TheGoldcountry
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Have you been on the internet before, sir? Oh, the things you'll see!
Transwomen are not women - X (XY?)
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Have you been on the internet before, sir? Oh, the things you'll see!
Paul2
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There's no choosing in the sense of determining who is going to win after the process is run.
I think you're saying that a neutral process - not knowing who is in what favored or unfavored position - is avoiding responsibility for determining who wins. Do I have that right? I ask because when I state it that way, my eyebrows are plastered to the top of my forehead.
Paul2
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I've heard that some people stumble on the most amazing things when Googling. where do you suggest I start?
Ziggurat
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What's completely absent from this post is any attempt to actually address the issue on its merits. You're trying to guilt trip someone into abandoning a deeply held position on the basis of guilt by association. That's not likely to work.
In fact, this sort of approach also runs a serious risk of backfiring. If opposition to trans activism is inextricably linked to the right, but someone who is otherwise a leftist concludes that this opposition is correct and justified, they might start to wonder what else the right might be correct about. If you don't allow people to stay on the left and hold these views, they're not going to abandon these views, they're going to abandon the left.
You might be tempted to say good riddance, but you also might end up facing a "more selective" voter appeal.
Nick Terry
Illuminator
Would that everything were so neatly divided between left and right. The slur 'TERF' is spelled out as 'trans-exclusionary radical feminist', and it's left-wing feminists who were and are at the forefront of criticising gender identity ideology and advocacy for self-ID for the ways in which they conflict with women's rights.
Politically, it is playing with fire for the centre-left to embrace uncritically self-ID and the most extreme manifestations of gender identity ideology, as it plays into the hands of hard right culture warriors, allowing them to stereotype the left as captured by identity politics to the point of lunacy. Not only does this alienate a considerable number of women from the left, it imposes a patronising vocabulary that minority communities, the working class and many others literally cannot understand, because it is so rebarbative and alienating.
Transgender rights and protections are already enshrined into the 2010 Equality Act under the category of gender reassignment, one of the protected characteristics. Anyone making the slighest step towards gender reassignment - i.e. anyone who declares themselves to be transgender - is protected from discrimination. So-called TERFs, gender identity critics and sex realists accept that trans people exist and that they have the right to be free of discrimination.
The dispute arises with the broadening of gender identity to erase the very term 'women', while paradoxically insisting that 'transwomen are women', to eliminate single-sex spaces (including rape crisis centres and domestic violence shelters), and to so loosen the definition of trans identity as to allow anyone to simply declare themseves the opposite sex through self-ID. None of these things are 'rights' in and of themselves; they generally conflict with women's rights, so they cannot be accepted without debate or discussion. And that's a left-wing position because it's one argued by quite a sizeable number who identify themselves as on the left.
I do not think that centre-left parties should be encouraging the teaching of what amounts to science denialism in schools, by deemphasising sex and replacing this with very vague notions of 'gender identity'. I do think that schools should be teaching inclusiveness and acceptance around sexual orientation as well as gender noncomformity. I think the way this is being done is making the lives of some children and teenagers worse by confusing them, and contributing to the social contagion bubble that has clearly arisen in the past decade.
When the actual medical experts in the NHS are now sensibly limiting uncritical affirmation of gender dysphoria and postponing puberty blockers, hormones and surgery until adulthood or restricting them to properly controlled research, it is quite important not to encourage children and teenagers to believe the delusion that medical interventions are a magic wand that will transform them from a girl into a boy. It is certainly very important to inform them clearly of the costs of this magic wand to their future health and their future potential for sexual pleasure and reproduction.
Nah, sorry, I've been a Guardian reader for over thirty years, never voted Tory, and hold radical opinions on all kinds of issues. Deciding not to swallow gender identity bollocks doesn't make me either 'reactionary' or 'transphobic'.
Not once in your interventions on this thread, btw, do you ever bother to spell things out beyond meaningless mantras. I fully support 'transgender rights and protection' as I understand them - but apparently I must disagree with what 'transgender rights and protection' really mean, or maybe it's just you never define what you mean by those words. Care to enlighten everyone?
No, apologies. That is me being unclear. My daughter and her friends know how the choosing game works, but they pretend not to to avoid admitting they are explicitly choosing which child will be IT. Probably mentioning that just confused things, but it popped into my head.
Paul2
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A random process of choosing which position to start counting (assuming that everyone is in position before the randomization) is, by definition, neutral with regard to position (for both the definition of "random" as well as "neutral").
Ironically, you are postmodern-ing this issue by claiming that agreement here can only be ideological.
ETA: Even more ironically, your putting the definition of "neutral" up for grabs recalls the trans activists' changing the definition of "woman." Strange bedfellows.
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If there is any kind of ideology, any kind of world view motivating our support of these positions, surely they are to some degree connected? Obviously most people don't think about this stuff very hard, but these positions are connected. Tactically, a left wing party might support some right wing position to win an election, but I don't see how you can tactically make a left wing position right wing or the other way around.
A lot of the arguments I see in this thread against trans-activists are conservative arguments based on breaking down meaningful traditional structures and the dangers and downsides of granting rights claims. These arguments are made by people who are otherwise generally progressive. That does seem worth commenting on.
Oh, certainly. I don't think post modernism was talking about nothing. The modern world did, after all generate a bunch of problems that then are the subject of post modernism. You can't organise a society on this "everything is relative, there is no truth" way of thinking though. It's like trying to live your life as if free will didn't exist. It's a type of madness. Some culture's idea of what is reasonable and what is fair have to be treated as if they were handed down by God, and obviously I have preferences about what that should be.
indeed. In a world without God, it's down to humans to decide what is fair, what a woman is and so on. I think the trans activists definition of woman is terrible and will not add to the sum of human happiness, so I am against it. Their definition isn't "wrong" though. This is what happens when you kill God, we can't even nail down what a woman is any more.
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Rolfe
Adult human female
Actually, those who are well informed about the political process are pretty confident that the bill will never make it to the statute book for precisely the reason that the cross-border implications have a huge effect on England. It will be struck down before it gets that far.
So there's one positive thing about the union, I suppose.
Ziggurat
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In principle, I would argue that even ideology is not enough to explain the correlations in public opinion across issues.
In practice, basically nobody really thinks through all of their opinions in great depth. It's too much work, too many issues, not enough time in the day. We take shortcuts, and one of those shortcuts is to adopt positions of people we trust. Another is to adopt the beliefs of the group we want to be part of, which is what LJ is trying to exploit (but it won't work here). That's a big part of why so many political positions end up highly correlated even though in principle they really don't need to be.
But once someone sees a position from a side they formerly trusted that they are convinced is wrong, and in a way that really matters, then that trust is broken. And then they won't adopt positions of agreement by default. They will start giving alternative arguments consideration that they never would have before.
I experienced that post-9/11. Recently out of college, I was largely "liberal by default". But the equivocation about who was to blame for 9/11, all the self-recrimination about blowback, etc. shook me up. I could never be liberal by default again. I still don't really think of myself as conservative, but I'm labelled that around here just because I'm not liberal.
Sure, but one needs to feel like ones positions fit into a world view, feel somewhat consistent, fit into a narrative about the world and history that makes sense of them. Of course most people spend next to no time confirming this, and do a horrible job if they are asked about it in the street. Once one starts supporting positions that fall outside the narrative of "your side", it seems to me like it would be generally undermining of of the whole narrative, the whole world view.
Paul2
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Nothing in Rawls demands there is no truth and everything is relative.
Agreed. But that doesn't mean nothing can be neutral with respect to X.
Agreed, except to the extent that a definition, in relation to other definitions, may be be incoherent or illogical. I think you and I agree that that is what is happening with some trans activists (Boudicca99 said she was a biological woman).
That sometimes it is very difficult to determine fairness doesn't mean it always is. Rawls' process plays out the same for all participants (see how I didn't use the word "neutral" there?), so for some very common understandings of neutral, Rawls' process is neutral with respect to position, and so is neutral with respect to determining who will be It. You can re-define "neutral" all you want, but the ostensible purpose of the schoolyard process is to have it play out the same for everyone, with no one having a greater or lesser chance at being It, and that's what Rawls' process accomplishes.
Nick Terry
Illuminator
Going to break up replies (not para by para though) - you came up with an argument about 1 in 10 people being a murderer in a specific space therefore all should be imprisoned. This is a misleading analogy to make and thus, created a slippery slope.
The consequences in your analogy are not identical to the consequences in the issue at hand, i.e. whether to exclude transwomen from women-only spaces.
The flipside of that issue is - whether to preserve women-only spaces, ensure a reasonable equality of access to them, or make sure that women who really don't want to welcome men into their spaces can be obliged.
Thus, if a woman's bathroom is turned into a unisex bathroom while the men's bathroom next to it is not, this is a clear violation of the equality of access principle.
If women are prohibited by law from excluding men from rape crisis centres and domestic violence shelters, because the men identify as women, this has rather specific consequences independent of whether the transwomen (or free riders exploiting self-ID) feel hurt by this. There's a legal challenge right now in Sussex here in the UK to ensure that just one rape crisis centre is women-only, accepting that transwomen will be welcome at other centres in the same county.
Transwomen athletes are being either included or excluded from women's sports, not because they are necessarily creepy AGPs who want to engage in dick-waving in changing rooms, but in the interests of fairness and safety. Safety is why both rugby associations in the UK banned transwomen from participating in women's rugby this year. Swimming has now banned transwomen from participating in international competitions if they experienced any part of male puberty, after reviewing the evidence.
No, there are more questions than this around the principle of self-ID. Identifying as a member of a group is insufficient grounds to accept the self-identifier into the group in a number of cases in society, especially if one is seeking to do this to gain access to restricted spaces or privileges. One cannot identify as a child if one is an adult, those who pass themselves off as aristocrats, the wealthy, army officers, Vietnam veterans or as ethnic minorities who are found out tend not to fare well.
There are conversely many groups one can identify into quite freely - sexual orientation, for example. In employment and job applications, equality, diversity and inclusion legislation and company policies might allow some to decide to identify as a minority or protected group to help them get shortlisted for an interview - the organisation isn't then obliged to give them the job (I've seen that happen in job presentation/interview panels) or promote them. In other cases that might happen. Doing so doesn't result in explicitly direct harms (there are usually many candidates for good jobs or internal promotion opportunities), while equality legislation also protects others against discrimination, or enables them to mount challenges. If someone declares themselves to be a transwoman when applying for jobs or once in post, then they can do so, just as they can declare themselves to be lesbian, Christian, disabled or any other protected characteristic.
There have been cases where a transwoman took up a position as a women's officer in UK organisations - a sex-specific role that can be restricted to women by law. They lacked a gender recognition certificate so were legally still men. This is a good example of a violation of existing equality legislation. Self-ID as a principle would blow open other legally recognised exceptions, or make it impossible to offer support for one or the other sex, e.g. scholarships.
'Rights' also can be enforced - and this is the other problematic aspect of talking in very vague abstract term about rights. There are proposals to turn 'misgendering' into a hate crime in some jurisdictions. But this criminalises speech, which automatically comes into conflict with freedom of speech, generally enshrined into the constitutions and legal systems of all western societies. There are ways one can avoid using 'preferred pronouns' in direct and written conversations, and this will likely become ostentatiously common to avoid using he/she/they in circumstances where this might be implicitly or explicitly policed.
In the UK, gender critical views have been recognised in a court ruling as a protected belief under equality legislation - so the insistence that 'transwomen are women' cannot be legally compelled from individuals exercising freedom of opinion and speech, for now.
That leaves the classic bathroom/changing room access discussion. Men who identify as women would like to acccess women's toilets and changing rooms, or are allowed to do so in a variety of jurisdictions. They are a minority, whose desires are cast in terms of 'rights', but these conflict with the desires and rights of women, at the very least with a minority of women who may decide to object. Both sides appeal incidentally to the dangers of using the 'wrong' bathrooms - transwomen suggest they are at risk of attack by other men, while women note cases where men claiming to be transwomen have exploited the loophole to engage in voyeurism, exhibitionism/flashing and sexual assault.
The problem with self-ID is that it makes it impossible to define transwomen as a group in such a way as to exclude other men who wish to exploit the new loophole.
In cases where women's toilets are replaced by unisex toilets while men's toilets remain men's toilets, the loophole is extended to every male irrespective of gender identification, while preserving a male-only privileged space.
The logical solution is to ensure greater provision of gender-neutral spaces - multiplying existing gender-neutral disabled facilities - to the extent that there is an actual need to accommodate a greater than negligible minority of transwomen.
In terms of rights, the rights of women, as the numerically greater group who are also the physically weaker and more vulnerable, should logically prevail over the rights of men identifying as women, in cases where these clash. Security personnel and police should not side with transwomen or men simply claiming to be women against the views of women, and transwomen should remove themselves if they are making women uncomfortable with their presence or behaviour. However laws might be changed to accommodate trans identities, then indecent exposure and other laws on sexual offences must still be enforced and should not fall by the wayside. Since transwomen who are trying to pass should be entering cubicles in toilets, there is no good reason for them to expose themselves in such situations anyway.
The most widely reported case concerned a sauna (the Wii Spa case), while there is a legal precedent from *Canada* that women offering waxing services are not obliged to serve men identifying as women (the Yaniv case). The balance should tip towards respecting the desires and rights of women not to have to share intimate spaces with natal males. In many other adjacent cases there are existing mixed-sex options (eg public swimming pools mostly provide mixed hours, and only a limited number of women-only hours or children-only hours).
The question of whether transwomen are women and should compete as women in sports, and thus which changing rooms they should use, at schools or in professional sports, illustrates how these issues converge. There are three levels to the question
1) are they legally women/can they identify as women?,
2) should natal males be competing alongside natal females in sports,
3) should they be sharing changing rooms?
Societies as well as sporting associations are starting to offer very different answers to these three questions, so there are already inconsistencies and contradictions, some of which might be open to legal challenge if self-ID and the view that 'transwomen are women' wins out. One can imagine scenarios where transwomen's legal status 'as women' is recognised (via a self-ID provision or an eased statute) but they still cannot compete in specific women's sports, so the question of whether they can enter women's changing rooms becomes potentially moot.
The biggest area of conflict will be in schools, especially those that encourage trans identifying children to use the changing rooms of their identified gender rather than their natal sex. Since the global trend generally restricts surgical transition to adults, trans girls will still have penises. Especially during puberty and adolescence, it seems to be a very bad idea to encourage or allow such genderswapping of changing rooms, to reduce discomfort first and foremost, both among girls as well as among trans boys who used puberty blockers.
If the trans social contagion bubble pops and deflates, as it might do before long, this will be less of an issue. But it will hurt the overall trans cause if a future generation of teenage boys exploits a self-ID, affirm-your-identity loophole to enter girls' spaces and act like, well, teenage boys. On balance, it is surely better to encourage other teenage boys to be more accepting of gender noncomformity in their own spaces, and to police any bullying, as one sincerely hopes is already the case (with gay teenagers and others). The same goes for teenage girls vis-a-vis trans boys, of course. Rigid and early sorting 'by gender' is probably more harmful in the short and long term, but I'd welcome detailed research on this issue to see how it is affecting actual children and teenagers.
Gender identity for children and teenagers also potentially conflicts with parental rights or wishes - the balance currently seems too heavily tipped away from parents, and the reported practice in some cases of hiding a new gender identity from parents raises huge red flags. In cases where parental opposition to identifying as trans is considered child abuse, this seems to have gone entirely too far, while there is insufficient attention being paid to safeguarding of children in schools. Children are rightly denied a whole range of rights accorded to adults, while also exploiting workarounds to access materials they're legally prohibited from accessing (eg porn, alcohol, some drugs in some jurisdictions, tobacco, motor vehichles).
Discussing children and teenagers shows how 'universal rights' might be too abstract to properly address the actual permutations arising from this debate. Trans people are much more diverse than the term and debate often suggests; the interests of trans-identifying children and teenagers, especially trans boys, are very different to those of late-transitioning transwomen.
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theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
This is the crux of the matter. It also turns out to be the dangling thread that unravels the entire fabric of trans-rights activism, once you start pulling on it.
Nick Terry
Illuminator
Not so; simple numbers mean the dispute should be weighted towards women, who form 51% of the typical population, and away from the claims of a very small minority of transwomen, who won't be a majority of trans people very soon, given the surge in girls identifying as transboys and transmen.
It won't do to reduce this to gender critical feminism vs trans activism, I'm afraid. Western societies are ideologically and religiously pluralistic, so it's not just the TERFs who are relevant here. Gender critical feminists might have sounded the alarm earliest, but that has long changed. Mumsnetters in the UK have acute awareness of how their womanhood and experiences as mothers play out in society but don't necessarily identify themselves as feminists.
Reducing how we might judge the dispute to 'our ideology' is also a cop-out. Multiple ideologies, including different religions, will have views on these matters.
The academy and the media are actually split on gender identity. The academy is decidedly left/liberal leaning so the split is more significant there, while the media is more politically polarised, but both left and right are finding common cause over the questions raised by gender identity ideology.
Trans activist behaviour has been responsible for 'peaking' a very large number of people who might otherwise have been allies and sympathisers; the tendencies to enforcing an expansive interpretation of existing equality law (in the UK) and litany of abuse, death threats, efforts to get people sacked for even asking questions or booted off Twitter, the apparent refusal to listen to those with concerns: tactically, the 'no debate' strategy is likely backfiring. Opposition to gender identity ideology has grown because of the conduct of its advocates, over and above any intellectual disagreements.
The striking thing is those who are opposed to gender identity ideology are not then criticising other liberal, progressive or 'woke' causes. The right would like to bundle them all together, and some might fantasise about reversing the now widespread social acceptance of gay marriage (as well as homosexuality in general), but this isn't happening.
One reason is arguably that trans identity is extremely artificial, both literally in terms of transgender people not actually passing or being able to change their actual sex, as well as because the identities arise in large part because of psychological disturbances. Destigmatising mental illness is part of the progressive package, but other psychological disorders are not being normalised.
Unless one buys into the 'no debate' declare-victory line, then since there are clashes of rights, who is right will in part be decided by experience, and only time will tell exactly how that unfolds.
Western societies contain substantial minorities, overwhelmingly of men, who identify as 'minor attracted persons', who are therefore considered paedophiles. Paedophile rights were pushed very heavily in the 1970s within and piggybacking alongside the emerging gay rights movement, but there was a dramatic break during the 1980s between lesbian and gay activism and culture and paedophiles, while paedophilia was policed vigorously into the 1990s, and beyond. There are therefore examples of causes that were once seen as progressive which stopped being seen as such, the political and social costs of endorsing them were simply too high.
MAPs/paedophiles are still with us, and some are infiltrating trans activism, or encouraging certain forms of trans identities, for their own reasons. The Mermaids scandal here in the UK is an illustration of this. The lesson of the 1970s is that activists for one cause cannot allow their cause to be infiltrated - the equation between gays and paedophiles was widespread and arguably slowed social acceptance.
The overlap might be much less this time around, and history doesn't repeat itself perfectly, but you'll have surely noticed how public disquiet over transgender identities seems greatest around 'trans kids'.
The sheer novelty of widespread trans identification among children and teenagers means that this is not guaranteed to last, all by itself: some of this is irrefutably a social contagion and trend. Moreover, the caution now being adopted by various countries towards medical transition will inevitably change the parameters through the rest of this decade and beyond. Societies are unlikely to tolerate or encourage entire generations seeking drugs and surgery based on their feelings as teenagers in ever larger numbers. The trans generation of the past decade will grow older and be visible exhibits of whether medical transition is a good or a bad thing. Yes, medicine might also advance to introduce better drugs, cope with the side effects, or carry out more effective surgery, but that would create intergenerational resentments as well as cautionary tales.
Societies may also decide after a while that affirming autogynephilia among late-transitioning men who become transwomen is dubious. AGP is a fetish, and it is not identical with a desire to fully transition. Those who identified as transvestites now identify more frequently as transwomen (this very much includes Eddie Izzard and his girl mode/boy mode arguments of late). AGP and related addictions is also encouraged by a culture and business model that are anything other than progressive: the porn industry, which caters to every kink, fetish and quirk imaginable, including 'sissy porn' and other WTF genres. Quite a few feminists have pointed out the irony of ostensible left-wingers giving a pass to an immensely destructive branch of capitalism.
There may be future changes in social attitudes towards sexual violence especially violence against women and girls, and accompanying patterns of men's behaviour, which by extension affect men who wish to identify as transwomen. Some of those could be trans-inclusive, some not. Dick pics, revenge porn, pressures to participate in pornified sex - eventually something might give. Or it might not, and maybe trans activism really does turn out to reinforce men's rights activism and misogyny, as some gender critical feminists suggest. Or acceptance of gender nonconformity is so widespread among teenagers that teenage heterosexual boys stop sending dick pics and stop forcing their girlfriends/hook-ups to contort themselves like pornstars.
Changing attitudes can already be seen in parallel cases. I noted how in the past 10-15 years, ordinary ******* men started resorting to the 'sex games gone wrong' defense when BDSM started becoming more mainstream or widely known about, to cover up or diminish their responsibility for strangling women. Few seem to have been practicing BDSM Dominants.
Awareness of femicide, coercive control and outrage at the shockingly low prosecution of rape is much more widespread, but few concrete results have emerged so far - that may or may not change.
The problem for trans activism and gender identity ideology is, male violence against women and girls and everyday sexism continue; so it's probably no accident that some women have become more outraged over self-ID and 'transwomen are women' in the exact same era between MeToo and the murder of Sarah Everard in the UK.
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I disagree. I don't think it is that easy to deny rights claims based on other people taking advantage of them. If these unintended consequences, implementation difficulties arguments worked, I think conservatives and traditionalists would be doing a lot better. I think progressivisms success is partly based on the assumption that one can just implement what is right, and any difficulties can be worked out. You asking people to say "no" to a bunch of poor suffering trans people today to save an as yet unknown woman having an unpleasant experience in a changing room at some undetermined point in the future that may perhaps be prevented by taking other steps. Emotionally, the trans-person wins this.
The Atheist
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That's a beautiful example of a statistics and damned lies.
I will categorically state that there are significant numbers of men who would date a trans woman, but will never be seen with one, due to the inevitability of the fallout they'd have to deal with.
I'm big enough and comfortable enough in my own skin that I was well prepared for the blowback on being seen with a trans date, and I wasn't wrong to expect it. I found it funny, my trans gf found it embarrassing, and that other guys don't want to put themselves through that experience isn't the fault of the trans women, or the guys attracted to them.
This is the biggest trouble with the absurdly pro-trans/anti-JK Rowling set. Instead of fighting for acceptance as they are, they've gone so far over the line they're harming their real need.
Mate, I've never seen a more obvious waving of a white flag. I mean, clutching at straws is fair when you're out of ideas, but trying to label opponents here as Daily Fail-reading right wingers isn't even laughable, it's just pathetic.
The Atheist
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I've highlighted a few people in this thread who write beautifully and coherently on the subject - it's what keeps this thread amazing and a testament to what thinking people can produce.
Absolutely superior posts - every word you write is spot on.
d4m10n
Penultimate Amazing
I wonder if there is a term for the unholy offspring of myside bias and political polarization.
In the past, I've gravitated to skeptic or freethought discussion boards b/c people there seemed somewhat less likely to indulge in our irrational instinct to judge ideas by who has them and whom they run with, rather than judging ideas in and of themselves.
(Ah well.)
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