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

[JoeMorgue]

Okay take a step back here and breathe a little people.

I mean seriously how many rapes do we really think happen or don't happen based upon which bathroom someone goes into?

Again I get (and I don't mean this disingenuously) that I'm coming from a male perspective so I don't see bathrooms as "safe" spaces necessarily. But even in their current state they don't strike me as particularly private or particularly high security.

 

[Strawberry]

To be fair, part of the reason stats are hard to come by is that the number of incidents is extremely small. (At least in the US)

I've seen the story you posted before. I've seen two unmistakable voyeurism cases in Target. There was a third about a week ago that seems like it might be a similar case, also in Target, but the perpetrator had not been caught last time I looked. I've seen one example of a sexual assault in a women's shelter, and another example of lewd behavior in a women's shelter.

In other words, there's an occasional hit, but not many.

That doesn't change my mind that such spaces ought to be reserved for females, but it isn't irrelevant either. To be honest, I expected a lot more cases than there have been.


(Aside: Welcome back. You might see some weirdness in my own posting if I get deeply involved in conversation again. Last week I announced that I would be adopting the newspeak vocabulary in this thread, in which "women" were people who had a feminine gender, and all that. My opinions haven't changed on the subject. It's just an exercise in illustrating some issues. My first post was about why, if we were to all start using the new vocabularies, the first thing we should do would be to rename girls' sports divisions to female sports divisions, just to make it obvious that we segregate by sex instead of gender. At some point, I'll do the same thing for changing rooms.)

Thanks for the welcome.

I don't think the number of incidents is the key issue here. The fact that it has happened at all is a good enough reason to keep some spaces female only for safety reasons, not to mention the general right to privacy from the opposite sex in places where we change our clothes. When I see people asking for stats on attacks by transwomen in female spaces, I'm tempted to ask how many attacks do they deem acceptable before they wake up and realise that this is placing women and girls in unnecessary danger.

 

[Belz...]

Yes, of course. It's the rat that's important here not the traumatized rape victims inside.

I'm serious. In addition to the obvious threat to the lives of the people inside, I have a particular hatred of people who kill animals for no reason.

 

[theprestige]

In one of the earlier installments of this thread, one of our female posters gave a pretty eloquent explanation of how the prospect of opening their safe spaces to males has a chilling effect. The space no longer seems as safe. That by itself already makes it a failure to serve women as intended.

The value of these spaces is that they make a promise to women, that to a reasonable extent certain things won't happen and don't need to be worried about. It's a place where women can relax, set aside some of those daily cares, and focus on other things with peace of mind.

That promise was tacitly extended to transwomen, who gained entry by playing along. Don't start none, won't be none, so to speak.

The new rules around self-id would get rid of that promise. They would also burden women with gatekeeping these spaces, rather than being able to rely on longstanding social norms and laws to uphold the promise on their behalf. The rules would also tend to invalidate any gatekeeping women attempted.

So the spaces would feel less safe, which is already a failure to serve women's needs. They would also punish women for trying to make the spaces safe again.

LJ's solution has been to propose that we should see how many new rapes there actually are, and if it's not very many, women should still feel pretty safe, so where's the problem.

The counter-argument to that is that it's usually preferable to prevent a risk before it occurs, rather than mitigate the consequences after it occurs. At that point, the discussion dead-ends into "the governments of the world have already figured out the best solution, based on the very best science I pinky-swear promise".

 

[Belz...]

The counter-argument to that is that it's usually preferable to prevent a risk before it occurs, rather than mitigate the consequences after it occurs.

The latter is known as the General Motors approach.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Okay but that's basically an argument for the illusion of safe spaces, not safe spaces.

Again how many rapes happen in a public bathroom and how many of those would actually be prevented by rearraigning the gender segregation?

 

[Belz...]

Okay but that's basically an argument for the illusion of safe spaces, not safe spaces.

Maybe... but a lot of things in life are a matter of illusion or perception. The point theprestige is making, for me, is that regardless of whether the perception is correct, that perception is shattered with the new proposals. I'm sure we all agree that women feeling unsafe in their own spaces is not good.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Listen I don't know how far I can go down this road without getting shouted down hard. My cards as to how men being treated as inherently predatory have been on the table for a while now. I'm not going to make any effort to build a hand with them anymore, but those cards are still on the table. "Men are just the only demographic that we have to protect society from" is simply not a place I am comfortable with.

Being treated as a rapist in waiting to protect women from actual harm is one thing.

Being treated as a rapist in waiting to protect them from feelings is another.

 

[Belz...]

Listen I don't know how far I can go down this road without getting shouted down hard. My cards as to how men being treated as inherently predatory have been on the table for a while now. I'm not going to make any effort to build a hand with them anymore, but those cards are still on the able. "Men are just the only demographic that we have to protect society from" is simply not a place I am comfortable with.

Being treated as a rapist in waiting to protect women from actual harm is one thing.

Being treated as a rapist in waiting to protect them from feelings is another.

Joe I think you and I usually have pleasant conversations, no?

I see no reason to assume otherwise here.

But yeah, one person's feelings are generally rather irrelevant; a few can be catered to a bit. But when we're talking about over 50% of the population, I think we should at least take heed.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Joe I think you and I usually have pleasant conversations, no?

I see no reason to assume otherwise here.

It is not a reaction from you I am concerned with.

 

[Belz...]

It is not a reaction from you I am concerned with.

Well, I still want you to be a little afraid of me, though...

 

[theprestige]

Listen I don't know how far I can go down this road without getting shouted down hard. My cards as to how men being treated as inherently predatory have been on the table for a while now. I'm not going to make any effort to build a hand with them anymore, but those cards are still on the able. "Men are just the only demographic that we have to protect society from" is simply not a place I am comfortable with.

Being treated as a rapist in waiting to protect women from actual harm is one thing.

Being treated as a rapist in waiting to protect them from feelings is another.

I think there's a degree to which men are being treated as inherently predatory, and I think that sucks.

But I also think there's a degree to which men are being treated as inherently riskier if and when a predatory urge strikes. And I think that's a valid framing. It doesn't denigrate men. It just recognizes the physical disparity and the inherent risk.

And to be honest? As someone who can pass as an old straight white rich cismale, being seen as inherently predatory doesn't do me much harm. I still get jobs. I still get recognized. I still get to sit on the train without much fear of anything. Strange women are reluctant to sit down near me? I can live with that.

My understanding, from Ms TP and other women, is that women have to carry around a whole other burden around with them all the time. One that I simply cannot relate to.

They can put down some of that burden in certain "safe spaces". Your argument seems to be that since they can't put down all of it, making those spaces seem less safe isn't a big loss. And anyway, it's unfair to us males that they feel like they have to carry this burden in the first place, so really why should we cater these safe spaces in the first place?

The world of men isn't as dangerous to women as women think it is? Okay, sure, premise accepted arguendo. But on the occasions when it does get dangerous, it gets really dangerous, due to the physical disparity. So women put up their guard as a hedge against risk. And they take let their guard down a bit in places where they feel safe. Now we're proposing to reduce the number of places in society where they can feel safe and let their guard down a little.

---

The thing about risk management is that it's not just about assessing how likely the risk is to occur. It's also about assessing the amount of harm that will result if the risk does occur. An unlikely risk that could cause a lot of harm is often worth preventing ahead of time. A likely risk that would cause very little harm is sometimes worth ignoring ahead of time, and just dealing with the consequences. There are other obvious combinations as well. Risk management looks at all the possible risks on a matrix of likelihood and cost.

Hence the question to LJ and others, about how many new rapes they've penciled in for the new rules, in their dismissal of this as a significant risk. One? Two? A dozen? Hundreds? The General Motors approach totally makes sense, if you view people as cogs in your moneymaking machine, rather than human beings.

 

[Strawberry]

Okay but that's basically an argument for the illusion of safe spaces, not safe spaces.

Again how many rapes happen in a public bathroom and how many of those would actually be prevented by rearraigning the gender segregation?

Is there a reason why you're limiting your question to public bathrooms? The implications of allowing men to self identify as women are far more chilling and wide ranging than who pees in which room, which is actually relatively trivial compared to such things as domestic violence shelters, prisons, sports, etc.

 

[Belz...]

The thing about risk management is that it's not just about assessing how likely the risk is to occur. It's also about assessing the amount of harm that will result if the risk does occur.

It's also about the cost of dealing with said risk, such as time, money, stress, mace, etc. Stuff that I usually don't think about as a man.

 

[Emily's Cat]

That looks to me like a rather amusing parody of postmodernism.

Sadly, I don't think it's satire. I fear that postmodernism is winning.

 

[Emily's Cat]

It would definitely be a good start!

Seriously? Sex observation at birth does NOT cause the development of sexual characteristics.

Holy crap. Biology is a real thing, sex is a real biological fact. The existence of all mammalian life on the plant (and most vertebrate life) is 100% dependent on the fact of biological sex.

 

[Emily's Cat]

It is a segregationist policy. And it makes it possible for the government to come up with discriminatory policies.

I am familiar with this sort of feminist writing. I am not going to pay 39 euros to see what the exact reasoning in this article is, but I guess it likely argues that registering a child as a particular sex is going to influence how it going to be treated, and that in turn has some effect on how their bodies develop; which may not be entirely wrong but not as big an influence as the article's summary makes it sound (to those not familliar with this sort of feminist writing).

Read the goddamned abstract instead of making thoughtless assumptions about what you think it "probably" says. Your assumptions are completely wrong in this regard.

Recording sex on official government documents still makes it possible to discriminate 100% of people.

False. I have never been asked to provide a birth certificate for anyone to determine which swim team I should be on. The visual indicators of biological sex do that, and what is recorded on my birth certificate are completely irrelevant. The courts are not using birth certificates to decide which ward a prisoner should be incarcerated in. Eliminating a recording of sex on birth certificates will accomplish nothing at all when it comes to the ways in which we reasonably and appropriately segregate services on the basis of sex.

Intersex individuals are more likely not-intersex individuals to want to transition regardless of how well their assigned sex matches their biological sex. Not having to go through the whole rigamarole of having to change their birth certificates improves their conditions.

False. People with DSDs are NOT more likely to be transgender. In fact, the proportion of intersex people who identify as transgender is significantly lower than the proportion of people without DSDs who do so. The two conditions are not related in any reasonable way.

The use and appropriation of DSDs by trans activists to push their political agenda seems pretty inconsiderate and insulting to people who actually have DSDs. It would be like me leveraging the medical conditions of people with dwarfism in order for me to get special treatment because I'm short.

 

[Elaedith]

No, it isn't.

The majority of children who are gender non-conforming desist at or shortly after puberty. The children with an official diagnosis of gender dysphoria are much less likely to do so, and the number of them to do so after showing a persistent gender identity for several years are even less likely to do so.

Zucker (2018, p4) showed that among those across several studies who had been carefully screened for meeting the diagnostic criteria, desistence was still nearly 70%.

The idea that the treatment itself can influence the outcome is pure wishful thinking by those who want to invalidate the treatment.

No it isn't. The process of going through puberty is associated with desistence in the majority of cases. There are good theoretical reasons for thinking that the changes associated with puberty may be responsible for this. They include the neurological effects of pubertal sex hormones on the brain, the feedback from development of secondary sex characteristics forcing children to confront the reality of their biological sex, and the development of the cognitive capacity for more abstract and flexible thinking.

As quoted from the findings of the Bell vs Tavistock judicial review " In short, the treatment may be supporting the persistence of GD in circumstances in which it is at least possible that
without that treatment, the GD would resolve itself. (point 77)"

"The Dutch study argued that adolescents who show established GD rarely identify as their biological sex. Professor Hruz suggested there may be two reasons for this. It may be that the clinicians made sound diagnoses of persistent GD. Alternatively, it may be that the very fact of the diagnosis and the course of treatment which affirmed that diagnosis (that is, both gender affirmative psychotherapy and the use of PBs) solidified the feeling of cross-gender identification and led the young people to commit to sex reassignment more strongly than they would have done if there had been a different diagnosis and treatment." (point 76)

Even if it were true, and some kids get misidentified, it would mean a very small number of confused gay boys who would grow up happy to be gay, would turn into girls happy to be straight.

If misdiagnoses and puberty blockade lead to medical transition you are looking at probably infertility, sexual dysfunction, and life-long medical treatment with potentially serious side effects.

 

[Belz...]

Holy crap. Biology is a real thing, sex is a real biological fact.

When one's ideology is that everything is socially constructed, because it's politically expedient, one tends to take it literally.

 

[Emily's Cat]

never mind