[ED] Discussion: Trans Women Are not Women (Part 6)

[Paul2]

Is there a rationale for using gender, not sex, as the criterion for who uses which changing room, other than it would allow trans people to use the changing room of their gender and therefore ostensibly be fair, including to trans people? That is, why is it fair to everyone that gender be the criterion? Corollary: why would it be fair to everyone that sex be the criterion?

 

[Boudicca90]

Though for the day regarding the thread title.

So much of this very long thread is all about linguistics. Take, for instance, the thread title.

If I say, "Transwomen are not women." What does that mean? Is it a comment about transwomen? Not really. We understand the term "transwoman". What that statement is really about is my definition of "women". It says that I have a defintion of the word "women", and transwomen do not fit that definition. It doesn't actually say anything about transwomen.

So much of the thread, for a couple of years running, is all about trying to get, and sometimes to force, "the other side", to use "our" terminology.

If you say "Trans women are not women" it is absolutely a comment about trans women.

If we are not women, then by definition we are the gender who are the opposite of women, which are men. Unless you are placing us somewhere else on the gender spectrum.

And we are certainly not men. You may argue if we are still 'biologically male' if you want to, but we are objectively not men.

 

[Aber]

And likewise, in the case of allowing transwomen to use women's changing facilities, it's not (IMO) unreasonable to suggest a similar approach. In other words, waiting to see if transwomen (or, for that matter, cismen masquerading as transwomen**) actually do start to commit offences (of any level) against female women - and then modifying or even reversing policy if required.


** Personally, I doubt that there actually will be any significant incidence of cismen masquerading as transwomen, in order to enter those women-only spaces to offend against female women. My doubts are based upon matters related to emasculation. But in any event, my suggestion is to wait and see whether this sort of thing does or does not start to become an actionable problem.

And you are making a strawman argument by focusing on offences, when it has been made clear that concern about men in these spaces includes privacy.

As noted earlier in the thread the Home Office experiment with unisex toilets has issues with women not using them, because they could not be assured about privacy from men.

The metric for success should not be recorded offences, but the opinion of women using these spaces.

 

[TomB]

I am not very familiar with the way high school sports are organised in the US. I am all for some Physical Education, but I don't see why it needs to be all that competitive.

I suppose it might vary somewhat from state to state. I can only describe the Illinois system with any confidence.

First, high school sports are not Physical Education, and you don't get a grade for participating. However, at some schools, anyway, the P.E. requirement may be waived for a student during their sport season. When my daughter was on the softball team and the cheer squad, she had an extra study hall instead of P.E. (P.E. is also waived during marching band season.) In order to be eligible a student has to maintain a minimum grade point average, with grades reported every week.

The teams compete against teams from other schools in the area within classes based on school size. Larger schools are likely to have a deeper talent pool than small schools.

High school sports is the first "serious" level of competition in most sports. Arguably, it's the point when some athletes begin pursuing a professional career. Consequently, families have been known to relocate across the country so their kid can play on a particular high school's sports team. There are even boarding schools that specifically cater to sports training. For example, IMG Academy: https://www.imgacademy.com/about-img-academy

Being high school, the teams for the public schools will be made up of a mix of serious athletes who are looking to del=velop and showcase skills to get a chance to play at the next level (college or pro) and more "social" athletes who are there for more casual reasons, often due to friendship with some of the more serious athletes on the team.

For some sports, like baseball, high schools sports are a direct feed to the pro level. MLB drafts students right out of high school as well as college. If drafted out of high school, a player who elects to play professionally, I think gets college paid for by MLB after their career is done.

High school sports are overseen by a state organization that sets eligibility rules and standardized game rules. In Illinois this is the IHSA. Obviously, the individual schools can add additional eligibility requirements on top of what the IHSA requires. IHSA is, as I understand it, a private organisation, but their power is somewhat limited by the fact that most of their member schools are public schools.

There are also club sports, which are independent private organizations. In these, the teams are usually organized by maximum age levels: 12 and under (12U), 14U, 16U, 18U, etc. Often, teams are made up of athletes who play against each other on high school teams. My experience with club softball was that the games sucked because they had time limits. We would go to tournaments where there were six to 8 games playing simultaneously in hour increments. So there might be fifty games at a tournament in a single day. Because of this, club sports are starting to replace high school sports from a college recruitment standpoint. A coach can go see many teams/players play in one stop.

But high school is still important as the high school season is at a different time of year from the club season.

Even with competition at high school level there is going to be much less of an issue since it would only require a rule to accommodate teenage transitioners. Unless they are banned from receiving the healthcare they need and forced to go through normal puberty, transgirls competitive advantage over other girls is going to be absolutely minimal.

That would depend a lot on the age that the transition began. High school runs from about age 14 to age 18. This is a period when there is a lot of development going on. If you look at a high school yearbook, the freshman and senior classes do not look like peer groups. So someone who begins hormone treatments at 16 will have already developed more than someone who started at 12. That's actually the same reason why some trans people advocate for hormone treatments (or at least puberty blockers) at the earliest possible point. (And, if the diagnosis is correct, they are right.)

Yes, because in the LondonJohn presumably lives in the UK, where there is no law banning men from using women's changing rooms. I don't think there is such a law anywhere in Europe, and despite attempts at creating them, there are no such laws in the US. I think there are in Saudi Arabia though.

As Meadmaker pointed out, while there are not specific laws, other laws apply.

What is banned is demanding to see proof of someone's sex before allowing them in women's changing rooms; a law instituted to protect women who look a bit butch from being harassed.

No, the loophole already exists. I don't think there has ever been a time when it didn't. If you want to close the loophole (requiring scrapping existing anti-discrimination laws) I think it is up to you to show that doing so will decrease harm to females.

Doesn't even need to claim being a transwoman. Just needs to act non-disruptively.

In the US, trespassing and voyeurism laws apply. Don't get me wrong, if you accidentally wander into the wrong bathroom, you aren't going to be arrested, assuming you turn around when you realize your mistake. But a property owner can have you given a trespass notice and ban you from the property if he thinks you did so purposefully.

 

[cullennz]

Is there a rationale for using gender, not sex, as the criterion for who uses which changing room, other than it would allow trans people to use the changing room of their gender and therefore ostensibly be fair, including to trans people? That is, why is it fair to everyone that gender be the criterion? Corollary: why would it be fair to everyone that sex be the criterion?

Think the difference is it is currently biological sex, kind of always has been in modern times, so the later is status quo.

Gender (as the term is used in the modern sense) is a changing it.

You could argue "gender" and "gender identity" are two different things, but that is even more over-complicating things.

 

[Distracted1]

I think it is kind of obvious from a few generations of the thread ago, it should probably be re-named "Transwomen are not females".

Because that is kind of what most of the agreers think and don't really care if someone wants to call themselves a woman.

That misses it.
Those of us who have no problem with anyone calling themselves anything they wish (including "woman" "man" and "attack helicopter") have a very big problem with attempts to force validation of those same terms.
A woman is "an adult human female". Anyone who is not an adult human female is welcome to claim that they are anyway, however, they are not welcome to avail themselves of societal benefits set aside for women (as society has always recognized the term).

The same applies to "man" (unless, of course, they are referring to being members of the human race. In which case- everyone is entitled to those benefits). Anyone may claim to be a man (again, under the adult human male definition) yet recognition of that reality cannot- and should not be coerced.

 

[theprestige]

Is there a rationale for using gender, not sex, as the criterion for who uses which changing room, other than it would allow trans people to use the changing room of their gender and therefore ostensibly be fair, including to trans people? That is, why is it fair to everyone that gender be the criterion? Corollary: why would it be fair to everyone that sex be the criterion?

Segregation of changing rooms isn't a question of fairness to everyone.

 

[theprestige]

If you say "Trans women are not women" it is absolutely a comment about trans women.

If we are not women, then by definition we are the gender who are the opposite of women, which are men. Unless you are placing us somewhere else on the gender spectrum.

And we are certainly not men. You may argue if we are still 'biologically male' if you want to, but we are objectively not men.

Objectively, transwomen are men. Subjectively, transwomen are whatever each subject perceives them to be.

 

[LondonJohn]

Objectively, transwomen are men.

Only if you hold the (now outdated) belief that biological sex (male/female) and gender (man/woman) are irrevocably linked in two fixed pairings, ie:

All males are, and always shall be, men (and vice versa)

and

All females are, and always shall be, women (and vice versa)


But, as I said, the world's experts know different now.

And they now know that it's entirely possible for a female to be a man, or for a male to be a woman.

That's the great thing about forward progressions in science and medicine: we learn new things about ourselves and our world that either a) we didn't know before, or b) which even contradict what we thought we knew before. And it's precisely this sort of progress which has led to so many real-world advances and benefits over the past 150-odd years in particular.

 

[Earthborn]

People who have no issues with biological males in women's sports divisions tend not to care very much about sports.

How much I am interested in sports is kind of off topic.

That spring, in the outdoor season, Terry Miller was now a "she", and was the New England regional champion and holder of the all time record in her sport. At that time, she was taking no hormones, no surgeries, no puberty blockers, no medical treatment of any kind.

According to this article she already started taking hormones. It does not mention for how long.

In the United States, anatomically male people who have not been altered by surgery or medicine are competing against girls. There's no need to deny this reality. It really happens.

That does not disprove my claim that all that is needed is for someone to think about it and come up with a rule to accommodate teenage transitioners. At most it shows that no one may not have done that. If one insists on having separate competitions for girls and boys, it would certainly be an odd choice to have anatomical males without alteration compete against anatomical females. But if the organisers of these competitions think that is what the rules should be, you are right to say that I personally don't care enough to tell them they're wrong.

The men, and it was always men, were charged for trespassing, disorderly conduct, or voyeurism.

I see no problem with arresting people for disorderly conduct or voyeurism. If voyeurism is a thing that happens, it probably means that the facilities offer insufficient privacy.

I think a lot of the "trespassing" stories though were just examples of police harassment of transwomen with no actual "disorderly conduct" or "voyeurism".

Is there a rationale for using gender, not sex, as the criterion for who uses which changing room, other than it would allow trans people to use the changing room of their gender and therefore ostensibly be fair, including to trans people?

I think there is. If one used biological sex as a criterion, it would require people to be invasively checked before entering. I don't think anyone wants that.

Think the difference is it is currently biological sex, kind of always has been in modern times, so the later is status quo.

No, it is currently based on gender, even to the point that is illegal discrimination to deny transpeople access based on biological sex, and in many places illegal to even ask for proof of what sex/gender a person is. We've been over this before.

 

[theprestige]

Only if you hold the (now outdated) belief that biological sex (male/female) and gender (man/woman) are irrevocably linked in two fixed pairings, ie:

All males are, and always shall be, men (and vice versa)

and

All females are, and always shall be, women (and vice versa)


But, as I said, the world's experts know different now.

And they now know that it's entirely possible for a female to be a man, or for a male to be a woman.

That's the great thing about forward progressions in science and medicine: we learn new things about ourselves and our world that either a) we didn't know before, or b) which even contradict what we thought we knew before. And it's precisely this sort of progress which has led to so many real-world advances and benefits over the past 150-odd years in particular.

You've said this a lot, but I have yet to see any support for it.

Meanwhile, we have words for the biological facts. Male and female, man and woman. The world's experts have not decided that biological males are objectively female. How could they?

 

[Paul2]

Segregation of changing rooms isn't a question of fairness to everyone.

What is it a question of? And, why isn't is (also) a question of fairness?

 

[The Atheist]

If transgender people believe they were born with the wrong genitalia, how does transgenderism differ from straight-out mental illnesses where people want to cut off their genitalia?

https://www.thedailybeast.com/insid...ckstreet-castrators-cutters-and-eunuch-makers

 

[Aber]

That does not disprove my claim that all that is needed is for someone to think about it and come up with a rule to accommodate teenage transitioners.

Legal view in the UK is that under-16s should not be taking hormones:

The Court said (126) "Where the decision is significant and life changing then there is a greater onus to ensure that the child understands and is able to weigh the information" and concluded:

(151) "A child under 16 may only consent ... where he or she is competent to understand the nature of the treatment. That includes an understanding of the immediate and long-term consequences of the treatment,... and its potential life changing consequences for a child. There will be enormous difficulties in a child under 16 understanding and weighing up this information and deciding whether to consent.... It is highly unlikely that a child aged 13 or under would be competent to give consent .... It is doubtful that a child aged 14 or 15 could understand and weigh the long-term risks and consequences ...."

(152) "In respect of young persons aged 16 and over, the legal position is that there is a presumption that they have the ability to consent to medical treatment. Given the long-term consequences of the clinical interventions at issue in this case, and given that the treatment is as yet innovative and experimental, we recognise that clinicians may well regard these as cases where the authorisation of the court should be sought prior to commencing the clinical treatment."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_v_Tavistock

 

[Meadmaker]

Edited by Darat: 

Moderated thread.

That does not disprove my claim that all that is needed is for someone to think about it and come up with a rule to accommodate teenage transitioners.

I agree.

And if that proposal were on the table in the United States, the conversation would be different. I don't know what things are like in The Netherlands or other places in Europe. Do they argue about this stuff in Sweden? I have no clue.

 

[Meadmaker]

If you say "Trans women are not women" it is absolutely a comment about trans women.

If we are not women, then by definition we are the gender who are the opposite of women, which are men. Unless you are placing us somewhere else on the gender spectrum.

(emphasis added)

You are exactly correct, and that is precisely my point.

Dictionaries have multiple entries for the same word. We have two definitions being tossed about in this thread. I'll put the newer one first.

Woman 1. A person who performs the feminine gender role as defined by society.
2. An adult human female.

The nature of transwomen does not change if I use definition 1 or definition 2. Words do not create reality, If I say, "Transwomen are not women", that means I am using definition number 2. If I say, "Transmen are not women", that means I am using definition number 1.


By definition, transwomen either are or are not women, depending on which definition is in use.



(Note: My definition number 1 above is my best attempt to summarize the various contributions seen during discussions of definition. If you wish to object to it, feel free, but if I may, I would like to make a request. If you wish to say that the above definition is not actually a definition that is in use on this thread, please offer a substitute definition, and in doing so, please make it in the form similar to what might be found in a dictionary).




We have two definitions of "woman" being used in this thread

 

[LondonJohn]

You've said this a lot, but I have yet to see any support for it.

Meanwhile, we have words for the biological facts. Male and female, man and woman. The world's experts have not decided that biological males are objectively female. How could they?

I'm confused, because I for one have provided plenty of support for it.

I don't know whether you intended to or not, but you've "reclaimed" the terms "man" and "woman" to tie them to biological sex. And once that's done, then by definition it's absurd to think something like "females are men".

But the world's experts have now realised that gender is an identity construct which is not unequivocally tied to biological sex. And in order to allow for some sort of meaningful way of expressing this in writing and speech, they have proposed the (entirely logical) scenario of re-purposing "man" and "woman" - particularly in the strict context of discussions about gender vs sex - to refer to a person's gender.

And once that is done, we now have the required vocabulary to discuss, without making things confusing, the difference between biological sex (male/female) and gender (man/woman). And of course the vast majority of people in the World will be either male men or female women. But a very small minority will be - through no fault of their own - male woman or female men.

I suppose that, in realising that gender is separate from sex, and that different genders can apply to the same sex, scientists could have decided that in order to allow them and others to express this concept, they could have invented new terms altogether to categorise gender. Let's say Gender A and Gender B. And allowed male & man and female & woman to remain synonyms for biological sex.

But that's not what they decided. And for very good reason. After all, when one wants to describe a male who has a gender identity which is the opposite of the one they were assigned at birth.... well, right now we can refer to them easily and accurately as a transwoman. Everyone who knows anything about the subject immediately knows what is meant.

But if scientists had instead stipulated the use of (say) Gender A / Gender B (with "A" describing the typical male gender and vice versa), then our example from the previous paragraph would have to me described as a "Gender B male" (or "Gender B man"). That's more cumbersome, and far less intuitive.

So here we are. "Man" used to be universally employed as direct synonym for "male", in a World where sex and gender were effectively one and the same. But in the more advanced World, in which we now know that sex and gender are in fact two separate and de-coupled things, "Man" (and "Woman, of course) are used - strictly in the context of this actual topic - to refer to gender rather than biological sex.

 

[LondonJohn]

If transgender people believe they were born with the wrong genitalia, how does transgenderism differ from straight-out mental illnesses where people want to cut off their genitalia?

https://www.thedailybeast.com/insid...ckstreet-castrators-cutters-and-eunuch-makers

This very question has, fortunately for the rest of us, been addressed and answered by the World's actual experts in this field. And, just as in the bad old days science and medicine thought of homosexuality as a mental deliquency or illness, science and medicine improve. That's why homosexuality is now accepted (almost universally, at least) as a valid human condition rather than any sort of illness or deliquency; and that's what's happened with gender dysphoria and transgender identity now as well.

 

[LondonJohn]

Edited by Darat: 

Moderated thread.

I agree.

And if that proposal were on the table in the United States, the conversation would be different. I don't know what things are like in The Netherlands or other places in Europe. Do they argue about this stuff in Sweden? I have no clue.

Well..... it turns out that (by way of typing "Sweden transgender" into Google) this is currently a pretty hot topic in Sweden, as it happens:

https://www.theguardian.com/society...nage-transgender-row-dysphoria-diagnoses-soar

 

[Lplus]

Only if you hold the (now outdated) belief that biological sex (male/female) and gender (man/woman) are irrevocably linked in two fixed pairings, ie:

All males are, and always shall be, men (and vice versa)

and

All females are, and always shall be, women (and vice versa)


But, as I said, the world's experts know different now.

And they now know that it's entirely possible for a female to be a man, or for a male to be a woman. That's the great thing about forward progressions in science and medicine: we learn new things about ourselves and our world that either a) we didn't know before, or b) which even contradict what we thought we knew before. And it's precisely this sort of progress which has led to so many real-world advances and benefits over the past 150-odd years in particular.

Do they also know that a male can be a female and that a female can be a male?