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

[The Atheist]

Whether society is very welcoming or intensely hostile, they still run faster than regular girls, so they shouldn't be in the girls' division.

Ah, I love the ongoing circularity of argument, that after almost 4 years, and ~25,000 posts we're still at the OP.

So are the lived realities of women. But that's a context you've consistently avoided or dismissed throughout this thread.

After that just-mentioned time period and amount of posts I'm now convinced that's deliberate and an attempt to erode women's rights.

Let's face it, apart from a small number of women, the "anti-TERF" lobby is populated by men, and men who have decided they're actually women. What could be better than hiding misogyny under a veneer of civil rights?

Muhammad Ali would have been proud. As he said, nothing makes whitey happier than ******* cheering for slavery.

 

[Emily's Cat]

My understanding is that currently in the UK transwomen prisoners without a GRC who do qualify for transfer to the female estate are placed in a separate wing and mix with female prisoners for some social activities. That seems a reasonable arrangement, although I think that participation in mixed-sex social activities should be optional for prisoners. I believe that those who self-declare but are not approved for transfer are given segregated showering/sleeping facilities within the male estate although I am not sure if they are otherwise segregated from other prisoners.

In this case, self-declared transwomen are often in the company of other self-declared transwomen. There may be other problems, such as the need to separate violent and non-violent transwomen. Having separate levels of security for different groups of transwomen becomes more of an issue if there are few of them in total.

This of course is not satisfactory to trans activists who insist that biological sex must not be acknowledged as real or relevant in any respect.

I'll add that the separate housing of transgender inmates is a direct result of the first willfully oblivious attempt to satisfy the demands of transgender activists while completely failing to consider the impact on females at all. That resulted in several female inmates being raped by transgender identified (but otherwise completely unaltered) males who had histories of sexual violence. In their desire to be inclusive and considerate of the feelings of these prisoners, they were placed in with vulnerable female prisoners. That the completely foreseeable outcome actually came out was... well... foreseeable.

The separate housing was essentially an "oops, we didn't think that would happen!" response.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Except where it isn't.

Where is the status quo segregation on the basis of gender identity, and not on the basis of sex?

Are those places where transgender people feel that their rights are, or are not being met?

 

[Emily's Cat]

The lived realities of trans people has a lot to do with why they are vulnerable populations.

Removing the discussion from this context is intellectually dishonest.

The lived realities of female people has a lot to do with why they are vulnerable populations. Removing the discussion from this context is intellectually dishonest.

Yet that seems to happen quite frequently.

 

[Meadmaker]

Ah, I love the ongoing circularity of argument, that after almost 4 years, and ~25,000 posts we're still at the OP.

Indeed. I was thinking the same thing as I wrote it, and the response after that one as well.


For some of that time, I've been trying something I commonly do with intractable arguers, often religious or woo types. I sort of play a "Let's see what they say with this one." sort of game.

Eventually, I grow tired of it. Now I'm at the stage of....

"Would it hurt you to say that penises actually matter sometimes?"

(And even more than penises, testicles?)


They'll invent some reason that makes me a TERF, which is friggin' hilarious. I'm standing there saying, "People with no balls will never be able to win a race!" This, apparently, is radical feminism.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Transwomen and ciswomen are alike in many ways, and dislike in some others. Which of these characteristics are most important?

In what ways?

You've been asked this several times, by several posters, and you have not yet provided a response. Your claim that transwomen are more like females is a bare assertion, and therefore worthless until you provide some rationale to support it.

 

[theprestige]

What if one wishes to prevent sex-based violence?

You see, the problem is that up until recently we didn't have a distinction between gender and sex. Now that we've learned so much more about the science of gender identity, we know that sex and gender are different. So now when you say "sex-based violence" you might mean gender-based or sex-based. Either way, more important than me answering your question is you rethinking your assumptions, and reexamining the problem through fresh eyes now that you know that sex and gender are different.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Testimony to California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDRC) given by Lauren Adams of WoLF.

https://www.womensliberationfront.org/news/wolfs-lauren-adams-testifies-at-cdcr-hearing

Some quick facts. 86 percent of incarcerated women are victims of abuse, and they are disproportionately women of color, disproportionately grew up in poverty. Compared to men, they're vastly less likely to be violent criminals, and only 4 percent of female inmates are sex offenders. By contrast, 20 percent of trans-identified male inmates are sex offenders, according to U.C. Irvine. Some of these men are now being housed with women under the stewardship of CDCR.

Just a handful of them include:

Shawn Gustafson, who molested a six-year-old and an eight-year-old, and he is being housed in CIW, fully intact male genitals. Jason Hahn is on Death Row for murdering two infants. He is being housed in the same facility as his victims' mother.

Anthony Lipsey is serving life for murder. He assaulted his female cell mate and spent a brief period in ad. seg. before being dumped on a different yard without restrictions. Christian Ramirez is under investigation for sexual assault. His victim disclosed immediately to a staff member who told her that if she wanted to be separated from him, she would need to go to administrative segregation.

Jonathan Robertson was transferred in June and is already in administrative segregation pending a sexual assault investigation. And Patrick White, who is a convicted rapist and a member of the Aryan Brotherhood.

Emphasis mine.

I've asked LondonJohn and SuburbanTurkey before: How much is too much? Is this too much? Or do you need more females to be assaulted by their fully-intact transgender identified male fellow inmates before we consider that perhaps... just perhaps... it's a bad idea to put males in with females where those vulnerable females have no escape.

 

[Emily's Cat]

You see, the problem is that up until recently we didn't have a distinction between gender and sex. Now that we've learned so much more about the science of gender identity, we know that sex and gender are different. So now when you say "sex-based violence" you might mean gender-based or sex-based. Either way, more important than me answering your question is you rethinking your assumptions, and reexamining the problem through fresh eyes now that you know that sex and gender are different.

Even though I 100% know that you posted this satirically... it still made my blood boil because it is so very close to arguments I keep running across.

What do we do when The Onion and The Babylon Bee can't be distinguished from actual activism?

 

[d4m10n]

The fact that trans people are disproportionately resorting to survival sex work says a lot about their precarious position in society.

I assume this is indeed a fact, but I've not found solid survey data with which I could demonstrate it to be true. Most articles I've seen point back to the same source, which wasn't rooted in probability sampling but rather convenience sampling.

Whether society is very welcoming or intensely hostile, they still run faster than regular girls, so they shouldn't be in the girls' division.

Demanding an unsportsmanlike systemic advantage isn't likely to reduce societal hostility, IMO.

What do transwomen have in common with females that they do NOT have in common with males?

I'd quite like to see an answer to this as well.

 

[theprestige]

An interesting thing about homosexuality is that it's an inscrutable internal feeling that has observable practical applications, and is also essentially a question individual freedom.

If a dude likes to hook up with other dudes, there's not much point in quizzing him about the qualia of gay. Who cares what "gay" really means? I'm having fun putting Tab A into Slot B, and that's a fact.

And if two dudes want to get up to some consensual Tab A/Slot B shenanigans, that's nobody else's business. All we require from public policy is (a) leave them alone, and (b) don't deny them other services and inclusion just because you don't personally like the whole A/B thing.

Transgenderism, on the other hand, doesn't really have any observable practical applications. It's very unlike sex and sexual attraction, in that regard. I can tell you right away what homosexuality means, in practical terms. See the preceding paragraph. But so far nobody can tell you what transgenderism means in practical terms. Something about pronouns, perhaps. But nobody knows what it really means to "be" a woman in modern society. Most of what we think of as "womanhood" is outdated cultural prejudices that are thankfully becoming obsolete.

Transsexuality, on the other hand, does have practical applications: The transcendence of sex-based discrimination. Not gender-based discrimination. Nobody is saying you can't participate in women's sports because identifying as a woman (whatever that means) is wrong. They're saying you can't participate in women's sports because you're male, and there's good reasons to keep males out of women's sports.

And this also very much not a question of individual freedom. The demand is not for the government to stay out of a transsexual's bedroom, the way we expect the government to stay out of a homosexual's bedroom. The demand is to allow the transsexual access into everyone else's bathrooms, whether they like it or not, as a matter of public policy.

Every aspect of this debate were "live and let live" would reasonably apply has already been stipulated and accepted by those of us here in this thread. All that's left are the places where "let live" is not acceptable, and public policy is needed to force compliance - positive action - on dissenters.

So the homosexuality analogy doesn't do anything for me. The two situations are not analogous in the ways that matter to this conversation. (Honestly I don't think they're analogous at all, except for both being qualia. Self-identity is very different from sexual attraction.)

 

[theprestige]

Even though I 100% know that you posted this satirically... it still made my blood boil because it is so very close to arguments I keep running across.

What do we do when The Onion and The Babylon Bee can't be distinguished from actual activism?

It gets worse: It's a good faith paraphrase of SuburbanTurkey's last couple of answers to my questions about sex segregation in prisons.

 

[JoeMorgue]

An interesting thing about homosexuality is that it's an inscrutable internal feeling that has observable practical applications, and is also essentially a question individual freedom.

If a dude likes to hook up with other dudes, there's not much point in quizzing him about the qualia of gay. Who cares what "gay" really means? I'm having fun putting Tab A into Slot B, and that's a fact.

And if a man sleeps with women, is married to women, admits to only being sexually attracted to women, only dates women, but still "Identifies" (Patented Pending, Trademark) as gay, simply going "Okay what definition of gay are you actually using here, we need some clarification" doesn't get the fire and brimstone "You are denying some intrinsic part of my identity by even asking the question to the point that I define you not understanding exactly what I am based on nothing but what I've decided to identify as as being tantamount to a direct personal attack" response.

We don't have to agree to some singular exact definition devoid of any nuance of context, but words have to mean things.

"Gay" as a term absolutely to be sure has nuance and variation from person to person, there's absolutely nothing wrong or surprising about that, but "gay" still has SOME context beyond pure internal self-identification. You still have to do something that exists externally to be gay.

The fact that people aren't all using the exact same definition of "man, woman, sex, gender" isn't (inherently) a problem, it's the fact that one side has reduced it to meaningless nothing that means anything and everything because it begins and ends at "I say so."

 

[theprestige]

If the goal of sex (or gender) segregated spaces is to protect women from the specific risk of male aggression, then it's clear that transwomen likewise need similar protection. The evidence is quite clear that they, like ciswomen, face the very same dangers. It's why so many of these women's clinics insist on treating trans women, because they see them as essentially the same problem. Despite their differences, they are very much alike in this regard.

I notice this is an argument from safety, not from identity. We should transfer these prisoners not because of their self identity, but because of concerns about their safety. It's the same reason we sometimes segregate sex offenders and others when the circumstances arise.

I recall that you have also argued that if we solved the problem of prison violence, we wouldn't have to worry about the safety of women prisoners with males in their midst.

So why not just solve the problem of prison safety, and then we don't have to transfer the transwomen for their safety in the first place? Hell, if we solved the problem of prison safety, we wouldn't need segregated facilities in the first place. Inmate Drake and Inmate Vasquez could bunk up no problem. And if anyone ever mistakes Vasquez for a man, well maybe that's the way he likes it.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

I notice this is an argument from safety, not from identity. We should transfer these prisoners not because of their self identity, but because of concerns about their safety. It's the same reason we sometimes segregate sex offenders and others when the circumstances arise.

I recall that you have also argued that if we solved the problem of prison violence, we wouldn't have to worry about the safety of women prisoners with males in their midst.

So why not just solve the problem of prison safety, and then we don't have to transfer the transwomen for their safety in the first place? Hell, if we solved the problem of prison safety, we wouldn't need segregated facilities in the first place. Inmate Drake and Inmate Vasquez could bunk up no problem. And if anyone ever mistakes Vasquez for a man, well maybe that's the way he likes it.

Sure. I see no reason beyond a practical one why segregated facilities must exist.

I'm not sure how you're going to guarantee safety unless prisoners have private cells, just to quibble with your example. Given the absurd rate we lock people up in this country, providing any kind of acceptable prison conditions seems like an extremely expensive proposition.

Much of the reasoning for segregated facilities can probably be traced by the total lack of individual privacy in prisons. If you're going to have open showers, open toilets, and a total lack of privacy that is common in US prisons, I imagine it would be foolish to not continue such segregation.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

The Cursed Isle strikes again:

On Tuesday, British newspaper The Guardian published an interview with Judith Butler—and then removed a section in which the renowned gender theorist made criticisms of the transphobic “gender critical” movement.

Responding to a question from writer Jules Gleeson about protests around Los Angeles’s Wi Spa this summer that turned violent after an allegation of exhibitionism in the women’s locker room drew far right anti-trans demonstrators, Butler termed trans-exclusionary ideology as “one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times.”

“So the Terfs will not be part of the contemporary struggle against fascism, one that requires a coalition guided by struggles against racism, nationalism, xenophobia and carceral violence, one that is mindful of the high rates of femicide throughout the world, which include high rates of attacks on trans and genderqueer people,” Butler said.

That section was removed. The paper said in an update that it made the redaction “to reflect developments which occurred after the interview took place” but did not detail them. You can read the original here.

...

The Guardian ’s reporting is highly regarded and an interview with a prominent public intellectual like Butler is in line with the paper’s general approach to political coverage. But this time, the subject matter was too much to handle.

“The Guardian US site has some of the best extremism reporters in the biz, and as far as I know they never have to pull punches against bigots, even when bigots complain,” tweeted HuffPost Senior Editor Andy Campbell. “It's legitimately baffling to see what happens to journalists and their work when people complain in the UK.”

Seems Butler broke the most important rule in UK journalism, don't be mean to the TERFs.

https://eoinhiggins.substack.com/p/guardian-pulls-judith-butlers-comments?justPublished=true

I'm sure Bari Weiss and the cancel culture gang will be along shortly to decry this censorious nonsense. Let's just wait...

 

[Ziggurat]

I'm sure Bari Weiss and the cancel culture gang will be along shortly to decry this censorious nonsense. Let's just wait...

That isn’t an example of cancel culture. Cancel culture is not synonymous with censorship, even though it is censorious.

 

[Ziggurat]

So why not just solve the problem of prison safety, and then we don't have to transfer the transwomen for their safety in the first place?

In short, because it's not actually a solvable problem.

Steps can be taken to improve safety, many of which cost money. Since money is always in short supply, we're never going to be able to do everything possible to improve safety. But even if we spent tons of money on improvements, you can't get rid of safety concerns completely. That's impossible as long as you don't isolate prisoners completely, and in most cases isolation is even worse for prisoners than the safety risks they face from each other.

In the short term, it may make sense to do finer grained segregation. The trans woman prisoner population is small, it seems like it should be possible to house them separately.

 

[theprestige]

In the short term, it may make sense to do finer grained segregation. The trans woman prisoner population is small, it seems like it should be possible to house them separately.

... and then they'll only be violent to each other. But at least the biggest ones will be safe from predation by males that are even bigger and stronger than they are.

More seriously, this only solves the safety problem, not the identity problem. Housing a transwoman separately from both men and women does not honor her womanhood. This is potentially a human rights violation.

Actually it's a conflict between two human rights: the right to be treated as a woman by society in every context, and the right to be safe while under the care of the state (or however you want to phrase these things).

Which one is more important? Which one should prisons prioritize with their limited resources?

These are questions for the trans-inclusionists to answer.

 

[Ziggurat]

More seriously, this only solves the safety problem, not the identity problem.

It's the only problem I'm really interested in. But yes, I know that view isn't universally shared.