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Trans women are not women (Part 8)

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Rolfe said:
Would a good look at a cross-section of naked male bodies ranging from ten to early twenties have been a positive development in the middle of all that? Someone is going to say yes, and point to Finland or something, but personally I'm pretty glad that wasn't part of the learning experience. The guys had their own room. What was under the swimming trunks was left to my imagination.
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The thing I always think about those sort of "but Finland" arguments is.... Finland is a different culture. You can't just pick one element that makes sense in Finnish culture, transplant it to Scotland and expect it to fit. It's like taking a puzzle piece from a different puzzle with differently shaped pieces and trying to force it into your puzzle.... it's not going to quite fit, so you are going to have to move a few more pieces across.... Also, how easy is it to just bring across the bits of the culture you want without bringing the bits you don't want?
 
Sideroxylon said:
* #notallWomen
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Indeed. I note also the attempt to mislead by claiming that this is something that "men are trying to force upon women". When in fact, the legislative, medical, regulatory and judicial bodies which are progressively accommodating transgender people and protecting their rights..... all typically contain healthily-representative proportions of ciswomen.

But that wouldn't fit the outraged narrative now, would it? Women forming an integral and significant part of the movement to give rights and protections to transgender people? No, that doesn't match up with any of the shouty, vituperative "male privilege" slogans, does it? So let's try to dissemble and claim that this is entirely about bigoted, entitled cismen taking deliberate aim at the rights of ciswomen, eh? That's a cause we can all get behind, right?!

:rolleyes:
 
Meadmaker said:
It's an interesting way to ask the question.

I think the role of academia is huge, especially their indirect role via media. A bunch of journalism majors head off to college and get indoctrinated, and end up writing style guides for newspapers that say to use "women" in ways other than the biological. People go along because they don't want to be seen as the bad guys.

Also, the political parties themselves drive division, some of which involves the trans agenda. Politically active people tend to be more ideologically driven that people who aren't so active. That tends to mean that the parties are more extreme than the average citizen, so in this case Democratic leaders do not want to alienate their base, so they support the trans agenda. The Republicans do the same, so they don't want any compromise, so they promote an anti-trans agenda. The people in the middle end up having to pick a side.

For a while, in America, the libertarian streak prevailed, and the anti-trans side was seeing the traditionalists as telling people what to do. I think the trans rights movement was riding the coattails of the gay rights agenda, which was pretty popular, especially among youth. Meanwhile, though, I think people didn't really pay attention to what was going on, and woke up to find people with penises in the girls' locker room or on girls' sports teams, and are now standing up and demanding some answers. They thought they were promoting the right to have a sex change operation if you wanted to. They are finding out now it's something different.

As a result, you're seeing the beginnings of the backlash. Lia Thomas is wildly unpopular outside of media circles. The trans rights lobbies are bemoaning setbacks in legislatures. Those setbacks aren't some weird change or heart. What's happening is that people got the memo about what is being asked for, and they are saying no.

At least, that's my take on where things are right now. It is, indeed, the youth that will matter in this, and I, too, would love to see more information, but it's hard to gather, and it just seems to me the media isn't all that keen to present it. That fact alone makes me think that maybe the traditionalists are a lot more present than the progressives on this issue. I think if the majority of high school students were supportive of males in the girls' locker rooms, the news would feature an awful lot of coverage of students supporting males in the girls' locker room. I don't see it, so I suspect it isn't there.


For my part, if you are right, and that comes out, that the youth support trans inclusion in private spaces, I'll go along. I've said that my position is based on supporting the wishes for privacy for women and girls. If you convince me that most of them don't want it, I'll change my position.

(Similarly for sports fairness.)
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If you convince me that young white girls in 50s USA would rather that 1) a black man is allowed to sit next to them on a tight bus bench, than 2) a black man is not allowed to sit next to them on a tight bus bench..... then (and only then) will I support civil rights for black people.
 
Rolfe said:
Well, people here seem to be getting the memo.

[imgw=600]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FTeg1ccXEAAKXMZ?format=jpg&name=medium[/imgw]

I'd take a fair bet that if you could explain what's going on to the majority of people who still haven't realised that Nicola is actually serious about this and what it entails, then ask them to vote, it would be a lot higher than 60%. (We know there was an international campaign among trans people to get them to engage with the consultation and say they agreed. What I don't know is how the responses split by location of responder. Although come to think of it I don't remember being asked for any verification of my reply that I live in Scotland.)
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If there had been a survey among the population in (say) Alabama in the 1950s, in which the question had been "Do you think black people should be given equal rights with white people", what do you think the outcome of that survey might have been?
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
I'm still failing to see how a tenured professor resigning is proof of much of anything than their own intellectual cowardice.

Tenure would have protected Stock's anti-trans opinions, no matter how unpopular, exactly as it is intended to had she not voluntarily quit.

Some of her peers supported her, some criticized her. Such is the nature of engaging in controversial issues. Perhaps she should grow a thicker skin.

Another crybully that demands the right to criticize others, but cries foul whenever a critical lens is placed on them.
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Well, what happened is that she elevated it to a cause celebre and made it a hill she was willing to die on. Once she'd taken it to that level, the outcome was inevitable - and I suspect that once things had passed a certain point, it was the outcome she herself might actually have desired.

A bit like Catholics in Protestant England in C16 (or vice-versa for that matter) loudly proclaiming their Catholicism, refusing to recant in any way, and ending up getting burned at the stake. Some people see virtue in martyrdom......
 
LondonJohn said:
If you convince me that young white girls in 50s USA would rather that 1) a black man is allowed to sit next to them on a tight bus bench, than 2) a black man is not allowed to sit next to them on a tight bus bench..... then (and only then) will I support civil rights for black people.
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Yawn. See previous responses.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
I suppose it's cultural. Damn near every adult in this country has been conditioned in their childhood that sex-segregated communal facilities were normal, or at least the best they can hope for.

Then again, even across living generations there have been shifts. Unused communal showers in schools, no longer being mandatory, seem compelling proof that sex-segregation isn't adequate at least in some contexts.

Every gym I have every been a member of has had privacy stalls for the showers. Presumably anyone shy enough could change in there if they wanted, but I have no idea how to know how common this is. Sitting around naked and chatting for extended periods of time seems exclusively an old man thing in my experience. I suspect it's a generational culture shift.
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I went to an all-boys' public (ie private) boarding school. There were plenty of vestiges of pretty shocking public-school practice when I was there (though thankfully many of them no longer exist). Not only was all showering communal, but until the age of 13, all group swimming and gymnasium activity was also performed naked.

Now.... none of what I'm about to say happened (to my knowledge) at my school while I was there, or (again to my knowledge) before or since my time there; but I know for certain that other schools with similar practices had experienced offences such as sexual assaults (typically by one or more powerful boys against a single weaker boy) in the showers, inappropriate touching in the swimming pools, and inappropriate behaviour by certain staff members towards boys in the pool or gym.

I can say that as a young (10-year-old) boy who'd never before been exposed to such practices, the concept of group showers and naked swimming/gym most certainly made me uncomfortable. But I suspect that perhaps two generations previous to mine, it was viewed as entirely normal.

As you say, things that are viewed as cultural norms at any given point in time, by any given group of people, shift over time. And it's a continuum: it's not a series of large step-changes. A devout Muslim woman would not be allowed to see another woman's genitals, and she would be outraged at the very thought. But a 20-year-old female college student in San Diego would likely see things very differently.

But yano..... certain constituencies prefer to polarise these sorts of issues, and they also prefer to try to posit domesday scenarios of disgusting offending as somehow an inevitability. And there's really no arguing with that sort of approach, I guess......
 
Aber said:
No, but you seemed to be making incorrect assumptions about the current state of universities in regards to the topic of the thread.
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I’m not into anti intellectual conspiracies about universities that do not even vaguely resemble the ideals of the Liberal arts culture they are founded on nor experience. But thanks.
 
Emily's Cat said:
I don't accept your forced redefinition. This isn't a natural shift in language that is happening organically. This is an intentional attempt to make a commonly understood term mean something different - and to also anachronistically revise the prior meaning to be the new one.

I reject it because doing so robs me of the ability to discuss my own life, my experiences, my sex, and my body. It reduces me to an object comprised of a collection of parts and function. It is degrading and dehumanizing.
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Funnily enough, I do not feel that the concept of "transmen are men" (and the associated concept of some men having been assigned female sex at birth) somehow robs me - a cisman - of the ability to discuss my own life, my experiences, my sex, and my body. Nor does it reduce me to an object comprised of a collection of parts and function. Nor is it degrading and dehumanizing.

Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks, I guess......


Oh and as an aside, the word "terrific" (just for example) meant - for several hundreds of years, up until around the 1930s - "inspiring terror", "inducing terror" or "causing terror". That's all it meant for all those hundreds of years. And for anyone who was in any doubt as to its meaning, well... the clue was in the word itself. But guess what? Throughout the 20th Century, the meaning of that word changed. So by 2022, if I told you that the movie I saw yesterday was terrific, you would not deduce that the movie had put me into a state of terror, would you? And nobody except super-pedants obsessed with arcane use of language would ever nowadays use "terrific" to mean "causing/inducing terror". Funny how the meaning of some words can change over time - sometimes in extremely big ways.......
 
LondonJohn said:
Oh and as an aside, the word "terrific" (just for example) meant - for several hundreds of years, up until around the 1930s - "inspiring terror", "inducing terror" or "causing terror". That's all it meant for all those hundreds of years. And for anyone who was in any doubt as to its meaning, well... the clue was in the word itself. But guess what? Throughout the 20th Century, the meaning of that word changed. So by 2022, if I told you that the movie I saw yesterday was terrific, you would not deduce that the movie had put me into a state of terror, would you? And nobody except super-pedants obsessed with arcane use of language would ever nowadays use "terrific" to mean "causing/inducing terror". Funny how the meaning of some words can change over time - sometimes in extremely big ways.......
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Was the meaning of the word "terror" changed as a top down effort at social engineering?
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
I don't think it was ever quiet, was it? The adversaries of the TERF agenda are not shy it.
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Indeed. Likewise, I seem to recall the likes of MLK and John Lewis not being all that genteel when addressing those who did not want black people in the USA to have decent and proportionate civil rights. Strange, huh?
 
shuttlt said:
Was the meaning of the word "terror" changed as a top down effort at social engineering?
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1) There had been a general claim that words with accepted and embedded meanings/definitions cannot (or should not) subsequently change those meanings/definitions in any material way. I was showing how wrong that was.

2) You seem to be somewhat unaware of how we've got to where we are with transgender rights. The only reason why clinicians, together with progressive governments and regulators, are now seeking to grant transgender people rights and protections (including the right of a transman to be considered a man, and vice-versa)... is that a) such people demonstrably exist, b) transgender identity is now - importantly - viewed within the mainstream medical/scientific community to be a valid condition and not an affliction/disorder, and c) such people therefore deserve a proportionate level of rights and protections. Your attempt to paint this as a "top-down effort at social engineering" is to entirely disregard the transgender communities that actually exist. Or do you think they're just "pretending" or something like that?
 
shuttlt said:
Was the meaning of the word "terror" changed as a top down effort at social engineering?
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It has evolved in the academic discussion, as well as usage by politicians, journalists, and the general public. Each meaning working for different pragmatic goals and often at variance. Organically. That is just how language and meaning works.
 
Emily's Cat said:
:mad:

We tried compromise. We already had compromise. This is ridiculous, TomB. You're in here lecturing those of us who have attempted compromise, have attempted reasoned rational discussion, and have tried to have open discourse of the consequences and the impact. We are not the ******* problem. We are NOT the ones screaming "no debate" and harassing people out of jobs and out of social life, threatening them with rape and death, and stopping them from having rallies or events to support their cause.

Right now, I really think that the real problem is that one side refuses to be nice, and the other side - the rational sane side - is fed up to the gills with being told to "be nice" by people who aren't being directly affected.

I'm done with being nice. It's a failed strategy. I can be civil most definitely. But the opportunity for nice is long gone. It was gone when TRAs started showing up to harass and physically attack females marching to raise awareness of VAWG. It was gone when TRAs started getting rape and domestic shelters shut down because anything being single-sex was unacceptable. It was gone when rape victims were told to "reframe their trauma" so that the feelings of male medical examiners weren't hurt by victims who wanted to have a female doctor attend to their intimate exam. It was gone when male prisoners with histories of sex offenses against females started being placed into female prisons on nothing more than magic words. It was gone when lesbians started being told that their single-sex attraction was bigoted and transphobic, and that they need to educate themselves on how to accept penises into their vaginas.

I'm sorry, but compromise is not possible when dealing with religious zealots.
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Heaven help all those "policy-captured" (:rolleyes:) psychiatrists/psychologists*, executive governments**, legislatures**, judiciaries**, regulators**, local authorities**.....

....when they find out that in fact they're tantamount to "religious zealots", that they're "the problem", that they're on the opposite side to the "rational sane side". I mean: surely they'll have no option but to resign en masse, right? ;)


* You know: the people who are actually expert in this area, and who - not incidentally - comprise a healthy proportion of women among their number

** All of whom - not incidentally - comprise a healthy proportion of women among their number
 
shuttlt said:
Personally, I like Rolfe's solution (I hope I am remembering this correctly) that trans-women do not get a right to women's spaces, but an effort is made to be kind and tolerate them so long as they are discrete, are respectful of women's fears, and don't stand with their penises out in front of little girls.

Effectively this was the situation until a few years ago.
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Something like that. Although I think I'd prefer them to be discreet, if they're not going to be discrete that is.

It's the granting of a legal right to any man who says the magic words that's the basic problem. First, that would destroy our ability to police our single-sex spaces against your basic predator. If men aren't allowed there, then the man who is lurking in the hope of finding a suitable victim alone in there is a lot easier to get rid of. If all your basic predator (peeping tom, exhibitionist, rapist, whatever) has to do is say "I'm a woman, you transphobe" - and he will - then we can't keep any of them out.

Second, we have the exhibitionist AGP performer. The selfie-taker, the masturbator in in the Ladies, the guy who gets off on being right there when women are performing their intimate tasks, the tampon fetishist. These guys aren't the same as your basic predator, they identify as trans. They vary in how hard they try to look female, but think Alex Drummond or Jonathan Yaniv much of the time. We don't want them there either.

That starts the whining about "so it's all about how well someone passes?" Yes, to a certain extent it is. But no transwoman who has made a tolerable attempt at it is going to cause any fuss in a Ladies room if he simply goes into a stall, does his business, comes out, washes his hands and leaves. And has the decency to get out immediately if something intimate and feminine starts happening, like someone having to wash out bloodstained underwear or wash out a moon cup or heaven forbid is having a miscarriage.

Also no offering to help a ten-year-old having her first period to insert a tampon - Jonathan Yaniv's fantasy. No offering to watch a baby for a woman who can't get the pram into the stall. No standing watching if a woman in that position decides to use the toilet with the stall door propped open so she can watch her baby the whole time. These (apart from the miscarriage and the unaccompanied tampon-inserting ten-year-old) are common occurrences, and women help women. Women do not want men muscling in to that.

And actually, no attempt to engage in the chit-chat that women engage in in the Ladies. No talking, because we do not want to hear your baritone tones. In and out as quickly and unobtrusively as you reasonably can. Don't assume we don't or won't realise you're male, because we will. That was the deal, and women generally were "kind".

And maybe it could go back to that. But the transactivists don't want that. They want the legal right for any man to be in that intimate space, and behave as he likes short of actually breaking the law. (And if he does break the law, such as by exposing himself, that still isn't a reason to prevent him coming in again tomorrow.) This might be a cake that can't be unbaked. We know too much now about what really motivates many (possibly most) of the men who insist they must use the Ladies, because they've told us by posting it all online.

We need males legally excluded in order to be able to exclude the ones who are undesirable. If that ends up by excluding all but the ones that look like Blaire White (and I understand even he gets what-the-hell looks in real life as opposed to the carefully-curated YouTube appearance) then so be it. Men need to stop being so mean to gender-nonconforming men and accept them in the male spaces where they belong.
 
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SuburbanTurkey said:
Maybe for adults, but as far as I can tell nervousness of teenagers about their bodies (especially in the context of their often vicious peers) is a pretty common experience throughout the ages.

Considering the string of sex abuse scandals over the last few decades involving children, I don't think it's a bad plan to reconfigure assumptions and prioritize individual consent and bodily autonomy, rather than authority figures making assumptions about what is acceptable.
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And after all, who's going to protect teenage boys in the men's communal changing rooms from the occasional (rare) predatory stacked gay gym-bunny who eyes them up as they get naked, and might even try to hit on them? Should all gay men be banned from the men's changing rooms, in order to eliminate the (very slight) possibility of offending behaviour towards naked younger men?
 
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