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

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theprestige said:
Such a voice is available here. Boudicca, a (trans)woman, has asserted in this thread that living as a woman means, for her, being seen and accepted as biologically female.

As far as I know, nobody in this thread, cis or trans, has come up with any answer that doesn't involve transsexuality.

Also, I think its probably in your best interest to give your own answer. After all, you will be called upon to treat a transwoman as a woman from time to time. You will need to have some idea in your mind of what that means and whether you're doing it.


This is exactly my starting assumption. Everything after it is your invention, and nothing to do with my premises, reasoning, or conclusion.

I simply assume that the only concrete, practical effect of transgender identity, is a transsexual effect in public policy.

This is the second or third time I've told you I assume sincerity. Can we at least agree that you won't keep arguing as if I assume otherwise?
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I'll take your word on it here out, yes.
 
theprestige said:
As far as I know, nobody in this thread, cis or trans, has come up with any answer that doesn't involve transsexuality.
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Pretty sure I have, on at least one occasion, brought up the scenario in which someone asks which way to the clothing section of a large dept. store.

If that person is wearing a sundress and holding a purse, I'm going to point them to the women's area, even if I suspect they may well be smuggling plums.
 
An interesting discussion of the issues in The Guardian...


What is fairness? In sport, everything. From childhood, we come to see the head start in the playground race, the shove in the goalmouth, a rogue thumb on the egg (and spoon) as unjust, and quickly, loudly, “Oi!” object.


...


By conflating gender and sex, I would argue we fudge the very reason we have sex categories in sport: the male performance advantage. Without a separate category for females, there would be no women in Olympic finals.
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https://www.theguardian.com/sport/b...der-and-sex-we-undermine-sporting-competition
 
Belz... said:
I don't know where you got that, but said word was in use the entire time I was alive until everyone pretended it meant something else in the 2010s.
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That doesn't tell me much unless you also tell us when you were born.

Wikipedia has some references about the uses of the word GenderWP before the 2010s.

History of the concept

The concept of gender, in the modern sense, is a recent invention in human history.[15] The ancient world had no basis of understanding gender as it has been understood in the humanities and social sciences for the past few decades.[15] The term gender had been associated with grammar for most of history and only started to move towards it being a malleable cultural construct in the 1950s and 1960s.[16]
Before Sexologist John Money and colleagues introduced the terminological distinction between biological sex and gender as a role in 1955, it was uncommon to use the word gender to refer to anything but grammatical categories.[1][2] For example, in a bibliography of 12,000 references on marriage and family from 1900–1964, the term gender does not even emerge once.[1] Analysis of more than 30 million academic article titles from 1945–2001 showed that the uses of the term "gender", were much rarer than uses of "sex", was often used as a grammatical category early in this period. By the end of this period, uses of "gender" outnumbered uses of "sex" in the social sciences, arts, and humanities.[2] It was in the 1970s that feminist scholars adopted the term gender as way of distinguishing "socially constructed" aspects of male–female differences (gender) from "biologically determined" aspects (sex).[2]
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Earthborn said:
That doesn't tell me much unless you also tell us when you were born.

Wikipedia has some references about the uses of the word GenderWP before the 2010s.
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This, at least:
The ancient world had no basis of understanding gender as it has been understood in the humanities and social sciences for the past few decades.​
Is obvious crap. The ancient world was only a three or four thousand years ago. Those humans are functionally identical to today's humans. Biologically, mentally, socially, they had exactly the same basis for understanding gender as we understand it today. In fact I wouldn't be at all surprised if we were to somehow discover that they did in fact understand it the same way we do, from the same basis.

Applying that understanding differently than we do is a sensible claim. That they had no basis for understanding it the way we do is not.

Yet more evidence that Wikipedia should not be used as a primary source for anything important.
 
d4m10n said:
Pretty sure I have, on at least one occasion, brought up the scenario in which someone asks which way to the clothing section of a large dept. store.

If that person is wearing a sundress and holding a purse, I'm going to point them to the women's area, even if I suspect they may well be smuggling plums.
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Fair enough. I was almost going to say, "but that's just reinforcing gender stereotypes!". Then I realized that if someone is wearing a sundress and holding a purse, it makes sense to point them to the section of the store that has more of the same.

Oh.

New question: Is directing them to the "women's" clothing section treating them like a woman, or treating them like a person who probably wants to shop for more dresses and purses?
 
theprestige said:
This, at least:
The ancient world had no basis of understanding gender as it has been understood in the humanities and social sciences for the past few decades.​
Is obvious crap. The ancient world was only a three or four thousand years ago. Those humans are functionally identical to today's humans. Biologically, mentally, socially, they had exactly the same basis for understanding gender as we understand it today. In fact I wouldn't be at all surprised if we were to somehow discover that they did in fact understand it the same way we do, from the same basis.

Applying that understanding differently than we do is a sensible claim. That they had no basis for understanding it the way we do is not.

Yet more evidence that Wikipedia should not be used as a primary source for anything important.
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Surely what matters is the reliability of the linked citations, not the concept of Wikipedia.
 
Earthborn said:
That doesn't tell me much unless you also tell us when you were born.

Wikipedia has some references about the uses of the word GenderWP before the 2010s.
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The word has existed and been used to distinguish between males and females for around 500 years. The separation of "gender" from "sex" is a recent invention in academia - springing from a feminist perspective on socially defined expectations and roles as opposed to biological reality - and still isn't how it's used by most people in everyday language.
 
Earthborn said:
That doesn't tell me much unless you also tell us when you were born.

Wikipedia has some references about the uses of the word GenderWP before the 2010s.
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The word has existed and been used to distinguish between males and females for around 500 years. The separation of "gender" from "sex" is a recent invention in academia - springing from a feminist perspective on socially defined expectations and roles as opposed to biological reality - and still isn't how it's used by most people in everyday language.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/gender
The "male-or-female sex" sense is attested in English from early 15c. As sex (n.) took on erotic qualities in 20c., gender came to be the usual English word for "sex of a human being," in which use it was at first regarded as colloquial or humorous. Later often in feminist writing with reference to social attributes as much as biological qualities; this sense first attested 1963. Gender-bender is from 1977, popularized from 1980, with reference to pop star David Bowie.
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I'm adopting a new term: "transextremists". I want to distinguish between people who are suffering from gender dysphoria for whom a physical and social transition are the most efficacious treatment for their mental health... and the collection of vociferous activists trying to drive policy and silence debate.

I support the treatment and reasonable accommodation of people with a diagnosis gender dysphoria.

The transextremists, on the other hand, seem to be the ones driving the policy bus, including self-identification, participation in female sports, and housing in female prison wards.
 
In the annals of the unbalanced discussion of transextremism versus women's rights...

BBC's "Moral Maze" had a debate about transwomen's participation in female sports. They had four males on the show, representing both "genders"... and not a single female to discuss the impact on female sports.

Somehow, I feel like this is missing a rather salient aspect of the controversy.
 
Transextremism around the world:

Feminist Protests in Spain, France, Canada, UK

Women in Spain protested the proposed sex self-identification legislation that would replace "sex" with "gender identity" in virtually all aspects of life. The protests were legal and peaceful. One of the demonstrators was physically attacked by a transextremist and ended up in the hospital.

In the Paris Pride parade, a group of lesbians advocating that "lesbians don't have penises" was physically attacked by transgender identifying males.

The Trans Pride rally in London included several transextremists proudly carrying signs calling for the death of J. K. Rowling, along with other violent rhetoric.


++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

If there is no risk to females, why is it that the transextremist branch of this movement feels that it is right and appropriate to silence, attack, and demonize females?
 
theprestige said:
Those humans are functionally identical to today's humans. Biologically, mentally, socially, they had exactly the same basis for understanding gender as we understand it today.
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I don't think people 4000 years ago had access to the feminist writing developed in the past few decades, so they do not have the same basis for understanding gender. People didn't even speak any modern language, so it is a rather extraordinary claim to suggest that they would understand any academic sociological, political, scientific concept in exactly the same terms as we do.
 
Earthborn said:
I don't think people 4000 years ago had access to the feminist writing developed in the past few decades, so they do not have the same basis for understanding gender. People didn't even speak any modern language, so it is a rather extraordinary claim to suggest that they would understand any academic sociological, political, scientific concept in exactly the same terms as we do.
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I would say that modern feminist writing is drawing a conclusion about gender from the same basis of understanding as the ancients, though not necessarily the same conclusions they drew.

And I'm not claiming an understanding in exactly the same terms we understand it. I'm saying I wouldn't be surprised of their approach to the question was, as a society, functionally similar to ours, regardless of the terms they used.

And I question the whole premise that we've recently discovered something objectively (scientifically) true about gender that was unknown to the ancients and changes everything we thought we knew about it.

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In fact, I'd say it's probably the other way around. We've inherited our gender roles in society from the ancients via thousands of years of tradition and social evolution. It seems pretty clear that the ancients had a good grasp of the physical disparities between the two sexes, and evolved gender roles in society accordingly. Hence the taboo against striking a woman, the emergence of chivalry as a moral framework, and the convention against sending women into combat.

Not that these stereotypical gender roles are necessarily good things. But you can see a link back to biological reality in them. Hell, even customs like the chador make sense, if you couple awareness of the biological reality with a particularly cynical view of the depravity of human nature.

Modern "science" seems to be more concerned with denying the biological reality, or imagining that gender roles in society can and should be entirely decoupled from it. Up to and including gender roles that are entirely and directly based on that biological reality. Competitive sports leagues, for example.

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Anyway, I'm less interested in the science of terminology, and more interested in the science of human rights.

Do you have any (non-wikipedia) citations of scientific literature that describes what rights transsexuals are entitled to, that they don't already enjoy?
 
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