Cont: Trans women are not women (IX)

[Rolfe]

That graph doesn't have an x-axis. It's made-up nonsense.

 

[stanfr]

Utterly wrong. One cannot change sex or develop into another sex.

You are missing my point. Here is my point:

Birth ID

Do you think such an article would be written about people born with 11 toes as opposed to 10?
Then why is number of appendages equivalent to sex?

 

[Steersman]

I am asserting that in a career spanning over forty years I never found an animal I couldn't tell which sex it was. Easily and almost instantly.

I'm asserting that telling the exact age of the animal is impossible.

Not really disputing that. It was your assertion that "sex is determined at conception and immutable".

Gender is one of three things. (1) A "polite" synonym for sex. Which we don't really need in this thread. Or (2) a grammatical term describing how nouns function within sentences. Or (3) a description of something that really boils down to "personality".

Glad we agree on something, item 3 in particular ...

Though the issue in that case is to what extent those personalities are determined or heavily influenced by biological factors that produce different averages by "sex".

If that is the case - as large amounts of evidence seems to support - then gender hardly qualifies as "nonsense" ... Q.E.D.

 

[theprestige]

Putting aside for the moment that date of birth is a lot more easily determined than sex

I assume you mean that it's easier for the physician attending a birth to remember the date than it is for them to check whether the newborn child has a wang or not.

let a lone gender id

What, in your opinion, makes gender ID difficult to determine?

What indicators do you look for, to make certain you have properly determined someone's gender identity? Or your own, for that matter?

 

[theprestige]

You are missing my point. Here is my point:

Birth ID

Your point is entirely irrelevant to this thread.

This conversation - indeed, the entire trans rights controversy - would be a lot different, and probably a lot simpler, if it were actually about edge cases in disorders of sex development. But it's not.

 

[Steersman]

That graph doesn't have an x-axis. It's made-up nonsense.

Of course it has an x-axis. You're just not paying attention, or you refuse to look at the evidence.

For example, look at this graph for "agreeableness":




As I - and others have argued - "agreeableness" is just one axis on a "multi-dimensional gender spectrum":

https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/i/64264079/rationalized-gender

But the foregoing emphasizes that anyone can be more masculine on some traits, on some axes of that multi-dimensional gender spectrum, while being more feminine on other traits. For example, a person, of either sex, who is very agreeable and 6 ft. 1 in. tall (185. cm) is therefore hyper-feminine AND hyper-masculine, although on entirely different axes. So a great deal of justification to argue that gender is in fact a spectrum, but it’s a seriously problematic misperception to suggest that it’s only one-dimensional. Quite an illuminating article - Gender Similarities and Differences - by Janet Hyde on that perspective:

Moreover, this difference or distance is along a dimension in multivariate space that is a linear combination of the original variables, but this dimension is uninterpretable. What does it mean to say that there are large differences in personality, lumping together distinct aspects such as emotional stability, dominance, and vigilance? Certainly contemporary personality theorists do not argue that there is a single dimension to personality.

A great many sources and credible researchers - Malone & Hyde in particular - endorse the view that gender is more or less synonymous with personalities and personality types. However, even limiting gender to what are called The Big Five personality traits means at least 5 dimensions to gender. But one might reasonably argue that any trait that shows some differences - on average - between males and females - like heights for example - also constitutes another entirely different dimension, another axis in that multi-dimensional gender spectrum.

The Fourth Wave Now article has mashed a whole bunch of those axes into one, but the principle is still the same.

 

[Rolfe]

Percentage of newborns where the sex cannot be accurately ascertained by simple observation, 0.017%.

Percentage of newborns where the sex cannot be discovered by appropriate investigations, 0.0000%.

 

[GlennB]

Of course it has an x-axis. You're just not paying attention, or you refuse to look at the evidence.

...

You use this expression regularly. Please don't, it just makes you sound self-important, verging on pompous.

 

[Rolfe]

Of course it has an x-axis. You're just not paying attention, or you refuse to look at the evidence.

For example, look at this graph for "agreeableness":

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/vbimghost.php?do=displayimg&imgid=35886http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/imagehosting/thum_771276328fbd909088.jpg

As I - and others have argued - "agreeableness" is just one axis on a "multi-dimensional gender spectrum":

https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/i/64264079/rationalized-gender

The Fourth Wave Now article has mashed a whole bunch of those axes into one, but the principle is still the same.

It's arbitrary and about as scientific as you'd expect. "Agreeableness." God give me strength.

There are more carefully-constructed charts like that where "mashing" is not a feature and they have some interesting features, but that pink-and-blue symmetry is a fantasy.

 

[lionking]

You are missing my point. Here is my point:

Birth ID

Do you think such an article would be written about people born with 11 toes as opposed to 10?
Then why is number of appendages equivalent to sex?

Again, the vanishingly minute number of transsexual conditions has been discussed here. This has nothing to do with your argument that sex can change or “develop”.

 

[Rolfe]

Only if someone thinks that Caster Semenya was once female and "developed" into a male, which would be quite sad and indicative of a complete lack of understanding.

 

[stanfr]

If gender has a biological basis, that throws a monkey wrench into the justification for self ID.

No, self-ID is intended tomato things easier for people, kind of like mail-in voting.
Do you believe there is no biological basis for gender?

 

[Steersman]

You use this expression regularly. Please don't, it just makes you sound self-important, verging on pompous.

And if it's true? As seems the case ...

None so blind and all that ...

 

[Steersman]

It's arbitrary and about as scientific as you'd expect. "Agreeableness." God give me strength.

There are more carefully-constructed charts like that where "mashing" is not a feature and they have some interesting features, but that pink-and-blue symmetry is a fantasy.

You bother to read any part of that 4th Wave article? Or the Hyde article?

https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2014-hyde.pdf

Kinda think you have your head in the sand ...

 

[GlennB]

And if it's true? As seems the case ...

My analysis was correct.

 

[Rolfe]

No, self-ID is intended tomato things easier for people, kind of like mail-in voting.
Do you believe there is no biological basis for gender?

That's not the point. You said it was more difficult to tell an animal's SEX than the date it was born.

This is such complete and utter nonsense that I hardly know how to process it.

 

[theprestige]

That's not the point. You said it was more difficult to tell an animal's SEX than the date it was born.

This is such complete and utter nonsense that I hardly know how to process it.

The way I process it is, he's saying the physician attending the birth can more easily know what day it is than what the sex of the newborn is.

Personally, I'd have to check for both. I think he also vastly overestimates the difficulty of determining someone's sex at birth. Yes, there are a few rare edge cases where figuring out a newborn's sex is somewhat more difficult than looking at a calendar, but as has been pointed out repeatedly, the trans-rights conversation isn't actually about those cases.

 

[Rolfe]

Putting aside for the moment that date of birth is a lot more easily determined than sex let a lone gender id...I agree that there can be potential downsides. My position is that we should be careful to support blanket discrimination against a group based on fear of those downsides. <... snip pointless analogy ...>

This is where this nonsense started. This was a reply to Emily's Cat asking how much damage to women was acceptable to coddle the feelings of men.

We weren't talking about whether it's easier to eyeball the neonate and see whether there's a cock and balls there, or to look at the calendar for the date. We were talking about whether men should be allowed to self-ID themselves into women's intimate spaces, to keep the men happy, and how much unhappiness caused to women was a reasonable trade-off for this male happiness.

And suddenly it's easier to tell the exact birth date of someone wanting to buy a pint of beer or have a tattoo done or only pay half fare on the bus than it is to tell whether they're male or female.

No, sorry, run that past me again.

 

[stanfr]

Only if someone thinks that Caster Semenya was once female and "developed" into a male, which would be quite sad and indicative of a complete lack of understanding.

Caster Semenya is an interesting example...I tend to agree with the conclusions in the NYT article about her:

times

Presumably you think she should not be allowed to compete as a woman?

 

[stanfr]

That's not the point. You said it was more difficult to tell an animal's SEX than the date it was born.

This is such complete and utter nonsense that I hardly know how to process it.

It apparently was for Caster Semenya, according to you.