Transwomen are not women - X (XY?)

[Rolfe]

But her physique surely gave her an advantage over the average woman of 5'4" with feminine shoulders and less developed quadriceps. The thing is it is not only transgender men who necessarily have a physical advantage in sport. The average male swimmer could never beat an Olympic swimmer such as Sharon Davies.

No average swimmer can beat an Olympic-class swimmer. What is your point, caller?

It has been shown multiple times that if you match élite athletes in a particular sport, men and women, for height, weight and wingspan, then men are still about 10% better than the women. Across the board.

continued from http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=359425

Posted By: jimbob

 

[GlennB]

There are species which mate for life and remain faithful to one partner, too.

I just had to look that up Wolves!! Didn't know that. Termites !!??!!?! How would anybody know?

 

[theprestige]

This is hilarious. Vixen is attempting a reductio ad absurdum based on a complete misunderstanding of the claim. Also, there's no reason to explain how absurd her argument is. That's her point. She knows it's absurd. What she doesn't know is that her absurd argument is based on her misunderstanding the claim she's trying to rebut.

 

[d4m10n]

What makes a person societally male or female is their observable sex.

You may as well drop the adjective if it's not doing anything.

If you're attracted to males, what makes someone male (and potentially attractive) to you is their male sex that you have observed.

Have you ever actually met a trans man? I've known a few, and they all pass for young males. They are "societally male" in the sense that people react to them as if they were male from birth.

A man can cosplay his sense of "womanhood" all he wants, but unless he's passing, he's still societally male because of his observed sex.

This leads me to believe that passing as male or female is the key element which makes someone socially societally male or female.

ETA: Now that I think a bit more about this, I'd rather avoid this novel turn of phrase altogether. One is biologically male or female, but societally we are (mostly) men or women and that carries rather more and different freight than the biology of sex.

 

[theprestige]

You may as well drop the adjective if it's not doing anything.

Good thing it's doing something.

Have you ever actually met a trans man? I've known a few, and they all pass for young males. They are "societally male" in the sense that people react to them as if they were male from birth.

I'm pretty sure I accounted for people who successfully pass. That's part of what the adjective is doing.

This leads me to believe that passing as male or female is the key element which makes someone socially societally male or female.

Sure.

ETA: Now that I think a bit more about this, I'd rather avoid this novel turn of phrase altogether. One is biologically male or female, but societally we are (mostly) men or women and that carries rather more and different freight than the biology of sex.

As a semantic puzzle I find it mildly interesting.

Part of my position on this for a while has been that for the social construct of gender to mean anything at all, it has to mean not (only) how you perceive yourself, but also how others perceive you. A dude can think of himself as a lady all he wants, but in the bedroom his valid lived identity means nothing in the face of how his date thinks of him.

A societal male is someone who is or appears to be a biological male. That's all it means. This is less an effort to connect with Vixen's train of thought, and more just an aside to explore a very minor linguistic folly (gazebo, not error).

 

[ponderingturtle]

I just had to look that up Wolves!! Didn't know that. Termites !!??!!?! How would anybody know?

Angler Fish, the male merges with the female and loses organs and become just a set of testicles for her.

 

[GlennB]

Angler Fish, the male merges with the female and loses organs and become just a set of testicles for her.

Ah yes. Saves a lot of hassle

 

[crazycat]

NM

 

[d4m10n]

Part of my position on this for a while has been that for the social construct of gender to mean anything at all, it has to mean not (only) how you perceive yourself, but also how others perceive you.

This runs up against something I'd call the central tenet of gender ideology, which can be summed up as "someone’s sex or gender is properly understood to be the same as their gender identity." I may well be wrong about this, but I think the idea that "gender is socially constructed" is a line from second wave feminism, and thus holds little sway in the minds of modern intersectional feminists who adhere to the Central Tenet. That said, I think your position is significantly more defensible.

 

[TheGoldcountry]

Angler Fish, the male merges with the female and loses organs and become just a set of testicles for her.

She must have met my wife! [rim shot]

 

[stanfr]

Good thing it's doing something.


I'm pretty sure I accounted for people who successfully pass. That's part of what the adjective is doing.


Sure.


As a semantic puzzle I find it mildly interesting.

Part of my position on this for a while has been that for the social construct of gender to mean anything at all, it has to mean not (only) how you perceive yourself, but also how others perceive you. A dude can think of himself as a lady all he wants, but in the bedroom his valid lived identity means nothing in the face of how his date thinks of him.

A societal male is someone who is or appears to be a biological male. That's all it means. This is less an effort to connect with Vixen's train of thought, and more just an aside to explore a very minor linguistic folly (gazebo, not error).

Indeed. Just look at all the transmen here:

Manly

And yet several posters here claim they can easily pick out the men from the women...with zero failure rate.

 

[Rolfe]

Point to just one person who has claimed zero failure rate in sexing clothed human beings. Nobody has claimed that even under normal circumstances, with no attempt being made to deceive.

(Debag these individuals, and we'd soon see.)

 

[d4m10n]

The Central Tenet of Gender Ideology

This runs up against something I'd call the central tenet of gender ideology, which can be summed up as "someone’s sex or gender is properly understood to be the same as their gender identity."

Okay so I came across this passage which sums up the core of the issue quite nicely:

Martine Rothblatt, a trans woman, lawyer, and tech and pharmaceutical billionaire who would come to public prominence in 2014 when New York Magazine put her on the front cover as ‘The Highest Paid Female CEO in America.’ In 1994, Rothblatt delivered a presentation to the Health Project group entitled ‘Unisexuality: The Wave of the Future,’ the themes of which she reprised in her plenary presentation of ‘The Health Project Report,’ and which laid out the conceptual bones of her 1995 book The Apartheid of Sex, reprinted in 2011 as From Transgender to Transhuman: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Form. In these presentations we can discern the central conceptual plank of the ideology of the present trans rights movement: the claim that sex should properly be conceived as the sex of the mind (or ‘gender identity’), and not the sex of the body, or, as Rothblatt phrases it, “[w]e must finally end the notion that sex is between our legs” and “realize that sex is between our ears.”

Source

I'm taking the trouble to paste this passage in from an awkwardly formatted PDF b/c it's nice to see the central issue summed up succinctly in the words of an early advocate.

 

[theprestige]

Indeed. Just look at all the transmen here:

Manly

And yet several posters here claim they can easily pick out the men from the women...with zero failure rate. : rolleyes :

Once your eyes return to their normal operating positions, would you like to address the points I raised here:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=13906762#post13906762

Since that post was left behind in the thread continuation, I'll repost it here for your convenience:

The whole thing is a sidetrack, really. I'm not here to engage your Devil's advocacy on the ease of observing someone's sex, or the relative significance of edge cases not actually relevant to the questions I have.

The questions I have being these:

1. To what degree should transwomen be entitled to access sex-segregated spaces for women?

2. On on what basis, if any, should such access be granted?

At the start of this thread, the space I mainly had in mind was women's restrooms, and I didn't really think of it as "sex-segregated". My answers to my two questions would have been:

1. "Total access [to women's restrooms]."

2. "On the basis of self-ID, however I would like to know how we can enable self-ID without allowing predatory males to exploit it, and without having to implement some sort official paperwork ID instead."

Nowadays, my thinking about all that has changed quite a bit, for reasons belabored at length and in depth in this thread. And I still haven't seen even any kind of attempt at addressing my concern in question 2.

If you have answers or arguments relating to those two questions, I'm happy to continue our conversation along those lines. Especially if you have an answer for my concern in question 2.

Otherwise, if you're still on the fence and inclined to more Devil's advocacy, try this one from the other side of the fence: The stipulated position is that fiat self-ID should be the basis for trans access to sex-segregated spaces, and that any kind of "papers please" solution is right out. I'd be interested in seeing your counter-argument to that position, playing the Devil's advocate.

ETA: I'd also very much like to see your reasoning for your claim that it is easier to determine someone's date of birth than their sex.

 

[Rolfe]

Okay so I came across this passage which sums up the core of the issue quite nicely: Source

I'm taking the trouble to paste this passage in from an awkwardly formatted PDF b/c it's nice to see the central issue summed up succinctly in the words of an early advocate.

Utterly delusional though. Autogynaephiles seem to control the world these days.

 

[stanfr]

Once your eyes return to their normal operating positions, would you like to address the points I raised here:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=13906762#post13906762

Since that post was left behind in the thread continuation, I'll repost it here for your convenience:

The whole thing is a sidetrack, really. I'm not here to engage your Devil's advocacy on the ease of observing someone's sex, or the relative significance of edge cases not actually relevant to the questions I have.

The questions I have being these:

1. To what degree should transwomen be entitled to access sex-segregated spaces for women?

2. On on what basis, if any, should such access be granted?

At the start of this thread, the space I mainly had in mind was women's restrooms, and I didn't really think of it as "sex-segregated". My answers to my two questions would have been:

1. "Total access [to women's restrooms]."

2. "On the basis of self-ID, however I would like to know how we can enable self-ID without allowing predatory males to exploit it, and without having to implement some sort official paperwork ID instead."

Nowadays, my thinking about all that has changed quite a bit, for reasons belabored at length and in depth in this thread. And I still haven't seen even any kind of attempt at addressing my concern in question 2.

If you have answers or arguments relating to those two questions, I'm happy to continue our conversation along those lines. Especially if you have an answer for my concern in question 2.

Otherwise, if you're still on the fence and inclined to more Devil's advocacy, try this one from the other side of the fence: The stipulated position is that fiat self-ID should be the basis for trans access to sex-segregated spaces, and that any kind of "papers please" solution is right out. I'd be interested in seeing your counter-argument to that position, playing the Devil's advocate.

ETA: I'd also very much like to see your reasoning for your claim that it is easier to determine someone's date of birth than their sex.

I'm probably somewhere in between where you were at the start of this thread and where you say you are now.
I don't have absolute answers to your questions, cause I don't know. A couple months ago I had zero knowlege of this subject, and I certainly am no expert now.

But I think my question is pertinent--should the transmen whose photo I linked above (or transwomen if you prefer) be denied access to traditional male(female) spaces or positions simply because they were born in the 'other' biological sex?

You (and most here) clearly think they should. I'm not so sure.

Which is why I think it's absurd when you ask me for reasoning of why dob is easier than sex determination. To me, it's patently obvious. Whether you think the DSD or intersex population is .1% or 2%--that implies a challenge to the binary sex assumption that just isn't present when you have a timer and watch a baby emerge from a womb. That's why there are several other whole threads devoted to these subjects. Along with gender and gender ID. And how that relates to policy and societal measures is a whole other subject.

So I see it as complex--not necessarily as "sex is a spectrum" but also not "Its Man and Woman and that's it, baby!"

 

[Graham2001]

Courtesy of the contrarian's at Spiked, a commentary on the alleged beating of one of the surviving participants at the Stonewall Riots, because he was opposing Trans-ideology...

At the weekend, on a balmy autumn day in Burlington, Vermont, the civil war engulfing what used to be called the ‘gay-rights movement’ stepped up a gear. Seventy-four-year-old Fred Sargeant, one of the most venerable pioneers of gay rights, was surrounded by a jeering mob of trans activists, knocked to the ground, robbed and spat on. At a Pride march.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/09/20/trans-activism-is-homophobia-in-drag/

 

[Rolfe]

This is nonsense. People with ambiguous genitalia are still either male or female, it just takes more investigation to be sure. There is nobody alive who isn't one or the other, hence they are irrelevant to single-sex spaces. They are not a challenge to the binary sex "assumption", they merely require more care in sorting.

Please, what relevance do you think DSDs have to single-sex spaces? The people with male DSD conditions use the male spaces, the people with female DSD conditions use the women's. We don't have any "you're neither one nor the other" category. In addition, trans people do not have DSDs. The problem is not how to police people with DSDs into the correct single-sex space, the problem is how to keep men out of women's single-sex spaces.

Now, your astonishing assertion that it's easier to tell someone's date of birth than their sex was made in the context of a question about whether people who identify as a different age from their chronological one should be able to access services based on their self-identified age. How many people did you watch coming out of the womb, with a stopwatch to check? If you are selling alcohol and a lad insists that he's old enough to buy the stuff, can you, by looking at him, tell his date of birth? Of course you can't. We can only guess someone's age to withing a year or two, at best, getting less accurate as they age.

In contrast human beings are about 97% accurate in determining the sex of other human beings, with no clothes or hairstyle clues, just from photos. Someone encountered in real life with more clues than that is going to be easier. How can you possibly say it's easier for a bar tender to know how old someone is, than for a changing room attendant to know what sex someone is? It's ludicrous.

We've been over the situation where someone has taken extraordinary steps to appear to be the sex they aren't. These are not the people we're concerned about. We're concerned about the bloody obvious men waltzing into women's spaces to perv, leer, plant hidden cameras and see if they can manage a grope.

And you start talking about very rare medical disorders and assuming everyone's exact date of birth is permanently tattooed on their forehead.

 

[Vixen]

Paul2 wrote:

Originally Posted by Vixen View Post
Posters here are claiming that biology is all. Therefore by extension, we should look to see if the animal kingdom also biologically operate female only spaces.

Not only does your conclusion (that which comes after "therefore by extension") not follow from your premise, but you've also got the problems of (1) how to choose which other species or genus from the animal kingdom we should be looking at, and (2) how do we choose which one to model when two or more options might operate in mutually exclusive ways?

"In other words, your post has serious problems.
__________________
It's nice to be nice to the nice.

Aristotle, so far as I know, was the first man to proclaim explicitly that man is a rational animal. His reason for this view was one which does not now seem very impressive: it was, that some people can do sums. - Bertrand Russell" [ends]

I can recommend N Tinbergen's the Study of Instinct. As you probably know, Tinbergen got a Nobel Prize for his work. The rationale for having this on a reading list is that because Psychology by its very nature is the study of human behaviour, before you can go anywhere near 'what makes people tick?', you need to have a firm grasp of where that behaviour arises from, hence the need to study physiology, especially the brain, the ANS, the CNS and all of the various hormones, heredity factors, psychopathology, animal behaviour. Then you can move onto strip out social psychology by looking at different cultures (social anthropology and kinship systems), then there is sociology, economics (transactional psychology) and criminology. You need to root out the artificial from the natural (Nature versus Nurture). So if people are going to affirm that 'biology is destiny' as Darwin states, then it follows that our question needs to be how much of gender ID is biological? Simply looking at genitals (so to speak) doesn't answer the question set.

 

[Vixen]

I just had to look that up Wolves!! Didn't know that. Termites !!??!!?! How would anybody know?

Foxes, swans - there are many.