Cont: [ED] Discussion: Trans Women are not Women (Part 5)

[Butter!]

Discussed/discussing stuff with my former squeeze who later came out as trans. (Mentioned in a previous section of this megathread, I'm pretty sure.) Some examples of her views -

She thinks that sports leagues should be redefined based on skills or hormone levels, as opposed to biological sex or gender. I'm not much of a sports follower, so I don't know if that would be a workable solution or not. I have thought that would be a good solution myself, along the way.

She does not agree with self-ID, but she also thinks the legal/medical procedures should be somewhat simplified in order to minimize trauma and humiliation to patients seeking gender confirmation. So, none of that "you must live two years as a woman" stuff, but also no same-day walk-in changes with no discussion whatsoever. Find a happy medium.

Finally, she does not see herself as identical to a female born female, but she does think of herself as a type of female. She's fine with the cis-women trans-women distinction being drawn, especially in medical contexts. She is not okay with being referred to as any type of male or man. She has no problem with cis-women talking about their vaginas, breasts, or other indicators of womanhood by their usual names. She does not personally see her penis as a female penis because she prefers not to think about her penis at all. She is planning bottom surgery. She emphasized that transitioners who choose not to undergo bottom surgery for whatever reason are just as legitimate as those who do.

That's as much as I'm willing to bug her about (though I did suggest she sign up here if she ever wants a calmer debate than one might find on Twitter). The point I'm trying to make is that, even among individual trans people, the debate can vary wildly. This is why we should at least try to assume good faith from each other when discussing this issue. I think people have a tendency to automatically assume bad faith.


ETA - By the way, I am in no way trying to deflect any criticism of my own views or questions by posting this. I am not pulling a "some of my best friends are black" ruse, so please do not think that. I just wanted to note that there's a lot of variation in positions, and I have the benefit of getting another viewpoint from a single trans individual. She only speaks for herself.

 

[qayak]

As I am a woman, if I did fill a position meant for a woman, there is nothing being taken away there. I am a woman as much as Emily's Cat, Rolfe, JihadJane, and the rest of the cisgender TERFs on this board.

We'll have to agree to disagree. In most areas of life I don't feel there is an issue, if you want to call yourself a woman I'll go along with it, but in some areas I agree with the women who have pointed the problem out and can't get behind your cause. I have mentioned them several times. Along with that there are some grey areas and I will defer to women who stand to lose from it as to whether or not you should be included.

In those areas you are always able to compete against men on a level playing field and take some of their abundant resources.

 

[Ziggurat]

Check out Fulton v. City of Philadelphia sometime, in which the Catholic Church is suing to preserve an allotment of foster care services set aside for straight men and their opposite-sex partners.

No, that isn't what they were trying to do. They were trying to make their services completely exclusive to heterosexual couples. There was not some separate allotment they had for gays, and especially not a larger allotment. Do you really not get the difference between having access at all and being able to take advantage of a quota to give yourself an advantage?

 

[Ziggurat]

This is not a compromise at all. How it should be:

1) "Gender Recognition Certificates" should be done away with in favor of Self ID.

You don't actually believe that. True self ID means that there is no way to separate out fraud. And you believe there are fraudulent claims. You have said so, explicitly.

So how do you separate out fraudulent claims from real ones? I've asked you before, but you refused to answer. I suspect you will continue to refuse.

2) People should be able to use the facilities that best fit them, regardless if the government things you are "official" or not. And no limitations.

No limitations and self ID only? That simply isn't going to fly.

4) Discrimination of us in sports in any way is unacceptable, as is hormone level requirements of us.

Yeah, not gonna happen.

Seriously, do you want women's sports to stop being a thing? Because that's where that leads to.

5) Transgender kids/teens should be able to start HRT when during puberty and not have to either delay their development with puberty blockers or have to suffer going through physical changes that can be devastating to them.

If I had confidence in the competency of the profession to properly advise such kids, I might be sympathetic. But I don't.

As I am a woman, if I did fill a position meant for a woman, there is nothing being taken away there. I am a woman as much as Emily's Cat, Rolfe, JihadJane, and the rest of the cisgender TERFs on this board.

This is axiomatically true, with the proper choice of definition for "woman".

But you have never made that definition clear. Attempts have all resorted to circular reasoning. And that's before we even get to the question of whether we should prefer that definition, and use it to make the sort of distinctions under discussion here.

 

[Aber]

Terf just means bitch now. Convince me otherwise. Meadmaker has said all the same stuff as EC, but somehow he didn't make the list.

Exactly.

 

[Meadmaker]

She thinks that sports leagues should be redefined based on skills or hormone levels, as opposed to biological sex or gender. I'm not much of a sports follower, so I don't know if that would be a workable solution or not.

I think you would find that this solution seems pretty good to a lot of people who are not sports fans.

 

[d4m10n]

No, that isn't what they were trying to do. They were trying to make their services completely exclusive to heterosexual couples.

Precisely. To the extent foster/adoption services are alloted by the state to Catholic Social Services (and their ideological fellow travelers) said allotment will be reserved entirely to heterosexual couples. (I'd be willing to bet CSS disallows families composed of at least one transgender individual from fostering/adoption as well—even if they are opposite sexed—but that's not on the docket right at the moment.)

 

[Butter!]

I think you would find that this solution seems pretty good to a lot of people who are not sports fans.

Yes, and that's why I did try to emphasize that I don't know whether it would work or not. I don't like to get too far into the sports debate, because I admit that I know nothing. I'm not a sports fan, but I'm also not a sports hater. I defend sports against their haters, in fact. I think they're an important part of human culture, down through the ages. I would like a solution that worked for most people.

Skill leagues are generally said to be a bad solution by sports fans. Would that be very different from the way things are now, though? Wouldn't we still end up with a league that consisted of mostly cis-women?

 

[JoeMorgue]

Once subcultures turn into self-feeding fandoms they always do that, their generic insulting term for the thing they are opposing because their generic insulting term for everything.

It's like how to most current, really outspoken feminists the "Patriarchy" is no longer a male-dominated society but all unfair power structures and responsible for everything up to and including the eventual heat death of the universe.

 

[Aber]

Skill leagues are generally said to be a bad solution by sports fans. Would that be very different from the way things are now, though? Wouldn't we still end up with a league that consisted of mostly cis-women?

No

Contact sports - rugby, American football would see serious injuries

Soccer - average female soccer national team would lose to 16 year old males

Tennis - Williams sisters would lose to men ranked 500+

 

[JoeMorgue]

"Because it makes sports fans unhappy" is not something we should be using to judge this on.

 

[Meadmaker]

Yes, and that's why I did try to emphasize that I don't know whether it would work or not. I don't like to get too far into the sports debate, because I admit that I know nothing. I'm not a sports fan, but I'm also not a sports hater. I defend sports against their haters, in fact. I think they're an important part of human culture, down through the ages. I would like a solution that worked for most people.

Skill leagues are generally said to be a bad solution by sports fans. Would that be very different from the way things are now, though? Wouldn't we still end up with a league that consisted of mostly cis-women?

It wouldn't end up with a league of cis-women. It would end up with a league of very athletic women competing against some not nearly as athletic men.

 

[d4m10n]

"Because it makes sports fans unhappy" is not something we should be using to judge this on.

Sports are bascially for players and fans, though. There are a few other considerations, such as basic fairness, but maximizing such things benefit all concerned.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Sports are bascially for players and fans, though. There are a few other considerations, such as basic fairness, but maximizing such things benefit all concerned.

Well yeah which, in my opinion, makes it (nearly) a totally separate issue from things like bathroom/locker room access, legal recognition, etc.

With sports the answer has to be "What people are willing to pay to watch to see" or this is all so much a trolley problem it's so detached from reality.

 

[Butter!]

No

Contact sports - rugby, American football would see serious injuries

Soccer - average female soccer national team would lose to 16 year old males

Tennis - Williams sisters would lose to men ranked 500+

I'm sorry if I sound a bit slow. I'm just trying to understand. I promise not to make this a huge derail.

Why would the 16-year-olds be in the same league as the women in this hypothetical? The whole idea of skill leagues would be to make things more fair. So if a transwoman comes along who is wiping the floor with the cis-women, she'd go in a different league. Maybe said league would wind up consisting mostly of transpeople? (I'm assuming that long-term estrogen usage would lessen a transwoman's innate male strength.)

If I'm way off in my understanding of this, I apologize. The only sport I've ever been involved in was martial arts, and we were always paired up for sparring by belt-rank. Gender wasn't usually a factor. The men did usually kick my ass, but not always. Sometimes you can get a lucky shot in, based on skill.

 

[Boudicca90]

This seems pretty borderline.

Terf just means bitch now. Convince me otherwise. Meadmaker has said all the same stuff as EC, but somehow he didn't make the list.

I get that you were trying to draw a parallel between yourself and other women posting, but you could have just said cis-women in this context. You went with terf. I'm getting kind of suspicious of the way that word's being thrown around lately. The discussion here is extremely tame, for the most part.

I called them TERFs because that's the ideology they spout. I don't mean it as "bitch", but since that is a typical attribute of TERFs, one follows the other.

I asked you before to say how you define the word "woman" without reply. I would appreciate a reply so I can understand what you mean when you say you are a woman.

I've made this clear in the past to others. No.

You don't actually believe that. True self ID means that there is no way to separate out fraud. And you believe there are fraudulent claims. You have said so, explicitly.

So how do you separate out fraudulent claims from real ones? I've asked you before, but you refused to answer. I suspect you will continue to refuse.

I absolutely believe that, and it is not a radical idea since we have had Self ID here in California for a while now: https://www.courts.ca.gov/25798.htm

I don't care about fraudulent claims. They are rare and shouldn't affect the laws that affect us. They will be dealt with if they come up. Otherwise it is just not an issue big enough for me to bother with.

 

[Meadmaker]

"Because it makes sports fans unhappy" is not something we should be using to judge this on.

It seems to me that when it comes to professional sports, making sports fans happy seems to be the entire point of the exercise.

 

[Ziggurat]

I don't care about fraudulent claims.

Other people do, and for good reason.

They are rare and shouldn't affect the laws that affect us.

Fraud that is rare when there are mechanisms to detect and dissuade it may become far less rare when you remove those mechanisms.

You want to remove those mechanisms.

They will be dealt with if they come up.

How will they be dealt with? How can they be dealt with? I don't think you have an answer.

Otherwise it is just not an issue big enough for me to bother with.

The fact that you personally are indifferent to the problem doesn't oblige anyone else to not care about it.

 

[TomB]

Exactly. It doesn't surprise me that someone with such transphobic views would support conversion therapy for us to "fix" us.

I agree with you to a certain extent.

However...
It is a common approach in medicine to begin with the least invasive treatments available. For example, my wife has knee problems. rather than move directly to a knee replacement, they try other things first: physical therapy, injections, etc. When those fail, they move on to knee replacement. (Which she is having next month. It's apparently outpatient surgery these days.)

If you look at it from that perspective, a patient comes in and says "Doc, I feel like I'm in the wrong body." (Or something like that.) Before saying, "OK take these hormones" or "Let's schedule surgery," the doctor would first, want to determine the condition, which is non-trivial in psychology...no blood tests/physical markers to use. This is because the condition may actually be something different that requires different treatment. For example, the patient may associate what he's feeling with being in the wrong gender when his anxiety is really related to something else and he is projecting.

Self-diagnosis is dangerous because if you find something that fits a lot of your symptoms, you can convince yourself that you have other symptoms that reinforce that diagnosis.

Since we love to use reaching analogies with borderline relevance in this discussion...here's another:

My wife was having pain in her foot. (My wife has quite a few health problems.) She thought she had cracked a bone or had a stress fracture. That's what the doctors initially suspected as well. But testing ruled that out. It turns out she has a problem with a disc in her back that manifests itself as foot pain.

My point is that a condition can present as something different than it actually is and doctors need to make evaluations to determine the correct treatment.

In psychology, there aren't x-rays or blood tests (usually) that can determine the diagnosis. My understanding (from the several psychology classes I took in college) is that there is a lot of analysis of patient anecdotes (psychoanalysis) involved along with trial and error. There was, I think a reason behind the old "live as a woman for x months" thing before surgery. It was not a test of sincerity, but rather a trial of the treatment. When doctors do a nerve ablation for back pain, they inject an anesthetic first to see if it relieves the pain before they inject the alcohol (or other substance) that will destroy the nerve on a long term basis.

It's possible that the patient is not actually trans and that transitioning is not the appropriate treatment. In that case, hormones or surgery could do lasting damage.

Now, is that to say that doctors should try to "convert" trans people? No. It means that before they treat them through chemical or physical transition, they need to be sure that they are treating the correct condition. This may include trying some therapies in another direction as well. Failed treatments are diagnostically useful, even if they can be frustrating for patients.

Just because everything is on a spectrum (sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation), doesn't mean there aren't people like me who still find ourselves on the ends of that spectrum. And gender dysphoria is not a "condition", it is our reaction to not being able to live as the sex/gender we truly are. It comes from society's expectations of us to adhere to gender norms meant for cispeople.

The condition is a misalignment between internal and external image. Dysphoria is a symptom of that condition. Transition is a treatment.

This is not a compromise at all. How it should be:

1) "Gender Recognition Certificates" should be done away with in favor of Self ID.
2) People should be able to use the facilities that best fit them, regardless if the government things you are "official" or not. And no limitations.

This is an argument, not for tran-access to gendered/sex-specific spaces, but for the absence of gendered/sex-specific spaces.

In order to have segregated spaces, you have to have a criteria that defines that segregation (who goes where). If you have no criteria, you don't have segregated spaces.

If you have a criteria, you have to have some way to recognize when that criteria is not being met. (Non-internal...something available to others.) If you do not, you really don't have a criteria and therefore, effectively, no segregation.

With what you describe, Donald Trump could use the women's room anytime he/she decided. Who am I to say what's in Trump's head? If Trump claims to be a woman (as evidenced by entering the women's locker room to change) I have no basis to challenge that. Even though, I know damn well that Trump identifies as a man and is going into the locker room for his own amusement. But I can't prove it and have no means to challenge him.

Effectively, it's unisex. The only deterrent is that we hope that bad people won't take advantage to do bad things.

Now, if you want to argue that we don't need gendered spaces, which is perfectly consistent with wanting to live your life however you want, that would be a valid discussion. But that's not how this is framed.

3) Discrimination of us by gender in any way is unacceptable. I can understand not waxing a woman's penis because they haven't been trained for it. But if you do offer that service, you offer it to everyone.

Hmm...I can think of some legitimate reasons to discriminater gender/sex. My wife used to volunteer as breast model at the local Susan G. Komen breast center for training videos. Kind of have to be biologically female and have intact breasts to do that.

She used to be a bartender at a jazz club in a complex shared with a strip club. The jazz club closed earlier than the strip club and when I picked her up from work I had to wait in the strip club. It occurs to me that people that it might be legitimate to require the dancers to be female.

Ditto male strippers.

And sometimes a rape victim would rather deal with a female doctor/nurse or police officer. And sometimes men (or women) will feel more comfortable talking about certain medical conditions with a doctor of the same sex.

4) Discrimination of us in sports in any way is unacceptable, as is hormone level requirements of us.

The thing about this is that it completely ignores why there are segregated divisions in sports. At least the main reasons. And they are not the same as for bathrooms and locker rooms.

My experience is that female athletes are not uncomfortable around male athletes. They train together, date each other etc. And male athletes do not (generally) consider female athletes as lesser athletes despite knowing that they could dominate them in their sport given equivalent skill levels.

They are not primarily segregated for social reasons, though there may be a little bit of chaperoning involved from an administrator or parent's point of view.

The primary reason is for the biological advantage males as a population have over females as a population in the areas related to sports. Note that I said as a population. Pointing out anecdotes of individual performance or overlap between the tails of the populations is irrelevant.

Once again, if you don't have criteria for the segregation and means of determining if it has been met, you don't have segregation. You are actually putting forward the position that there should be no men's/women's sports. Which frames the discussion differently.

5) Transgender kids/teens should be able to start HRT when during puberty and not have to either delay their development with puberty blockers or have to suffer going through physical changes that can be devastating to them.

I don't agree with a ban on puberty blockers. But I also don't agree with on demand access. Such treatments should be undertaken under the guidance of a qualified physician.

As I am a woman, if I did fill a position meant for a woman, there is nothing being taken away there. I am a woman as much as Emily's Cat, Rolfe, JihadJane, and the rest of the cisgender TERFs on this board.

This one is a little more murky. Mostly because I don't like the idea of positions being earmarked for specific demographics.

 

[Ziggurat]

"Because it makes sports fans unhappy" is not something we should be using to judge this on.

Why not? Why isn't that a valid criteria for consideration?

Why do you think professional sports even exists in the first place?