If we have 10 people in a room and we know one of them is a murderer, but we don't know which... we don't lock all 10 of them up just to be safe.
But this skids down a misleading slippery slope. The logic of single sex spaces is to exclude
all members of the opposite sex, not to jail them for entering single sex spaces because they turn out to be registered sex offenders and thus somehow violated their parole.
This principle has been customary worldwide, in diverse societies, for a very long time: changing it to a unisex model is discriminatory at the very least on age grounds, even if one assumed, which is unlikely, that children and teenagers would be genuinely comfortable with overturning this norm.
This, I think, assumes that both sides have the same conception of rights. Do they?
Evidently not, since the trans activists and their allies don't even acknowledge the clash of rights as they claim that 'transwomen are women', which sidesteps the conflict entirely.
You also have the utilitarian calculation problem. You can't actually quantify these values in a neutral way. It comes down to whose claims we feel sympathetic to, and whose we don't. Who has the more appealing victim story.
Of course one can quantify these values: for starters, trans people are still a clear minority in western societies, whereas women make up 51% of the population. The topic is polled repeatedly but the results tend to be ignored by politicians. The disconnect between public opinion and the censorship of voices raising questions about these issues is considerable.
I'm sure the trans-activists will have some version of the oppression hierarchy to tell them whose interests to prioritise. Rolfe, you, or I will have a different method. The whole thing comes down to that playground game where you go round the circle saying a rhyme to decide who is IT, but if you are in the know who is going to be IT is determined by where you start. Whose rights claim wins depends on which system for deciding rights claims you use. Which system you choose depends on your ideology. There is no neutral way of deciding it.
This doesn't even begin to engage with the actual realities of the era. Public opinion is currently against self-ID and associated changes, as measured by numerous polls. There is a clear split in the reporting or lack thereof between right and left leaning media in the US and UK on trans issues. The rightwing press in the UK reports critically and skeptically, the left leaning press passes over many incidents in silence. Politicians in organised parties are shaking out into pro and con positions. The Tories in the UK seemed to think this was an easy win, like gay marriage, and received a shock when they realised it wasn't; all the many prime ministers we've had since July have made statements opposing self-ID.
The centre-left (Democrats in the US, Labour + LibDems + Greens in the UK) seems hellbent on overriding concerns from within their own ranks, and from among their own voters, with the result that many who identified with the left or as liberals on a lifelong basis are questioning this, or finding they don't mind siding with the right on this issue (and usually this issue only). The same has happened in Scotland with the SNP, although this week's vote shows more opposition than some might have expected (33 votes against vs 88 for self-ID). Political tribalism is not as dominant in the UK as it is in the US, one reason we're now known as 'TERF Island'.
Gender identity has become a political issue.
Sure, but does that mean that the trans-activist claim must be denied, or is that something that potentially we try to address in other ways?
Self-ID is already law in some countries (Ireland in the EU for example) and in some US states. It may not become law in some other countries, despite the best efforts of trans activisists. So the claim is already being denied.
This is only one part of a political conflict over trans issues, which we're seeing playing out in different countries. Sweden, Finland, and the UK have come out against rapid gender affirmation and the prescription of puberty blockers or hormones to gender dysphoric children. The same has just happened in the US state of Florida.
There are always downsides that one can point to for reorganising society. It's not like feminists would have accepted that feminism be held back because it would lead to the decline of the family, depress birth rates etc (let's just assume these things are bad for the sake of argument), they too would have argued that if those side effects appear we should mitigate them without stopping women living their best life.
That's a hilariously ignorant caricature of the changes to the position of women in western societies over the past 100 years. What is 'feminism' here? I think you'll find that women's rights were extended long before second-wave feminism - the right to vote mostly coming after 1918 in response to women's participation in WWI on the home front, something with many right wing parties successfully exploited (the British Tories hoovered up a disproportionate share of the 'women's vote' in the 1920s).
Women's participation in the workforce was already a reality 150 years ago - it's called working in agriculture or working in textiles - and there were feminised professions, including nursing, teaching and secretarial work, 120 years ago. Women were being admitted to universities all over the western world 100+ years ago, and there were women policemen in Germany before WWI (the first was Jewish, incidentally). I sometimes have to remind middle-class students that working in factories was the norm for working-class women in the Victorian era, and that common-law marriages were also widespread - not everyone got married back then.
The 'decline of the family' and depressed birth rates are the products of other secular changes, including the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
I don't doubt it. Look, Thomas Sowell has been arguing since at least the 70s that welfare has led to the collapse of the Black family.... if that is the case, is welfare wrong, or should we try to reengineer it to avoid these bad effects? We are hypocritical about these things. The social changes we like, we say "all the possible problems are things that we can deal with as we go, but it is right that this change go ahead". The social changes we don't like, we say "this change will lead to terrible problems and we should not do it".
Thomas Sowell is wrong: African American families were already under strain by 1960, before the Great Society reforms or the Moynihan report, while welfare states elsewhere in the western world did not generate quite the same level of single parent families as seen among African-Americans by the end of the 20th Century. Besides, while African-Americans remain the group in US society most likely to be below the poverty line, this has fallen in the 21st Century, with the majority being in work, even slowly growing a middle class.
Moreover, welfare provision has undergone a dramatic revolution in neoliberal English-speaking societies: it is more often workfare, time-limited, stingier, and less capable of supporting individuals much less families than was once the case. The reforms and cuts have been justified on various grounds, including for sure some attempts to stem the tide of secular change to family structures, rates of marriage and single-parent families.
The greatest beneficiaries of the 'decline of the family' have been men, who find it easier to walk away from unwanted pregnancies and act the cad, avoiding the shotgun weddings they might have been forced into in earlier eras (but not always: working class women were always vulnerable to abandonment in such situations). Feminism has very little to do with this, male entitlement has everything to do with this.
There is an old saying attributed to Robert Conquest: "Everyone is conservative about what he knows best", I prefer a slightly different version "Everyone is conservative about what he loves best".
This makes no sense.
In conversations about the paradox of declining female happiness, I've suggested that feminism has made it harder for women to stay home and have kids and that this has created lots of unhappiness. I'm told that those downsides shouldn't stop other women from pursuing their dreams. Now, I'm not necessarily saying these different downsides are equivalent, but equally, I don't get the sense that for social changes we like, a bunch of people having to eat a big downside is a reason not to do it. From where I'm sitting, the differentiating factor in people's thinking is who is eating the downside. Social progress is a lot more palatable when you don't think the downside is going to be eaten by you, or people you identify with.... and when you are on the receiving end of the upside.
Both you and your interlocutors are evidently extremely ignorant of the actual history of men, women, employment patterns and family patterns in western societies (and make sure not to be so narcissistically USAian, mkay?).
But beyond this, you also seem ignorant of what feminism has been campaigning for and the concerns that arose in the second wave, which go beyond family/career issues that were mostly settled before the 1970s, and instead focused on some unpalatable realities of male violence and entitlement, which are clearly still with us today. Campaigning for rape crisis centres and domestic violence shelters, for marital rape to be criminalised and not excused on some archaic notion of women as property, against sexual harrassment at work, just some examples of issues which feminists have fought over.
I presume you've heard of the concept of 'coercive control' in domestic violence? The term was coined by a male academic IIRC but provided a framework for women's campaigning and assistance to victims of domestic abuse, which falls disproportionately, overwhelmingly on women. Without this discussion of coercive control and the tactics of domestic abusers, the term 'gaslighting' wouldn't have caught on as quickly as it did in the past 10 years. Which is unfortunate for trans activists, as the 'transwomen are women' mantra strikes many as blatant gaslighting.
