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

[Matthew Best]

Your argument was:

Discrimination against X is wrong.
Discrimination against Y is wrong.
My opponents says that discrimination against Z is OK because Z isn't X or Y.

That was an incorrect summation of your opponent's view.

You then revised your argument to:

Discrimination against X is wrong.
Discrimination against Y is wrong.
My opponents says that discrimination against Z is OK.

The implication of this is that you think if discrimination against X and Y is wrong, it must be wrong against Z, too.

That, inasmuch is it is even an argument that anybody has made, which I'm not convinced it is, is incoherent and logically fallacious.

The fact that you call it "taking people at their word" is rather hilarious.

 

[Collin237]

But it's NOT the choice of the females in the room whether or not they want to see said penis? And it's not the choice of the females in the room whether or not they want said penis-bearer to see them?

Why is it that only the male-bodied transperson is granted choice as a preequisite, and females are forbidden the same level of agency?

EVERYBODY is being deprived of the privilege of changing in a private stall. Isn't it already a violation of women's rights that men build locker rooms that require women to see each other naked?

 

[TurkeysGhost]

You're begging the question of what constitutes a civil liberty. You aren't demanding cismen be given access to women's bathrooms and changing rooms, so segregation of these areas on some basis is acceptable to you and doesn't violate what you consider to be civil liberties.

I understand the usefulness of sex segregated spaces. However, somewhat recent acceptance that portions of the population do not fall into the heteronormative standard challenges the underpinnings of such a policy. A sex segregated space is not guarantee to be a lust free environment.

Even then, I concede that, since most of the population is straight, cis people, sex segregation greatly reduces the the extent that these sensitive spaces are sexualized. We should not bury our heads in the sand to defend this practice simply because it works for the majority. Queer people do not experience these sex segregated spaces in the same way we do, and if the goal is to maximize privacy, safety, and comfort, their viewpoint should also be considered and adjustments made.

It seems to me the best way to ensure such a thing is to increase the amount of personal privacy available in these spaces and no longer assume that communal, sex-segregated spaces are a complete solution.

So why does it qualify as a civil liberty for trans people? And which trans people? Does Zuby count?

I don't know who Zuby is. perhaps you can ask this question another way.

You're pretending that the argument is already won, but you haven't even really made it.

You're right, I've been taking it for granted.

Whether or not trans people are valid is the pivotal question to this whole thing.

If they are, arguments from consequences really don't matter. If trans identity is valid, then us cis people simply cannot deny them their rights simply because we don't like the consequences of that.

I don't really understand how there can be a middle ground on that issue. Either trans identity is valid, and they should be respected as a civil right, or they are not and these people should be treated as delusional.

If they are not, then it's fair game to discriminate against them in pretty much every circumstance as delusional weirdos.

I think it's pretty clear that trans identity is not delusion, but I'm not sure how you can "prove" that any more than you can "prove" that gay people also aren't mental defectives.

 

[Meadmaker]

The against part is part and parcel of discrimination.

No

But nice that you admit its OK to discriminate against trans people in your worldview.

No. But it is ok to discriminate between men and women, by, for example, inisisting that no men enter a locker room designated for women.

So transpeople don't have a choice about who when and where they declare their identity. You want to make that choice for them.And you aren't transphobic at all, right.

No one in our society, trans or cis, has a right to expose their genitals to an unwilling audience, except in circumstances designated by law.



Hmmmm.....what a useless post. It's just repeating things that I've already said, all because someone decided to twist what I said into something else. It's not like what I said was difficult to understand.

 

[Meadmaker]

Whether or not trans people are valid is the pivotal question to this whole thing.

If they are, arguments from consequences really don't matter. If trans identity is valid, then us cis people simply cannot deny them their rights simply because we don't like the consequences of that.

Instead of using "valid", I would say that the pivotal question is whether transmen are really men, and transwomen are really women. If they are, then all of your proposals make sense.



Their identity as transwomen or transmen is definitely valid. No, forget "valid". Their identity as transwomen or transmen is real. It's accurate. It cannot be reasonably denied in most cases.

Now all we have to do is decide if a transwoman is a woman and if a transman is a man.

I say no. Transwomen are not women. Transmen are not men.

Do you have any way of refuting that assertion?

ETA: I suppose it's disingenuous to even ask. I know the answer. Five continuations in, and the answer hasn't changed.

 

[Butter!]

Yes, that seems to be what's happening. I'd have expected that ISF would be a place where independently enlightened policies would arise, but my hopes for that have been dashed.

Why?

I'm genuinely very confused by this statement.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I'm not really sure how I'd make precise an allegation of a fake website. Suspicious, yes. Disingenuous, yes. But nothing I can put my finger on. So I'm going with the latter. I definitely do consider intersectionality, as it's currently in vogue, to be hogwash, to put it mildly.

I'm right there with you on that one.

Interestingly, the initial idea behind intersectionality was pretty decent. It was an acknowledgement that when there is more than one in play, some social disadvantages can end up being even more of a problem than each one by itself would be. One of the classic examples is the females face discrimination and disadvantages, and that black people face disadvantages... and that people who fall into both situations - black women - end up facing a level of discrimination that is worse then the sum of those two together.

In a clinical setting, we would say that the conditions are "comorbid" in that they amplify the effects.

Unfortunately, the very shallowest understanding of that concept has been glommed onto and then has just lost its mind. The same kind of thing has happened with the concept of social privilege, in that the original idea was sound and quite useful, but it's become so distorted in application that it has nearly lost all meaning.

But that entire aside is neither here nor there. Just an interesting side comment.

It's mainly about that list you quoted from the guide. I still maintain that empirically, given only the list itself, it's the type of rhetoric that would serve the purpose of scaremongering, rather than actually giving anyone instructions. That gives me two questions, which TBH I have no basis to guess the answer to:

1. What was the purpose of including this list in the guide? Remember that this is an unencrypted and publicly accessible file. Anyone in the world can see that list and run helter skelter with their interpretation of it.

2. How did you find that list? You can answer that in PM if you wish.

I wasn't the one who originally posted it, that was Aber. Not particularly important though.

1. The purpose in posting it was to counter your assertion that lobbying efforts and policy drafting were not going on behind the scenes out of the public's eye. It was to show that keeping some of the efforts out of public view (by limiting media exposure to the efforts and by piggybacking on unrelated but more popular bills) is actually going on, for really reals, in the real world. This is actually the tactics that many of the trans rights activist organizations and lobbying groups advocate.

Of course anyone can find it and run helter skelter with it. Unfortunately, the only people who go looking for it tend to be a) those who agree with the proposed policy reform efforts and already think these tactics are appropriate and a) those opposed to these policy reform efforts. What tends to happen is that group (a) has no objection... and group (b) gets painted as conspiracy theorists, transphobes, TERFs, anti-trans, feminazis, and all around horrible females who don't know their place A lot of this is only now making it into public light, despite being very, very real... and it's making it's way into the light because some of us refuse to be silenced and think this is a topic that bears further discussion to come to a reasonable and fair agreement for both transgender people and females.

2) How those lists get found isn't exactly a secret. We've had discussion on ideological capture and policy capture earlier in this thread. Several of us know what the big lobbying organizations are, and as you said - this is publicly available if you know where to look. Go peruse Stonewall's website, and get down past the front pages. Dig around on Mermaids. Check out some of the International rights orgs (I can't recall off the top of my head right now). Go look into what various political parties are adopting as their policy positions.

 

[Emily's Cat]

If trans people's civil rights come into conflict with our own, it must be resolved from the position of equal stakeholders, not as hosts deciding whether or not a guest can be accommodated.

Great! How about you practice what you preach? Treat females as equal stakeholders who also have rights that should be respected.

 

[theprestige]

That just goes back to what I said, that nobody should be exposing themselves in a locker room. Therefore private stalls need to be built.

Sex-segregated shared spaces have worked fine for thousands of years. Rolfe has made the case that these spaces have a communal benefit for the women that use them. Not every woman makes use of this (similarly in men's locker rooms), but it's probably not a good idea to abolish it entirely to satisfy an ad hoc "no exposure" requirement.

And I say it's ad hoc because it didn't really come up until we started talking about the implications of trans accommodations. Locker rooms have been around for thousands of yers, without anybody saying, "this needs to stop, private stalls for everyone all the time".

 

[Archie Gemmill Goal]

Your argument was:

Discrimination against X is wrong.
Discrimination against Y is wrong.
My opponents says that discrimination against Z is OK because Z isn't X or Y.

That was an incorrect summation of your opponent's view.

You then revised your argument to:

Discrimination against X is wrong.
Discrimination against Y is wrong.
My opponents says that discrimination against Z is OK.

The implication of this is that you think if discrimination against X and Y is wrong, it must be wrong against Z, too.

That, inasmuch is it is even an argument that anybody has made, which I'm not convinced it is, is incoherent and logically fallacious.

The fact that you call it "taking people at their word" is rather hilarious.

This is an absolute mess. Want to try again?

 

[Emily's Cat]

Trans people are as much citizens as us cis people in the majority, and it's not our place to deny them civil rights based purely on our own perceived self interests.

For clarity... which civil rights are trans people being denied?

 

[Archie Gemmill Goal]

No

You don't understand what the word means. Great place to start.

No. But it is ok to discriminate between men and women, by, for example, inisisting that no men enter a locker room designated for women.

The topic was transpeople. Try again.

No one in our society, trans or cis, has a right to expose their genitals to an unwilling audience, except in circumstances designated by law.

Not the question. But again nice try. You want them to HAVE to out themselves by going to male facilities. Own what you want. And be honest. If a transwoman goes to a female facility and uses a private changing booth she wouldn't be exposing her genitals but you want to outlaw that because you NEED them to go to the male facilities.

Hmmmm.....what a useless post. It's just repeating things that I've already said, all because someone decided to twist what I said into something else. It's not like what I said was difficult to understand.

It is difficult to understand. How you think you have the right to determine that a transwoman has to go to a male changing room because you know better than her. It's beyond me the arrogance of it.

 

[Archie Gemmill Goal]

Instead of using "valid", I would say that the pivotal question is whether transmen are really men, and transwomen are really women. If they are, then all of your proposals make sense.



Their identity as transwomen or transmen is definitely valid. No, forget "valid". Their identity as transwomen or transmen is real. It's accurate. It cannot be reasonably denied in most cases.

Now all we have to do is decide if a transwoman is a woman and if a transman is a man.

I say no. Transwomen are not women. Transmen are not men.

Do you have any way of refuting that assertion?

Well if it's only an assertion then we can just assert the counter. And if you accept that their identity is female/male then on what grounds are you denying it?

ETA: I suppose it's disingenuous to even ask. I know the answer. Five continuations in, and the answer hasn't changed.

We all know the answer. You have conservative views about sex and gender and you don't want to listen to anything that counters those views. You are quite comfortable being transphobic even though you will deny to your grave that you are. Stalemate.

 

[Meadmaker]

dis·crim·i·nate
/dəˈskriməˌnāt/

verb
1.
recognize a distinction; differentiate.
"babies can discriminate between different facial expressions of emotion"

 

[Archie Gemmill Goal]

Why?

I'm genuinely very confused by this statement.

Just out of interest .... where are we on the 'the majority of people here are quite reasonable and not in the least transphobic'?

Can we agree that for example a poster saying a handful of posts above here explicitly that 'transwomen are not women' is transphobic?

Can we count that as 1?

Happy to provide more evidence as we go just genuinely interested in whether your perception matches mine and whether we are agreeing on what we see

 

[Archie Gemmill Goal]

dis·crim·i·nate
/dəˈskriməˌnāt/

verb
1.
recognize a distinction; differentiate.
"babies can discriminate between different facial expressions of emotion"

DISCRIMINATION

noun
1.
the unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people, especially on the grounds of race, age, sex, or disability.
"victims of racial discrimination"

----

disingenuous
/ˌdɪsɪnˈdʒɛnjʊəs/

adjective: disingenuous
not candid or sincere, typically by pretending that one knows less about something than one really does.
"he was being somewhat disingenuous as well as cynical"

 

[Emily's Cat]

Yes, that seems to be what's happening. I'd have expected that ISF would be a place where independently enlightened policies would arise..

Please feel free to suggest your own independently enlightened policies.

I'm pretty sure that a great many of us would welcome a reasonable, thoughtful, and considerate approach to mitigate this loggerheads.

On the table are:

• Use guidelines for public restrooms, including in public schools
• Use guidelines for restrooms on private property, including in employment
• Use guidelines for public showers and locker rooms where nudity sometimes occurs, including in public schools
• Use guidelines for showers and locker rooms on private property
• Sex versus gender identity with respect to employment that is limited by sex, including as caregivers in intimate settings
• Right to deny intimate services to a person on the basis of their sex versus their gender identity, such as genital waxing services offered for females and denied to physically intact transwomen
• Appropriate housing in prison populations on the basis of gender identity
• Eligibility for sex-based positions, scholarships, grants, and short-lists in organizations that have defined objectives for sex equality and representation
• Honorifics based on gender identity rather than sex such as "woman of the year" or "most highly paid woman CEO"
• Access to sex-segregated services for high vulnerability populations such as rape shelters and domestic violence refuges
• Access to subsidized health care for gender transition treatment, including surgeries, as a right rather than as cosmetic procedures (such as breast augmentations, genital surgery, facial and tracheal shaving, hair removal)
• Eligibility for participation in sex-segregated sports including middle and high school sports where the affect of testosterone has a material impact on athleticism
• Access of minors to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgical procedures without parental consent

In particular, I would be very interested to hear your perspective on which of these should be considered an entitled right on the basis of gender identity, which are case-by-case basis (and what your idea of reasonable criteria would be), and which would allow exclusion on the basis of biological sex.

As an additional complication, where does self-identification fall within these topics? Which should be accommodated on the basis of the individual's declarati0on of gender identity, and which should be limited to those with an appropriate medical diagnosis?

 

[Olmstead]

[...]

If they are, arguments from consequences really don't matter. If trans identity is valid, then us cis people simply cannot deny them their rights simply because we don't like the consequences of that.

I don't really understand how there can be a middle ground on that issue. Either trans identity is valid, and they should be respected as a civil right, or they are not and these people should be treated as delusional.

[...]

Let's ignore the question of what valid is even supposed to mean in this context. Why does this matter?

The situation for trans people would be exactly the same in both scenarios. Through no fault of their own, they would face exactly the same challenges and go through exactly the same agony, and the best solution to improve their quality of life would also be the same.

Why would you provide this help to one group but not the other?

 

[TurkeysGhost]

Let's ignore the question of what valid is even supposed to mean in this context. Why does this matter?

The situation for trans people would be exactly the same in both scenarios. Through no fault of their own, they would face exactly the same challenges and go through exactly the same agony, and the best solution to improve their quality of life would also be the same.

Why would you provide this help to one group but not the other?

I'm not sure what you mean. The situation, prior to very recent changes in law, was very poor for trans people. Without recognition that gender identity is a civil right, it is perfectly lawful to discriminate against trans people.

 

[Ziggurat]

I understand the usefulness of sex segregated spaces. However, somewhat recent acceptance that portions of the population do not fall into the heteronormative standard challenges the underpinnings of such a policy. A sex segregated space is not guarantee to be a lust free environment.

It doesn't need to be in order to serve a useful purpose.

Even then, I concede that, since most of the population is straight, cis people, sex segregation greatly reduces the the extent that these sensitive spaces are sexualized.

That's only part of it. The sexual asymmetry of males and females also makes females particularly vulnerable to males in such an environment, in ways that males alone or females alone are not even with homosexuality.

We should not bury our heads in the sand to defend this practice simply because it works for the majority. Queer people do not experience these sex segregated spaces in the same way we do, and if the goal is to maximize privacy, safety, and comfort, their viewpoint should also be considered and adjustments made.

Queer people aren't asking to do away with sex segregation.

It seems to me the best way to ensure such a thing is to increase the amount of personal privacy available in these spaces and no longer assume that communal, sex-segregated spaces are a complete solution.

Nobody is opposed to that in principle. But it's not always practical to accomplish.

I don't know who Zuby is. perhaps you can ask this question another way.

Zuby is a male rapper who said he was a woman, deadlifted a big weight, and declared himself the new women's world record holder in deadlift. I do not take his claim to be a woman seriously. But I've seen no argument in favor of self-ID which allows me to exclude him.

You're right, I've been taking it for granted.

Whether or not trans people are valid is the pivotal question to this whole thing.

I don't think this concept of "valid" is actually rigorous enough to rest your argument on, but even on this basis, some people claiming to be trans are not "valid". Zuby is an example. It's obvious in his case, but it's not obvious in others.

If they are, arguments from consequences really don't matter.

No. Consequences always matter.

I don't really understand how there can be a middle ground on that issue. Either trans identity is valid, and they should be respected as a civil right, or they are not and these people should be treated as delusional.

Again, you haven't established that the use of any particular bathroom, for ANYONE, is a civil right. Whether or not trans identity is "valid" does not suffice for that question. If the justification for segregation is based on biological sex, then the "validity" of trans identity doesn't matter. Being trans doesn't change your biological sex. It would be unfair discrimination to ban them from using any bathroom, but if you insist that they use the bathroom corresponding to their biological sex, well, how have you discriminated against them any more than against a cismale person who wants to use the women's room? You haven't.

And despite Boudicca's position on the matter, a lot of trans people recognize that they have not, biologically, changed sex by transitioning.

If they are not, then it's fair game to discriminate against them in pretty much every circumstance as delusional weirdos.

I think it's pretty clear that trans identity is not delusion, but I'm not sure how you can "prove" that any more than you can "prove" that gay people also aren't mental defectives.

That really isn't the question here at all.

First off, you keep trying to bring in other forms of discrimination. That isn't valid to do. Not all forms of discrimination are equivalent, and the fact that you already accept sex discrimination in these intimate spaces for non-trans people in ways that you (and everyone else here) wouldn't accept for something like employment or housing should establish that pretty convincingly.

Second, you're simply wrong about the implications of delusions. For example, anorexia is a form of delusion, and a disability to boot. They believe themselves to be overweight even when they are underweight. But it is still illegal to discriminate against someone with anorexia in many cases, under the ADA. So even if one were to take the position that trans identity is a delusion (and I haven't made that claim), you still don't end up with the conclusion that any and all forms of discrimination against them are acceptable.