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

[caveman1917]

Secondly, I have provided "my"* definition within these threads more than once already.

Feel free to link to the post containing your definitions then.

I took exception at being virtually ordered to do so in something approaching an imperialist fashion (in an online forum!), so I declined to jump through that hoop.

But soon thereafter I provided a link to document which accurately contains all of "my"* definitions as they pertain to the issue under discussion in these threads.

Meadmaker (who is still, as opposed to me, stupid enough to waste time checking your links) checked the document you provided and found it didn't contain the requested definitions.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I'm curios. What is your opinion on borderline cases? Reassignment surgery is a reality now. A non-binary person could have any combination of sexual characteristics, and in my mind that is their right. I think you've said that transwomen without a penis should be welcome in female spaces. Should that be the line regardless of other sexual characteristics?

Because this seems to be a complex issue, regardless of whether "transwomen are women" makes sense. I can see why transgender people could feel opressed.

My personal perspective is that people should use the restrooms and locker rooms that other people will generally assume they belong in.

Contrary to a lot of the arguments periodically made here, humans are quite identifiably sexually dimorphic. That dimorphism extends well beyond genitalia. For 99.5% of people, you can look at a tall, muscular, narrow-hipped, flat-chested female and still correctly identify them as female. Females and males have different hips, different gaits, different brow ridges, different jaw and chin shapes, different depositions of fat, etc. There are a great many elements that are part of the constellation of secondary sex characteristics. Most people don't fit the norm on any single element... but vanishingly few are outside the bounds of their sex on more than half of them.

That said... if someone effectively passes as their identified gender well enough that they don't get challenged, they get to go in.

That view doesn't hold for all situations though. It doesn't hold for prisons. I don't care how passing a transwoman is - if there is a penis attached, they do NOT get placed in the female ward.

And if a person was born male, regardless of how passing they are, they don't get counted as a female for the purposes of representation in politics or business, nor do their crimes get counted as female crimes.

 

[d4m10n]

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]?

Well the most obvious other option would be that some of them can readily pass as adult human females. The reason Boudicca90 would be expected to (for example) try on and purchase clothes designed for adult females when visiting a department store is that people in the store perceive her as female.

Another (other) option would be that some people make an effort to adjust their gendered expectations out of goodwill or for the sake of ethical concerns.

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.

I'm not saying it is correct (i.e. widely used by native speakers of English) I am saying it's the one I'm using for the purposes of this particular discussion. I can probably come up with a few examples of it being used in feminist philosophical literature, but I doubt anyone cares all that much.

Until then, all biological males were expected to perform the male gender role.

Surely there must have been a few people who managed to consistently pass as the opposite sex prior to 1970.

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.

I would not argue that modern western society is really all that indifferent to gender roles; I can nearly always guess a baby's sex just from how their parents have chosen to dress and accessorize them.

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...

I seriously don't see where I said anything about stereotypes or sexism. You seem to be assuming that all aspects of femininity^WP are offensively bad, when in fact several of them are obvious virtues which everyone should cultivate. Other aspects of femininity are morally neutral things like fashion choices which vary based on culture, time, and place.

 

[Collin237]

That's not choosing one.

Is this serious or sarcastic?

 

[Butter!]

Butter IMO in this thread is the textbook example of how these emotional and occasionally vitriolic discussions exert a radicalizing pressure on actual well meaning moderates. It happens on message boards all the time.

Moderate person starts out with their own comfortable understanding of the situation. Extremist talks about ‘horrible things x and y that Group are doing!’ Moderate goes ‘wow is that true? I hadn’t thought that was happening, but I read the thing you posted and it sounds bad. It would be bad if Group is really doing x and y.” Member of Group who is on their last nerve says something mean about anyone that would think Group really wants to do x and y. Moderate assumes something mean is directed squarely at them and gets understandably upset. Starts to think maybe Extremist might have a point, or at least Group wasn’t as nice as they thought.

This is totally a thing that can happen, and I think it's good to point out as a general phenomenon. But I do feel compelled to note that it isn't happening here with me . I'm always going to default to being a live-and-let-live hippie. I don't have to understand everything that happens. I would never turn toward anti-progress people, even if the progress people are being mean or pissing me off. It's a temporary storm. We're on the same side.

I do think that some people and organizations can be very weird about this issue and all its interconnected satellite issues (bathrooms, jail, sports, sex, language, doctors, kids - the list is endless), BUT I also think said weirdness mostly comes from a place of fierce protection for the rights of a disadvantaged group. And the world's kind of scary right now for disadvantaged groups, especially in the US with all the alt-right BS, and Trump's military ban tweets, and all sorts of horrible, sinister ****. So maybe the dialogue will stabilize a little and become more balanced as time passes and things chill out and the proverbial sky does not, in fact, fall.

I would like to apologize to Archie - for making assumptions and jumping all over you. Your response to me was gracious, considering my tone. Same to you, LondonJohn (even though I haven't read your response to me yet, if there is one, lol - it may be a doozy). I did freak out because I was frustrated, but that wasn't the main issue with me. I'm having a bad day, and if it hadn't been this debate that made me pop off, it would have been something else. I'm sorry.

I was going to flounce and sulk, but as soon as I calmed down a bit, I realized it would be much better to return and say "my bad."

 

[caveman1917]

In principle, the technology that is hypothetical from science fiction could make this possible?

The brain is a physical system, it can in principle be scanned precisely and simulated like any other physical system, it's a matter of precise scanning and computing power. My point was that just because we can't now, with our current technology, identify the neural correlates for particular beliefs and behaviours, doesn't mean those beliefs or behaviours don't have neural correlates. And yes of course it's going to be a complex relationship rather than something simple one-to-one, my point wasn't to start discussing brain uploading/simulation but to counter a fallacious claim you've made about your relative's behaviour not having a neural correlate.

 

[Meadmaker]

I'm not saying it is correct (i.e. widely used by native speakers of English) I am saying it's the one I'm using for the purposes of this particular discussion.

Ok. It's doesn't really illuminate very much. A person is a woman if people expect them to behave as a woman.

Which is all very well, except when they see her penis I think expectations might change.

 

[Sherkeu]

It does, huh? It doesn't break mine. But diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks I guess.


(Oh, and mainstream medical/sociological thinking is that the "transabled" phenomenon is not a valid lived condition - and that therefore those who hold themselves to be "transabled" are indeed aberrant to some degree. So your repetition is absolutely not analagous in the only important way. On the other hand, homosexuality and gender dysphoria/transidentity are both classed as valid lived conditions, so......)

Why? Why is removing healthy breasts or other healthy organs (such as testes) to feel 'whole' not the same as removing a leg below the knee when the persons well- being improves after the surgery? In terms of life-long medicalization, it seems to me even more drastic than simply not having a hand or a foot, which may only require some physical adaptation.


There was recent news of a WNBA player who removed both of her breasts. She is praised for being brave and a trailblazer in the trans movement. Good for her if it alleviates her suffering. She seems very happy!

https://www.usatoday.com/story/spor...wnba-ny-liberty-after-top-surgery/4317478001/

"I had Top Surgery! I’m feeling free & euphoric in my body & want Trans people to know and see that we’ve always existed & no one can erase us!" (Layshia) Clarendon identifies as trans/non-binary

Well, BIID sufferers have been around forever as well and have the same results with their surgeries.
So why the difference in their 'validity'?
It seems to me to be a judgement call on what society deems 'acceptable' to alter.
.............................................................

Take results from BIID surgeries. Are they also not 'really' trying to live their internal identities?

https://www.verywellmind.com/amputa...xt=BIID Examined,surgery made him feel better.

In the late 1700s, a French surgeon was forced at gunpoint to amputate a man's healthy limb. After the surgery, the man sent the surgeon payment and a letter of gratitude claiming that the surgery made him feel better.

In 2000, the public found out that a Scottish surgeon named Robert Smith had performed leg amputations on two patients with seemingly normal limbs. When the CEO of Smith's hospital figured out what Smith had done, Smith was forbidden to perform any more amputations. However, in the wake of these amputations, the debate concerning healthy amputation and other seemingly "unnecessary" and debilitating surgery gathered steam.

Interestingly, people with BIID who desire leg amputation feel better after the procedure and report improved quality of life. Of note, the two people on whom Robert Smith, the Scottish surgeon, performed surgery, felt remarkably better after surgery and went on to live happily with prostheses.

The etiology of the two conditions may be different but the 'valid lived experience' and the treatments that work (as of now) are remarkably similar.

 

[Matthew Best]

Is this serious or sarcastic?

Why can't it be both?

 

[Collin237]

My personal perspective is that people should use the restrooms and locker rooms that other people will generally assume they belong in.

Contrary to a lot of the arguments periodically made here, humans are quite identifiably sexually dimorphic. That dimorphism extends well beyond genitalia. For 99.5% of people, you can look at a tall, muscular, narrow-hipped, flat-chested female and still correctly identify them as female. Females and males have different hips, different gaits, different brow ridges, different jaw and chin shapes, different depositions of fat, etc. There are a great many elements that are part of the constellation of secondary sex characteristics. Most people don't fit the norm on any single element... but vanishingly few are outside the bounds of their sex on more than half of them.

That said... if someone effectively passes as their identified gender well enough that they don't get challenged, they get to go in.

That view doesn't hold for all situations though. It doesn't hold for prisons. I don't care how passing a transwoman is - if there is a penis attached, they do NOT get placed in the female ward.

And if a person was born male, regardless of how passing they are, they don't get counted as a female for the purposes of representation in politics or business, nor do their crimes get counted as female crimes.

This actually does make sense. As for the last two paragraphs, that's the advantage of making gender certificates legally binding; if they're found guilty of a crime, their gender can be revoked.

 

[TomB]

But "Dragons" is a fine name. (I grew up nearby.)

I vaguely remember someone objecting that the dragon is a symbol for Satan....

Never mind that a dragon had been the symbol for decades. (It was always a dragon painted in the center of the basketball court.) And there was actually a chinatown style dragon used at halftime for a while.

 

[Collin237]

Why can't it be both?

Well, I could invent a new word, "centrophobic".

 

[caveman1917]

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

Sure, but you then can't define "male" by "walks like a male" because in order to train the program you already had to use a different definition for "male" so as to label your motion-captures with "male" or "female" for the program to learn from. The problem isn't training some network to distinguish the way different sexes walk, the problem is then using the output of that to define the sexes.

 

[Rolfe]

I saw an absolutely bat-crap crazy paper linked to on Twitter which was indeed arguing for "transabled" people to be treated in all ways as if they were genuinely disabled. It seemed to be serious, although who can really tell these days. It made as much sense as the papers claiming that transgender people are in some way deserving of being treated in every possible way as if they were the opposite sex.

I wouldn't be that surprised if this is the next big thing we're supposed to swallow. The SNP NEC is doing its level best on that one at the moment, insisting that since there's no official register of disabled people then it must all be done by self-identification. (There are of course such things as the blue badge scheme, lists of medical diagnoses that are considered to be disabling, and a decent definition of what "disabled" actually means, but Fiona Robertson and Rhiannon Spear scorn all that.)

 

[d4m10n]

A person is a woman if people expect them to behave as a woman.

Adult human female.

 

[Rolfe]

Sure, but you then can't define "male" by "walks like a male" because in order to train the program you already had to use a different definition for "male" so as to label your motion-captures with "male" or "female" for the program to learn from. The problem isn't training some network to distinguish the way different sexes walk, the problem is then using the output of that to define the sexes.

That's what they did with the facial recognition software. Used the normal definition of male and female, and the software was very good at getting this right. But then the transactivists cried a lot, and the software company duly grovelled, but as far as I know they have not been able to programme the thing to recognise mysterious inner essence of womanhood.

 

[caveman1917]

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."

The "generally expected" part and the "self-presentation" part.

 

[theprestige]

This actually does make sense. As for the last two paragraphs, that's the advantage of making gender certificates legally binding; if they're found guilty of a crime, their gender can be revoked.

I keep getting stuck on the horns of this dilemma. On the one hand, "papers please" seems like the only really pragmatic solution in public policy. On the other hand, I see a lot to hate in this solution. I can't imagine it would be acceptable or even very humane to treat transsexuals that way.

I definitely don't want legal gender to be revoked when someone commits a crime.

 

[TomB]

I get where you're going with this, and appreciate it. But I'm going to point out that it's not just transwomen in men's prisons that face this danger - it's a whole lot of smaller-framed or even vaguely effeminate men. And some who are neither small nor effeminate.

It's a problem with male aggression and male sexual violence. I have all kinds of empathy for any of the victims... but it's a problem that males need to figure out how to address.

Not all males, of course. But statistically, the perpetrators are overwhelmingly male.

Well, yeah. The problem isn't merely that type A prisoner is Dangerous to Type B who is dangerous to Type C. The overarching problem with prisons is that they are dangerous. If you could figure out how to solve that problem, you might be able to consider co-ed prisons and simplify the whole thing.

Alas, reality.

But anyway, the concerns of both the women and trans-women regarding incarceration have validity. And effort should be put into addressing both.

There aren't any easy answers.

 

[Olmstead]

My personal perspective is that people should use the restrooms and locker rooms that other people will generally assume they belong in.

Contrary to a lot of the arguments periodically made here, humans are quite identifiably sexually dimorphic. That dimorphism extends well beyond genitalia. For 99.5% of people, you can look at a tall, muscular, narrow-hipped, flat-chested female and still correctly identify them as female. Females and males have different hips, different gaits, different brow ridges, different jaw and chin shapes, different depositions of fat, etc. There are a great many elements that are part of the constellation of secondary sex characteristics. Most people don't fit the norm on any single element... but vanishingly few are outside the bounds of their sex on more than half of them.

That said... if someone effectively passes as their identified gender well enough that they don't get challenged, they get to go in.

That view doesn't hold for all situations though. It doesn't hold for prisons. I don't care how passing a transwoman is - if there is a penis attached, they do NOT get placed in the female ward.

And if a person was born male, regardless of how passing they are, they don't get counted as a female for the purposes of representation in politics or business, nor do their crimes get counted as female crimes.

In certain contexts, some people will feel hard done by, arguably due to no fault of their own. There's also the possibility of non-binary people that aren't welcome in either male or female spaces, and I think that would definitely be a case of discrimination. Just put them into male spaces? I guess you could see it as an inevitability, so there's only bad solutions and less bad solutions.

I was trying to picture myself going through different stages of gender reassignment, and the challenges that would entail. And I do get it, enabling a transwoman to live as a woman in all contexts would make everything much easier and much less distressing. There are good reasons for transwomen to want access to female spaces that go beyond validation. But of course, there's the other side of the issue.

I don't actually have anything constructive to say about this. I just got stuck trying to figure out a way to make things okay for everyone. Someone should come up with some sci-fi solution.