Cont: Trans women are not women (IX)

[Rolfe]

If 'boy' still appears on Lady Colin Campbell's birth certificate, would you be clutching your pearls and going into a faint if she turned up using the Ladies 'rest room'?

How do you perceive Lady Colin Campbell?

Oh, come on. She's a woman. She's obviously a woman. The fact that she was wrongly labelled as a boy when she was born is irrelevant.

Just as it should be irrelevant that Caster Semenya was wrongly labelled as a girl when he was born.

ETA: I just looked her "ladyship" up. She had her birth certificate changed to record her actual sex.

 

[Rolfe]

From what I can see, the aim of a transgender is not to make women feel uncomfortable.

Take one example, Quentin Crisp. He was notoriously anti-gay liberation and thought homosexuality was an abomination. This, despite having worked as a rent boy for homosexual clients during his youth. In his memoirs he believes he was actually transgender, not gay as is the general assumption. He was outrageously camp but always obviously male. I don't think he was out to 'invade women's spaces'.

Where do we even start with this? The aim of that section of transganderism that is dominated by narcissistic autogynaephilic men is most certainly to make women uncomfortable. They get off on it.

Quentin Crisp was not an autogynaephilic man. If he had transitioned (which he didn't, so this is irrelevant), he'd have been HSTS, the same as Blaire White. Blaire White isn't trying to make women uncomfortable either, because - Blaire White is HSTS.

This entire ****-show is being driven by and operated for the benefot of aggressive AGP men, and if they didn't exist we'd be having a whole other conversation.

 

[shuttlt]

Oh, come on. She's a woman. She's obviously a woman. The fact that she was wrongly labelled as a boy when she was born is irrelevant.

Just as it should be irrelevant that Caster Semenya was wrongly labelled as a girl when he was born.

The weird thing here is the apparent failure to understand the concept of "woman" that pertained from pre-history up until single digit years ago. If some of the posters here are 14, I can maybe understand them having grown up with this and not understanding what went before.

 

[Rolfe]

Why is it so incredibly important to ensure that only someone with 100% female karyode gets to use the Ladies loo at John Lewis or Victoria Station?

Sigh. Do you have reading comprehension issues? Not only has nobody ever claimed that "only someone with 100% female karyo[type]" gets to use female intimate spaces, we've already spoken about people like Jackie Green and Blaire White. (We also have at no point suggested that women with CAIS or Swyer's syndrome be excluded by some magic DNA reader at the door.)

What is important is that MALE people do not have the LEGAL RIGHT to use these spaces. That way an obviously male person who is behaving inappropriately in such a space can be challenged and removed, without fear of the challenging woman being branded a transphobe and charged with a hate crime.

Jackie Green won't even be noticed. He never went through male puberty, poor lad. Blaire White probably won't be noticed, but even if someone did do a double-take, there's no way he'd be challenged, not with these exaggeratedly feminine mannersms and the absence of any male-typical behavour. The old-school transsexual who is doing his best to pass as a woman and who simply goes in and comes out again in as unobtrusive a manner as possible is unlikely to be challenged, and if he is, all he has to do is apologise and leave at once.

All that is fine. What is not fine is what's going on at the moment, where AGP men take delight in swanning into our intimate spaces and getting off on the discomfort of the women who are unable to object because they know they'll simply be accused of transphobia if they do.

 

[Rolfe]

Rolfe reckons she can spot a transgender at ten paces and have her pepper spray ready.

I can tell a man from a woman at ten paces. So can you. You do it every day of your life.

 

[shuttlt]

We keep coming back to this assumption that there are a perfect set of definitions of "man" and "woman" that include everybody we want to include and exclude everybody we want to exclude and that some kind of hard set of explicit rules can govern access to toilets based on these definitions. It's like we are trying to programme a computer.

Rolfe's system pretty much worked, until the current political push undermined it. Sure, it created occasional embarrassment, but there is no perfect system out there that inconveniences nobody and makes nobody feel threatened. It's one of the classic criticisms of progressivism that, by undermining the taboos and social enforcement that allow informal systems like Rolfe's to function, you inevitable create a problem that the government has to step in and police. Liberation movements inevitably lead to centralisation of state power and ever more intrusion and control over people's lives.

This reminds me of a criticism from years ago that consent laws, and explicit positive consent for each sexual action was as if one was trying to design the system for robots. It's like the old saying about social contract theory being the "views of childless men who have forgotten their own childhood".

 

[theprestige]

Yup. Though it's really not a case of just me - all by my little own lonesome - saying that.

<further off topic rambling better suited for the DSD thread snipped>

But while you're here, can you explain how the definition you have in mind/are arguing for solves any problems with trans ID in public policy?

For example, how would you say your preferred definition helps us better answer the question of whether men in prison should be housed in women's prisons if they request it?

 

[Rolfe]

We keep coming back to this assumption that there are a perfect set of definitions of "man" and "woman" that include everybody we want to include and exclude everybody we want to exclude and that some kind of hard set of explicit rules can govern access to toilets based on these definitions. It's like we are trying to programme a computer.

Rolfe's system pretty much worked, until the current political push undermined it. Sure, it created occasional embarrassment, but there is no perfect system out there that inconveniences nobody and makes nobody feel threatened. It's one of the classic criticisms of progressivism that, by undermining the taboos and social enforcement that allow informal systems like Rolfe's to function, you inevitable create a problem that the government has to step in and police. Liberation movements inevitably lead to centralisation of state power and ever more intrusion and control over people's lives.

This reminds me of a criticism from years ago that consent laws, and explicit positive consent for each sexual action was as if one was trying to design the system for robots. It's like the old saying about social contract theory being the "views of childless men who have forgotten their own childhood".

Even if you could formulate this perfect definition of "man" and "woman", it would fall flat on its face over the rock of "how do you tell?" It's the same problem, essentially, as the ludicrous idea that bathroom access be split by "those who have a penis or a reasonable facsimile thereof" and "those who have a vagina or a reasonable facsimile thereof". How do you tell, looking at someone with all their clothes on? (And that's giving the idea that a phalloplasty or a neo-vagina are "reasonable facsimiles" a free pass, which it doesn't deserve. They're not.)

That distinction would bar Blaire White from the Ladies room (he is a fully intact man) and Buck Angel from the Gents' (she has a vagina and never had a phalloplasty). But hey, they'd both be able to get away with flouting the rules, because we'd have to de-bag the pair of them before we found out.

The same with any "perfect definition". As soon as it starts involving chromosomes or genital configuration, it's unenforceable.

 

[Rolfe]

But while you're here, can you explain how the definition you have in mind/are arguing for solves any problems with trans ID in public policy?

For example, how would you say your preferred definition helps us better answer the question of whether men in prison should be housed in women's prisons if they request it?

Crickets, I predict.

 

[d4m10n]

This has now become the most ridiculous thread on the forum thanks to Steersman.

I forget who it was that claimed women's sports leagues have a duty to prove that transgender women perform at a higher level than cisgender women (either on average, or in the top few percentiles) rather than taking it as a baseline assumption based on well-established discrepancies between males and females, but this thread has been the most ridiculous one ever since then, if not before.

 

[Rolfe]

It was LondonJohn, and I think it was actually in this thread.

 

[shuttlt]

Crickets, I predict.

I counter predict lots of text.

 

[Rolfe]

Yes, and the text will be the equivalent of lots of chirping.

 

[Paul2]

Sorry, this is a load of dingo's kidneys.

You are assuming that the definitions you gave were extensional definitions, which is to say, they list the objects that a term describes, whereas in fact they are intensional definitions - incapable of explanation solely in terms of the set of objects to which they are applicable, i.e. they try to give a sense of what a term means. In effect, your definitions are general, NOT specific and NOT exclusive. A pre-pubescent girl is still a female and so is a post-menopausal woman, even though neither produce gametes.



Exactly... an intensional definition.

Yes. Dictionaries, by the way, may well miss implications and specifics with broad definitions. Think of all the arguments about what an atheist is.

As I said earlier,

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.

 

[Vixen]

Oh, come on. She's a woman. She's obviously a woman. The fact that she was wrongly labelled as a boy when she was born is irrelevant.

Just as it should be irrelevant that Caster Semenya was wrongly labelled as a girl when he was born.

ETA: I just looked her "ladyship" up. She had her birth certificate changed to record her actual sex.

Not so. When her husband Lord Colin Campbell found she had been raised as a boy until age 18, he recoiled from touching her and the marriage ended within 10 months. She had corrective surgery. She had been given male hormone treatment as a child. She became a confirmed female but I doubt she was able to have children.

The point here is that persons self identifying as the opposite sex from what was assigned at birth are not just horrible female-hating bearded ladies who hate women and want to invade their private space.

 

[Rolfe]

But, you know, some of them are. Quite a lot of them are. We need the power to protect our intimate spaces against these people.

 

[Vixen]

I can tell a man from a woman at ten paces. So can you. You do it every day of your life.

Nature or nurture? Psychological experiments show that in our society, the first thing we notice about someone is their sex, closely followed by their race. But wait. The same psychologists also found that for persons who grew up in apartheid South Africa, it was race that was the first thing they identified. This indicates identification of others is based on learned social behaviour. Even they way we walk or stand is socially conditioned to some degree.

 

[shuttlt]

But, you know, some of them are. Quite a lot of them are. We need the power to protect our intimate spaces against these people.

Want. Not need. For the good of progress all this can be taken away from you. If enough social change is thrown at it at the same time, you won't even be able to point to the bit that did the harm or gather the evidence to prove it. If it follows the normal path, in 20 years from now it will all be the new normal, and people will doubt that toilets and changing rooms were in fact any safer, if they were, perhaps it was due to the general decay in social order that happened for no reason, and put the whole thing down to bigotry.

 

[shuttlt]

Nature or nurture? Psychological experiments show that in our society, the first thing we notice about someone is their sex, closely followed by their race. But wait. The same psychologists also found that for persons who grew up in apartheid South Africa, it was race that was the first thing they identified. This indicates identification of others is based on learned social behaviour. Even they way we walk or stand is socially conditioned to some degree.

This proves nothing of the sort. It may prove that social forces have an influence, but has that ever been in dispute?

 

[Ziggurat]

The point here is that persons self identifying as the opposite sex from what was assigned at birth are not just horrible female-hating bearded ladies who hate women and want to invade their private space.

Nobody here thinks that. This is a straw man. And how many times do we need to tell you that disorders of sexual development have basically nothing to do with the transgender debate?