Cont: Trans women are not women (IX)

[Rolfe]

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.

She has some sort of DSD. The story as told suggests that when she was born she was actually recognised as being a girl, but someone thought it would be a good idea to let her be a boy (for all the advantages that would confer) because of her malformed genitals. It has seriously disturbing parallels to what that bastard Money did to the Reimer twins.

That's unusual. The more usual case is that a boy is misidentified as being a girl and brought up accordingly. Cases in point, Erik Schinneger and Caster Semenya.

I gather that Erik Schinneger accepts the label of being "trans", because he did transition from living as a woman to living as a man. But like her ladyship, what he did was correct a mistake and shift to living as the sex he always was.

In terms of actual trans-identification, that is moving to be seen as the sex you aren't, it seems that people with DSDs don't do this any more frequently than people without. It also seems likely that their motivations are different. The psychological problems that often seem to affect people with DSDs who have been insentitively treated as children could well be a significant factor in a later decision to transition.

 

[theprestige]

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 ...

Wait wait wait.

If I understand you right, you're basically in agreement that we need some structure-absent-function criteria for segregating sports. You just don't think we should use the terms "male" and "female" for the two categories, because those terms refer to function?

ETA:

If that's the case, then here's the general state of play in this thread, as of about a month ago.

There's broad agreement that gender is a social construct, and to the extent that it is divorced from sex* it is also essentially meaningless.

There's broad agreement to using the terms "man" and woman" to refer to the two dominant social constructs when necessary. There also seems to be tacit agreement among the trans-exclusionists (sorry!) to read "man" and "woman" as synonymous with "male" and "female"* in contexts where the meaning is clear. "Women's sports" for example.

There's broad agreement that sex segregation should happen based on a structure-absent-function definition This definition is rooted in the binary development pathways of sex in mammals - specifically in humans.

There's broad agreement to use the terms "male" and "female" as a shorthand the technical details of the biological structures and their genetic origins. These terms are rooted in longstanding social and medical conventions in English, as terms denoting the generally obvious structural distinctions between men and women, without getting into the underlying biology or genetics, or even inquiring into functional concerns. These conventions are well attested to in various dictionaries, which describe language use, and in biology literature, which gives us many examples of accredited biologists using the terms in a structural context.

---

It seems you might quibble with the exact biological criteria for your preferred structure-absent-function definition of the sexes, but what you absolutely object to is the use of the terms "male" and "female" for that structure-absent-function definition.

Have I finally got it right?

 

[Rolfe]

Wait wait wait again.

Does Steersman actually think that "RONG" is the way the word is spelled, or is this another affectation? He's done it often enough now that it doesn't appear to be a simple typo.

 

[d4m10n]

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

She was born female; it was a terrible mistake for her to be assigned male at birth and a cruel injustice that she was forced to undergo cross-sex hormones at puberty.

 

[theprestige]

If it were as simple as saying something like "The men's 100m world record is 9.58s while the women's 100m world record is 10.49s, and on this basis we are banning transwomen from competing in elite women's 100m events", it would have been done by now.

No it wouldn't. <perfectly cromulent developments snipped for a slightly narrower focus>

With respect to Rolfe, I think another excellent answer to this question is: It has been done. That's what men's and women's divisions in sports actually are. It hasn't been framed as a ban, because quite frankly the need for the division is obvious. And the blatant unfairness and unsafety-ness of letting men compete with women is obvious. Only a scumbag male chess master would apply to compete in a women's division chess tournament. Only a scumbag male tennis pro would try to enter into a women's league rather than languish at 301st rank among the men. Up until very recently, the obvious scumbaggery of such ideas was more than ban enough.

This "we shouldn't have to spell this out" loophole is exactly the loophole scumbags like Lia Thomas and other LGBTQ+ carpetbaggers are shoving their penises through. I believe the goal of trans-activists is to normalize this state of affairs, and make it too politically costly to institute explicit bans, until it is too late for most leagues to acknowledge the error of their ways and take steps to correct course.

 

[Rolfe]

It's interesting that when the IOC was conducting SRY gene tests on female athletes they weren't even thinking about the trans issue. They were thinking about countries entering male athletes who might pass as female with a bit of coaching and a bit of luck, so as to scoop up medals.

They didn't find any cases of that, which is why they decided the cost of the testing wasn't worth it. What they did find, I suspect, was DSD cases, but since these people weren't deliberately trying to cheat (or at least couldn't be proved to be deliberately trying to cheat), but they decided to leave that hot potato alone. Now that we've seen Caster Semenya and other similar cases emerge following the discontinuing of that testing, and there is a suspicion that rather than coaching normal males countries are seeking out boys with 5ARD and other similar conditions to win those medals, there are calls to reinstate it.

This is all happening at the same time as the trans nonsense, and in context it would now appear that nobody needs to coach a man to pretend to be a woman, or to scour the countryside for 5ARD boys registered as female at birth, all they have to do is to persuade a couple of their slightly less-than-top-rank male athletes to transition and that's the job done.

 

[shuttlt]

With respect to Rolfe, I think another excellent answer to this question is: It has been done. That's what men's and women's divisions in sports actually are. It hasn't been framed as a ban, because quite frankly the need for the division is obvious. And the blatant unfairness and unsafety-ness of letting men compete with women is obvious. Only a scumbag male chess master would apply to compete in a women's division chess tournament. Only a scumbag male tennis pro would try to enter into a women's league rather than languish at 301st rank among the men. Up until very recently, the obvious scumbaggery of such ideas was more than ban enough.

This is one of the fundamental issues with the progressive project to free people from social taboos and traditional social restrictions. Because those things were unwritten, they could be loosely enforced in the way Rolfe describe with bathrooms. Having swept that away, we are now left having to come up with tight legal definitions for things that worked fine as loose concepts for thousands of years. We now have to have lawyers, and bureaucrats and police and auditors and so on managing something that previously managed itself. #winning. It leads to a micromanaged world where the government has to become super interested in which bathrooms people are using, and who is on the netball team having created a chaotic muddle that can no longer be managed without billions of dollars of funding.

 

[Vixen]

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.



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.



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.



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

What I would say to this is that this narrative is by Lady Colin Campbell's own account. She says when she was twelve, a boy told her to 'stop being so girlish' and that is when she began to have doubts about her sex. She went to a psychiatrist aged 14 (she relates) who had her hospitalised and pumped full of male hormones and insulin treatment.

Her husband - from whom she takes her title, Lord Colin Campbell, was 69 and she 27, when they married so it is all very strange anyway. He didn't think she was female, despite her 'corrective surgery'.

Who knows what her medical records state? In the meantime we just have to take her word for it.

 

[Vixen]

With respect to Rolfe, I think another excellent answer to this question is: It has been done. That's what men's and women's divisions in sports actually are. It hasn't been framed as a ban, because quite frankly the need for the division is obvious. And the blatant unfairness and unsafety-ness of letting men compete with women is obvious. Only a scumbag male chess master would apply to compete in a women's division chess tournament. Only a scumbag male tennis pro would try to enter into a women's league rather than languish at 301st rank among the men. Up until very recently, the obvious scumbaggery of such ideas was more than ban enough.

This "we shouldn't have to spell this out" loophole is exactly the loophole scumbags like Lia Thomas and other LGBTQ+ carpetbaggers are shoving their penises through. I believe the goal of trans-activists is to normalize this state of affairs, and make it too politically costly to institute explicit bans, until it is too late for most leagues to acknowledge the error of their ways and take steps to correct course.

What has chess got to do with it? A Russian grandmaster sued the Netflix producers of that chess film 'Queen's Gambit' because it claimed that no woman had ever been a chess champion and this woman had beaten the guys on several occasions.

 

[Ziggurat]

What I would say to this is that this narrative is by Lady Colin Campbell's own account.

That's the only account we have. So either we accept it, or we reject it and, with no alternative account, we just ignore her completely.

In neither case is her example useful for addressing the current transgender debate.

 

[Vixen]

That's the only account we have. So either we accept it, or we reject it and, with no alternative account, we just ignore her completely.

In neither case is her example useful for addressing the current transgender debate.

I believe Lady Colin Campbell is a classic transgender. You can't disregard her just because it doesn't fit your narrative of who should be barred from the Ladies Room.

 

[Matthew Best]

I believe Lady Colin Campbell is a classic transgender.

You cannot be serious. You can't call her transgender just because she has a boy's name. There's more to it than that.

(Just seeing if this kind of thing works for me as well as it does for Vixen.)

 

[theprestige]

What has chess got to do with it? A Russian grandmaster sued the Netflix producers of that chess film 'Queen's Gambit' because it claimed that no woman had ever been a chess champion and this woman had beaten the guys on several occasions.

It turns out that chess is a competitive activity where we observe a difference in performance between the two sexes. For whatever reason, women play chess at a consistently lower level than men. As a result, there is a separate grandmaster category for women. This is one of many examples of a socially-enforced de facto ban on men competing with women. It also rebuts LJ's claim that no such banning has yet taken place.

 

[theprestige]

I believe Lady Colin Campbell is a classic transgender. You can't disregard her just because it doesn't fit your narrative of who should be barred from the Ladies Room.

The discussion of public policy for the Ladies' Room would be a lot different if it were actually about people in Lady Campbell's situation. But it isn't.

 

[Vixen]

You cannot be serious. You can't call her transgender just because she has a boy's name. There's more to it than that.

(Just seeing if this kind of thing works for me as well as it does for Vixen.)

Her name is 'Georgia' (born George). The name Lady Colin Campbell comes from her husband. It's an affectation, rather like Princess Michael of Kent.

 

[Vixen]

The discussion of public policy for the Ladies' Room would be a lot different if it were actually about people in Lady Campbell's situation. But it isn't.

So you agree that men changing sex to female who have gone through 'corrective surgery' are rightfully female, if not by substance, at least by style?

 

[Ziggurat]

I believe Lady Colin Campbell is a classic transgender.

Unless she's lying, then she obviously isn't.

And if she is lying, then we have no idea what the truth is, and her case isn't useful for consideration.

You can't disregard her just because it doesn't fit your narrative of who should be barred from the Ladies Room.

You can't just cram her into a conversation when you can't even make a coherent point about her.

 

[Ziggurat]

So you agree that men changing sex to female

Nobody can actually change sex. "Sex change" surgery doesn't actually change sex. It changes cosmetic sexual characteristics, but according to what Campbell claims about herself, she didn't go through "sex change" surgery. She never had a penis or testicles to remove, and was never actually a man. You have never presented any argument that we should disbelieve her account of her own story.

 

[Vixen]

It turns out that chess is a competitive activity where we observe a difference in performance between the two sexes. For whatever reason, women play chess at a consistently lower level than men. As a result, there is a separate grandmaster category for women. This is one of many examples of a socially-enforced de facto ban on men competing with women. It also rebuts LJ's claim that no such banning has yet taken place.

That difference in performance will be 100% to do with social reasons (nurture). Statistics in the UK show that girls get consistently higher grades than boys in exams, so you can't claim lesser intelligence.

 

[Vixen]

Nobody can actually change sex. "Sex change" surgery doesn't actually change sex. It changes cosmetic sexual characteristics, but according to what Campbell claims about herself, she didn't go through "sex change" surgery. She never had a penis or testicles to remove, and was never actually a man. You have never presented any argument that we should disbelieve her account of her own story.

Why on earth would a psychiatrist pump her full of male hormones at age 14?