Non-binary identities are valid

[theprestige]

Same source that says carts cannot pull horses.

Hi there!

 

[LondonJohn]

Anyway, I've got far better things to do this evening that hold my nose and deal with all the horse manure. Suffice it to say that non-binary identities are valid. Hope you all have a vitriolic evening

 

[Emily's Cat]

So... how was it decided at some point (not so very long ago) that homosexuality was not the disorder that science, medicine and law had viewed it as, but that it was actually a valid human condition?

Nobody decided homosexuality was "valid" at all. Medical practitioners decided that it wasn't something that needed medical treatment or intervention. And policymakers decided it was not something that needed laws forbidding it, and that it was legally allowable.

You keep using this term "valid condition" like it has some kind of magical meaning... but in reality its nothing more than undefined jargon that you throw around instead of having to actually engage other people and discuss the topic on its own merits.

 

[Emily's Cat]

It is possible to adopt someone's preferred pronouns without agreeing to or supporting any of the rest of this. I don't buy the "Foot in the door" argument--it can be a separate result for each of these issues.

I am reminded of arguments that accepting marriage equality is a foot in the door for bestiality, pedophilia, and so forth.

It *should* be possible, I agree. At present, however it's not. It's also not analogous to the arguments regarding marriage equality, as the advocates for marriage equality never asked for bestiality or pedophilia as part of their platform. Trans Activists, on the other hand, are literally demanding access to places where females are naked and vulnerable, access to female-only rape and domestic violence shelters, to be placed in female prison wards, to count as females for diversity objectives to increase female participation in business and politics, to compete against females in sports, and to have access to female scholarships, honors, and short-list positions.

 

[Emily's Cat]

You'll probably have noticed by now that I neither agree with nor feel comfortable with the tenets of radical feminism.

Did you even bother to read the experiences being collected by "No Conflict They Said"? Maybe you should give it a thought instead of just assuming whatever inane thing it is that you're assuming.

I entirely agree, of course, with the general concept of safeguarding women as much as possible. But not when it requires the denial of significant civil rights to another group (unless there truly is no reasonable alternative).

I disagree with your claim here. You might believe that you agree with the "concept of safeguarding", but you've repeatedly and consistently asserted that the feelings of transwomen and their desire to be validated as "actual women" are more important than safeguarding females. The significant civil rights that you seem to think are lacking are rights that literally nobody else has, they are special privileges. Nobody else gets to choose which prison ward they're placed in. Nobody else gets to dictate that they're allowed to see other people naked without their consent. Nobody else gets to decide that they get to compete against people with serious biologicals constraints in athletics because they feel like it. Those aren't civil rights that transgender people are being somehow denied - those are special privileges that they are asking for at the literal expense of females, and often to the actual real harm of females.

But you've made it abundantly clear that you don't care about that. You don't care about the women who are harmed, the female prisoners who are raped, the abused women in shelters who are subjected to harassment and abuse by male-bodied people who have demanded entrance to their refuge on the basis of their internal feelings.

So yeah, I don't believe you when you claim that you agree with safeguarding.

And fortunately, governments, parliaments and experts around the western world appear to be agreeing with my point of view. I wonder what all the women who form very significant proportions of all of those institutions are doing, huh? That's the point when most groups start to wonder why their positions are being so marginalised and rejected. But history repeatedly shows that it tends to have the opposite effect: it makes those radical fringe groups start to think there's some sort of conspiracy against their "perfectly reasonable" positions, and makes them want to shout ever more loudly into the ever-widening abyss.

I don't know if you've been paying attention, but there's been a rather large exit of females from the Green Party, and the expectation that females will be leaving the Lib Dems and Labour as well. Because they've been pretty well taken over by lobbyists with dogmatic ideologies who have captured policy.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Same source that says carts cannot pull horses.

So... You're just going to continue spewing whatever BS you think sounds good, and refuse to provide any support for your assertions.

 

[HansMustermann]

Appeal to sophisticated theology, I believe the term was?

Well, it's called the "sophisticated theology defense", but really it's just a subcase of asserting "X exists" and not even intending to meet the burden of proof on that, or even often trying to reverse it. The only difference from the general case is that the X which is asserted to exist is some form of "a perfectly rational and sound argument for whatever the apologist is saying." It's just asserted that such a perfectly sound argument or evidence exist somewhere, you just don't know it. You're pretty much not sophisticated enough to be criticizing their bare assertions, basically.

It tends to be used A LOT about religion, hence it being called the "sophisticated theology defense." In fact, at times it seems like THE go-to argument for people feeling a need to defend religion, while not actually having an argument of their own, and generally the value of their intellectual contribution being a big fat zero without a border.

E.g., in the religion and philosophy forum here, some years back we had someone literally saying that you can't say criticize religion unless you've literally read every single theology article and eve every single apologist post on some board, and can show that every single one of them is invalid. Otherwise you're basically not sophisticated enough.

I'm not gonna name and shame, but yeah... it happens.

Often it degenerates into basically proof by assertion fallacy. I.e., just say the same thing again, without even trying to support it or anything, as if mere repetition proved or settled it. Or how I like to informally call it, pretending to be the Bellman in The Hunting Of The Snark: "I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true."

 

[d4m10n]

The point is this: whether or not Person A loves Person B is not a matter for Person B to decide.

Before accepting a diamond ring, I'd advise person B to be as confident as she can reasonably be, even though all she has to go from are person A's words and actions.

All you're doing is trying to guess correctly what his internalised experience is.

If internal mental states fail to manifest in ways that substantively benefit the object of one's affections, I'd hesitate to apply the l-word in most cases.

 

[HansMustermann]

I disagree with your claim here. You might believe that you agree with the "concept of safeguarding", but you've repeatedly and consistently asserted that the feelings of transwomen and their desire to be validated as "actual women" are more important than safeguarding females. The significant civil rights that you seem to think are lacking are rights that literally nobody else has, they are special privileges. Nobody else gets to choose which prison ward they're placed in. Nobody else gets to dictate that they're allowed to see other people naked without their consent. Nobody else gets to decide that they get to compete against people with serious biologicals constraints in athletics because they feel like it. Those aren't civil rights that transgender people are being somehow denied - those are special privileges that they are asking for at the literal expense of females, and often to the actual real harm of females.

And I would add, something where the proportion of people disadvantaged for each person whose feelings we're supposed to protect by giving them those privileges is INSANELY out of whack. We're supposed to disadvantage 51.1% of the population (which the women are in the USA; source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/737923/us-population-by-gender/ ), and it's not even for the sake of about 0.58% of both genders who are actually trans. It gets better. It's pretty much for the sake of the 0.005% to 0.014% biological males with gender dysphoria, i.e., the only ones who might actually be totally depressed with being reminded that they're not a biological woman. I.e., multiplying by the 48.9% that males are in the general population, it's for the sake of between 0.0024% and 0.0068% of the total population.

That's a ratio of between almost 7500 and over 21,000 actual biological women who have to suck it up and accept a disadvantage, for every 1 trans woman whose feelings are so fragile that we totally can't remind them even indirectly that they're not biological women.

Frankly, that kind of an insane ratio of peons for each guy who gets a privilege, is more insanely out of whack than what even middle age feudalism managed to produce. We're talking more peons than an Italian count would get in the Lombard age, i.e., middle of the early middle ages or so.

Edit: as I was saying before, even proposing to shaft the women to make the incels happy, would actually be LESS insane, since at least there are more of those. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not supporting that aberration either. I'm just saying that bang-per-buck, as in how many disadvantaged per guy given a privilege, this is even more insane.

 

[theprestige]

Well, it's called the "sophisticated theology defense", but really it's just a subcase of asserting "X exists" and not even intending to meet the burden of proof on that, or even often trying to reverse it. The only difference from the general case is that the X which is asserted to exist is some form of "a perfectly rational and sound argument for whatever the apologist is saying." It's just asserted that such a perfectly sound argument or evidence exist somewhere, you just don't know it. You're pretty much not sophisticated enough to be criticizing their bare assertions, basically.

Further support for my hypothesis that you don't need a deity, to have a religion.

 

[HansMustermann]

Further support for my hypothesis that you don't need a deity, to have a religion.

Well, that's technically true, but not in the by-association way that if the same fallacy is occasionally used for religion as for X, then X is a religion too. You need a few more elements than that to really call something a religion in any meaningful way.

 

[LondonJohn]

Nobody decided homosexuality was "valid" at all. Medical practitioners decided that it wasn't something that needed medical treatment or intervention. And policymakers decided it was not something that needed laws forbidding it, and that it was legally allowable.

You keep using this term "valid condition" like it has some kind of magical meaning... but in reality its nothing more than undefined jargon that you throw around instead of having to actually engage other people and discuss the topic on its own merits.

Seriously? Seriously??

The claim: Being transgender is not a valid condition. Transgender people are mentally ill and should not be afforded the same legal protections or healthcare guarantees as gay and lesbian Americans.

The facts: The clear majority of mainstream medical, psychiatric and psychological communities agree that being transgender is not a concocted fantasy or mental illness. It's simply a valid state in which one's gender does not match what was assigned at birth.

https://edition.cnn.com/2017/03/07/health/transgender-bathroom-law-facts-myths/index.html

What Does It Mean to Be Gender Fluid? Here's What Experts Say

It's a valid gender identity, not a phase, a psychologist explains.

https://www.health.com/mind-body/gender-fluid



And those were just the first two that I could be bothered to find. Where do you come up with this stuff? Is it just down to some sort of need to attack everything that's said by someone such as me?


ETA: I've just remembered that the very title of this thread is "Non-binary identities are valid". So maybe you should almost take up arms against d4m10n, who wrote the thread's title........

 

[LondonJohn]

And I would add, something where the proportion of people disadvantaged for each person whose feelings we're supposed to protect by giving them those privileges is INSANELY out of whack. We're supposed to disadvantage 51.1% of the population (which the women are in the USA; source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/737923/us-population-by-gender/ ), and it's not even for the sake of about 0.58% of both genders who are actually trans. It gets better. It's pretty much for the sake of the 0.005% to 0.014% biological males with gender dysphoria, i.e., the only ones who might actually be totally depressed with being reminded that they're not a biological woman. I.e., multiplying by the 48.9% that males are in the general population, it's for the sake of between 0.0024% and 0.0068% of the total population.

That's a ratio of between almost 7500 and over 21,000 actual biological women who have to suck it up and accept a disadvantage, for every 1 trans woman whose feelings are so fragile that we totally can't remind them even indirectly that they're not biological women.

Frankly, that kind of an insane ratio of peons for each guy who gets a privilege, is more insanely out of whack than what even middle age feudalism managed to produce. We're talking more peons than an Italian count would get in the Lombard age, i.e., middle of the early middle ages or so.

Edit: as I was saying before, even proposing to shaft the women to make the incels happy, would actually be LESS insane, since at least there are more of those. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not supporting that aberration either. I'm just saying that bang-per-buck, as in how many disadvantaged per guy given a privilege, this is even more insane.

*sigh*

Three points:

1) Point to me somewhere where it says that a certain group should not be granted fair civil rights simply on account of its scarcity in relative population terms.

2) Given that we are indeed talking about an exceedingly small proportion of transgender people compared with cisgender people, it's hard therefore to even conceive theoretically of the sort of endemic abuse/disadvantaging of the cisgender population by the transgender population.

3) As I've stated very many times before: the ethical thing to do if there are concerns that the granting of fair civil rights to Group A might lead to negative outcomes for Group B..... is not to address that by rowing back on the granting of civil rights to Group A (if at all possible). The ethical thing to do is: firstly, put in place all reasonable pre-emptive mechanisms to minimise the likelihood of negative outcomes for Group B (I've also outlined - many times before - what I believe those mechanisms should be); then secondly, monitor the situation carefully to see what happens in the real world, and try to modify or add to the minimisation mechanisms accordingly; then thirdly - and only if the first two fail to work - consider altering or even removing the civil rights afforded to Group A.


By the way, nice touch with the "incel" barb - it really added to the credibility of your position!

 

[LondonJohn]

Before accepting a diamond ring, I'd advise person B to be as confident as she can reasonably be, even though all she has to go from are person A's words and actions.

If internal mental states fail to manifest in ways that substantively benefit the object of one's affections, I'd hesitate to apply the l-word in most cases.

Neither of these is the point at all. Once again, when we're talking about whether Person A loves Person B, you're talking purely about how Person B perceives the credibility of Person B's love.

Person A either loves Person B, or they do not love Person B (let's keep things binary for the moment, for the sake of simplifying the argument). Person A's observable manifestations of their feelings towards Person B are the only thing that allows Person B to adjudicate Person A's feelings towards them (or to adjudicate whether or not Person A is being sincere in their professions of love).

I'm in no way suggesting that it's not critically important a) for Person A (assuming they state that they love Person B) to manifest their love for Person B through observable acts; or b) for Person B to feel - via their observation of Person A's acts towards them - secure in the knowledge/belief that Person A does indeed love them.

But

None of that changes the fundamental fact that Person A's love (or otherwise) of Person B is something which is intrinsically wholly within the internalised experience of Person A. All that Person B is doing is trying to find ways to confirm (or otherwise) Person A's love for them.

 

[LondonJohn]

Did you even bother to read the experiences being collected by "No Conflict They Said"? Maybe you should give it a thought instead of just assuming whatever inane thing it is that you're assuming.


I disagree with your claim here. You might believe that you agree with the "concept of safeguarding", but you've repeatedly and consistently asserted that the feelings of transwomen and their desire to be validated as "actual women" are more important than safeguarding females. The significant civil rights that you seem to think are lacking are rights that literally nobody else has, they are special privileges. Nobody else gets to choose which prison ward they're placed in. Nobody else gets to dictate that they're allowed to see other people naked without their consent. Nobody else gets to decide that they get to compete against people with serious biologicals constraints in athletics because they feel like it. Those aren't civil rights that transgender people are being somehow denied - those are special privileges that they are asking for at the literal expense of females, and often to the actual real harm of females.

But you've made it abundantly clear that you don't care about that. You don't care about the women who are harmed, the female prisoners who are raped, the abused women in shelters who are subjected to harassment and abuse by male-bodied people who have demanded entrance to their refuge on the basis of their internal feelings.

So yeah, I don't believe you when you claim that you agree with safeguarding.

Did you see what you just did there? You challenged my own internalised set of values by stating that you didn't believe me. The only way in which you feel able to do that is by measuring the observable manifestations of my internalised values (and those manifestations, in this instance, are the things I'm writing within these threads).

But I really don't care whether or not you think I'm telling you the truth about my values. Because I know what my values are. And I also know that my stated values in this area are in any way invalidated by the things I've written. I realise that you think they are, but I think know you're wrong.

I don't know if you've been paying attention, but there's been a rather large exit of females from the Green Party, and the expectation that females will be leaving the Lib Dems and Labour as well. Because they've been pretty well taken over by lobbyists with dogmatic ideologies who have captured policy.

Oh good: the "policy capture" rhetoric again! And you really don't appear to have any faith in the collective integrity of properly-constituted political parties - or, indeed, representative democracy in general - do you?

Plus once again, I'd ask you a question which you seem either unwilling or unable to address or answer: how can it be that groups which are determining everything from medical/scientific definitions, to the policies of certain political parties, to government policy initiation, to parliamentary approval of those policies leading to legislation.....

..... contain very significant numbers of females....

..... yet....

..... each of these groups has been consistent in recognising and validating transgender rights even when they are seriously damaging females' rights in the process (per your "explanation")?

How have each of these groups contained very significant numbers of people who - if you are to be believed - are behaving/acting in just the same way as "turkeys voting for Christmas"?



Anyhoooo, this is all straying pretty far from the straight and narrow in terms of the topic/remit of this particular thread. But I'll end by pointing out, yet again, that non-binary identities are indeed valid.

 

[Emily's Cat]

And I would add, something where the proportion of people disadvantaged for each person whose feelings we're supposed to protect by giving them those privileges is INSANELY out of whack. We're supposed to disadvantage 51.1% of the population (which the women are in the USA; source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/737923/us-population-by-gender/ ), and it's not even for the sake of about 0.58% of both genders who are actually trans. It gets better. It's pretty much for the sake of the 0.005% to 0.014% biological males with gender dysphoria, i.e., the only ones who might actually be totally depressed with being reminded that they're not a biological woman. I.e., multiplying by the 48.9% that males are in the general population, it's for the sake of between 0.0024% and 0.0068% of the total population.

That's a ratio of between almost 7500 and over 21,000 actual biological women who have to suck it up and accept a disadvantage, for every 1 trans woman whose feelings are so fragile that we totally can't remind them even indirectly that they're not biological women.

Frankly, that kind of an insane ratio of peons for each guy who gets a privilege, is more insanely out of whack than what even middle age feudalism managed to produce. We're talking more peons than an Italian count would get in the Lombard age, i.e., middle of the early middle ages or so.

Edit: as I was saying before, even proposing to shaft the women to make the incels happy, would actually be LESS insane, since at least there are more of those. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not supporting that aberration either. I'm just saying that bang-per-buck, as in how many disadvantaged per guy given a privilege, this is even more insane.

Actually... it's more like the 1.5% to 2% of the population who do not have gender dysphoria, have undergone no surgical transition, don't intend to undergo any surgical transition, and whose sole argument is that they "feel like a woman" in some vague and indefinable sense.

Honestly, if we were talking exclusively about professionally and thoroughly evaluated people with a clinical diagnosis of gender dysphoria, how had made a real commitment to living their life as a woman in a meaningful way... I wouldn't have much complaint at all.

 

[LondonJohn]

So... You're just going to continue spewing whatever BS you think sounds good, and refuse to provide any support for your assertions.

LOL it's nothing more than (absurdly simple) logic:

A person can possess a transgender identity without experiencing gender dysphoria.

A person cannot experience gender dysphoria without first possessing a transgender identity.

Simple analysis and re-framing of the above therefore shows that:

a) gender dysphoria does not (and cannot) give rise to transgender identity

whereas

b) transgender identity can give rise to gender dysphoria.

 

[Roboramma]

The answer - as I've already said - is that it's reductive and nonsensical to delineate along the lines of "this one has biological sex as the important factor" and "this one has gender identity as the important factor" and so on. The actual reality is this: any interaction between two or more people is influenced by myriad complex factors, including (but certainly not limited to) biological sex and gender identity.

Of course people are complicated. The way to do with such complications isn't the be as vague as possible about how those different factors influence various situations. It's the opposite: the understand how those factors influence things. Sure, sometimes both sex and gender influence how we should interact with each other. But finding clarity about how each of them applies is important, and that's exactly the distinction that theprestige's post was trying to shed light on, and which you are trying very hard to obscure.

For example - to use the "one person wanting to have sex with another person" instance - a cishetero male might be in this undressing situation with a female. But suppose that once the female had undressed, the male saw that she had excessive body hair. Our male happens to find excessive body hair a complete turn-off, and suddenly his sexual attraction towards the female ends. Where does that fit into your categorisation?

It's neither and issue of sex nor gender. Do you think I was suggesting that those are the only factors that exist in interpersonal interactions?

No, that's not what was happening. What was happening was that you were suggesting to me that there was nothing wrong with theprestige's "philosophy", which kicked off this little line of discussion with the banger that "in the bedroom, it's entirely up to your partner to decide what gender you are"

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=13434075#post13434075


I believe it's generally recommended practice to understand what it is one is defending before one decides to defend it.

I was defending a specific post that you failed to respond to except to say it was so wrong you were blinded by it's wrongness, without actually addressing what was wrong with it. You still haven't, by the way. Now you're quoting a separate post that you think is wrong, without addressing why you think it's wrong, as evidence that the first is wrong.

I think the second quote, if you actually understand what is being said in context, is fine too, by the way.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Seriously? Seriously??



https://edition.cnn.com/2017/03/07/health/transgender-bathroom-law-facts-myths/index.html



https://www.health.com/mind-body/gender-fluid



And those were just the first two that I could be bothered to find. Where do you come up with this stuff? Is it just down to some sort of need to attack everything that's said by someone such as me?


ETA: I've just remembered that the very title of this thread is "Non-binary identities are valid". So maybe you should almost take up arms against d4m10n, who wrote the thread's title........

I don't think you understand how to evaluate the quality of your sources. Just because a transgender person and a writer, neither of whom has a medical background or any real expertise, uses the term in an article doesn't make that a good source. In their article, they do the same thing you do - they appeal to "experts" without referencing any experts at all. It's the same assertion that you're making, and similarly has no definition and no support.

Your second references a single psychotherapist, who says that gender fluid is "a valid gender identity", it likewise doesn't define "valid condition" or anything similar.

 

[Emily's Cat]

*sigh*

Three points:

1) Point to me somewhere where it says that a certain group should not be granted fair civil rights simply on account of its scarcity in relative population terms.

2) Given that we are indeed talking about an exceedingly small proportion of transgender people compared with cisgender people, it's hard therefore to even conceive theoretically of the sort of endemic abuse/disadvantaging of the cisgender population by the transgender population.

3) As I've stated very many times before: the ethical thing to do if there are concerns that the granting of fair civil rights to Group A might lead to negative outcomes for Group B..... is not to address that by rowing back on the granting of civil rights to Group A (if at all possible). The ethical thing to do is: firstly, put in place all reasonable pre-emptive mechanisms to minimise the likelihood of negative outcomes for Group B (I've also outlined - many times before - what I believe those mechanisms should be); then secondly, monitor the situation carefully to see what happens in the real world, and try to modify or add to the minimisation mechanisms accordingly; then thirdly - and only if the first two fail to work - consider altering or even removing the civil rights afforded to Group A.

Can you please specify what rights you're referencing, that transgender people are seeking?