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Transwomen are not women - X (XY?)

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TomB said:
For the first hilighted section...explain the connection between ex-military and a particular diagnosis. I don't personally know any transgender people, but I do know gay ex-military people. And lesbian ex-military people. And straight ex military people. Not sure where you arrive at a connection between military and (presumably) AGP.

For the second, we call that "house-sitting." It's fairly common. I've seen both men and women offer to house-sit. Just saying you might be projecting a motive onto a fairly common activity. My daughter's (then) boyfriend house-sat for us during one of our vacations. I don't know them, but you might be defining an entire person by a single attribute.
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I've never heard of someone house sitting when there weren't pets involved. In which case, they're actually pet-sitting, in the pet's own home.

That said... I also don't know anyone wealthy enough to have a house that needs to be sat in the first place. A trusted friend gathering the mail or watering the plants is generally about all that's needed.
 
Distracted1 said:
That has always been the "heart of the matter" to me. I respect anyone's desire to be addressed in the manner of their choosing (if Peppermint Patty wants me to address her as "sir", I will play along). When she insists that she has the right to control which non-derogatory pronoun I use when referring to her, however, she crosses a line that I will not budge on.
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Aye, there's the rub. It's not the decency granted directly to them, it's the way in which pronoun demands obligate us to pretend belief in artifice - even when the person is not there.
 
Rolfe said:
That's very unusual. When I was in general practice I made a point of checking the next patient's notes to get the pronouns right when the owner brought the animal in. If it was a new patient I'd have to fill in some details anyway, and depending on the owner I'd say something like "are we a boy or a girl?" or I'd simply check for myself as part of the examination.

Many owners absolutely hate it when you call a male she or vice versa, and take against the vet, believing he or she doesn't relate to the animal as an individual. Also there's the suspicion that the vet doesn't actually know which sex the animal is, which is quite scary from a medical point of view.

Heck, even when I was in farm animal pathology latterly, it was normal among the vets and our staff to refer even to the corpses we were doing post mortems on as he or she accordingly.
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Conversational aside...

Having learned so much about puberty in humans, and the impacts of interrupting that puberty both on the body and on cognitive development, I find myself having second thoughts about my cat having been spayed as a kitten. I've started to wonder if perhaps we're doing our pets a disservice by not allowing them to reach complete maturity before sterilizing them.
 
Emily's Cat said:
I've never heard of someone house sitting when there weren't pets involved. In which case, they're actually pet-sitting, in the pet's own home.

That said... I also don't know anyone wealthy enough to have a house that needs to be sat in the first place. A trusted friend gathering the mail or watering the plants is generally about all that's needed.
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Yes, that's why I thought it was odd. No pets involved. Small mid-terraced house, only four rooms, kitchen and bathroom. Nothing especially valuable at all. If my friend herself had decided she wanted someone to stay, then of course it would be a different matter. But "Elaine" came forward of his own volition, and the offer was in fact rejected.

When my friend told me this (as part of a sales pitch about what a lovely person "Elaine" is) I had this sudden vision of AGP man who has wormed himself into a female friendship getting off on living in a single woman's home. Maybe this is unjust, but the few things my friend has told me about "Elaine" ring some warning bells.

Not that I think my friend is going to come to any harm. I just don't like to think of her as the prop for an AGP fetishist, any more than the redheaded girl at the petrol station.
 
theprestige said:
Nobody here has any objection to gender nonconformity. None of the public policy concerns raised here are concerns about gender nonconformity.

LJ is trying to defend a certain kind of toxic, misogynistic "gender trans-conformity" (for lack of a better term). A trans-conformity that is quite clearly linked to certain characteristic mental disorders. Disorders that are not healthfully treated by the policies proposed. Not for the people suffering from those disorders, and not for the communities in which they are being "treated".

And LJ's defense of these "treatments" is essentially, "you're just a bigot who hates gender nonconformists." It's a solid play for a lawyer who doesn't have much else to work with. But this isn't a courtroom, and none of us are so easily fooled or intimidated by such lawyerly bluster. LJ would be much better served by doffing the activist-lawyer hat, and donning the scientist or critical thinker hat.
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It would be even more aggravating and less unintentionally funny if it weren't for the fact that I myself am *quite* gender nonconforming. IIRC, so is Rolfe.

My general take is "**** you gender ********, I'm going to be me and do what is comfortable for me"
 
theprestige said:
I think it can be effective in person. Not necessarily in changing anyone's mind, but effective in silencing dissenting opinions. Obviously it doesn't work so well in this venue.
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True story - I had a fellow student in high school decide that they wanted to beat me up for something I'd said to someone else when they weren't even present, and which was admittedly not kind. They did a lot of puffing up and threatening gestures and yelling and trying to intimidate me while I was getting things out of my locker at the end of the day. I finally told them "If you're going to beat me up, just get it over with. You can't change my mind, all you can do is cause me pain. And all this yelling is annoying."

I did not get beat up. I'm still a bit impressed with myself, all these many years later :)
 
Emily's Cat said:
Conversational aside...

Having learned so much about puberty in humans, and the impacts of interrupting that puberty both on the body and on cognitive development, I find myself having second thoughts about my cat having been spayed as a kitten. I've started to wonder if perhaps we're doing our pets a disservice by not allowing them to reach complete maturity before sterilizing them.
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I'm inclined to agree. All my pets have gone through puberty before being neutered. At first this was coincidental, but then my senior partner advised me to leave Caramel as long as possible (he was canvassing for three but in fact I caved at two), and then by the time I got Jori (whom I am currently typing round - he's on my knee) I had worked it out for myself. Mind you, Jori's antics as chronicled in Community led to his castration at just over a year.

Vets say jokingly "if they're big enough they're old enough" and there are some fairly vocal proponents of early neutering. I can't say it's an obvious disaster, if it was it would be stopped, but I don't think it's optimal. My senior partner's view was that the body proportions of cats, especially head size, were wrong if they were castrated before puberty. The sainted Rolfe came to me as an entire tom aged about three (and I castrated him almost immediately) and George always said that was why he was so handsome and won so much at cat shows.
 
Rolfe said:
Today, in Scotland, a man was found guilty on two counts of rape. Subsequent to these crimes, shortly before appearing in court, he announced that he was "transitioning". (Yes, this is the creep mentioned previously, whose advocate thought that his transition should lead to his acquittal, fortunately the jury wasn't so gullible. I'll bet that's 15 extremely peaked citizens.)

He has now been sent to the women's prison.
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Now I'm irate. This is obscene, and it is reckless endangerment of the females imprisoned there. I'm so angry I don't even have words for it.
 
Elaedith said:
Of all the things that irritate me the most about this stupid ideology, it is the idea that it supports gender nonconformity.

Gender nonconformity means rejecting the stereotypes about behaviour, traits, and social roles associated with your sex if those don't suit your personality and wishes. In other words a man doesn't have to be masculine and a woman doesn't have to be feminine, both sexes can have any personality, any type of gender expression, any social role and any occupation that suits them as individuals. The key to this is understanding that 'man' and 'woman' just refer to sex and therefore nothing else is required. It doesn't even matter to what extent you think gender roles are based on innate sex differences or not; you can be gender nonconforming either way.

We already had decades of people fighting for the right to be gender nonconforming, before this ridiculous movement came along and started promoting the idea that 'who don't identify with the gender assigned to them on the basis of their sex aren't 'men' and 'women',' by changing the meaning of 'man' and 'woman' to refer to 'identification with genders'. Not one person has ever explained why this is anything but regressive and sexist. Instead, they pretend that when you say 'a woman is an adult human female' you are saying that 'all female people have the gender 'woman'' and are not letting people 'be themselves'. There is absolutely nothing you can do by changing the meaning of words to refer to 'genders' rather than sexes, that you can't already do by just rejecting gender roles that don't suit you - other than to try to enter spaces for the other sex.

This movement is not about promoting gender nonconformity; it is just about sex denialism, which is purely ideological. People who are unhappy with their sex (dysphoria), which is not the same as gender nonconformity although they are correlated, are being used as pawns.
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:bigclap
 
d4m10n said:
What movement or ideology do you have in mind here?

If one were to ask me which ideological adherents stand to benefit the most from deprecating (or at least significantly weakening) the social salience of gender roles, I'd say feminists.

If one were to ask me who benefits from "sex denialism" or elevating gender over sex, I'd be somewhat at a loss. Perhaps intersectional feminists?
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I'd say males benefit from sex denialism. That seems to be the outcome we are observing.
 
Emily's Cat said:
Hallelujah! Every time some reason and logic wins out, I feel like maybe, just maybe, there actually is a god. Because it's so rare it might just be a miracle.
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Nope. Press reporting that he's been sent to Cornton Vale women's prison. Although there has been such an outcry that I'm not sure it'll stick. A couple of news outlets were making noises about it not being definite, as if they'd been fed some line from the SPS.

Well, Isla could have bunked up with Katie Dolatowski who was imprisoned there for sexually assaulting a couple of girls, all six feet five of him, except I think he's been released. He was in a men's prison at one point but he beat up another prisoner. Maybe that's why when he re-offended he got sent to Cornton Vale.
 
Rolfe said:
I'm inclined to agree. All my pets have gone through puberty before being neutered. At first this was coincidental, but then my senior partner advised me to leave Caramel as long as possible (he was canvassing for three but in fact I caved at two), and then by the time I got Jori (whom I am currently typing round - he's on my knee) I had worked it out for myself. Mind you, Jori's antics as chronicled in Community led to his castration at just over a year.

Vets say jokingly "if they're big enough they're old enough" and there are some fairly vocal proponents of early neutering. I can't say it's an obvious disaster, if it was it would be stopped, but I don't think it's optimal. My senior partner's view was that the body proportions of cats, especially head size, were wrong if they were castrated before puberty. The sainted Rolfe came to me as an entire tom aged about three (and I castrated him almost immediately) and George always said that was why he was so handsome and won so much at cat shows.
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All of our cats have been females, and all have been spayed prior to us adopting them (or them us, depending on your perspective). I do know that mature toms have a very distinctly male face.

There's a tiktok person my spouse follows, who has Maine Coons. The males are spectacularly handsome. If only my Discordia didn't hate all other non-humans, I'd love one.
 
Emily's Cat said:
So... Puerto Rican then?
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Ya tu sabes.

As to whether "males benefit from sex denialism," I'm not about to generalize from a handful of males (e.g. Lia Thomas, Rachel McKinnon, Laurel Hubbard) to all of the males. Most males benefit directly from the medical understanding that risk factors for various maladies and conditions (such as prostate cancer or pregnancy) are statistically different for men and women, and there are various other ways in which the scientific understanding of sex effects everyone.

I'm guessing that the actual beneficiaries of sex denialism are an elite few, people who got on board with the relevant ideology early on and can now be seen as thought leaders.
 
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d4m10n said:
What movement or ideology do you have in mind here?

If one were to ask me which ideological adherents stand to benefit the most from deprecating (or at least significantly weakening) the social salience of gender roles, I'd say feminists.

If one were to ask me who benefits from "sex denialism" or elevating gender over sex, I'd be somewhat at a loss. Perhaps intersectional feminists?
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The movement or ideology promoting sex denialism is not necessarily synonymous with those benefiting from it. Sex denialism seems to be associated with queer theory and intersectional feminism. To understand it one needs to go back to postmodern claims about the impossibility of objective knowledge about reality, and the idea that all knowledge is constructed in the service of power. Truth claims, including scientific claims, are all just narratives reflecting the interests of those who make them.

I think people confuse this with the idea that knowledge can be inaccurate due to biases of researchers. To have a bias there must be an objective reality and a way of determining that an claim about this reality is less accurate than another. But the ideas come from a philosophy that says there is no way to determine that one claim is more accurate than another, because even the methods used to test claims (logic, reason, scientific methods etc) are constructed in the service of power. There is no objective way to determine between competing claims based on truth. You can only try to identify who the claim appears to benefit and then uncover how it serves their interests. By extension, any claim which is identified as serving the marginalised and oppressed should be elevated because it must have been unfairly suppressed by the powerful.

There is also no distinction between concepts or categories that are based on biological reality (e.g. sex) and ideas that are socially constructed (e.g. how sex should behave, or gender roles), because all categories are constructed to oppress people. Therefore, if it appears that women have been oppressed based on their sex, or people in general have been oppressed based on gender roles, it must be that the concept of sex itself was constructed for the purpose of oppression. Therefore it needs to be deconstructed. Instead of attacking the justifications for sex-based oppression or attacking the pressures to conform to gender roles, you can just attack sex itself, and these things will go away by getting rid of the concept of sex. If somebody defends the reality of sex, it can't be because they care about scientific truth - it must be because they want to maintain oppression (or if they belong to the oppressed group, they have a false consciousness). Of course there are a few problems with this, one of which is whose interests the concept of sex serves if sex didn't exist until it was constructed. The funniest example of this is a claim that sex didn't exist until it was invented by male scientists to oppress women.

I'm not suggesting that those who pick up these idea actually believe or articulate the above. I think these ideas are emotionally appealing because they fit with the way the human mind works (but that might just be my bias due to cognitive science background), and the tendency towards tribalism. So people like ideas that are unfalsifiable (because you can't be shown to be wrong) but at the same time want to say their belief is superior to the alternative. People want to start from the desired conclusion and work backwards to construct support for it rather than look for evidence that it's inaccurate. People are cognitive misers who don't want to have to defend ideas by debate unless they are forced to. People want to say that their idea is correct because it is the one favoured by their 'tribe' and not by the outgroup. People want to denounce heretics and punish them for speaking the wrong narrative, rather than have to debate them. One way to achieve all of this is to just claim you are self-evidently correct because you claim to be supporting the interests of an oppressed minority, and that makes anyone who challenges your claim a bigot. You then don't have to examine their evidence, because the evidence is obviously biased since it supports the wrong conclusion.
 
d4m10n said:
What movement or ideology do you have in mind here?

If one were to ask me which ideological adherents stand to benefit the most from deprecating (or at least significantly weakening) the social salience of gender roles, I'd say feminists.

If one were to ask me who benefits from "sex denialism" or elevating gender over sex, I'd be somewhat at a loss. Perhaps intersectional feminists?
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As for who benefits - I think there are a few groups, in the short term. I'll think up a list. But just as one example - in academia now, you can definitely benefit from promoting ideas that claim to serve this type of ideology. You get to publish things in certain journals even if the claims are complete nonsense, and others are scared to challenge them for fear of repercussions for their career. You also get to denounce colleagues who disagree with you (e.g. Kathleen Stock) and damage or destroy their careers without needing to produce any argument or evidence to refute what they say on the basis of logic, reason or accuracy.
 
UK government - which likely for this issue means Scotland is devolved - has finally confirmed it won't send trans women to women's prisons.*
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/update-on-changes-to-transgender-prisoner-policy-framework

The criteria are clear-cut and cover the*two main concerns, the first especially. Want to do your porridge in women's prisons? Lose the penis.

As a result of the new policy, transgender women who are in future sentenced to custody and
have male genitalia
OR
who have been convicted of sexual offences
will not serve their sentences in the general women’s estate unless there are exceptional circumstances.
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In reply to this, on Twitter, someone quipped, "I wonder if this will reduce Prison Onset Gender Dysphoria".*

Trans activists should be thankful adults reached this conclusion; it might cut down on the number of stories in the news which end up peaking women and turning them into dastardly TERFs. Self-ID cannot work as a policy if predatory men opportunistically exploit the loopholes, as they're clearly doing.

It will be interesting to see if the Scottish government pays any attention to this or if they're happy to provide more empirical evidence for why self-IDing men into women's prisons is a bad idea by providing a contrast with the rest of the UK over time. And then to see if after 2024, an incoming Labour government tries to reverse this or if they quietly accept this is a common-sense policy.

On a related note, the Daily Mail interviewed the ex-wife of the double rapist convicted this week in Scotland. She said, 'His gender transition is a sham for attention and an easier life in prison. When I saw the photos of him dressed as a woman with a blonde wig and pink lycra leggings, I fell out of bed laughing."
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...nder-rapist-Isla-Bryson-warns-never-stop.html

Scottish rugby, at least, has excluded trans women from women's rugby. That, too, will prevent a few negative headlines in the future and reduce potential injuries.
 
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