Hercules56
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Banning discrimination against ALL races, ALL genders, ALL nationalities, ALL veterans status, ALL age groups, means NOBODY is being treated special.
Duh.
Transwomen are not women - X (XY?)
- Thread starter Rolfe
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Banning discrimination against ALL races, ALL genders, ALL nationalities, ALL veterans status, ALL age groups, means NOBODY is being treated special.
Duh.
Rolfe
Adult human female
We're getting closer to your meaning then, but we haven't quite got there.
I don't intend to debate women-only bars or women-only gyms with you. (There are arguments for the latter that do not apply to the former, though.) You have accepted that sex-segregation for bathrooms is fine. But you still seem to think it's discriminatory to refuse a certain (undefined) category of male access to women's bathrooms.
Explain that.
Rolfe
Adult human female
Do you support adult men being allowed to compete against children in athletics? Do you support children under five feet tall being allowed to ride an adult-sized Big Dipper?
Do you support men with bass voices being allowed to sing the soprano line in choir?
Hercules56
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Cute.
Hercules56
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I am not sure about requiring trans women be allowed in female bathrooms.
Who decides who qualifies as being sufficiently "trans-woman"? Must they have engaged in reconstructive surgery? Be taking female hormone therapy? Must they dress according to "average" standards of female dress?
What if the person wants to be a transwoman, who dresses like a man? The possibilities are endless and crazy.
This is why some places have simply decided to have a third bathroom option, that is gender-neutral.
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Society is enormously complex. You can't protect all people from discrimination any more than one can make everybody happy. You can make some people happy in some ways, but then you have to choose which people. Same with discrimination. We don't have the power to protect all people from discrimination. We perhaps have the power to protect some people from some discrimination. The question then is which people are we going to protect from what, and of course which people are we going to allow to be discriminated against in other ways.
The state has the power to make rules, sure. In the past it decided that white people can drink from this fountain and non-whites must drink from that water fountain. I'm not sure pointing to our ability to make rules answers the question.
All forms of discrimination, or just some forms of discrimination? It's odd, I remember all sorts of drives to push women and ethnic minorities at my previous employers, were all of those illegal? At my children's school they teach anti-racism and feminism that, as far as I'm concerned, discriminates against white boys.
Like I said before, it's the utilitarian measurement problem. Things are too complex to work out what would be a fair balance of protections and privileges, even if one can say what that is. If all of that was possible, you wouldn't be able to implement it.
Saying "well society decides which discrimination to care about" is exactly the thing Rolfe is complaining about. At the moment society doesn't seem to care about he group and are leaving them swinging in the wind.
Hercules56
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Which group is not being protected from discrimination?
I will answer for Rolfe, since she has answered this before many times, and I am a man and therefore answering for a woman comes naturally to me. The system before was that trans-women had no absolute right to be in a female bathroom. Generally they would be tolerated and nobody would say anything. If they caused problems then, since they had no absolute right to be there, they could be removed and steps could be taken to discourage them from returning.
<no longer speaking for Rolfe>
Your mistake is in thinking that society can be made to conform to some set of rational, objective, universal rules. It can't. The more you try to force it to be like that, the more you find you have to force the people who were not made for your rational, objective, universal rules to conform to them. Square pegs and round holes.
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Rolfe
Adult human female
That's not much of a response. These things are discriminatory. They are however necessary discriminations. You can't simply announce that you want all discrimination removed without facing up to these situations.
Hercules56
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Society has decided that "discrimination" must include ill will and prejudice.
Separating adult and child athletic events, is not "discrimination" according to the modern understanding and usage.
You listed some tiny, arbitrary set of groupings. Why those and not others? In any case, even within those groupings, who says what is discrimination? Rolfe feels that having special spaces for women is necessary for particular reasons, but that that shouldn't apply to men. Like I said, all my employers for as long as I can remember have had programmes pushing women, and pushing ethic minorities, is that discrimination, or isn't it? There is no objective, ideology free way of deciding this stuff. In the UK Labour and the Liberal Democrats have women only shortlists (now including trans-women) to ensure that they have women candidates in particular seats. Was that discriminating against trans-women before? Is it now discriminating against women because trans-women are on the list? Who decides? Affirmative action is widely legal across the US, is that discrimination? It's all well and good to say that "society" decides what is and isn't discrimination, but society used to think that segregated drinking fountains were fine.
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Hercules56
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You stated:
"At the moment society doesn't seem to care about he group and are leaving them swinging in the wind."
So I ask, WHICH groups are being left swinging in the wind?
Rolfe
Adult human female
The third space is an ideal solution. Nevertheless women find to their cost that even when such spaces are available, men LARPing their pornified fantasy of femininity insist on colonising the women's bathrooms regardless. This is because their primary desire is for "validation" of their belief that they are women. If you don't know about autogynaephilia, you're not up to speed with this debate.
Human beings in general are extremely good at telling which sex other human beings are, and women are better at it than men. I do not need to see someone's genitals to know if they are male or female (we allow for occasional sincere mistakes which can be solved with goodwill on both sides).
I know when someone is male. I do not know whether or not he is taking hormones or whether he has had genital surgery. I don't care what he's wearing. In many cases, a man LARPing womanhood is more alarming than any normal man. (I don't have a problem with an ordinary man who has wandered into the wrong bathroom by mistake, I know he isn't weird or a thread. I do have a problem with the weirdos in lipstick in that film I linked to.)
What I (and most women who have thought this through) is giving any male the legal right to be in a female sex-segregated space. What are we supposed to do to check that a man we see in there has that legal right? Ask him to strip off to prove he's had his penis and testicles amputated? I don't think so. Ask him to show his hormone prescription? I don't think so. Critique his wardrobe? Really?
The de facto result of giving any male the legal right to be in our intimate spaces is that we can't keep any male out. When challenged he will merely claim to be one of the select group with that legal right and accuse us of transphobia and hate speech. We lose the ability, which we value greatly, to police our intimate spaces for the presence of males and invite any male who wanders in there to leave.
As I said only a few pages ago, if someone presenting like Blaire White comes in, I almost certainly won't notice that he's male (even though he is a fully intact man - the illusion is very good). So no problem. If someone presenting like Debbie Hayton comes in, I will notice, and be a little creeped out, but if he simply goes into a cubicle, comes out, washes his hands and leaves without attempting eye contact or conversation I will tolerate his presence. However, if there is another woman there with a lower tolerance threshhold for men in women's spaces and she asks him to leave, I would expect him to do so immediately without escalating this into a confrontation.
That is how things worked until very recently. There was a degree of tolerance, but men had no legal right to be there and a woman could ask a man to leave and she would be in the right.
You want to give men - in effect all men who are prepared if necessary to claim to be transwomen - the legal right to colonise our spaces and remove our ability to police them so as to keep predators out while our daughters are dealing with their first period.
This is backwards. Society attributes discrimination it doesn't approve of to prejudice. If it was decided that trans-age was a thing, we'd discover that preventing men in their 40s from playing in the little league was actually motivated by prejudice.
Rolfe
Adult human female
And who has decided that keeping males out of female-only spaces includes ill will and prejudice?
Hercules56
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What percent of trans-women are sexual predators?
There I was talking about Rolfe's complaints about privileges that are granted to women being encroached on by trans-women, or "men" as she sees them.
Stonewall
Hercules56
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Nobody, that's why seperate male & female bathrooms are not considered to be discrimination.
Hercules56
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A women's-only club in NYC is being sued for discrimination.
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