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

[Agatha]

Indeed.

And for that matter, I'm not sure that, for example, a 5ft2 80lb ciswoman in a women's prison who found herself forcibly sexually assaulted with a pool cue butt by a 5ft11 180lb predatory gay ciswoman prisoner....

.... would be all that enamoured by any suggestion that this was a "lesser" violation than a sexual assault/rape by a transwoman prisoner.

Please, please tell me that you are not saying that sexual assault by penetration with an object is equivalent to rape, which by definition in the UK is penetration by a penis. Or that women will ever consider it equivalent.

I don't often talk about being a rape survivor on here, though I've never kept it a secret. Indeed, my very first post on this website was related to being a rape survivor.

From my perspective, and from my experience as a survivor, as a rape crisis counsellor and a Samaritan, assault by penetration with an object is of course very traumatising but it is less traumatising than rape with a penis.

 

[TheGoldcountry]

There probably aren't enough openly trans people at any of these schools to field an entire soccer team.

Which is what a lot of people originally said about girl's sports, from people who didn't care about sports. The circular logic being, girls sports weren't popular enough to care about. Ergo, no need to support them. Of course, if the girls sports were supported to begin with, girls would compete, and have.

Of course transgender athletes aren't a very big issue now, because it's never even been considered. But this laissez-faire attitude towards allowing anyone, regardless of biology, to compete in women's athletics will surely become more impactful in the future.

I'm sorry if you may feel the need to label me "intolerant," but I don't like the idea of opening up an institution to possible irrelevance to satisfy a small minority.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

Please, please tell me that you are not saying that sexual assault by penetration with an object is equivalent to rape, which by definition in the UK is penetration by a penis. Or that women will ever consider it equivalent.

I don't often talk about being a rape survivor on here, though I've never kept it a secret. Indeed, my very first post on this website was related to being a rape survivor.

From my perspective, and from my experience as a survivor, as a rape crisis counsellor and a Samaritan, assault by penetration with an object is of course very traumatising but it is less traumatising than rape with a penis.

Telling other women their sexual assaults don't count as much to do a feminism.

 

[LondonJohn]

Females are very rarely sexually predatory. Beyond that, prisoners don't have access to pool cues, for what should be obvious reasons.

Perhaps you'd care to provide some support for your position? Perhaps you can share the reports of forcibly penetrative sexual assaults on females by other females as a widespread problem in society? Or as a widespread problem in prison even?

I hate to disabuse you over what goes on in prisons.... but many of them have pool tables. Which are somewhat useless without pool cues.

And I hear that lots of prisons have chairs with wooden chair legs as well.

And I hear that some predatory gay women in prison can have fairly powerful hands and forearms as well.


Oh and I already told you that there were 97 documented* sexual assaults carried out on ciswoman prisoners by other prisoners in E&W women's prison stock in 2016-19, and that only seven or eight of those were carried out by transwoman prisoners.

So perhaps you'd like to tell me just how statistically scared, relatively speaking, ciswoman prisoners in E&W ought to be about being sexually assaulted by another ciswoman prisoner as opposed to a transwoman prisoner. With evidence, obviously.


* And while it's entirely suppositional on my part, I wonder whether a ciswoman prisoner who'd been sexually assaulted by another ciswoman prisoner might perhaps be somewhat less likely to report that assault to the prison authorities than if she'd been sexually assaulted by a transwoman prisoner? But for the sake of argument, let's just assume that the ratio of reported assaults (ie by ciswomen vs by transwomen) closely matches the ratio of actual assaults.

 

[Meadmaker]

* I don't know now how many times I've explicitly pointed to elite-level sport being a public entertainment as the driving factor in the opt-out. Yet you keep looking straight past that in favour of your own provocative "it only matters where there are business interests involved" ********. And you wonder why I can't now even be bothered to engage with you.

Ahhh, so it's not the money, it's the public participation.

I agree. I would just say the crowd size doesn't matter.

High school sports and Little League teams have fans in the stands.

 

[TheGoldcountry]

The way you describe it, any athlete that doesn't get a scholarship spot at a university is wasting their time, which is clearly not the case.

Only to someone with inadequate reading comprehension.

Female athletics at the lower levels create the athletes who move on to collegiate athletics. If more girls are discouraged from competing in these sports, it reduces the viability of these programs as a whole.

THAT DOESN'T MEAN I THINK EVERY ATHLETE WILL BE VYING FOR SCHOLARSHIPS. That's a strawman of your own invention.

 

[TomB]

Maybe you didn't use the right critical thinking tools.

I'll make one additional effort to elaborate:

At sub-elite level, sport is a leisure pursuit - a competitive one, for sure, but a leisure pursuit nevertheless.

Here's your first mistake. The highlighted is incorrect.

When it comes to the matter of ciswomen/girls at a sub-elite level who have ambitions to become elite-level athletes, they (in my model) will already be able to discount any transwomen/girls who might be beating them - since these people will pose no competitive threat to them at elite level. In addition, if ciswomen/girls and their families feel sufficiently strongly about the matter as to reject the validity of transwoman/girl competitors, they're perfectly at liberty to discount the efforts of those transwomen/girls in favour of a "ciswoman/girl leaderboard". If that's what floats their boat.

This is also not entirely correct and shows a lack of understanding of how sports work.

My daughter's current boyfriend coaches both high school and travel baseball. Most of the players on the high school team play travel ball. Travel ball is all about showcasing talent for scouts at the next level. Scouts come to these tournaments because they can see players from fifty teams all at a single event. And they watch kids starting as young as 12 years old.

It is not a "leisure" activity at this level. This is the point where the kids are putting in a grueling amount of work and the parents are spending thousands of dollars to a) be on the team and, in some cases b) for individual private coaching. In softball, for example, it is very common for pitchers in Jr. High to work with a private pitching coach.

And then there are the camps. My daughter attended a volleyball camp at a Big Ten University between 7th and 8th grade. These are both instructional and scouting/recruiting tools. Yes, at that age. It is very significant who stands out at camp.

So what am I saying? The pursuit of an elite career begins at a much younger age and a much lower level than you credit. At the levels you call "leisure" the serious players are already attempting to pursue it as a career.

So...park district recreational league? sure, that's leisure. School and club sports? Not so much.

Oh, almost forgot. Getting attention in school or club sports is the main gateway to elite sport. Kids already switch schools or transfer to private academies so that they aren't playing with other players at their level at their position. They need to be the star setter or the star point guard. They need to be on a team where they can stand out and showcase their talents. So it's not just a case of the scouts will look past one player and see the other that's next in line.

 

[Agatha]

Telling other women their sexual assaults don't count as much to do a feminism.

How fortunate, then, that I never said any such thing. I specifically acknowledged that sexual assault by penetration was traumatising. Kindly do not represent me.

 

[Ziggurat]

No. You misunderstand. If US college sport is judged to be elite-level and therefore not open to transgender athletes, US colleges are not going to be offering scholarships to the top high-school athletes if those athletes are transgender, are they? Rather, they're going to be offering their scholarships to the highest-performing high-school cisgender athletes.

No. That isn't how scholarships get awarded. They don't hand them out as prizes for specific competitions. Rather, they have applicants from all over the country, who competed in different championships, and they choose from among them. Losing out to a transgender competitor still knocks them off the podium, and places them at a competitive disadvantage against athletes who competed in championships that didn't have to face transgender competitors and who could therefore win those competitions.

And your hypothetical about how they could structure scholarship awards processes don't matter, because in general they don't do it that way, and they're not going to do it that way.

 

[LondonJohn]

Please, please tell me that you are not saying that sexual assault by penetration with an object is equivalent to rape, which by definition in the UK is penetration by a penis. Or that women will ever consider it equivalent.

I don't often talk about being a rape survivor on here, though I've never kept it a secret. Indeed, my very first post on this website was related to being a rape survivor.

From my perspective, and from my experience as a survivor, as a rape crisis counsellor and a Samaritan, assault by penetration with an object is of course very traumatising but it is less traumatising than rape with a penis.

Well if it helps you, the "/rape" was added by me in an attempt to be more inclusive about the relative types of sex crime.

But the original report spoke about nothing more than "sexual assault", in respect of attacks on ciswomen both by ciswomen and transwomen. I would imagine, somehow, that in fact this would mean that there were no reported rapes of ciswomen by transwomen in the period specified (because it would be extremely remiss of the report not to separate rapes out from sexual assaults).

So I'll delete the words "/rape" from my original post, which in fact makes it more accurate in any case. And I apologise for causing you any unnecessary distress or discomfort.

ETA: Oh, the edit window is closed on that post of mine now. Apologies.

 

[Ziggurat]

Telling other women their sexual assaults don't count as much to do a feminism.

Aside from this being a straw man, you really can't figure out why penetration with an object might be different than penetration with a penis? Wow, that's pretty dense. Because there are two very obvious differences.

Pregnancy and STDs.

 

[LondonJohn]

Zero understanding of how youth athletics works.

High school sports is the training ground for future collegiate athletes. If young girls think it's a waste of time to compete in a sport because they allow anyone, regardless of biology, that avenue is now closed for them.

I have a feeling you understand this and are just being willfully obtuse. Women's athletics have grown immensely in my lifetime, and what you advocate for will send them back to obscurity.

Have you not read/comprehended a single one of my recent posts on this subject?

 

[Elaedith]

Oh and I already told you that there were 97 documented* sexual assaults carried out on ciswoman prisoners by other prisoners in E&W women's prison stock in 2016-19, and that only seven or eight of those were carried out by transwoman prisoners.

So perhaps you'd like to tell me just how statistically scared, relatively speaking, ciswoman prisoners in E&W ought to be about being sexually assaulted by another ciswoman prisoner as opposed to a transwoman prisoner. With evidence, obviously.

I already addressed this. There were around 3800 prisoners in women's prisons and approximately 34 of them were transwomen (less than .1%) yet they committed 7% of sexual assaults. In other words, male prisoners statistically pose a massively greater risk to female prisoners than do other female prisoners. Whether the male prisoners are transgender or not is completely irrelevant. All the available evidence shows that the risk is based on biological sex, not identity.

 

[Meadmaker]

School sports are a whole different can of worms. Unlike professional sports, which is competition solely for the sake of competition, school sports are ostensibly about education. As such, there are lots of requirements to ensure that school sports are reasonably accessible to all students, and discrimination on the basis of protected classes is explicitly illegal.

It's a huge mess of competing interests, including what's best for students, what's best for schools, the money making potential of popular sports, what fans and local communities want, federal law, and so on. It's a real mess.

I agree. Earlier I said that I think the priority in school sports should be safety, fairness, and inclusivity, in that order.

I think proponents of allowing transgirls into girls' sports would put inclusivity above fairness.

 

[TomB]

Telling other women their sexual assaults don't count as much to do a feminism.

And what gives you standing to critique a female perspective of sexual assault?

 

[Emily's Cat]

I suppose we'll finally get some real info besides a viral video on some losers screaming at a front desk clerk.

Even though charges have been filed, and the perpetrator is a registered sex offender with a considerably criminal history... the females upset at having a sexual predator in their midst are still considered 'screaming losers' by you.

How exactly does someone get charged with indecent exposure for sitting in a locker room that state law allows them to use?

I'd say it has a lot to do with having a prior history of indecent exposure and being a registered sex offender. Call me crazy.

Law-enforcement sources revealed that Merager is a tier-one registered sex offender with two prior convictions of indecent exposure stemming from incidents in 2002 and 2003 in California. She declined to comment on the convictions. In 2008, she was convicted for failing to register as a sex offender.

...


In addition to Merager’s new felony charges of indecent exposure, she is also facing six felony counts of indecent exposure over a separate locker room incident in December 2018. Los Angeles County prosecutors accuse Merager of indecent exposure to women and children in a changing area at a swimming pool in West Hollywood Park.

...


“Merager claims to identify as female so he can access women’s locker rooms and showers,” reads an internal flyer by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department that was sent to law enforcement departments in southern California in late 2018.

 

[Emily's Cat]

What data would convince you?

My prognostication is... None. No amount of data will convince them.

 

[LondonJohn]

What's the purpose for those who don't have a diagnosis of gender dysphoria? Or for those who believe that gender dysphoria is irrelevant to whether a person is transgender?

Well - and yes, I know this whole area is something of a hot potato - there logically can be no such thing as transgender identity (assuming one believes that this is a valid condition) without at least a small amount of gender dysphoria.

After all, if (eg) a person assigned "man" at birth comes to realise in their 20s that they are actually "woman", it's functionally impossible in practice for them not to experience at least some small level of gender dysphoria. There can be no transgender people whatsoever who a) have come to the discovery that their internalised gender is different from that which was assigned them at birth... who b) aren't in the slightest bothered by that rather fundamental dichotomy - irrespective of how they decide to proceed.

 

[Louden Wilde]

Replacing "sex" with "gender identity" within the context of policy effectively negates rights accorded to people who are same-sex oriented.

And it leads to things like lesbians being harassed and threatened because they don't want to have sex with penises... something that lesbians have only recently managed to get past in society. And gay males being derided and labeled as bigots because they don't want to have sex with vaginas. And gay mean, wearing a t-shirt for gay and lesbian charity, being hounded out of a Pride Parade because they are exclusively same-SEX attracted rather than same-"Gender" attracted.

And for the lurkers - several of us have posted multiple links with many instances of this happening- e.g.
https://terfisaslur.com/cotton-ceiling/
https://lesbian-rights-nz.org/shame-receipts/

 

[theprestige]

The way you describe it, any athlete that doesn't get a scholarship spot at a university is wasting their time, which is clearly not the case.

It is a principle widely agreed upon that competition for limited prizes should be fair.

Earlier you alluded to transwomen causing unfair competition in sports (you suggested maybe validating their identity was a more important goal for sports than fairness).

I think we can agree that losing out in a fair competition is substantially different from losing out in an unfair competition.

What we're missing from you is an explanation of why unfair competition in this case would be a better thing than fair competition.