Cont: Trans Women are not Women 4

[Darat]

What a bizarre take for a forum where everyone ought to understand that humans are nothing more than upright apes to begin with. There is nothing about the human condition which doesn't have roots in our biology, including all of the conditions and disorders we read about in the DSM.

But AGG didn’t say anything like that.

 

[d4m10n]

But AGG didn’t say anything like that.

No, he mischaracterized someone else.

 

[Darat]

No, he mischaracterized someone else.

He started it! Right.

 

[Matthew Best]

He started it! Right.

I never said that and you can't prove I did!

 

[d4m10n]

If anyone at any point in the last 10,000 posts has reduced womanhood merely to breeding capability without regard to the experiences of girls and women living in a society with gendered behavioural norms then I must have missed it. Last I checked, feminists (including gender critical feminists) have been complaining about the differential treatment women face as a result of their biology.

 

[Darat]

If anyone at any point in the last 10,000 posts has reduced womanhood merely to breeding capability without regard to the experiences of girls and women living in a society with gendered behavioural norms then I must have missed it. Last I checked, feminists (including gender critical feminists) have been complaining about the differential treatment women face as a result of their biology.

Moving the goal posts after you've already kicked the ball is a little bit silly.

 

[Paul2]

Personally I find the constant reduction of woman-hood to mere biology as they are just breeding-livestock to be the most unfeminist position going.

This mis-represents that position. One can focus on what biology leads to without reducing women to mere biology. Focusing on something is not reducing the issue to what is focused on.

If you have a link that supports what you're saying, I'm all ears.

 

[d4m10n]

Moving the goal posts after you've already kicked the ball is a little bit silly.

Allow me to be 100% clear on my goalposts here:
Represent feminist positions fairly and accurately.

ETA: This includes accurately representing the positions put fwd by posters like EC and Rolfe without flagrantly strawmanning their position.

 

[Aber]

UK lawyers view of Biological sex

Biological sex

Refers to biological differences that have been stereotypically grouped into male and female categories.

Some of these differences can be found within a person’s gonadal, morphologic (internal and external), chromosomal, and hormonal characteristics.

There’s no one indicator of ‘biological sex’, which is determined using a combination of these factors.

 

[Darat]

Allow me to be 100% clear on my goalposts here:
Represent feminist positions fairly and accurately.

ETA: This includes accurately representing the positions put fwd by posters like EC and Rolfe without flagrantly strawmanning their position.

You are the one reading into the statement that he was even talking about anyone in this thread....

 

[Lithrael]

Personally I find the constant reduction of woman-hood to mere biology as they are just breeding-livestock to be the most unfeminist position going.

Eh, it’s understandable if you spend your life with the background radiation of knowing there’s this huge biological imperative to reproduce and everyone is stuck with these gametes that have this huge influence on society’s expectations for their lives and hormonally on their drives. Knowing most guys want to bone, in happy or unhappy ways; knowing someone can make you get full of baby, in happy or unhappy ways. Knowing a lot of people honestly think a guy can never be friends with a girl, that it’s always just step one in a sexual relationship.

It’s a pain in the ass, and I can understand being worried that a young girl who isn’t into dealing with that **** could be convinced to jump ship and be a trans guy. (I remember being worried a trans guy I knew might have just decided that was a better alternative to being a gay catholic woman. But I saw how it panned out and that my worries were not well founded. On the other hand, that does seem to be a real concern in some cultures.)

It’s a pain in the ass, and I can understand being worried that more inclusion of trans women means more risk and more dealing with all of that ****. And to be honest, in some countries and some situations, it might. Sex-segregated facilities seem to be a net positive in improving safety in places where assaults are commonplace, so I can understand extrapolating that to believe that accepting trans women into any segregated facilities is likely to be an increased risk with no reward.

Maybe think of the way women worry about life-changing assault and the way that spills over into general anxiety, like the way we all worry about life-changing traffic accidents. Most people don’t obsess, they just understand it’s a real and a serious risk that can’t really be avoided. But if you see somebody weaving lanes or zipping up to tailgate you, you’ll be like ‘****, is this guy going to kill me?’ Now add into that that getting care after a wreck is a lot less socially fraught that getting care after a sexual assault or getting pregnant. I can sympathise with people who flip to high alert over the ‘interacting with a guy’ version of wandering around the lanes on the highway. And to some people, that is what seeing a trans person in a segregated facility is.

Imagine traffic standards suddenly change, say tailgating is legal now because of auto-driving follow mode or something. Someone riding your ass will still set off your alarm bells - and how do you know if it’s legit someone using assisted driving, or just some yahoo human tailgating you, which is super dangerous? And now there’s thousands of blog posts talking about how auto makers are ramming through auto driving legislation and how unsafe our roads are becoming! Even though all you actually find in the news in the last five years about auto-following are a few fender benders, and there’s no evidence that illegal non-auto tailgating has increased.

But anyway it’s not like any cars are safe. I prefer to drive around other small cars to trucks and SUV’s. But none of them worry me inherently - it’s weird driving behavior that worries me. And what is weird or not weird depends on social expectations. Which can change.

 

[d4m10n]

You are the one reading into the statement that he was even talking about anyone in this thread....

I didn't see anyone reduce womanhood to mere biology, did you? I also didn't see anyone imply that woman are valuable solely for their reproductive capacity. It's a fairly significant smear to imply as much.

This raises the obvious question: Whom was AGG attempting to paraphrase or parody?

 

[Rolfe]

"Mere" biology? I'd be interested to know what certain posters think we are, other than our biological bodies.

 

[TomB]

Eh, it’s understandable if you spend your life with the background radiation of knowing there’s this huge biological imperative to reproduce and everyone is stuck with these gametes that have this huge influence on society’s expectations for their lives and hormonally on their drives. Knowing most guys want to bone, in happy or unhappy ways; knowing someone can make you get full of baby, in happy or unhappy ways. Knowing a lot of people honestly think a guy can never be friends with a girl, that it’s always just step one in a sexual relationship.

It’s a pain in the ass, and I can understand being worried that a young girl who isn’t into dealing with that **** could be convinced to jump ship and be a trans guy. (I remember being worried a trans guy I knew might have just decided that was a better alternative to being a gay catholic woman. But I saw how it panned out and that my worries were not well founded. On the other hand, that does seem to be a real concern in some cultures.)

It’s a pain in the ass, and I can understand being worried that more inclusion of trans women means more risk and more dealing with all of that ****. And to be honest, in some countries and some situations, it might. Sex-segregated facilities seem to be a net positive in improving safety in places where assaults are commonplace, so I can understand extrapolating that to believe that accepting trans women into any segregated facilities is likely to be an increased risk with no reward.

Maybe think of the way women worry about life-changing assault and the way that spills over into general anxiety, like the way we all worry about life-changing traffic accidents. Most people don’t obsess, they just understand it’s a real and a serious risk that can’t really be avoided. But if you see somebody weaving lanes or zipping up to tailgate you, you’ll be like ‘****, is this guy going to kill me?’ Now add into that that getting care after a wreck is a lot less socially fraught that getting care after a sexual assault or getting pregnant. I can sympathise with people who flip to high alert over the ‘interacting with a guy’ version of wandering around the lanes on the highway. And to some people, that is what seeing a trans person in a segregated facility is.

Imagine traffic standards suddenly change, say tailgating is legal now because of auto-driving follow mode or something. Someone riding your ass will still set off your alarm bells - and how do you know if it’s legit someone using assisted driving, or just some yahoo human tailgating you, which is super dangerous? And now there’s thousands of blog posts talking about how auto makers are ramming through auto driving legislation and how unsafe our roads are becoming! Even though all you actually find in the news in the last five years about auto-following are a few fender benders, and there’s no evidence that illegal non-auto tailgating has increased.

But anyway it’s not like any cars are safe. I prefer to drive around other small cars to trucks and SUV’s. But none of them worry me inherently - it’s weird driving behavior that worries me. And what is weird or not weird depends on social expectations. Which can change.

Excellent post.

 

[d4m10n]

"Mere" biology? I'd be interested to know what certain posters think we are, other than our biological bodies.

Precisely my point at #2040.

Males and females have different experiences, in part, because we have different bodies. Males don't feel the need for a private space to change out tampons, for example. Females don't have to worry about badly timed erections.

With that said, females are (far too often) treated differently because of gendered expectations which have more to do with malleable society than immutable biology. For example, women are shamed by Trinity Baptist Church for using certain forms of birth control, whereas men can use whatever they like. For another example, women aren't expected to register with Selective Service in the U.S. For a third and final example, women are generally expected to display feminine virtues such as empathy and kindness whereas men, well, not so much.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Fair enough, and thanks. Yeah, I post a lot once in a while and then hardly at all for another while. This thread in particular gets too muddy for me sometimes.

Your position, too, usually isn’t far from mine when it comes to brass tacks, but you end up talking a much more extreme game as far as what you feel is going on.

For example the mistaking tomboys for trans boys idea, what evidence do we have that therapists don’t know what tomboys are? It seems to me that it’s not hard to tell a little casual penis envy from dysphoria. What little kid after all would NOT like to practice their aim by sinking little sponge battleships, pee outdoors with their pants up, or write their name in the snow? Are therapists meant to be too stupid to understand that fun things are attractive?

And it’s not so outlandish that someone prefers boys’ toys but doesn’t reject girls’ toys. He-Man, Transformers and space LEGO were my jam but I didn’t ignore my sister’s hand me down barbies. You’d never catch me in a dress and when kids demanded to know my gender I said it was “banana.” But if you’d tried to convince me I could try out actually being a boy I would have said “why?” the same way I said “why?” to the height-increasing hormonal study I was offered. Who wants therapy, shots and medicine for something they don’t care about changing?

It sounds like people think therapists are going “are you sure you don’t want to be the other gender? We’d all be really happy if you did! Everyone would love you if you changed your gender!” Like, therapists aren’t supposed to lead clients any more than lawyers are supposed to lead witnesses. But if it’s really a problem let’s get some therapy judges in there to yell ‘objection!’

At one point, I would certainly have agreed with you whole-heartedly. And perhaps I am more concerned than is truly necessary. But the fairly dramatic increase in childhood diagnoses of dysphoria, especially the massive increase in female children being diagnosed with gender dysphoria, makes me worried. When I pair that with the abhorrent treatment of adult cisgendered lesbians, including the reports of lesbians being pressured to transition because they're not being viewed as women who like female sex parts... it gets disturbing.

 

[theprestige]

"Mere" biology? I'd be interested to know what certain posters think we are, other than our biological bodies.

I'm probably not one of the "certain" posters, but other than our biological bodies, we're our thoughts and feelings and abstract reasoning.

 

[Emily's Cat]

The idea that no dude has to worry about a transman hassling them in the toilets is a ******** outdated gender stereotype anyway. Female on male sexual assault is a thing. And it is probably hideously under-reported because of BS attitudes like that.

And before anyone jumps in - I'm not saying it's as prevalent as the opposite way around.

Females: You know, the magnitude of sexual assault and rape that females are subjected to is really intolerable. When you consider the abysmal rates of those assaults being prosecuted, it's clear that we need to speak out against this and get some recognition with respect to this risk that females face.

Males: Males get assaulted too you know! Some of them are even assaults by females!

Contrast to...

Black men: You know, the magnitude of police abuse and disparate judicial action that black men are subjected to is really intolerable. When you consider the ridiculous rate of unnecessary stops and maximum penalties applied, it's clear that we need to speak out about this and get some recognition with respect to this risk that black men face.

White men: White guys get arrested and killed too you know! Some of them even get abused by black cops!

 

[shuttlt]

Precisely my point at #2040.

Males and females have different experiences, in part, because we have different bodies. Males don't feel the need for a private space to change out tampons, for example. Females don't have to worry about badly timed erections.

With that said, females are (far too often) treated differently because of gendered expectations which have more to do with malleable society than immutable biology. For example, women are shamed by Trinity Baptist Church for using certain forms of birth control, whereas men can use whatever they like. For another example, women aren't expected to register with Selective Service in the U.S. For a third and final example, women are generally expected to display feminine virtues such as empathy and kindness whereas men, well, not so much.

Apologies if this has been covered somewhere in the past 10,000 posts... but isn't there an issue here of essential and non-essential characteristics. The essential characteristics defining women can be biological without denying that typically that then carries with it a host of particular experiences.

 

[Emily's Cat]

UK lawyers view of Biological sex

Makes me glad that lawyers aren't doctors.