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

[Emily's Cat]

Let's not pretend cis-women never engage in sexually predatory behavior, including behavior directed towards other women or children.

It's an infinitesimally small volume compared to that done my males.

 

[caveman1917]

Yes.

If I'm scared of a gay man's penis because it might rape me, I'm homophobic.

I've spend about 5 threads trying to figure out why that's different.

It's easy, because about 95% of people are heterosexual and 5% are homosexual. So out of a group of 20 men, you'd only have to be wary of 1, whereas women would have to be wary of 19. That's why it's different, the risk ratio is 19 times higher.

 

[Ziggurat]

Yaniv lost in court and had to pay recompense to the victims of her legal harassment. Canada passed trans rights into law and yet Yaniv's crackpot legal trolling was unsuccesful.

At least one business closes as a result of Yaniv's trolling. That he lost in court doesn't mean he didn't still do harm.

 

[theprestige]

The assumption has been, historically, that everyone is straight and cis. Therefore, by achieving a sex segregated space, there are less reasons to feel immodest or shy about the nude body.

Of course, this only works under the heteronormative assumption.

Gay men and lesbian women do not benefit from the same modesty measures of a single sex space. Plenty of people are still self-conscious about their bodies in single sex spaces, even if sexual attraction plays no part. Trans people may or may not feel welcome or comfortable in either or both places.

Seems we should just build in as much individual privacy into these spaces as possible and let people use as much or little as they feel comfortable with.

I agree with the gist of your post, but have questions about "we" and "should".

What's wrong with "we" building in as much individual privacy as we find convenient, and letting people take it or leave it as they see fit?

If I open a gym and decide to just have one open-plan unisex locker room because it's the cheapest to construct, what's wrong with that? Other than, my gym may not be attractive enough to actually stay in business.

What if I find that I get plenty of business with two open-plan locker rooms, one for each sex? Sure, I'm missing out on some clientele, but I'm seeing profits and honestly the expense of building in more privacy has an opportunity cost I'd rather not pay.

"Should" "we-as-a-society" come after me to build in more privacy, as a matter of law, in the name of trans rights?

 

[TomB]

I'm probably the only one who thinks that was supposed to be the meaning of trans rights all along, and both sides are to blame for screwing it up.

Probably.

Both sides want to encode their position into law. I'm not convinced that's productive.

 

[Collin237]

Do you really mean you don't believe the policy to include transwomen in women's crime statistics is real?

The claim was that most of the male criminals included as women did not have gender recognition certificates. In terms of policy, that means they were not trans women. So if the story is true, it was a huge breach of policy. Whether they were trans women by some other criterion is irrelevant.

Police officers are expected to adhere to protocols. In a law-based society, finding that the expectation leads to unjust behavior is supposed to imply that the protocols that led to that behavior are unjust, and should be reformed or repealed.

Conversely, finding that police officers are behaving unjustly in violation of those expectations is supposed to imply that the police officers violated their duty and/or that the protocols were not sufficiently deterministic.

Gender recognition certificates were established as a basis for trans rights. The police officers compiling crime statistics bypassed that provision and determined trans identity by say-so only. The story says that the TRAs approve of this. If the story is true, that means they're implying that the protocol needs to be changed to remove the requirement of gender recognition certificates. But that would deprive trans people of their rights, which is contrary to the TRAs' stated mission.

How do you put all that together?

 

[theprestige]

No it isn't, take any dictionary and you'll quickly see that very few words are explicitly defined as: "X is whatever people think X is."

It's implicit in the entire premise of dictionaries. They're descriptive, not prescriptive. The list of words and definitions is literally, "this is how people are using these words"*

---
*As of some arbitrary point in time, since it's a moving target and dictionaries have to take snapshots of their best efforts.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

I agree with the gist of your post, but have questions about "we" and "should".

What's wrong with "we" building in as much individual privacy as we find convenient, and letting people take it or leave it as they see fit?

If I open a gym and decide to just have one open-plan unisex locker room because it's the cheapest to construct, what's wrong with that? Other than, my gym may not be attractive enough to actually stay in business.

What if I find that I get plenty of business with two open-plan locker rooms, one for each sex? Sure, I'm missing out on some clientele, but I'm seeing profits and honestly the expense of building in more privacy comes at an opportunity cost I'd rather not pay.

"Should" "we-as-a-society" come after me to build in more privacy, as a matter of law, in the name of trans rights?

That's fair, assuming your plans are consistent with anti-discrimination laws which, in the near future, may not allow trans discrimination that is being advocated in this thread.

As a matter of scale, the trans menace has always been a tempest in a tea pot. The number of trans people is still quite small, and even in a world that is more trans accepting, there really are never going to be that many trans people.

You'd think these incidents are extremely common, but the anti-trans panic mongers have to search high and low for incidents to elevate to a fevered discourse.

Outside of certain specific contexts, trans acceptance is going to have a barely noticeable impact for the vast majority of people. Transphobic people will probably find it pretty easy to totally exclude trans people from their social circles and may never have to interact with a trans person in any meaningful way.

This is somewhat true for homophobes and will only be more so with transphobes.

I would suspect that changing rooms and saunas are probably among the most sensitive (given the nudity) and high volume places, so there's likely bound to be someone who might prefer a bit more privacy than what is offered by an open changing area.

 

[Aber]

So if the story is true, it was a huge breach of policy. Whether they were trans women by some other criterion is irrelevant.

If?

https://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/north-wales-police-allows-rapists-17128145

Detective Superintendent Gareth Evans, of North Wales Police, said: "While recognising the rights of suspects and offenders in rape investigations, we remain victim focused in all that we do.

“The issue of gender has been evolving rapidly over the past few years and North Wales Police evolves to reflect best practise in line with national expertise and engagement with our communities.

“If evidence was presented that any of our procedures were harmful to victims, we would naturally consider this through national and local scrutiny procedures and adapt to any changed guidance in this area.”

According to the force, they will record all victims and suspects on the "Annual Data Requirements" [ADR] as the gender they self declare as.

The ADR are submitted by every force in the UK to the Home Office as part of the recording of crime statistics.

The force said that if somebody confirmed they were transgender, then an "alias file" would be created in which their previous identity would be included, but only their current self-identified gender would be included in ADR returns.

When a person self-identifies as non-binary, their gender is recorded as indeterminate.

 

[Emily's Cat]

There's no way that a very small zealous minority can "capture" the entire infrastructure of one of the world's most powerful countries.

And yet...

Honestly, set aside your personal beliefs, and read through Fair Play for Women and Women's Place UK and Women are Human. Take a look at what is actually happening.

If you're staunchly pro-trans, you're likely to view some of it as being anti-trans. But try to set aside the emotional reaction and focus on the information presented.

It's already happened. There are several states in the US where transgender identity is on the basis of self-id, and people can change the sex on all of their legal documents and be legally recognized as their identified sex solely on the basis of their declaration - no diagnosis or transition treatment of any sort is required.

California passed a law last year that allows transwomen who are fully intact physically to be housed in the women's prison, and that's on the basis of their self-declaration of being transwomen.

This past year, New York very quietly re-wrote a requirement that required one male and one female representative from each borough in political parties so that it now reads "any two people who don't identify as the same gender unless they both identify as non-binary"... and now one of the boroughs is being represented by a self-declared transwoman who has had no hormone therapy or surgery at all.

We aren't having this long-running discussion because of hypothetical possibilities - we're having it because these policies are already going into place.

 

[theprestige]

By the standards of liberal society, someone who is "extremely obviously male" would not be considered a trans woman. If you're going by extremists on either side, rather than ordinary liberals, YMMV, but don't pretend that's a legitimate interpretation of this thread.

Trans rights activists have been working to change that norm about "extremely obviously male" transwomen. And they have been making real, substantial progress towards that goal in public policy.

You may believe this is the work of extremists, but the truth is that it is working. You can't dismiss it as irrelevant or nonexistent. It does exist. It is relevant. The interpretation is an observation of the actual facts on the ground regarding the shift in public policy.

Whether or not you believe it should be happening, you need to recognize that it is happening. It's not just a fringe fantasy, it's a growing fringe reality.

 

[TomB]

After reading hundreds of pages of this discussion, it seems that me that there is absolutely no consistency in the positions of what I will simplistically call the "pro-trans" side of the argument debaters here when it comes to the basics: "trans-women really are women", self-identification vs certification, surgery, attempting to pass, when and where to legitimately discriminate, etc, etc.

That's usually good enough to dismiss them entirely.

There are varied positions from people on both sides. The existence of nuanced positions is never a reason to dismiss a side of an argument.

 

[Butter!]

Boy, I'll tell you one thing. I am completely over analogies. Theprestige is right about them. Awful way to argue.

Sometimes situations have their own particular nuances that are simply lost (or deliberately cast aside) once an analogy comes barreling in. I think I'm going to reexamine my own use of such arguments going forward. And by "reexamine," I mean "knock it off."

 

[theprestige]

I'm probably the only one who thinks that was supposed to be the meaning of trans rights all along, and both sides are to blame for screwing it up.

The goal contained the seeds of its own screwup all along.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Absolutely. That's entirely the justification we are being given.

If I'm in a bathroom with a woman, I can't be trusted to not rape her.

What other possible reason has even been discussed?

We can't be expected to just not take that at least a little personally.

Joe, if that's the only thing you've gleaned from this discussion, then you simply haven't been paying attention at all.

 

[Emily's Cat]

That would be medical malpractice. But I wouldn't be a bit surprised if Boris Johnson allowed such a thing.

Several states in the US allow it, as does the entirety of Canada.

 

[theprestige]

And female sexual predators are very unlikely to pose as a transman in order to gain access to male-only spaces, because again, that's not how female sexual predators generally operate. Females are not excluded from areas where men get naked for the physical safety of men.

I have the mental image of a house cat prancing into a cave all like "Gonna get my predator on! Where's all my prey at!"

And the wolves in the den are looking at it like, "bless your heart, you sassy little morsel."

 

[Emily's Cat]

Emily.

Too much of your identity as a woman is tied up in fear.

I honestly wonder if you consider anyone who doesn't live in total fear a "real woman."

I don't live in total fear. But it IS a reality.

We've covered this bit earlier in these threads, but nearly every female poster in this thread has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape, or the victim of a sexual assault, of the victim of sexual harassment many, many times throughout their life. It's so frequent that many females don't even bother counting the unsolicited boob and butt grabs in crowded spaces as "sexual assaults" because they happen so often, and they pale in comparison to the more egregious acts that we're subjected to.

There are a few men who have, once or twice in their lives, been groped by a female at a bar. And a couple who have been subjected to significant childhood sexual trauma.

The numbers and the frequency are staggeringly different.

For most women, this isn't a case of cowering in fear for our poor widdle selves or whatever derogatory and dismissive framing you keep using. It's basic common sense. It's wearing our seatbelts. It's not carrying a wad of cash in our hands when we're walking down a dark alley in a rough part of town. It's something that we are aware of as a potential hazard of life. Because for the vast majority of women, it IS a potential hazard of life.

This topic and the policies put forth are ones that REMOVE the safety of the very, very few spaces in our lives where we are free to set aside that wariness and that attention to our surroundings. These are some of the very few spaces outside of our homes (and not even all of those), where we don't need to have that hazard in our awareness and we can just ******* relax.

Honestly, you getting so wound up about this as some kind of personal affront that hurts your male ego is off-putting. It is yet another case of males insisting that their desires and their feelings should be centered at a higher priority than the needs and safety of females.

FFS, you're not even the person asking to come into the changing rooms! You're getting offended as a male on behalf of other ******* people! And you present this as if your second-hand discomfort is justification for females not having a right to sex-segregated spaces!

 

[Emily's Cat]

Hypothetically. Say 90% of instances of (b) are done by x, and 5% of x do (b).

That doesn’t make me think x’s in general do (b). It doesn’t even make me think x’s should be excluded from anything, unless having x’s around has no benefit at all to anyone.

There are better ways to mitigate risk than excluding a group that’s 95% ok.

Which is totally why nobody gets a bit tense when an adult male with no children is hanging about at the park where the toddlers are playing, right?

 

[Collin237]

That's usually good enough to dismiss them entirely.

People being willing to say and hear many different viewpoints is supposed to be the virtue of open-mindedness that Skeptics are promoting.

Anyway, since when do you say we all disagree with each other? I thought the line was that we're all in lock-step with ideology?