Transwomen are not women - X (XY?)

[d4m10n]

We'd have to see their actual letter but I suspect they will be arguing that a blanket ban is a disproportionate (is that the right word?) action to achieve "fair and safe competition" rather than for example setting the level of testosterone in the blood as the test.

Your suspicions are correct. The letter reads, in part, “It is difficult to see how a blanket ban with no exceptions could be justified as necessary. Allowing a particular trans woman to play in the female category for contact rugby may not raise any issues in respect of fair competition or the safety of competitors, and if so her exclusion cannot be justified.”

I don't quite follow this logic, since the same could be said, ceteris paribus, about any blanket ban in sport (e.g. strict weight classes in wrestling or boxing, bans on doping, steroids, etc.). So long as the individual competitor in question isn't too near the tail of the performance curve (as most others will be, at an elite level) giving them some specific enhancement won't effect the overall fairness of the game. Folks like Julie Curtiss and Laurel Hubbard (from the OP) might well argue that their advanced age offsets many of the inherent advantages of male puberty, and no doubt they are at least partially correct.

 

[theprestige]

As the second paragraph says, "I was biologically male". I trust that you can deduce that I still am. I mean, even with alchemy and the law of equivalent exchange, that doesn't change : p

Thanks! I missed that earlier. I apologize for asking you to repeat yourself.

 

[Lord Muck oGentry]

I don't quite follow this logic, since the same could be said, ceteris paribus, about any blanket ban in sport (e.g. strict weight classes in wrestling or boxing, bans on doping, steroids, etc.).

Commentary here:
https://sex-matters.org/posts/updates/why-are-lawyers-giving-faulty-advice-about-women-only-sports/

It is sometimes said that a “blanket rule” excluding all men might have to be separately justified as being a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim if it discriminates indirectly against trans people, but that is nonsense: a blanket rule excluding all men is what section 195 expressly permits.

Text of sec. 195:

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/section/195

The comparators are " average persons" of each sex, so a case-by-case approach looks hard to justify.

 

[d4m10n]

LondonJohn - Does the assertion of a "valid lived identity" tell us anything about whether it is ethical or legal for RFU to "only permit players in the female category if the sex originally recorded at birth is female" in your view?

 

[Rolfe]

Your midnight check-in on the petition reports 78,979 signatures, so 370 new signatures today. Ticking along quite nicely.

The new magic number is 284.1.

 

[lionking]

LondonJohn - Does the assertion of a "valid lived identity" tell us anything about whether it is ethical or legal for RFU to "only permit players in the female category if the sex originally recorded at birth is female" in your view?

I have no doubt that you will find that a “valid lived identity” is different from a “valid rugby playing identity”. After the “experts” in the RFU can’t be wrong.

(Oh, in case people don’t recognise the sarcasm in my post, the RFU is right)

 

[LondonJohn]

It looks like you haven’t read this thread. Despite LJs rants, nobody here is denying the rights of trans people to equality when it comes to things like employment and housing. Nobody has expressed any objection to people dressing and living the way they prefer and to have access to medical treatment to assist transition.

The problem is that so many TRAs demand access to women’s private places, eligibility to women’s scholarships, access to women’s prisons and shelters. They demand to play women’s sports, which is unfair and sometimes dangerous to women. Most transwomen making these demands have penises and some have raped women in their so-called safe places. What I and others object to is the attack on women’s rights by TRAs.

But thanks for your depiction of posters and your drive-by.

Haha "LJs (sic) rants"!!

And you're being entirely disingenuous by completely avoiding the way that you - and many many other posters in this thread - have used terms such as*:

"bloke in a dress" or

"men LARPing at being women" or

"men cosplaying at being women" or

"Elliot Page is a mentally unwell person with a delusion which makes her believe she's a man" or

"Denying the existence of trans women and calling them men is 100% proof of what I said" or

"People born with a cock and balls are not women, and can never become women. They remain men" or

"The Atheist knows some men who perform "woman"" or

"I may not like men LARPing a cariacature (sic) of over-sexualised fantasy "woman", but they're perfectly free to do that"

(NB: Some of the above are direct quotes; the others are very close paraphrases which capture the wording and the intent)


Because, lionking, all of those insults (and all the rest that are in a similar vein) explicitly deny the identity of transgender people. They are all, in a word, transphobic. I know you've expressed ignorance of this fact not so long ago, and I guess I can understand why you (and others in this thread) might want to pretend/rationalise/deny wrt this issue. But I'm afraid the truth is right there in (virtual) black and white: a significant proportion (maybe even the majority) of people regularly posting in this thread have expressed explicitly transphobic points of view.


* And these are all from the pretty recent past within this thread. Were I inclined to do a fuller search, I am highly confident that I would be able to reproduce a whole litany of similar types of transphobic comments, which were posted by a large number of regular contributors to this thread.

 

[LondonJohn]

LondonJohn - Does the assertion of a "valid lived identity" tell us anything about whether it is ethical or legal for RFU to "only permit players in the female category if the sex originally recorded at birth is female" in your view?

I've already made my own view clear on this matter within this thread. A number of times. May I recommend that you carry out a none-too-arduous search?

 

[LondonJohn]

BTW it's interesting - and revealing - to watch the usual suspects continuing to pretend that they don't understand what's meant by "valid lived identity".

Once again, I'll make it easier for the slower members of the group: simply swap the phrase "valid lived identity" for "identity that is not now considered to be a mental health disorder".

Not sure why anyone would prefer that latter lengthier phrase rather than the shorter - and easily comprehensible - three-word phrase. No accounting for taste (or feigned ignorance), I guess....

 

[lionking]

Haha "LJs (sic) rants"!!

And you're being entirely disingenuous by completely avoiding the way that you - and many many other posters in this thread - have used terms such as*:

"bloke in a dress" or

"men LARPing at being women" or

"men cosplaying at being women" or

"Elliot Page is a mentally unwell person with a delusion which makes her believe she's a man" or

"Denying the existence of trans women and calling them men is 100% proof of what I said" or

"People born with a cock and balls are not women, and can never become women. They remain men" or

"The Atheist knows some men who perform "woman"" or

"I may not like men LARPing a cariacature (sic) of over-sexualised fantasy "woman", but they're perfectly free to do that"

(NB: Some of the above are direct quotes; the others are very close paraphrases which capture the wording and the intent)


Because, lionking, all of those insults (and all the rest that are in a similar vein) explicitly deny the identity of transgender people. They are all, in a word, transphobic. I know you've expressed ignorance of this fact not so long ago, and I guess I can understand why you (and others in this thread) might want to pretend/rationalise/deny wrt this issue. But I'm afraid the truth is right there in (virtual) black and white: a significant proportion (maybe even the majority) of people regularly posting in this thread have expressed explicitly transphobic points of view.


* And these are all from the pretty recent past within this thread. Were I inclined to do a fuller search, I am highly confident that I would be able to reproduce a whole litany of similar types of transphobic comments, which were posted by a large number of regular contributors to this thread.

Well done. You addressed me and quoted a range of statements which I did not make. Pretty sloppy even for you.

But whatever, what is more important is you did not address in any way the post of mine you were supposedly responding to. This is what I said:

nobody here is denying the rights of trans people to equality when it comes to things like employment and housing. Nobody has expressed any objection to people dressing and living the way they prefer and to have access to medical treatment to assist transition.

You haven’t refuted it because you can’t.

And please don’t imagine you need to keep popping in with a range of insults showing, supposedly, how tough you are. I treat your posts as light amusement.

 

[Samson]

Meanwhile it is transphobic to quote a young woman who thanked God her parents prevented her from being mutilated.

"From ages 4-12 I wore boys’ clothes, played boy sports and rejected all thing ‘girly’. When my brother teased me for being a girl, I even said that when I got older I would ‘cut my boobs off’. I was not transgender, I just idolised my brother. Thank God my parents were sane,” the tweet said.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/so...social-media-post/WXEQCHDPZFAU7FGNY764FTMB6I/

 

[Samson]

I felt something was missing.

This is one reply in the thread:

When I chose to have my breasts removed I was suicidal. That was said to be from gender dysphoria. I got my breasts removed and I didn’t feel any euphoria instead I felt empty like something was missing. The doctors should have never went ahead with the surgery.
8:16 AM · Feb 6, 2023
·
380.8K
Views

 

[d4m10n]

I've already made my own view clear on this matter within this thread. A number of times. May I recommend that you carry out a none-too-arduous search?

Did you make it clear why the validity of someone's lived identity doesn't take priority over biological reality in this particular case? Why, in other words, is it acceptable for RFU to pointedly fail to validate Ms Curtiss' lived identity? Is elite sport the only time and place where such validation is not required, in your view, or should females allowed to have their own spaces in other circumstances as well?

 

[Elaedith]

Did you make it clear why the validity of someone's lived identity doesn't take priority over biological reality in this particular case? Why, in other words, is it acceptable for RFU to pointedly fail to validate Ms Curtiss' lived identity? Is elite sport the only time and place where such validation is not required, in your view, or should females allowed to have their own spaces in other circumstances as well?

I believe it was that elite sport is a 'performance' and it is therefore permissible to discriminate against transwomen for not matching the 'female athlete' role in the same way as it's acceptable to discriminate against somebody with the wrong characteristics for a role as an actor, for example.

Of course, in practice the UK Equality Act indicates it is acceptable to discriminate based on sex in several contexts in addition to sport.

 

[Nessie]

I am getting to grips with the terminology.

Woman - a woman
Man - a man
Trans woman - a man
Cis - an unconfused person
Trans man - a drag queen
Feminist - an angry woman
Terf - a woman from Edinburgh with a lawn
Nonbinary - prefers to use numbers
Nicola Sturgeon - a very confused woman

 

[ahhell]

Mind if I ask side question that may have been addressed in the previous 74 pages?. For the sake of medical emergencies, shouldn't Identity cards indicate that someone is Trans? I mean, if you're incapacitated in some way by accident or due to some other medical emergency, isn't it of value for the emergency responders and doctors to know?

 

[IsThisTheLife]

Another question that has been exercising me is, now that anybody can marry anybody else and the pension age has been equalised (or I think it has), what real benefit is there to a man to having his legal sex changed? And I mean sensible benefits, not simple appropriation of things that are women's on account of their being women?

I really can't think of much, although maybe others will come up with more.

A man in Canada self-IDed as a woman to get cheaper car insurance. Is this fair? Is this what the people bringing in these laws are trying to achieve? The man isn't a lower risk as a driver simply because he got a piece of paper saying he was a woman.

Much of what is put forward seems merely to be aimed at avoiding a bit of embarrassment, although I'm not sure it actually does that. Someone who is honestly taken for a woman has to present a passport or a driving licence that says "M" and this is embarrassing. For this, we turn the world upside down? But indeed, how many such cases are there? Very few transwomen actually look like women to the point you'd be surprised to see an M marker on a document. Any embarrassment that's going on is merely the constant embarrassment they encounter every minute of every day, because people see them as men in women's clothing. Or we can go further and consider the transwomen with beards and little concession to even trying to look like a woman. They still want that documentation, but what actual good is it doing them?

Transmen on the other hand seem to be positively disadvantaging themselves, as they take themselves out of all the legislation that has been passed to protect women's vulnerabilities. It seems that legally male people may not be entitled to ante-natal care or maternity leave or protection from dismissal on account of being pregnant.

Equal pay legislation is becoming a minefield, as to get a successful claim under that, a woman has to identify a man doing an equivalent job but who is getting higher pay. I saw a lawyer declare that all the equal pay settlements in however long could be argued to have been decided on erroneous grounds, if sex doesn't mean sex.

I haven't even touched on the male appropriation of female single-sex spaces and provisions, although that seems to be the main objective of the trans activists. This seems to have been granted to them de facto rather than de jure, although achieved by the dubious tactic of misrepresenting the law to numerous public and private bodies. That's the bit that has to stop. No legal right of any male to enter a women's single-sex space or category.

Without that, what's left? Not blushing at passport control because you think you look like a woman and your passport says M? When in actual fact you probably look M in the first place? Is all this upending of society's norms actually worth it to achieve this objective?

A while back (20182017) I needed a job quick-smart and started work in a Lidl distribution centre (in the UK). Couldn't really hack it and lasted less than three months - excellent pay by warehouse or retail standards but you go at it hammer-and-tongs for 8-hour shifts with a single 20 minute break, and I'm just getting too old for that **** (lost a stone and a half, down to not much over 11 st./69kg at 6') - I was easily the oldest there, a few in their forties but most in their twenties and thirties.

If only the legislation were in place to facilitate it and I'd been able to self-ID as a "woman", the mandatory pick-rate would have been 20% lower for the same pay (women just can't heave as many slabs of butter and such like onto their pallets at once) and I might have stuck with it a bit longer.

Edited by jimbob: 

edited for rule 10 in body of text

 

[d4m10n]

I believe it was that elite sport is a 'performance' and it is therefore permissible to discriminate against transwomen for not matching the 'female athlete' role in the same way as it's acceptable to discriminate against somebody with the wrong characteristics for a role as an actor, for example.

What I'm really trying to understand here is why the trump card of "valid lived identity" doesn't work (for LJ) when females are performing as scrum-halfs rather than, say, in any other social context like a traditional Korean spa or the Hampstead ponds. What makes elite sport exempt from the usual norms which require gender identity to be validated and affirmed?

 

[Ziggurat]

BTW it's interesting - and revealing - to watch the usual suspects continuing to pretend that they don't understand what's meant by "valid lived identity".

Once again, I'll make it easier for the slower members of the group: simply swap the phrase "valid lived identity" for "identity that is not now considered to be a mental health disorder".

Not sure why anyone would prefer that latter lengthier phrase rather than the shorter - and easily comprehensible - three-word phrase. No accounting for taste (or feigned ignorance), I guess....

Oh, I understand that fine. But it doesn't answer the important questions. If transgender identity in the absence of gender dysphoria is not considered a mental health disorder, that still doesn't tell me what it is. So what is it? Perhaps more importantly, why does it deserve any accommodations? You have never answered these questions.

 

[Francesca R]

What I'm really trying to understand here is why the trump card of "valid lived identity" doesn't work (for LJ) when females are performing as scrum-halfs rather than, say, in any other social context like a traditional Korean spa or the Hampstead ponds. What makes elite sport exempt from the usual norms which require gender identity to be validated and affirmed?

It seems it's a special case where trans women are not women. If they were women, they'd compete in elite women's sport (if they were good enough).

Another special case, per Nicola Sturgeon, is when trans women have raped women; they're not women then either. If they were women, they'd be incarcerated in female prisons.

So in summary, trans women aren't women. They can do plenty of the things women do. They should not be allowed to do anything a woman can do as a matter of policy. And this is according to LondonJohn and Nicola Sturgeon.

(Does that wrap up this thread series? Only took six years abouts)