Cont: Trans women are not women (IX)

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Vixen said:
That is very silly. As you know, the biological sexes, male and female are not polar, but like so many things in nature, are on a continuum. For example, some men are far more masculine than others, with perhaps as much bodily hair as a silverback gorilla and a gravel voice and some women look like a bloke.
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Get on my level.
 
Ziggurat said:
Gender is not assigned at birth. Sex is observed at birth. Any time someone says gender is assigned at birth, it is a guarantee that they are not discussing the issue honestly and factually, they are spouting dogma.


Audiences who watch female sports watch it because they want to see females compete. If they want to watch males compete, they watch male sports. If males start winning female competitions, it's not the end of the world, but it very well may be the end of female sports. Why would audiences want to watch that?

If you don't care about the existence of female sports, that's fine. But just be honest about it.
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Gender is assigned at birth. As an example of a wrongly assigned gender, there is Lady Colin Campbell:

At birth, she had a genital malformation (a fused labia and deformed clitoris). Medical advice at the time was to assign her as a male so that she could live what was deemed a normal life, as what was thought of at that time as "the superior sex".[8] Though her family life was otherwise happy, Ziadie has since spoken and written of the many personal issues she faced being raised as a boy when she is biologically female.[3]
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wiki
 
Rolfe said:
I spent hours travelling to and from my holiday sitting in airports watching people go by. I saw only one person I couldn't sex instantly - then he obligingly removed his baseball cap and sweatshirt, almost removing his t-shirt as well, leaving me in no doubt. If he'd been closer, or not wearing the baseball cap, or (even better) I'd heard his voice, I don't think I'd have been in any doubt in the first place.

Young or old, black or white, bearded or not, tall or short, fat or thin, long or short hair, casual or smart dress, it didn't seem to matter. Everyone was recognisably male or female pretty much instantly apart from that one young man. And he wasn't in doubt for long.

Butch lesbians don't look like men. Effeminate men don't look like women. (There were two butch lesbians ahead of me in one queue for the Ladies - not together. Nobody batted an eyelid, because they're women and we're all used to seeing them as members of our own sex.)

We can easily distinguish men from women without undressing them in almost all cases. The few genuinely androgynous-looking individuals will get the benefit of the doubt so long as they really are unidentifiable as their actual sex at close quarters, and so long as they don't do or say anything inappropriate.

This is a perfectly workable solution and it has worked for a century and more. But the minute you give any man the LEGAL RIGHT to enter women's intimate spaces, all bets are off. We can no longer police these spaces because we have no way to tell whether the man we are confronted by is one of these privileged individuals or not.
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Can I ask a couple of questions?

  • How do you know your assessment of the sex of the person you were looking at is correct?
  • If NONE of those literally thousands of people at the airport were transgender in your view, what is the hysterical panic about their using a Ladies washroom?
 
Vixen said:
Gender is assigned at birth.
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No it isn't. "Gender assigned at birth" is just a synonym for "sex observed at birth" in language that predates the "T" in "LGBT".


As an example of a wrongly assigned gender, there is Lady Colin Campbell:

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This discussion of public policy would be a lot different if it were actually about such cases. But it's not.
 
smartcooky said:
male (adjective): A person who is, or will be, or was at any time in their life, or would have been under normal medical circumstances, biologically and physiologically capable of producing gametes, especially spermatozoa, with which a female may be fertilized or inseminated to produce offspring.

female (adjective): A person who is, or will be, or was at any time in their life, or would have been under normal medical circumstances, biologically and physiologically capable of bearing offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) which can be fertilized by male gametes.
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I think these are perfectly serviceable definitions pretty much of the time. They certainly present a challenge to those who would claim that "the biological sexes…are on a continuum."
 
Vixen said:
Can I ask a couple of questions?

  • How do you know your assessment of the sex of the person you were looking at is correct?
  • If NONE of those literally thousands of people at the airport were transgender in your view, what is the hysterical panic about their using a Ladies washroom?
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I didn't say anything about trans people. I said I could tell male from female. As you can too, and do automatically every day of your life.

As I said, in only one case was I unsure enough even to need a second look. I'm perfectly confident in the accuracy of my assessments. In contrast, how are you at telling whether a man has had his penis removed, or not, just by looking at him clothed? (Hint. "Miss Blaire White" is a fully intact man.)

Our natural ability to distinguish men from women is good enough. If the occasional male manages to fool this ability and never does or says anything to give himself away, we can live with that. What we do not want to live with is seeing an obvious male in our intimate spaces and being unable to challenge him because he could be one of a privileged group who have been given the legal right to be there - or he'll claim to be one of that group and be believed on his say-so because genital inspections are unthinkable and also transphobic.
 
smartcooky said:
Really? This is just nitpicking and it certainly does not advance the debate.

If you look at the definitions posted by Steersman, it makes no mention of the person, it just says what the sex is. A male does not cease to be a male when he loses his virility, and a female does not cease to be a female after she goes through menopause. Queen Victoria, for example, was female, and regarded as such - even thought she is now dead.

I tried to making allowances for things that happen to people both naturally and artificially in the definitions I posted earlier, but I guess it probably is not possible to avoid having some nitpicking smartass come up with whataboutisms and edge cases.

But if you insist, let's modify Steerman's posted definitions, slightly to apply to humans and account for the whatboutism...


male (adjective): A person who is, or will be, or was at any time in their life, or would have been under normal medical circumstances, biologically and physiologically capable of producing gametes, especially spermatozoa, with which a female may be fertilized or inseminated to produce offspring.

female (adjective): A person who is, or will be, or was at any time in their life, or would have been under normal medical circumstances, biologically and physiologically capable of bearing offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) which can be fertilized by male gametes.
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Another way to say it that I've seen is, "a person who is on the developmental track that includes production of spermatozoa. . . ." There are two tracks, male and female.

A developmental track extends throughout a person's lifetime, and the actual production of gametes may or may not be present at any particular time.
 
d4m10n said:
Came across an instructional illustration today.

View attachment 47087

It doesn't exactly tell us what "gender" means, except when paired with another term. Still, might be useful for anyone new to the thread.
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I wish trans-activists would pay more respect to the "gender attribution" apex. Doesn't matter how much you want me to perceive you as feminine, if I perceive you as masculine, what are you going to do? Brain-wash me?
 
theprestige said:
I wish trans-activists would pay more respect to the "gender attribution" apex. Doesn't matter how much you want me to perceive you as feminine, if I perceive you as masculine, what are you going to do? Brain-wash me?
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Yes, absolutely.... they are environmentalists in the sense they think that there is no innate human nature, no innate masculine nature and no innate feminine nature. They think the reason you don't think chicks with dicks are women is because of bigoted social programming that they can replace with progressive social programming. This is the theory advertising and politics is based on, that you can nudge and suggest people into wanting to smoke, not wanting to smoke, whatever.... This is the same project to remake man as you had with eugenics, just moved into sociology and psychology because eugenics ate too much bad PR.
 
Vixen said:
Gender is assigned at birth. As an example of a wrongly assigned gender, there is Lady Colin Campbell:

wiki
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Sex is observed at birth, to an accuracy rate of about 99.92%, by looking at the infant's genitals.

Very occasionally an infant is born in which the genitals are ambiguous or misleading. Usually, as in the case of Caster Semenya, the problem is that a male infant has genitalia that look superficially female. Most mistakes are that way round. In the past, and even today in deprived societies (such as black South Africa), an infant was/is brought up as the wrong sex because of this. This outdated practice of looking at ambiguous genitalia and taking a guess became known as "assigned at birth" among people with anomalies of the genital system that caused such mistakes.

Modern medicine can virtually eliminate this by karyotyping, hormone analysis and other investigations, so that even for infants with these anomalies "assigned at birth" should be a thing of the past. It's always possible to figure out which sex someone is by doing the right tests.

Trans activists have appropriated the "assigned at birth" terminology for their own purposes. 100% of trans people, to a close approximation, are genetically and phenotypically normal members of their own sex, and there was no assigining going on at all when they were born (or more likely, when their mother had her ultrasound scan). Their sex was correctly observed.
 
Rolfe said:
Our natural ability to distinguish men from women is good enough.
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Indeed, the ability to determine the sex of other individuals is part of the natural order of things in of animals with binary sexes. Its part of the survival instinct.

Rolfe said:
If the occasional male manages to fool this ability and never does or says anything to give himself away, we can live with that.
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Correct. Its just that some posters here do not understand (or are deliberately ignoring the fact) that the debate is not about transwomen who pass for women, its about those who do not, but they will keep going back to what they wan't to argue about because they mistakenly think their position gives them the high-ground.

Rolfe said:
What we do not want to live with is seeing an obvious male in our intimate spaces and being unable to challenge him because he could be one of a privileged group who have been given the legal right to be there - or he'll claim to be one of that group and be believed on his say-so because genital inspections are unthinkable and also transphobic.
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Agree. The real danger here is that, if this situation of people who look like men being allowed to walk into women-only spaces becomes normalized and unquestioned, it won't be long before rapists, ones who have no transgender feelings at all, catch on that they can use "self-ID as a women" as a subterfuge to gain access to a space when a woman might be at her most vulnerable.
 
There really are very few transwomen who pass as women (up close and in person), other than those poor boys who were put on puberty blockers then castrated without going through puberty. Even Blaire White says he quite often gets "double-take" looks from both men and women.

However, if the facsimile is reasonable, and the person does or says nothing inappropriate while in the Ladies' room, most woman are going to let that slide. Men who transitioned back in the 1980s and 1990s were actually trained in how to do this (I know a couple and they described the therapy to me), and warned that if a woman seemed to be uncomfortable in their presence they should leave immediately. (This is still problematic - this decision to sanction these men to enter women's intimate spaces was made by male psychologists and women weren't consulted - but at least there was an attempt to address the issues.)

There is a world of difference between "Jane" who is obviously doing his level best with a poor starting hand and who displays no masculine mannerisms while getting in and out as unobtrusively as possible, and "Jessica" - well, we all know about Mr Wax-my balls, don't we. Jane has turned out to be the thin end of the wedge, and the rest of the wedge is men with beards and masculine mannerisms and sometimes even dressed in typical men's clothing insisting that they are women and have every right to be there.

Now we are in a situation where the only way to save women's intimate spaces is to make it clear that no male at all is permitted in there. If anyone fancies his chances then he risks being challenged and asked to leave, and women may issue such challenges without fear of being charged with a hate crime. This may disadvantage the old-school transsexuals with the 20th century psychotherapy training, but sorry "ladies", the comfort and safety of half the human race is more important than the risk that you may be embarrassed.
 
Oh heck, there are a number of publications giving the error rate of eyeballing the infant as about 0.08%. I don't bookmark everything I see on Twitter. Someone took me to task last month because they had a paper saying it was 0.078% or something like that, so I had over-estimated.
 
Rolfe said:
Now we are in a situation where the only way to save women's intimate spaces is to make it clear that no male at all is permitted in there. If anyone fancies his chances then he risks being challenged and asked to leave, and women may issue such challenges without fear of being charged with a hate crime. This may disadvantage the old-school transsexuals with the 20th century psychotherapy training, but sorry "ladies", the comfort and safety of half the human race is more important than the risk that you may be embarrassed.
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Both of my daughters carry pepper spray* and an aerosol can of dry hairspray, although only one one of them has used it when a shady looking man came into the public toilets in Nelson.

*pepper spray can't be purchased in NZ and it is illegal to carry, so I made it for them, using cayenne pepper, ethanol and a small amount of indelible ink to make sure the predator is distinctively marked.
 
I think in practice Blaire White would be fine (he has exaggeratedly feminine mannerisms as well as expert facial surgery) as would Jazz Jennings and Jackie Green and the like. Chances of any of them being challenged, essentially zero. The old-school transsexuals would be on a stickier wicket, potentially, but behaviour counts for so much. A male, even if fairly obviously so, who appears to have tried his best to present as female and simply goes in and comes out without trying to "own" the place or set up a confrontation with a woman is unlikely to suffer many challenges. If challenged, he should simply apologise and leave. Also, if there is a gender neutral facility available, he should use it. I don't think your daughters would use a pepper spray in that situation.

The man who is there to impose his masculinity on women, to get his jollies by making women uncomfortable, to assert his right of ownership of the space, is the one we want to be able to exclude. By pepper spray if necessary. And without fear of being branded transphobic and the predatory man coddled like a frightened infant.
 
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