Trans women are not women (Part 8)

[shuttlt]

I've noticed something interesting about a music group I belong to. We have days when we meet up in a school hall and play (mainly) renaissance music on various sizes of recorders. For every ten women there, there will be maybe two men.

Does that make recorder-playing a "womanly thing"? Are Neil and John really women, in some indefinable way? (Neil is married to Louise, who plays extremely well.)

Or is it just the case that interests correlate to sex in some weak way that isn't even worth paying attention to>

I don't understand why some activity being womanly would make anybody who does that activity a woman. There is a very odd idea of categories that occur in these kinds of conversations. It's as if traditional gender roles were absolutely rigid, non-overlapping things with hard clearly defined boundaries and an airgap in between.

 

[shuttlt]

These men are not in any way occupying a feminine role or behaving in a feminine manner, except in their own porn-fuelled imaginations. Woman are socialised to be kind and considerate and to give way to the feelings of others. These men are weaponising this, demanding that women be kind and considerate and give up all their single-sex spaces to satisfy their sexual whims, and the idea of giving anything up to avoid making the women uncomfortable wouldn't even cross their minds. Women being uncomfortable in their presence isn't even a bug, it's a feature, it's part of what they get off on.

I'm not sure that weaponsing the rules of female spaces is such an unheard of thing amongst women. It sounds like they are doing the kind of nasty things that go on routinely amongst women. This is a profoundly un-male way to force your will on people.

Someone posted a video clip of a TV studio conversation involving a transwoman who seemed to "pass" relatively well - until he rounded on a male panellist whose behaviour wasn't sufficiently deferential to the pronoun police and threatened him with physical violence, at a distance of about two inches.

Yes, this is an example of a negative male way of trying to force your will on people.

If the nunber of trans people is so tiny, why are we turning society upside down in order to appease them - forcing schoolchildren to use mixed-sex toilets and changing rooms and so on? If it's not so tiny, then women's rights are under enormous threat as invasion by a male isn't going to be a rare event that most people won't even encounter.

I would imagine the hope is to grow the number. Lots of the rhetoric around representation is really just the idea that there is something intrinsically oppressive with a particular immutable characteristic, or lifestyle being "normal". You have two strategies to attack that, you can move people who would have been in the "normal" category across to one of the abnormal ones, or you can deconstruct the normal category so that it no longer dominates.

The other aspect is that the smaller the marginalised group actually is, the more perception of them can be defined by activist rhetoric rather than actual experience.

 

[theprestige]

I'm not sure that we are the redefinable beings you seem to imply. After how many decades of being drilled with this ideology you still have women looking for partners who are higher status than they are and men not. This predates the evolution of humans.

If you dogmatically insist that there is no difference between men and women and that society must be equalised, then you end up with a bunch of unhappy women at the top who can't find anybody and a bunch of unhappy men at the bottom who can't find anybody. There are innumerable differences like this that then play out through society and from that we get some things being male and some things being female.

The project of doing away with these stereotypes and sex/gender differences is an exercise in anti-human denial of reality.

I'm open to the idea that gender and gender roles are, at their core, correlated with sex. How could they not be? But if so, I think over the centuries we've accreted a lot of stereotypes and gatekeeping that is either unnecessary or counter-productive. Some things can and should be redefined.

That said, I'm not dogmatically insisting that there's no difference between men and women. Quite the opposite! And I think a lot of gendered expectations in society have emerged in recognition of, and response to, that difference.

But just because men are physically-advantaged horndogs who are sexually stimulated by the sight of the female form, that doesn't mean we need to hide women under tarps and cloister them for their own safety, and so that men can focus on the hard work of running a society without constant sexual distraction.

ETA: My purpose in that post and posts like it is to challenge p0lka and others to actually work through the implications of their claims, and arrive at a coherent public policy prescription for trans accommodation. p0lka says that gender doesn't correlate with sex? Okay, then what? A man who does "womanly" things is now a woman? Is that how that works? What even is on the trans-activist's list of "womanly" things? Etc.

 

[shuttlt]

I'm open to the idea that gender and gender roles are, at their core, correlated with sex. How could they not be? But if so, I think over the centuries we've accreted a lot of stereotypes and gatekeeping that is either unnecessary or counter-productive. Some things can and should be redefined.

If you look at almost anything in society in terms of the roles of men and women, our place in society, our institutions etc... it isn't really rationally justifiable. But that doesn't tell you that you can do without them. Society isn't a rational construction, it's an evolved one. This is the Burkean argument about the French Revolution.

How do you determine what is unnecessary or counter-productive? It feels to me that the process has basically been one of just assumed or asserting a bunch of stuff was unnecessary or counter-productive and then getting rid of it and never looked back.

That said, I'm not dogmatically insisting that there's no difference between men and women. Quite the opposite! And I think a lot of gendered expectations in society have emerged in recognition of, and response to, that difference.

But just because men are physically-advantaged horndogs who are sexually stimulated by the sight of the female form, that doesn't mean we need to hide women under tarps and cloister them for their own safety, and so that men can focus on the hard work of running a society without constant sexual distraction.

No, but neither does some liberal vision of how society ought to work being at odds with this mean that you can do away with such things. Maybe you can and maybe you can't. Again, there is a liberal idea that we want the same number of senators and CEOs to be women as men, but women also want to partner up with men who are higher status and earn more than they do. If one simply reimplements society based on principle, significant things are likely to break.

ETA: My purpose in that post and posts like it is to challenge p0lka and others to actually work through the implications of their claims, and arrive at a coherent public policy prescription for trans accommodation. p0lka says that gender doesn't correlate with sex? Okay, then what? A man who does "womanly" things is now a woman? Is that how that works? What even is on the trans-activist's list of "womanly" things? Etc.

Sure, your post was interesting. I don't want to be unnecessarily confrontational.

 

[Meadmaker]

I'm not sure that we are the redefinable beings you seem to imply. After how many decades of being drilled with this ideology you still have women looking for partners who are higher status than they are and men not. This predates the evolution of humans.

If you dogmatically insist that there is no difference between men and women and that society must be equalised, then you end up with a bunch of unhappy women at the top who can't find anybody and a bunch of unhappy men at the bottom who can't find anybody. There are innumerable differences like this that then play out through society and from that we get some things being male and some things being female.

The project of doing away with these stereotypes and sex/gender differences is an exercise in anti-human denial of reality.


Society need men and women, males and females to be functioning and hence they have to be protected. If you collapse them, you collapse society. The idea that there is the same need to protect the right of people to identify as anthropomorphic foxes as women is the most ridiculously "first world problems" effete nonsense I've heard in weeks. This is the thought process in a world where there are no negative consequences from sacrificing the groups that are required to keep society functioning, in order to benefit anthropomorphic foxes who might just be doing it for attention.


The idea that the world should be rebuilt on rationist grounds where we define things in the way you want "woman" to be defined and then we proceed rationally forward from there is an enlightenment project that comes in with the French Revolution with their decimalised calendars and clocks. That isn't the way humans actually work though. You didn't have Saxon's wandering around not knowing what a man and a women were because nobody had fleshed out a proper definition. Everybody here knows what the ordinary definition of man and woman is that has survived down the centuries.

The root of this is not that that definition was confusing or vague or deficient, it is that some people want to change it. If it was a question of definition, this would be a debate between lexicographers that nobody would care about. This is just an attempt the change the meaning of the word in order to achieve a political end.

To be fair, I like living in the "first world", i.e. a world where we can afford to care about things that are not matters of life and death, or of societal survival. Because we live in the first world, we can afford to use up smoe recsources to make a minority happier than they would otherwise be. Also, while your discussion about differences between men and women are accurate, I don't think they should be imposed on people who don't want to live according to the stereotypes that describe the differences between typical men and typical women. It's ok to be atypical. If the different sex-based behaviors really are instinctive, then there's no need to have laws that enforce them. They'll happen anyway for most people, and we should accommodate people who don't fit into the typical niche to the extent we can.*

Biut I think you have really done a good job of addressing some of the underlying philosophy of the discussion.

*ETA: And I think you would agree with that, and, really, you already have for the most part, and expressed it better than I did.

 

[Rolfe]

It's OK to be atypical. Absolutely. We keep saying this, and it makes no difference.

These men want to act out their pornified LARPing of femininity in women's spaces, and they want absolutely free rein to do it in bad wigs and gold lamé stilettos, or beards and jeans and a sweatshirt. They will not tolerate any effort to compromise in a way that leaves some female spaces closed to them - not even prisons or rape shelters. And certainly not youth camps or gym changing rooms.

If you don't understand this you will never understand what the debate is about.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Thanks for that information. I have been edified.

 

[Emily's Cat]

The premise is sexist.
The trans right movement could indeed be spearheaded by people who are aroused by the thought of being the opposite sex, but why is it necessarily male?Swap out woman female from autogynaephilia and add andros? (i think, don't know much greek) and you get someone that is necessarily female with the same condition, why couldn't they be spearheading it too.

The overwhelming majority of sexual paraphilias occur in males. I don't recall the actual stat, but it's something like 90%-ish male.

The only paraphilia where females come close to male is with respect to specifically submissive BDSM stuff. Everything else is skewed massively toward males.

Autogynephilia is a paraphilia classified as an expression of transvestic disorder, which is found almost exclusively in males.

That's why the focus is on males.

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

This is also, by the way, why any discussion about rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence are focused on male offenders. Because very nearly all of the offenders are male. Females are capable of committing those offenses... but they very rarely do so.

 

[Rolfe]

Well, females aren't capable of committing rape by the definition in many jurisdictions, but they are capable of committing assault by penetration, except they seldom do.

The thing about AGP is that it is an exclusively male paraphilia/fetish by definition. It is defined as a male getting sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a woman. So it's a complete nonsense to say "but what about the women who do it?" Which seems to be polka's gotcha to everything.

 

[Emily's Cat]

One thing that was actually said in the Scottish parliament reduced me to helpless giggles. Some people were questioning how this proposed new self-ID law might work in the case of bad actors, people who declared they were women for the purpose of accessing women's spaces but who weren't "really trans". Once they'd got past the "nobody would ever ever do this so it's irrelevant" bollocks, the announcement was "there will be fines for not living as a woman."

They'll have to fine a large swathe of women, then.

(In actual fact, the bad actors won't have to self-declare themselves as women to access women's spaces when this law comes in. Since there is no way to tell who has a gender recognition certificate and who hasn't by looking at them, and it will be illegal to ask, no man can be challenged. Any such challenge would be opening the woman who challenged to charges of committing a hate crime.)

That Scottish reform bill is legitimately frightening. Both in it's very foreseeable impact... but also with respect to the complete inanity of the politicians supporting it.

 

[Rolfe]

Oh, don't I know it. I wish I could explain how we came to elect these idiots. I know, I was part of the process, but I still can't explain it.

 

[shuttlt]

To be fair, I like living in the "first world", i.e. a world where we can afford to care about things that are not matters of life and death, or of societal survival.

Sure, but if one lives in a first world country and enjoys living in a first world country.... then ultimately we need to do the things that keep it a first world country, and do the things that ensure our children are the kinds of people capable of sustaining a first world country. It's not like once you achieve a particular level of development that's locked in and you can't fall back.

There is a theory that goes back at least to Weber's Protestant Work Ethic in 1905 that the success of the US was down to particular attitudes to work as a redirected religious calling. There are many such theories, and I don't intend to mount a defence of any of them as true. What I will claim is that cultures have particular properties, ideas, characters that mark them for success or decline. The West has been energetically pursuing a policy of destroying the aspects of the culture that made it powerful.

Rome was great. Then it became soft, and paid barbarians to fight so that Roman citizens didn't have to, or because they no longer could, or would. They came to lack the fire and drive to handle the world themselves and their civilization crumbled.

We act as if our dominance has been handed to us by God.

Because we live in the first world, we can afford to use up smoe recsources to make a minority happier than they would otherwise be.

Perhaps. Sometimes, in some ways. Because my house is strong, I can afford to take a way a brick, and another brick. That doesn't mean that I can completely disregard structural concerns about the stability of my house.

Also, while your discussion about differences between men and women are accurate, I don't think they should be imposed on people who don't want to live according to the stereotypes that describe the differences between typical men and typical women.

We all necessarily live in a world that imposes a "norm" on us and is full of expectations, to do otherwise is chaos. I don't care that you philosophically think it is "fair". Can a society be sustained that works on the principle you describe. I believe they tried something like it in the early Soviet period, and in Weimar.... there were elements of it in the French Revolution.

Has there ever been a stable society that ran anything like the way you imagine this ideal society would with everybody inventing themselves without judgement? This is the kind of thing that occured in late Rome where citizens were idle and decadent. Nobody who is busy contributing to society is idle enough to go about reinventing their own personal concept of gender or demanding access to women's bathrooms.

It's ok to be atypical.

I'm not making a moral claim. I don't care whether people are atypical or not. I don't think though that a society will long survive if it spends it's time anaudinately focusing on reshaping society to meet the needs of men who want to use women's bathrooms. One of the things about living together in cities is that some people aren't going to fit in. That is a fact of life. Refusing to accept that is a denial of reality in favour of dreams.

If the different sex-based behaviors really are instinctive, then there's no need to have laws that enforce them.

That doesn't follow. In any case, I think you are against social norms as well.... so perhaps we should keep the line in the sand there?

They'll happen anyway for most people, and we should accommodate people who don't fit into the typical niche to the extent we can.*

At what cost? You can't change the definition of woman, normalise women having penises, remove the associations with bearing children and then pass that off as only having changed things for the tiny number of people with penises who want to be called women.

Men and women relate to one another through a whole bunch of cultural associations that have their roots in biology but are filtered through culture. Vast amounts of western literature is about the relationship of female fertility to the soil and the mystical connection to being able to bring life into the world combined. The idea of "woman" is tinged by Eve and Mary in the Bible.

There are all of these connections. You are tossing that away and replacing it with a new definition to please what minute percentage of the population? and somehow the only people impacted by it are that minute percentage of people. When you muck around with a societies' concept of gender you a messing with key concepts that have to work in order for society to reproduce itself.

Biut I think you have really done a good job of addressing some of the underlying philosophy of the discussion.

Thank you. I suspect I am coming at this from a rather different place to the normal forum perspective.

*ETA: And I think you would agree with that, and, really, you already have for the most part, and expressed it better than I did.

Well, I think the key question is "to the extent we can". Nietzsche talks about slave morality, where weakness is made a virtue replacing strength. Where I get concerned is when society seems to fixate on victims and make lifting up victims an absolute good and a driving purpose. This strikes me as the society wide version of an individual who prioritises sitting at home wallowing over some problem in their life over doing something useful like going to work.

 

[shuttlt]

Oh, don't I know it. I wish I could explain how we came to elect these idiots. I know, I was part of the process, but I still can't explain it.

I'd be interested in your thoughts on that. I was an Englishman in Scotland in the late 90s during the devolution referendum. There was still a fading Braveheart poster over the cinema in Edinburgh and all my friends felt some kind of deep connection to William Wallace. It took me 20 years to have some window into it.

 

[Rolfe]

It's not really about that. It's about how nonentities who have ambition and can play the system managed to take over politics and squeeze out the few left who had some principles.

What is particularly shocking to me is the realisation that people who have been in Scottish politics for a long time and whom I thought were genuinely both intelligent and altruistic have swung in line with the genderfairy nonsense.

 

[shuttlt]

It's not really about that. It's about how nonentities who have ambition and can play the system managed to take over politics and squeeze out the few left who had some principles.

Oh, well.... yes. I think one of the disappointing things is, given Scotland's size, that there isn't really a localism effect making that better. I hadn't thought about it before, but it's a good counter-example to some of my intuitive ideas about government.

What is particularly shocking to me is the realisation that people who have been in Scottish politics for a long time and whom I thought were genuinely both intelligent and altruistic have swung in line with the genderfairy nonsense.

That's the whole anglosphere for you. Then you have a kind of Gell-Mann Amnesia effect thought..... if they are like this about a topic that is directly knowable enough for me to see through it, how many topics are they like this on that I don't know enough to see through it?

From an atypical Englishman's perspective.... I hope Scotland get independence, I hope we let you guys go without too much difficulty, and if it doesn't work out, I hope we let you back. Independence is a political weapon that the Scottish Nationalists don't need to do anything in order to be able to wield, and devolution gives them a reason to blame any failures on the English. It all feels like it sets up the wrong incentives.

I'm not sure politics in England is any better, but I dread the idea of Nicola Sturgeon becoming part of a coalition government. I get the impression Keir Starmer is eyeing her like the ring of power.

I take it you've seen this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCl_JEaqvjg

 

[Hercules56]

It is my firm belief that trans-women are not women.

My question is: should they be TREATED as women? I think that's a much more appropriate inquiry.

 

[Rolfe]

Oh, well.... yes. I think one of the disappointing things is, given Scotland's size, that there isn't really a localism effect making that better. I hadn't thought about it before, but it's a good counter-example to some of my intuitive ideas about government.

That's the whole anglosphere for you. Then you have a kind of Gell-Mann Amnesia effect thought..... if they are like this about a topic that is directly knowable enough for me to see through it, how many topics are they like this on that I don't know enough to see through it?

From an atypical Englishman's perspective.... I hope Scotland get independence, I hope we let you guys go without too much difficulty, and if it doesn't work out, I hope we let you back. Independence is a political weapon that the Scottish Nationalists don't need to do anything in order to be able to wield, and devolution gives them a reason to blame any failures on the English. It all feels like it sets up the wrong incentives.

I'm not sure politics in England is any better, but I dread the idea of Nicola Sturgeon becoming part of a coalition government. I get the impression Keir Starmer is eyeing her like the ring of power.

I take it you've seen this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCl_JEaqvjg

Oh, I wasn't expecting it either. Sturgeon, a feminist to her fingertips, either completely brainwashed by genderwoo or convinced espousing it will benefit her career. Refuses even to meet women who disagree with her premise that men must be centred in all discussions about women.

Right now I don't know whether it's entirely self-interest, or whether she is actually an MI5 plant. Whichever, she is a disaster intent on being re-elected to a subordinate parliament in perpetuity by dangling the carrot of independence in front of her brainwashed supporters. I think we've lost. We had a real chance 2017-19 but she blew it and we won't get another now the US will be really determined not to let the state where the nukes are parked become independent.

But this is getting OT, more so than all the guff about Texas, so we'd better stop.

PS. I hadn't seen that video, it's hilarious.

 

[Rolfe]

It is my firm belief that trans-women are not women.

My question is: should they be TREATED as women? I think that's a much more appropriate inquiry.

How do you define "treated as a woman"? Paid less for work similar to a man? Have a man hold doors open for them? That's the big question. If it involves allowing males into female single-sex spaces, that is where the push-back is going to happen.

 

[theprestige]

Society need men and women, males and females to be functioning and hence they have to be protected. If you collapse them, you collapse society. The idea that there is the same need to protect the right of people to identify as anthropomorphic foxes as women is the most ridiculously "first world problems" effete nonsense I've heard in weeks. This is the thought process in a world where there are no negative consequences from sacrificing the groups that are required to keep society functioning, in order to benefit anthropomorphic foxes who might just be doing it for attention.

It seems like you both misunderstood my point, and disagreed with it. Those two things combined to put you in vehement agreement with me, and to make a very effective argument in favor of my point.

 

[Rolfe]

A case came to light last night, in the House of Lords, of a woman who had been raped while in hospital, by a man who said he was a woman. When the woman reported the rape to the police the hospital said this was impossible as there were no men in the hospital. This was following NHS guidelines, which state that if anyone objects to the presence of a man in a hospital ward, and that man says he's a woman, the person complaining must be told that there is no man present. (Imagine how a woman in a confused state is going to react to that.)

This is the twitter screen-shot.

[imgw=700]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FOCz8UDXMAEtGHN?format=png&name=medium[/imgw]