Cont: Trans women are not women (IX)

[Vixen]

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

It indicates social learning otherwise humans the world over would have the same visceral response as to what they recognise first but it seems to be based on the society you have been brought up in. We can readily identify men and women in our society (but how does Rolfe know she is correct, if someone is passing as transgender?). However, were one to go to the Congo or deep China, with everybody wearing loose boiler suits and the same short haircut, you would not so readily 'spot the gender', as it were.

 

[Vixen]

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?

How do you know it is 'a disorder of sexual development'? Lady Colin Campbell was identified as a boy, was brought up as a boy, had hormone treatment as a boy. She decided she was female and felt this strongly, so she had corrective surgery to have this changed. In which way does she not qualify for this topic? Her husband had no doubt he had been tricked into 'marrying a man' and the marriage was over within six months.

To me she comes across as a very witty, bitchy and camp androgynous type, who can pass as female but one is always conscious she is a male playing a female.

 

[Vixen]

Christ in a sidecar; don't think you're paying attention.

I've been arguing from square one that "male" and "female" - particularly the biological definitions for such - are the RONG criteria for qualifying people to play in "women's sports".

A better bet is simply karyotype - no XY need apply. And maybe qualify that further with genitalia.

Straining at the gnat and swallowing the camel whole ...

But why is it necessary? If athletes now have to have the correct karyotype there is going to be a LOT of confusion because you know as well as I do there will be a whole spectrum, and what is the cut off point?

Many athletes look decidedly androgynous and wouldn't fit the usual male/female stereotype. For example, the ultra tall Dutch women who seem to win half the running races.

 

[shuttlt]

It indicates social learning otherwise humans the world over would have the same visceral response as to what they recognise first but it seems to be based on the society you have been brought up in. We can readily identify men and women in our society (but how does Rolfe know she is correct, if someone is passing as transgender?). However, were one to go to the Congo or deep China, with everybody wearing loose boiler suits and the same short haircut, you would not so readily 'spot the gender', as it were.

I don't think there is any argument that if you masked everybody up, stuck them in boiler suits and poked everybody's eyes out it would be much harder to tell what sex people are. Other steps could be taken to mask smell indicators and so on. It is quite possible that in North Korea there are fewer cues to sex than in Scotland. I'm not sure what fundamental claim that anybody is making this refutes. You would be talking about a radical programme of social change to get things to the point where sex became difficult to determine with high accuracy. Is implementing some kind of Handmaids Tale with enforced dress codes and everybody hiding their hair a price worth paying for whatever the imagined benefit is?

 

[shuttlt]

How do you know it is 'a disorder of sexual development'? Lady Colin Campbell was identified as a boy, was brought up as a boy, had hormone treatment as a boy. She decided she was female and felt this strongly, so she had corrective surgery to have this changed. In which way does she not qualify for this topic? Her husband had no doubt he had been tricked into 'marrying a man' and the marriage was over within six months.

To me she comes across as a very witty, bitchy and camp androgynous type, who can pass as female but one is always conscious she is a male playing a female.

She had 'a disorder of sexual development' because she had a disorder that caused her sex organs to fail to develop normally leading to the incorrect identification of her sex. She was female at birth, always was female, and always will be female. A rare mistake was made. She claims she was then forced to have hormones to try and get her to conform to this mistake. It seems rather like the John Money horror show.

 

[Vixen]

No it wouldn't. Don't be naive. Every aspect of society has been captured by the trans lobby, and everyone from professors of medicine to prison governers to sports authorities is far more afraid of being branded "transphobic" than they are concerned about being fair to women. Until very recently all the trans-activists had to say was "you wouldn't want to be seen not to be inclusive, would you?" and men were being admitted to women's prisons even. And medical schools can't even teach students that there are two sexes.

We're seeing the early effects of the women's counter-attack now, but this will obviously take time.

Fair point. However, have you ever stopped to wonder why the NHS (UK national health service) has started using non-specific pronouns? Is it really a hijack by rights activists? But wait! These are medical guys. Perhaps they know something about gender that we don't, hence the - on the face of it - 'very silly' (according to the right wing tabloids) - references to 'people who give birth' or 'chest feeding'.

Maybe the idea that 'man is man and woman is woman and n'e'er the twain shall meet' (like East and West) is not so clear cut as has been previously thought?

 

[Steersman]

But why is it necessary? If athletes now have to have the correct karyotype there is going to be a LOT of confusion because you know as well as I do there will be a whole spectrum, and what is the cut off point?

I doubt there are all that many different karyotypes - maybe a dozen? And seems that 98% of us are either XX or XY which strongly correlate with genitalia. Assign karyotype at birth and do tests later if there are anomalous conditions.

And the benefits of "no XY need apply" for women's sports are that it cuts most transwomen off at the knees right out of the chute. Likewise for lady's loos and the like.

Many athletes look decidedly androgynous and wouldn't fit the usual male/female stereotype. For example, the ultra tall Dutch women who seem to win half the running races.

Don't think its the "stereotype" that is the issue, it's mostly the benefits that follow from a Y chromosome - apart from the downsides of being cannon fodder ...

 

[Vixen]

Yes, it is 100% as simple as that. This was explained to the last time you brought it up - you were wrong then and you are wrong now.

Males outcompete females at at ALL levels of ALL sports in which the physical attributes of the competitor give them an advantage. How do I know this? BECAUSE THEY ALREADY DO!!! Across across the board, at all comparable post-puberty levels, biological males are 25% to 50% stronger, 30% more powerful, 40% heavier, and about 15% faster than biological females. These are facts; they are attributes acquired by biological males as they go through male puberty - this cannot be undoned with any kind of hormone therapy, drug regimens or woo-woo treatments . Puberty cannot be mitigated to any significant degree and it certainly cannot be reversed... period! End of story! Fact!

If you allow transgender women to compete in female sports at lower levels, you eventually WILL have very few cisgender women competing in elite level sports for the simple reason that they will not get advanced to that level, and when that happens, and continues to happen (and it will), women will be discouraged from even participating in sport where that have no chance of winning. You don't just automatically advance to elite level on seniority, you have to be faster, stronger, more powerful that your opponents. Not only do athletes have to meed a minimum standards for selection, they must also place high in the event in question. With the spots available limited to just a couple (in some sports just ONE spot) transgender women (in other other words, men) will dominate, they will eventually fill the top spots, and no real women will get even close to a look in.

Be that as it may there is a (smug-looking) transgender US Golf Player who has currently got through to the Women's Golf finals. She claims that when she was a male her speed (?) was a unit of 15 more powerful than it is now since she became female.

Hmmmm.

 

[Vixen]

I don't think there is any argument that if you masked everybody up, stuck them in boiler suits and poked everybody's eyes out it would be much harder to tell what sex people are. Other steps could be taken to mask smell indicators and so on. It is quite possible that in North Korea there are fewer cues to sex than in Scotland. I'm not sure what fundamental claim that anybody is making this refutes. You would be talking about a radical programme of social change to get things to the point where sex became difficult to determine with high accuracy. Is implementing some kind of Handmaids Tale with enforced dress codes and everybody hiding their hair a price worth paying for whatever the imagined benefit is?

The point I was making is that Rolfe's claim that it is an inherent human capability to immediately ascertain what sex a stranger walking down the street is or at a crowded airport, ain't necessarily so. A large element might be to do with nurture as opposed to nature.

 

[shuttlt]

Fair point. However, have you ever stopped to wonder why the NHS (UK national health service) has started using no-specific pronouns? Is it really a hijack by rights activists? But wait! These are medical guys. Perhaps they know something about gender that we don't, hence the - on the face of it - 'very silly' (according to the right wing tabloids) - references to 'people who give birth' or 'chest feeding'.

Maybe the idea that 'man is man and woman is woman and n'e'er the twain shall meet' (like East and West) is not so clear cut as has been previously thought?

If they have made this incredible discovery, that somehow medical research has uncovered the true definition of the non-medical concept "woman".... they might share the details of the discovery, rather than treating it in the same way they have every other bit of political correctness that they have mindlessly hoovered up and implemented for decades.

 

[lionking]

Fair point. However, have you ever stopped to wonder why the NHS (UK national health service) has started using non-specific pronouns? Is it really a hijack by rights activists? But wait! These are medical guys. Perhaps they know something about gender that we don't, hence the - on the face of it - 'very silly' (according to the right wing tabloids) - references to 'people who give birth' or 'chest feeding'.

Maybe the idea that 'man is man and woman is woman and n'e'er the twain shall meet' (like East and West) is not so clear cut as has been previously thought?

Utter rubbish. They using non-specific (aka incorrect) pronouns because they have caved in to trans activist demands.

 

[shuttlt]

The point I was making is that Rolfe's claim that it is an inherent human capability to immediately ascertain what sex a stranger walking down the street is or at a crowded airport, ain't necessarily so. A large element might be to do with nurture as opposed to nature.

I don't think Rolfe meant to imply that humans have paranormal powers where they could determine somebody's sex while concealed in a box from another room like some million dollar challenge application. There is a tendency on here on the trans rights side to act as if people's sex was terribly ambiguous and difficult to reliably determine. If we have to resort to saying that in cultures where people where burqas you would find it much harder to tell, it kind of reinforces Rolfe's point. Short of putting bags over everybody's heads, or something similarly wild, humans can tell the sex of other humans with pretty high accuracy. Given that I don't think we are going to start putting bags on people's heads, what ever the solutions are need to work in the context of people being able to tell what sex other people are, regardless of their self identification, with pretty high accuracy.

 

[Vixen]

I don't think Rolfe meant to imply that humans have paranormal powers where they could determine somebody's sex while concealed in a box from another room like some million dollar challenge application. There is a tendency on here on the trans rights side to act as if people's sex was terribly ambiguous and difficult to reliably determine. If we have to resort to saying that in cultures where people where burqas you would find it much harder to tell, it kind of reinforces Rolfe's point. Short of putting bags over everybody's heads, or something similarly wild, humans can tell the sex of other humans with pretty high accuracy. Given that I don't think we are going to start putting bags on people's heads, what ever the solutions are need to work in the context of people being able to tell what sex other people are, regardless of their self identification, with pretty high accuracy.

This issue of burkas is a good point. So Rolfe will have assumed that people at Schipol wearing burkas are female. However, walking down the street in London I have passed by someone wearing a burka and the whole shebang from head to toe and had the distinct weird impression it was a man disguising himself.

 

[smartcooky]

So I think we've established that trans women aren't women, because, contrary to popular belief, most women aren't women either.

 

[smartcooky]

Be that as it may there is a (smug-looking) transgender US Golf Player who has currently got through to the Women's Golf finals. She claims that when she was a male her speed (?) was a unit of 15 more powerful than it is now since she became female.

Hmmmm.

Umm, nope. Hailey Davidson is Scottish player, not American, and is not participating in a "final". Davidson is trying earn an LPGA tour card.

Oh, and most importantly.

1. Davidson has undertaken gender reassignment surgery - which is an LPGA requirement for transgender woman to participate in Ladies Golf. You will recall (if you have been paying attention) that the objection is against people who merely self ID as transgender women being allowed to play women sport. Getting your nuts and dick cut off shows considerable commitment to the cause, and tends to weed out those who are only self-IDing in order to cheat.

2. Davidson last played at the age of 22 (and still had a cock and balls) and is now 29, so the loss in swing speed and power is far more likely to be due to age and not playing than anything else. A typical golfer will lose 10-15% of their swing speed between 20 and 30 years of age.

[relevant aside]
Another thing to consider is (and bear with me because this is not only interesting and relevant, but you might learn something) that golf is not all about power, distance and swing speed, its more about accuracy, shot shaping and control, and most ladies players are just as good, if not better than most men in this aspect of the game. If it were all about power and distance, then every player would take their longest club off the tee for any hole that is longer than their driving distance. In fact, the idea is to hit the club that will leave you a known distance from the green - every golfer has a good idea how far they hit each club in their bag with a full swing. Even at my age, I can still hit my driver 230 yards. On a 280 yard Par 4, for example, I would never hit a driver as that would leave me with having to try to play a fiddly, difficult to execute 50 yard low-percentage shot to the green. Now I know that I hit a full gap wedge about 110 yards, so the smart play is to try to end up about 170 yards down the fairway to leave me a full gap wedge to the green. For me, that is a 5-Wood off the tee.

Now I hear you ask, how is all this at all relevant? Well, its because ladies play off the "forward tees" (used to be known as the "Ladies tees"). Course designers place the forward tees so that the ladies' average driving distance and the mens' average driving distance will bring all the tee shots to roughly the same area of the fairway. The upshot of all this is that it is not much of an advantage to a big hitter playing from the forward tee boxes, because they will likely hit too far, and make their second shot more difficult.

 

[d4m10n]

This issue of burkas is a good point.

No, it's a red herring. People who evade our senses of sight (by covering up) and hearing (by remaining silent) aren't easily sexed, but Rolfe's claim wasn't about mind-reading but ordinary physical observation.

It seems rather like the John Money horror show.

Is that the one with all the audience participation?


Sent from my Lampadati Tigon using Tapatalk

 

[Rolfe]

I don't think Rolfe meant to imply that humans have paranormal powers where they could determine somebody's sex while concealed in a box from another room like some million dollar challenge application. There is a tendency on here on the trans rights side to act as if people's sex was terribly ambiguous and difficult to reliably determine. If we have to resort to saying that in cultures where people where burqas you would find it much harder to tell, it kind of reinforces Rolfe's point. Short of putting bags over everybody's heads, or something similarly wild, humans can tell the sex of other humans with pretty high accuracy. Given that I don't think we are going to start putting bags on people's heads, what ever the solutions are need to work in the context of people being able to tell what sex other people are, regardless of their self identification, with pretty high accuracy.

I think studies (which used facial recognition only, eliminating effects of clothes and hair styles) found something like 97-98% accuracy in sex recognition, with women being a percentage point or two better than men at it. Once you allow other cues - even being able to see the shape of the body, never mind allowing for clothes and hairstyle clues - it's going to get even better. (I actually found that the ubiquitous jeans-sweatshirts-and-trainers mob were no harder than anyone else to figure out.)

I certainly didn't claim to be 100% accurate. But neither did I see anyone who appeared either to be deliberately concealing their sex, or to be pretending to be the sex they weren't. (I didn't see anyone in a burqua.)

Obviously if you put someone in an all-enveloping bag and cover their face, it's going to get hard to tell. Obviously if someone has gone to a great deal of trouble to make themselves into a facsimile of the opposite sex, it's going to be hard to tell. Always.

But to drag this back to the point, and consider Blaire White as an example, the people who have gone to all that trouble are not the problem. If I see Blaire White and mis-sex him as female (which is very likely) in a women's intimate space, there is no harm. He isn't bothering me. Even if I do twig that it's all a very good act, it's such a good act that I'm unlikely to be bothered.

The idea that we can't look at a man with a receding hairline, a prominent Adam's apple, a five-o'clock shadow, a baritone voice, large hands and feet, a masculine body shape and a bulge in the front of his trousers and know to 100% certainty that he is male is ludicrous.

 

[Rolfe]

Umm, nope. Hailey Davidson is Scottish player, not American, and is not participating in a "final". Davidson is trying earn an LPGA tour card.

Oh, and most importantly.

1. Davidson has undertaken gender reassignment surgery - which is an LPGA requirement for transgender woman to participate in Ladies Golf. You will recall (if you have been paying attention) that the objection is against people who merely self ID as transgender women being allowed to play women sport. Getting your nuts and dick cut off shows considerable commitment to the cause, and tends to weed out those who are only self-IDing in order to cheat.

2. Davidson last played at the age of 22 (and still had a cock and balls) and is now 29, so the loss in swing speed and power is far more likely to be due to age and not playing than anything else. A typical golfer will lose 10-15% of their swing speed between 20 and 30 years of age.

[relevant aside]
Another thing to consider is (and bear with me because this is not only interesting and relevant, but you might learn something) that golf is not all about power, distance and swing speed, its more about accuracy, shot shaping and control, and most ladies players are just as good, if not better than most men in this aspect of the game. If it were all about power and distance, then every player would take their longest club off the tee for any hole that is longer than their driving distance. In fact, the idea is to hit the club that will leave you a known distance from the green - every golfer has a good idea how far they hit each club in their bag with a full swing. Even at my age, I can still hit my driver 230 yards. On a 280 yard Par 4, for example, I would never hit a driver as that would leave me with having to try to play a fiddly, difficult to execute 50 yard low-percentage shot to the green. Now I know that I hit a full gap wedge about 110 yards, so the smart play is to try to end up about 170 yards down the fairway to leave me a full gap wedge to the green. For me, that is a 5-Wood off the tee.

Now I hear you ask, how is all this at all relevant? Well, its because ladies play off the "forward tees" (used to be known as the "Ladies tees"). Course designers place the forward tees so that the ladies' average driving distance and the mens' average driving distance will bring all the tee shots to roughly the same area of the fairway. The upshot of all this is that it is not much of an advantage to a big hitter playing from the forward tee boxes, because they will likely hit too far, and make their second shot more difficult.

There are similarities between this and the Renée Richards case in tennis. Richards also had his penis and testicles removed. He played in the ladies events, but when he was very much older than the usual age for women tennis players to be at the top of their careers. I think he was in his forties.

Some time later he coached Martina Navratilova, who was world #1 at the time and at the peak of her performance. She said she could barely stand against Richards. She did win the match she played, but only just. She said that if Richards had been in his twenties she'd have had no chance at all.

Bear in mind this is someone with NO testosterone, and who hadn't had any testosterone for years.

Richards himself has come out and said he now believes he should never have been allowed to play in the women's game because his retained advantages from going through male puberty were simply too great. (Even without any testosterone at all, as I said.)

So really, although golf is obvously a different sport. I think the principle of nobody in the women's events who has ever gone through any part of male puberty is a sound one, and shouldn't be compromised to suit individual people or for different sports.

 

[Ziggurat]

How do you know it is 'a disorder of sexual development'? Lady Colin Campbell was brought up as a boy, had hormone treatment as a boy.

I previously knew nothing about her, but I said that because children with ordinary sexual development don't require hormone treatment, which you said she was given as a child. Looking her up on Wikipedia, it says "At birth, she had a genital malformation (a fused labia and deformed clitoris)." Sounds like a disorder of sexual development to me.

She decided she was female and felt this strongly, so she had corrective surgery to have this changed.

No. She didn't decide she was female, she was ALWAYS female. She decided to stop living a lie that she was male when she never was.

In which way does she not qualify for this topic?

She isn't transgender. You can argue that she was transgender, but she detransitioned. And again, she had a disorder of sexual development (deformed genitals). People like that constitute a vanishingly small fraction of the transgender community. They aren't where the actual conflict is.

To me she comes across as a very witty, bitchy and camp androgynous type, who can pass as female but one is always conscious she is a male playing a female.

Well, she isn't a male playing a female. She's a female who was given male hormones while growing up.

 

[Rolfe]

Another thing I wondered about Renée Richards. Wasn't he embarrassed at the time? I don't mean about being the wrong sex for where he was, but being the wrong age?

When I was a teenager the upper age limit for competing in pony gymkhanas was sixteen. I dearly wanted to do this for all of my childhood, but didn't have a pony. I got my pony when I was seventeen. For a few years I simply lied about my age and nobody asked any questions. (The rules laid out the age eligibility, but in fact there was never a point where I had to make a false declaration - the lying was implicit, not explicit.)

I never won anything, or anything much. Me and my pony were in it for the fun, not for the winning. Neither of us was in a position to stand against the super-kids and their super-ponies. But there were times when I found it quite awkward, even though I was passing for sixteen easily enough even when I was twenty.

I was at university. In fact I was at vet college. The other kids in the pony events were talking about taking their O levels. Several times I consciously bit my lip and didn't join in conversations because I knew my conversational level was some way more mature than theirs, even though physically I could pass. The awkwardness of being in the wrong age group intellectually was weird, and something I'll never forget.

I wonder if Renée Richards, aged forty-something, felt as out of place in a pack of women in their early twenties?