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Transwomen are not women - X (XY?)

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the prestige wrote:*

Originally Posted by Vixen View Post
What makes a person societally male or female? {NB - actually a question set by Emily's Cat}
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Originally Posted by d4m10n View Post
In a word, genderWP.
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"I dissent. We're using male and female to denote biological sex. What makes a person societally male or female is their observable sex.

Consider sexual attraction. Generally speaking, this has a necessary social component. If you're attracted to males, what makes someone male (and potentially attractive) to you is their male sex that you have observed.

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. Trans activists wish it were so easy to just erase our ability and instinct to observe and register someone's biological sex."

The easiest way to determine sexual attraction is to just the follow the eyes. For example, when a group of people enter a room you will instinctively look at someone you find attractive, as your subconscious often registers something before your intellect does.

You can look at your companion and see what their eyes follow. If you have a partner with wandering eyes you might not like what you see. :D


*Sorry about this mess, I have to cut and paste from the previous thread to answer.
 
Rolfe said:
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.


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The point was about 'cheating' in sport. There is no denying that as margins get ever smaller and competition ever fiercer there are a thousand and one ways to cheat and get away with it. (For example, there was an Olympic cyclist who used the fact he had asthma to take a whole load of ephedrine to improve his performance [he was found out]. With muscle building sports, athletes can take anabolic steroids for years, then lay off for the specified time period so it no longer shows up, yet they stilll have an unfair advantage.)

Yes, Sharon Davies is correct that those East Europeans cheating with testosterone should be rightly banned. However, men pretending to be women are only one side of the cheating that goes on. There are female athletes who look like men but I daresay that because it says 'female' on their birth certificate they get away with it.

In the every day world (how many of us are Olympic sports persons?) there are no nanoseconds margins to worry about so less need for furtive cheating. Better for an athlete to be open about being transgender than to be furtive about it.
 
theprestige said:
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).
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Have you ever listened to the pop song, 'Lola' by the Kinks? Ray Davies who wrote it is as heterosexual as they come (as it were) but nonetheless he had no problems with 'Lola' a transgender getting down her knees (the imagination boggles here but I think we get the drift), which he says is based on a real life experience.
 
Rolfe said:
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.
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Citation, please.
 
Vixen said:
Have you ever listened to the pop song, 'Lola' by the Kinks? Ray Davies who wrote it is as heterosexual as they come (as it were) but nonetheless he had no problems with 'Lola' a transgender getting down [on] her knees (the imagination boggles here but I think we get the drift), which he says is based on a real life experience.
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Nope. It was the guy 'encountering' Lola that was on his knees, and not voluntarily; it seems like he fell over, probably drunk (if you look at the provenance of the song).

Lyrics:

I pushed her away
I walked to the door
I fell to the floor
I got down on my knees
Well, I looked at her, and she at me
 
Vixen said:
Have you ever listened to the pop song, 'Lola' by the Kinks? Ray Davies who wrote it is as heterosexual as they come (as it were) but nonetheless he had no problems with 'Lola' a transgender getting down her knees (the imagination boggles here but I think we get the drift), which he says is based on a real life experience.
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I have no opinion about that.
 
Vixen said:
The point was about 'cheating' in sport. There is no denying that as margins get ever smaller and competition ever fiercer there are a thousand and one ways to cheat and get away with it. (For example, there was an Olympic cyclist who used the fact he had asthma to take a whole load of ephedrine to improve his performance [he was found out]. With muscle building sports, athletes can take anabolic steroids for years, then lay off for the specified time period so it no longer shows up, yet they stilll have an unfair advantage.)

Yes, Sharon Davies is correct that those East Europeans cheating with testosterone should be rightly banned. However, men pretending to be women are only one side of the cheating that goes on. There are female athletes who look like men but I daresay that because it says 'female' on their birth certificate they get away with it.

In the every day world (how many of us are Olympic sports persons?) there are no nanoseconds margins to worry about so less need for furtive cheating. Better for an athlete to be open about being transgender than to be furtive about it.
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What about contact sports? Is it okay for a male bodied transwoman boxer to beat up women? Rugby? Where women have been seriously injured by transwomen.

And what about professional sports? Why should women have their livelihoods impacted by people who went through puberty as males and merely self identify as female (like Lia Thomas)?
 
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The only arguments for letting males compete in women's events work just as well as arguments for abolishing sex segregated events completely. That may be the objective, of course.
 
stanfr said:
But I think my question is pertinent--should the transmen whose photo I linked above...be denied access to traditional male...spaces or positions simply because they were born in the 'other' biological sex?
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I cannot think of good reasons to bar passing trans men from male bathrooms, locker rooms, sports leagues, etc.

As to male positions, I'd require some elaboration on what those might be.


Sent from my SM-G996U using Tapatalk
 
However, this thread is about transwomen, and as I have pointed out before, this is not a symmetrical situation.
 
Rolfe said:
The only arguments for letting males compete in women's events work just as well as arguments for abolishing sex segregated events completely. That may be the objective, of course.
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Is there one besides equestrian?
I'm trying to think.
 
For me, chess is the weirdest one. As far as I know, there's no rule barring women from competing with men, but there's a separate list for women grand masters. This might be one case where lack of proper support explains the disparity. But this might also be a case where the women land in the hump of the bell graph, and the men land at either extreme.
 
d4m10n said:
You may as well drop the adjective if it's not doing anything.

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.
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Trans-men can much more easily pass for male than trans-women can pass for female, largely because of the beard thing (a lot of trans-men go for the unshaven look) and some because they bulk up with weight-lifting. Not really relevant to this thread though, right?
 
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theprestige said:
For me, chess is the weirdest one. As far as I know, there's no rule barring women from competing with men, but there's a separate list for women grand masters. This might be one case where lack of proper support explains the disparity. But this might also be a case where the women land in the hump of the bell graph, and the men land at either extreme.
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Larry Summers made some speculations along that latter point, and it did not work out well for him. I recommend watching a whole bunch of Queen's Gambit episodes and five Hail Mary's as penance for this sin.
 
lionking said:
What about contact sports? Is it okay for a male bodied transwoman boxer to beat up women? Rugby? Where women have been seriously injured by transwomen.

And what about professional sports? Why should women have their livelihoods impacted by people who went through puberty as males and merely self identify as female (like Lia Thomas)?
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Nobody said it was okay. Strawman.


I had a friend who played rugby. I don't know what her sexuality was but I suspect she would not have cared if a transgender joined her team.
 
theprestige said:
For me, chess is the weirdest one. As far as I know, there's no rule barring women from competing with men, but there's a separate list for women grand masters. This might be one case where lack of proper support explains the disparity. But this might also be a case where the women land in the hump of the bell graph, and the men land at either extreme.
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Chess is traditionally male dominated because of its predominance in the Eastern bloc (USSR Russia). As for the bell curve, yes, it has been observed that boys/males tend to cluster at the tail ends of the curve. However, there are plenty of females who are classed as having 'learning difficulties' plus there does seem to be a higher number of persons unexpectedly at this side of the bell curve, possibly because intelligence is not necessarily 100% a normal distribution (which the Gaussian-curve measures) but only approximates to it. It is important to avoid sweeping generalisations such as 'men are more intelligent than women' simply because statistically there are more of them on the outlying +/- 3sd. This could be accounted for by for example, congenital abnormality that results in learning difficulty or extreme growth development.

So the idea that 'men are better at chess' or 'men are better at football' could well be a simple matter of boys being more likely to play these games at school from an early age, whilst girls have to be extra determined to participate int he face of scepticism and prejudice.

It is specious to equate lesser muscle power with lesser intellect. (Given that the brain is composed of fat, not muscle.)
 
Vixen said:
I had a friend who played rugby. I don't know what her sexuality was but I suspect she would not have cared if a transgender joined her team.
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Even if that person were a heavily-muscled 18st prop forward with previous extensive experience at a high level in the men's game? That transwoman would inflict awful injuries on 'her' female opposition.

She should care, as should you.
 
GlennB said:
Even if that person were a heavily-muscled 18st prop forward with previous extensive experience at a high level in the men's game? That transwoman would inflict awful injuries on 'her' female opposition.

She should care, as should you.
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Rugby, like football, is largely a game of agility. I doubt very much an 18st man would ever condescend to join a team of ladies. There is a taboo against men appearing to be 'cissy'.

Few men would ever dream of presenting as female in any way. My ex- would fret if his t-shirt was too long as he didn't want anyone to think he was wearing 'a skirt'.
 
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