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

[theprestige]

Of course not! But the crime of seeing a naked man is exactly as serious as the crime of seeing a naked woman, regardless of who's looking.

The "crime" (which I stipulate) might be the same, but the risk is different. Due to the average biological differences between the two sexes. A woman subjected to the unwanted advances of a naked man is likely to be in more danger than vice-versa.

 

[TomB]

I think I understand what a "valid lived condition" is.

I don't understand what an "invalid lived condition" would be.

My thought as well. I think every "lived condition" is valid.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Or, of course, you could go to literally any authoritative, reliable source for a definition of "valid lived condition"

Can you provide a link?

Because entered in the search bar returns several pages of things that are not that at all (like life span and living conditions). Putting it in quotes for a perfect match returns this thread and nothing else.

(I'm wondering whether you'd perhaps go into a thread about astronomy and ask one of its participants for "their" definition of terms such as "light year" "parsec" "moon" or "standard candle" - as they apply strictly to discussions about astronomy.....)

Seeing as those terms all have well defined and easily locatable meanings, it's not all that necessary. On the other hand, if someone did ask what "light year" means, they're going to get the same definition from all of the astronomers and most of the humans in that thread. And anyone who offers up "it's however far light feels like going during a year" will get laughed at.

ETA: I recall being "challenged"(!) on "my" definition of "woman" in a transidentity context. I don't recall being "challenged"(!) on "my" definition of "valid lived condition" (that Ron Obvious post was a stand-alone observation of his/hers). But as I've now repeated several times, none of these are "my" definitions. They are the definitions which are generally-accepted and adopted among every serious real-world body/institution/government in the context of gender dysphoria and transidentity. So, y'know, people who are genuinely interested can always go and look them up themselves.

You keep saying that you're using the "generally accepted definition" but you are also unable to provide a non-tautological description, and you're unable to provide a link to any of the experts providing a non-tautological definition.

You seem to rely on an appeal to a hypothetical authority, without actually bothering to demonstrate that such an authority actually exists, or is in any way an authority.

 

[TomB]

"I DEMAND YOU ACKNOWLEDGE I HAVE FIVE FINGERS ON EACH HAND!"
"NO YOU HAVE FOUR FINGERS AND A THUMB!"
"STOP DENYING THE NUMBER OF FINGERS! LOOK I CAN COUNT THEM! FIVE!"
"I AM COUNTING! I ONLY COUNT FOUR!"

Wash, rinse, repeat.

This conversation can't go anywhere until we either

A) Agree on Man/Woman/Male/Female demarcation and language even if only for the purpose of this discussion.

or

B) Stop pretending like we can define an argument into existence.

or

C) At least stop pretending that we don't understand that everyone isn't using the same definition, even if we don't agree with how they are using it and respond to their argument using their definitions and not our own, again even if we disagree with them.

Amen.

 

[theprestige]

At the risk of sounding clicheed, democracy.

I think this is the first time I've ever heard someone argue that democracy involves everyone being equally unhappy with policy. Let alone present this idea as a well-worn cliche.

As far as I can tell, democracy mostly involves the majority being more or less happy with policy, even if that leaves a minority that's unhappy with it.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I'm not interested in engaging in this thread again (for the time being anyway) but I will just say that no I wasn't implying you were a transphobe. I was objecting to the idea being repeatedly put forward (not just by you either) that all the anti-trans posters here are reasonable, evidence driven, caring, compassionate human beings who only want what's best for everyone including transpeople. That's not how I would characterise the majority of the content on this thread at all.

I think we're well aware of how you would characterize. Unfortunately, your narrative framing doesn't dictate reality.

 

[Meadmaker]

Throw in "adult" and "human," narrow the context to a specific culture, and bear in mind that it isn't necessarily ethical to impose gendered expectations on those who have no use for them. With all that in mind, pretty much, yes.

Said rebuttal assumes that to acknowledge the existence of gendered norms is to facilitate and perpetuate them. That's ********, obviously, and I'm surprised anyone falls for it.

But I genuinely don't understand something. If your definition is correct, then there were no transgender people until about, at most 50 years ago. Until then, all biological males were expected to perform the male gender role. So no biological male in those years was ever a woman, so no transgendered people existed, or at least whichever transgendered people existed, the transwomen weren't really women and the transmen weren't really men, because they were all expected to perform the gender role associated with their biological sex.

Now that society is indifferent to their gender roles, they are expected to perform the gender role if they are already seen to be performing that gender role, so a transwoman today is really a woman, by your definition.

So, society defines "woman" by setting expectations?

 

[Olmstead]

Throw in "adult" and "human," narrow the context to a specific culture, and bear in mind that it isn't necessarily ethical to impose gendered expectations on those who have no use for them. With all that in mind, pretty much, yes.

[...]

Okay.

Ciswomen are expected to behave like adult human females because they are adult human females.

Transwomen are expected to behave like adult human females because ...

... they identify as adult human females?

... their brain tells them that they are adult human females?

... [other options]?

 

[theprestige]

I'm not sure we agree that this is the sole reason. To some degree it is, but it's also because many people don't want to see the other person's nudity even if there's no lust.

Additionally, it keeps getting ignored or dismissed as "not important" but there's also the issue of sexual assault.

Suburban Turkey - what is the reason that transwomen don't want to change in the men's changing room? What is the argument against male-bodied people changing with male-bodied people, regardless of their gender identity?

How about... Because dudes are generally homophobic and violent, and as soon as they see another dude putting on a dress they'll beat him her up?

But the ladies, being the weaker sex, are less prone to violent confrontations. Especially with a lady who removes her dress to reveal her male penis. Any lady with a sense of self-preservation would know to go along to get along, and let that lady-dude complete her changing ritual unmolested.

Yes, it's sarcasm. Any possible "it's tragicomic because it's true" is entirely unintentional.

 

[JoeMorgue]

If transgender people can only exists in societies with strong ideas of masculine and feminine traits to define the transgender people by, then the society has a vested interested in promoting masculine and feminine traits in order to accommodate transgender people and that's not a good thing.

 

[caveman1917]

I also (to repeat myself) think that the thread title is a problem. Its original context (sports only) has long been lost to time, and new people joining the fray are naturally going to view it as transphobic and cruel. I think it should be changed. The OP of the first thread is NOT anti-trans; he was trying to make a point about sports competitions. If you go back to the first installment of the thread, you can see this for yourself. But it's been a long time since then, and I really think we need a new title.

No we don't. It's the trans activists who keep cultishly repeating that damn false[*] mantra of "transwomen are women" so they don't get to complain about a thread titled with the true[*] negation of that statement.

* By the mainstream dictionary/wikipedia definitions of the terms.

 

[Rolfe]

Ruffian was clearly expressing the gender role of a male horse, so it is utterly bigoted to call him a filly.

(For those for whom Ruffian was before your time, Ruffian was a female horse who could run very fast. In the 1970s, a "Battle of the Sexes" race between her and recent Kentucky Derby winner Foolish Pleasure was arranged. As I recall, the outcome was very much in doubt, and Ruffian wasn't given any sort of advantage to compensate for her sex.

Sadly, Ruffian collapsed during the race, and broke her leg, and was euthanized.)

While there is a slight difference between male and female performance in horses there is nothing like the marked sexual dimorphism seen in man. The reasons for this are left as an exercise for the reader.

 

[theprestige]

Hmmm. That would definitely have to be compensated for. As far as computer programming, that's way above my league. But I wager someone would be able to figure something out.

My point is that we can already distinguish between men and women, to a scientific certainty. We don't actually need to write motion-analysis software to decide if you're a man or a woman.

Unless you mean that we'd use the quality of your performance as the criteria? Do you walk sufficiently like a woman? Then you're a woman. Or just really dedicated to your drag.

I don't think anybody is going to agree to that, though.

 

[Rolfe]

You might inadvertently have a point. If it could be established, by taking motion-capture readings and putting them through pattern-matching software, that a distinction can be made between "moving like a male" and "moving like a female", then the debate between sex and gender could be dropped, and everyone could just defer to the software.

I think it's extremely likely that this could be done, if it hasn't already been done. The differences in pelvic structure between adult men and women are sufficiently great as to produce a pretty significant difference in gait.

Note that the developers of facial recognition software have already had to grovel to the trans-activists because their product is "transphobic". The software correctly recognises the person's real sex in an extremely high percentage of cases. The TRAs are upset, of course.

ETA: If you were talking about horses though, I don't think this is possible. There is not nearly sufficient sexual dimorphism in the musculoskeletal system.

 

[JoeMorgue]

//Total Hijack//

A lot of motion capture isn't done by the performers of the same sex as the character.

 

[Louden Wilde]

That's a feature not a bug. When it's impossible to please everyone, the only fair option is to please no one.

'adult human female' has worked pretty well and has functional value - e.g. in health announcements.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I'm not talking about what any person thinks. I'm talking about a computer program that would know nothing except training data from cisgender athletes. Computer programs are capable of making identifications that no human would consider reasonable.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/2/...e-attacks-adversarial-turtle-rifle-3d-printed

Interesting bit of a side-note here. Data science (machine learning, AI, neural nets, predictive analytics, etc.) are notorious for learning wrongly. They can't distinguish between cause and affect, nor between causal and correlative. And at then end of the day, they frequently end up reinforcing social biases, rather than eliminating them.

There was a case a few years ago where a subsidiary of United Health Care designed a really powerful care triage system for doctors, which prioritized patients with more severe symptoms or who had greater need for doctor intervention. When they put it into practice, the doctors noticed and reported that the software was seemingly racist - even though race wasn't one of the characteristics used in the software at all. The software was echoing a known racial bias in treatment - that black men are perceived to be stronger and healthier than they actually are, and that their complaints of pain are subconsciously downplayed and assumed to be exaggerated*. So in practice the software entrenched that same bias.

So without a significant amount of judgement-based overrides, you'd very likely end up with software that reinforces sexist stereotypes. For example, an AI looking at job selection between males and females might infer that females are naturally better caregivers, since so many more females than males are nurses and teachers. It would miss the social bias that drives those selections in the first place.

 

[theprestige]

Activists will never be satisfied with reasonable political progress, on any topic. After a certain point, you just have to ignore them and find a compromise between moderates.

We already have a compromise between moderates: Transwomen are not women, but we're more than happy to treat them as women in most cases, including important cases like employment and housing, but not in all cases and not on Self-ID alone.

As for reasonable political progress - self-ID is being implemented as the law of the land in several places. Is that reasonable political progress and ignoring the activists who will never be satisfied? Or is that ignoring the moderates, rejecting their compromise, and trying to appease the insatiable appetites of the activists.

If this thread were just about moderates and activists having a slapfight because the activists are mad about reasonable compromise in public policy, I'd say, no harm, no foul. But the actual public policies going into place aren't the reasonable compromises of the moderates. They're the extremities of the activists. So this thread has a larger significance, I think.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I still don't see what's wrong with "Women are the set of people who are generally expected to perform femininity, either on account of sex or self-presentation."

As a technical statement, it's fuzzy at best. "expected" makes it difficult to pin down and very subjective. I mean, drag queens are "expected to perform femininity" even though the vast majority of drag queens are gay men.

As a women, my objection is the "expected to perform" and the impact it has on entrenching regressive sex-based stereotypes.

 

[Rolfe]

I still don't see what's wrong with "Women are the set of people who are generally expected to perform femininity, either on account of sex or self-presentation."

You seriously don't see how offensive it is to tell women that their identification as a woman depends on society generally expecting them to perform a set of stereotypical sexist behaviours, as opposed to being actually female? We kind of thought we left that behind in the 1960s.