me.

1. Women just feel uncomfortable around men - OK, but that's not necessarily different that straight guys feeling uncomfortable around gay guys, white guys feeling uncomfortable around black guys, fat guys feeling uncomfortable around thin guys or vice versa or any other multitude of things that someone can say makes them uncomfortable.

2. There's no demand. Well there obviously is some demand other we wouldn't be talking about it. The majority of cis people might be not be pushing for a change to the status quo but the majority of straight people weren't screaming to introduce gay marriage either.

3. The whole gay part seems strange to me. How have you decided that there's no risk to being around gay people but there is to being around transwomen? Why should one group just get over themselves and the other shouldn't. And furthermore ... it's not about risk anyway it's about comfort levels.

4. If the majority of women want transpeople in their changing rooms. We may well already be at that point. There's going to be discussion but most evidence points to the idea of the majority of women who use changing rooms, in the majority of places we are talking about, being largely positive towards transgender people using the changing rooms of their choice. It does seem that we could have short-circuited a lot of the argument though had you said this was your position, as you did seem to suggest you had strong-ish personal views on the matter. I'm not sure how I can convince you of what the majority of women think

5. It bugs me that in all of this discussion you never seem to be concerned with what transwomen think or feel. there never seems to be any thought given to their concerns. And maybe in there lies our fundamental disagreement because it would never have occurred to me to think that 'I'll take the view of the majority of white people on whether black people deserve access to their spaces' . And whether you mean it or not this is very much how your arguments are coming across to me. That you don't actually care about transpeople at all and find their requests, at best, an inconvenience.
 
I would phrase it slightly differently, but still directed at Archie.

Why is it so important for a person to change clothes in the presence of people who match their gender identity? The cis-people want to avoid changing in the presence of the opposite sex. The trans people find it important to change in the presence of people who match their gender identity, but who do not match their biological sex. Why should we place one desire above the other?

(I would change the wording because I don't think that AGG recognizes a "right to privacy", so I don't think he would recognize a "violation of privacy" either.)

I'm having issues with this because it seems to be assuming a lot in terms of what cis-people and transpeople want for a start.

But your very first question is interesting.... because the importance of changing clothes in front of people who match their gender identity is exactly what you have been trying to explain to me for a while. Why cis-women need to change in front of only cis-women. And you're going to say 'NO ITS SEX' and I'm going to say potato potahto.

Why we should value one above the other is maybe more to do with a philosophical position on values and rights. I don't believe we should deny people rights based on what another group wants without good reason. I believe the default should be to give people what they want unless you have good reason to deny them it.

For this reason I do not believe that straight people should be able to deny gay people the right to marry, that white people should be able to deny black people the right to live their lives. But for example we should be able to deny the 'right' of paedophiles to have sex with children because that would be harmful to the children.

Taking a broad position on this topic I see that transpeople feel better having the right to access the spaces that match their gender identity and see cis-people trying to deny them that right. So I tend to side with transpeople. Perhaps also its because pretty much throughout history every time someone has tried to deny Group X the right to do Y it's been shown that Group X were in the right and the anti-Group Xers were the dicks.

On the other hand I see that there are some potential issues and feel that where a real harm or real risk can be demonstrated then there might have to be exceptions. I'm not arguing otherwise. But I also see a hell of a lot of BS and outright prejudice passing as legitimate concerns. I doubt that all people who are against trans-rights are bad people but when your allies are the Christian Right, Tories, Brexiteers and other deplorables then you should maybe reflect on whether 'we are the bad guys here'

For the record I do believe in a right to privacy and that one's privacy can be violated. My objections to that argument are twofold - firstly that communal areas are not private and secondly that your right to privacy doesn't trump someone else's right to be in a place they are legitimately allowed to be in.

You have a right to demand your next door neighbour doesn't climb the fence to watch you sunbathing in your garden but you don't have a right to demand that your next door neighbour doesn't enter his upstairs bedroom because he can see you sunbathing from there. Of course if he gets his binoculars out to watch you then you have a right to object.

And that's kind of how I see the transwomen in changing room issues. You have a right to not feel comfortable with it and go find yourself somewhere else to change. Equally if the transwoman starts staring at your boobs, rubbing themselves and saying 'let's get it on sexy' then they are the ones in the wrong. But if they just go in, go about their business and leave then I fail to see why they need to be excluded just because you feel a bit icky about it.
 
I don't know, better ask them.

Stonewall seems to have transformed itself in its entirety into a pro-trans lobbying group (mainly pro-transwomen, although with a nod to the medicalisation and sterilisation of gender-nonconforming children of both sexes), which was a decision made in 2015, quite explicitly, in pursuit of funding.

Homosexual rights have been achieved, in law. All that remains there is to keep up the pressure for the law to be enforced and for public acceptance (already pretty favourable) to be consolidated. You don't get huge grants for six-figure executive salaries for that. The organisation faced either downsizing into a minimally-funded pressure group whose goals were essentially achieved, or finding a new cause to rake in the money.

They went for the latter, with "trans rights" as the new poster child, and there we are. They've been raking in a huge income for operating "training sessions" for organisatons and authorities, in which they presented their own desired legislation as if it were already the law of the land. They've been funded by governments as advisors, and they've given the advice that their goals should be enshrined in law. And there we are.

Not that you will care probably but I also find it unbelievable that any group would simultaneously argue that cis-women can't request a cis-woman in situation X but a trans-woman can request a trans-woman. to the point where I genuinely don't believe it. Can you point me to where I can verify that?
 
That traditional standard is in the process of changing. If it had fully changed, it wouldn't be a topic of debate.

No, it's definitely changed. It may not be at the end of the journey but it is not where it started.

Of course there are some people who are trying to move it back but that's always the case.

It's interesting that for example the people arguing against further changes in the law often cite as consequences of the changes things that are already legal. e.g. "If self-id laws in the UK are adopted then transpeople will be able to access women's toilets without any medical diagnosis just on their say-so'

That's already what the law says right now.
 
Oh, you'd be surprised. There was a case in Sussex where a woman who was a rape victim and had, because of this, specifically requested a female nurse to do whatever procedure she was in for, was shocked to find a man with 5-o'clock stubble and wearing a female nurse's uniform coming in to carry it out. She protested. She later checked the hospital's web page to find out their exact policy before going for another appointment, to find the letter she had written on the previous occasion on display as an example of the sort of transphobia the hospital deemed unacceptable.

The BMA has very recently published a paper declaring that all medical and nursing staff should be permitted to carry out intimate examinations of people of the same gender as their self-identification. The political row about how this was accomplished is still going on.

If you refuse to have a procedure carried out the medical practitioner cannot force you to have it. Don't be silly.

If for example you don't want to be treated by a Pakistani doctor then you can leave. What you cannot do is force the hospital to provide a non-Pakistani doctor to treat you. And rightly so.

A woman who was in some minor trouble with the police and about to be searched, looked at the male policemen in attendance and said, I hope you have a female colleague to carry out the search. The response was, how do you know none of these officers identifies as female? This was probably a joke, but it's the sort of thing that could easily happen if self-ID was allowed.

No, it isn't. Don't be silly. What it probably does show is that the police still recruit dicks.
There is a sub-group of transwomen whose trans identity is fuelled by fetishism, and what they get off on is being involved with female bodily functions. You bet your bottom dollar they're lobbying for this, and as the politically correct view is that transwomen are the most oppressed and marginalised beings in creation and should be deferred to in everything, they're getting their way. Women will not be allowed to refuse their "services" on pain of being branded transphobic bigots and potentially being reported to the police for a hate crime.

Elderly women being helped to toilet and bathe by granny fetishists who identify as women? Transwomen mammogram technicians? Transwomen fitting teenagers' first bras in department stores? We already have a transwoman head of a rape crisis organisation in Scotland who is very vocal about his right to insert himself into women's most traumatic experiences. It's all coming if the present trajectory is maintained, so thank goodness for Liz Truss, for once.

Never miss an opportunity to tar transpeople with the 'they're just perverts' brush, do you?

Liz Truss is an evil idiot. That you agree with her on this matter is not an endorsement of you or Liz Truss.
 
4. If the majority of women want transpeople in their changing rooms. We may well already be at that point. There's going to be discussion but most evidence points to the idea of the majority of women who use changing rooms, in the majority of places we are talking about, being largely positive towards transgender people using the changing rooms of their choice.
So far in these threads I've seen exactly one survey which explictly asked about bepenised individuals using the women's changing room as the result of their sense of gender identity. It did not yield the results you are hoping to see.


[IMGw=720]https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20200925/c16089d02ad1d3dcd0d7642988f3db73.jpg[/IMGw]
 
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A few sticking points for me.

1. Women just feel uncomfortable around men - OK, but that's not necessarily different that straight guys feeling uncomfortable around gay guys, white guys feeling uncomfortable around black guys, fat guys feeling uncomfortable around thin guys or vice versa or any other multitude of things that someone can say makes them uncomfortable.
The uncomfortableness in your examples stem from different sources. The primary driver of women feeling uncomfortable around men in a changing room is modesty, I think, which itself appears in order to avoid encouraging sexual attraction from others (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modesty).

If someone wanted to challenge women feeling uncomfortable around men in a changing room, I don't know how you'd prevent that from being a challenge to modesty in general, which I'm not sure anyone here is willing to do.
 
4. If the majority of women want transpeople in their changing rooms. We may well already be at that point. There's going to be discussion but most evidence points to the idea of the majority of women who use changing rooms, in the majority of places we are talking about, being largely positive towards transgender people using the changing rooms of their choice. It does seem that we could have short-circuited a lot of the argument though had you said this was your position, as you did seem to suggest you had strong-ish personal views on the matter. I'm not sure how I can convince you of what the majority of women think

If that's true, then there is a significant implication far beyond some sort of argument ad popularem.

I have contended that the aversion to undressing in the presence of males is an innate feeling, not created by social conditioning. Perhaps a better way to say it would be that it is related to instinctive feelings, but shaped by social conditioning.

If the majority of women think that transwomen ought to use the women's changing room, it would mean that the majority of women are not experiencing the feelings that I am attributing to instinct. That, in turn, would strongly suggest that the feelings aren't instinctual after all.

So, if it makes a majority happy, and doesn't cause the sort of anxiety that I am saying is perfectly normal and natural, we should do what the majority wants. Democracy isn't perfect, but it's a fine default position.

My impression is that this is not the case. My impression is that the majority of women object to sharing private spaces with biological males. Convince me that is not the case, and I'll go along with the majority.

And, that really covers a lot of the ground in responding to your last two posts, so I won't add anything more specific.

One caveat: If 80% of the men and 25% of the women support trans-inclusion in women's private spaces, that's a majority of people, not a majority of women.

One other caveat: A survey result probably won't convince me. Survey questions are easily misunderstood, and easily manipulated. What I see in real life in the US is that high school girls protest when asked to share a locker room with transgirls. I won't call them bigots for doing so, even if they are not in the majority. However, I will say that if a clear majority of the girls welcome the transgirl in, then I would say that the other girls will just have to deal with it. So far, that's not what I'm seeing.
 
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1. Women just feel uncomfortable around men - OK, but that's not necessarily different that straight guys feeling uncomfortable around gay guys, white guys feeling uncomfortable around black guys, fat guys feeling uncomfortable around thin guys or vice versa or any other multitude of things that someone can say makes them uncomfortable.
1 in 3 females have been sexually assaulted by males
1 in 6 females have been subjected to attempted or completed rape by males
90% of the victims of sexual crimes are females
98% of the perpetrators of sexual crimes are males
Males are on average bigger, stronger, more physically dominating, and more aggressive and violent than females

But sure, it's just some groundless social ick-factor that we females just need to stop being all hysterical about and get over. I mean, it's not a big deal, right?

4. If the majority of women want transpeople in their changing rooms. We may well already be at that point. There's going to be discussion but most evidence points to the idea of the majority of women who use changing rooms, in the majority of places we are talking about, being largely positive towards transgender people using the changing rooms of their choice. It does seem that we could have short-circuited a lot of the argument though had you said this was your position, as you did seem to suggest you had strong-ish personal views on the matter. I'm not sure how I can convince you of what the majority of women think

They don't! And you've been shown this repeatedly. Females are supportive of transsexual women in their spaces - people who have fully transitioned including surgical transition. Females are, in general, not supportive of people with penises being in their spaces.
 
Not that you will care probably but I also find it unbelievable that any group would simultaneously argue that cis-women can't request a cis-woman in situation X but a trans-woman can request a trans-woman. to the point where I genuinely don't believe it. Can you point me to where I can verify that?


I'll see if I can find the reference. To be clear, this was in a Stonewall document which gave details of the measures they were promoting in relation to the proposed new legislation which has now been shelved. I couldn't believe my eyes either. I doubt if it would have been seriously considered by legislators, but on the other hand a lot of things are happening that I wouldn't have believed five years ago. (If you think that's extreme, you probably won't believe the manifesto of the Edinburgh Action for Trans Health group, which goes a great deal further and seems utterly deranged, nevertheless this is a group policy-makers sit down with and listen to.)

Stonewall has more recently back-tracked and denied that it ever advocated removal of the single-sex exemptions in the Equality Act, but several eagle-eyed women's rights campaigners saved the document so I should be able to find it.
 
Never miss an opportunity to tar transpeople with the 'they're just perverts' brush, do you?


Do you seriously not understand the word "sub-group"? The fact that not everyone in the larger group is a member of a sub-group doesn't eliminate the existence of the sub-group. Perverts exist, in a variety of flavours, and some of these perverts identify as transwomen.

Or are we back to the assertion that every single transwoman is an actual saint, and the very utterance of the words "I identify as a woman" by a male instantly, magically, purges their soul of all baser instincts?
 
1 in 3 females have been sexually assaulted by males.


I seriously question this figure. I consider myself to have led an exceptionally sheltered and fortunate life, but I have been physically sexually assaulted twice, both times by men. One of these men was a typical creep, the other was a Senior House Officer in Crawley Hospital. (Respiratory medicine, 1988, and I think the consultant in charge was called Mr. Thoroughgood or something like that. The offending SHO was of Far Easten ethnicity. And if that identifies anyone, do they want to make something of it? Because I can remember the date too.)

Neither assault was serious, I wasn't raped or anything, but they were both sexual assaults. Which I did nothing about, in the first case because I didn't want to cause a fuss in a cinema while the film was showing and in the second case because, believe it or not, I didn't want to damage the doctor's career.

I genuinely think that if the women answering these surveys were encouraged to think more deeply about what has happened to them, including incidents they didn't think were serious enough to raise a stink about (that pesky conditioning again), you'd get a lot more than 33%.
 
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