Transwomen are not women - X (XY?)

[Rolfe]

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?

You may think this is a sensible thing, and many of us would agree with you. However, I can't think of many things more likely to elicit screams of "transphobia!" and "discrimination" from the usual suspects.

At the risk of it being deemed off topic, because of course the topic is transwomen and not transmen, there was a very sad story a couple of years back where a transman showed up at hospital with abdominal pain. She did tell the staff on admission that she "was trans", but all her medical records said she was male, and it's likely that whoever took the message that she was trans didn't understand that she was trying to indicate that she was female.

She was treated by people who did not know she was female. She was pregnant and her baby died.

This raises the question of whether it is ever reasonable to falsify anyone's sex on an identity document (as opposed to issuing a supplementary document identifying the person and a transman or a transwoman). There are so many medical issues where it's very important to know the sex of the patient.

It also raises the question of just how someone with such extreme body dysphoria that she has to try to present as a man to the point of (I believe) having a mastectomy and taking testosterone was doing stuff with that body that got it pregnant. Still, people are weird sometimes.

 

[Ziggurat]

Here's a pretty interesting interview with a transwoman who transitioned as an adult. She doesn't fit the TRA mould.



She doesn't think society is generally hostile to trans people, she doesn't care what pronouns people use for her, she thinks transwomen are men, etc. And she's also glad she didn't have the option to transition as a child. A very interesting perspective.

 

[TomB]

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?

Well, sure.

But, leaving the outing or privacy issues that the "trans" side might present aside for the moment....

There is a lot of information that one might think would be useful for emergency responders to know. None of that tends to be on ID cards. (Except, maybe if you are an organ donor.) Some examples: diabetes, heart condition, allergies to medications, foods, etc. You can get MedicAlert cards, bracelets or necklaces that carry this information. But there is no means of putting that on my Illinois ID/driver's license.

Given that, while I agree it is useful information that care providers should have, I find it hard to single out this one piece of information that should be on the official ID for medical purposes above all others.

That said, the field on my ID says "Sex" not "Gender," so listing a trans-person's gender in the sex field is not, strictly speaking, accurate.

ETA: There was a case discussed a couple years ago in which a trans-man was treated as male in an ER which may have resulted in the loss of their baby. the individual, as I recall (I may be mistaken) filled out the forms indicating their gender rather than their sex. I'm not sure if they communicated the issue to the nurses.

 

[Rolfe]

Here's a pretty interesting interview with a transwoman who transitioned as an adult. She doesn't fit the TRA mould.



She doesn't think society is generally hostile to trans people, she doesn't care what pronouns people use for her, she thinks transwomen are men, etc. And she's also glad she didn't have the option to transition as a child. A very interesting perspective.

Oh God, Debbie Hayton again. Haven't we already been over him and his unusual but highly effective approach to managing his AGP.

 

[Rolfe]

ETA: There was a case discussed a couple years ago in which a trans-man was treated as male in an ER which may have resulted in the loss of their baby. the individual, as I recall (I may be mistaken) filled out the forms indicating their gender rather than their sex. I'm not sure if they communicated the issue to the nurses.

I already covered that in (I think) the post before yours. Assuming it's not unforgiveably off topic to discuss transmen in a thread about transwomen, I'll repeat that she told the staff who admitted her that she was "trans". It seems likely that this was not understood as her informing them that she was female. The information that she was female either wasn't understood or wasn't passed on, and she was treated by people who assumed she was male.

 

[theprestige]

That said, the field on my ID says "Sex" not "Gender," so listing a trans-person's gender in the sex field is not, strictly speaking, accurate.

It is sadly an important and useful distinction to make nowadays, but there isn't really a broad consensus in popular culture that sex means the binary biological fact and gender means the social construct. Listing a trans-person's gender in the sex field is, unfortunately, highly accurate for a large swath of society. Including policymakers, policy enforcers, and people trying to comply with policy.

 

[TomB]

I already covered that in (I think) the post before yours. Assuming it's not unforgiveably off topic to discuss transmen in a thread about transwomen, I'll repeat that she told the staff who admitted her that she was "trans". It seems likely that this was not understood as her informing them that she was female. The information that she was female either wasn't understood or wasn't passed on, and she was treated by people who assumed she was male.

Yes, I didn't read your post before I replied and edited my reply. Same case.

 

[Rolfe]

Thankfully. It would be very sad if that had happened more than once.

 

[TomB]

It is sadly an important and useful distinction to make nowadays, but there isn't really a broad consensus in popular culture that sex means the binary biological fact and gender means the social construct. Listing a trans-person's gender in the sex field is, unfortunately, highly accurate for a large swath of society. Including policymakers, policy enforcers, and people trying to comply with policy.

Yes, it's one of the oddities of this whole situation.
The field says "Sex." It is completed with the term for sex: M or F, male or female, not the terms for gender (since they are no longer synonyms) "Man" or "Woman."

One thing that has occurred to me before is that if we were to apply the updated language retroactively, there would not be rooms labelled "Men" or "Women." Instead, they would be labeled "male" or "female." I think the original labelling envisioned sex, not gender, but it was not anticipated that at some future point there would be a difference.

This is why I think you can't just look at the word on a legacy usage and apply the current definitions. You have to examine each instance and determine if what was applicable was sex or gender.

Does that make any sense?

 

[Emily's Cat]

LOL One article by an anti-transgender-identity activist (you should maybe check out his Twitter page....).

And by the way (and entirely relevantly), most of the good old general public of England & Wales were against the decriminalisation of consensual private gay sex when that took place in 1967. Shockingly, gay sex wasn't decriminalised in Scotland until 1980, at which point only a small majority of the Scottish public didn't regard it as a legitimate criminal offence.

Oh, and a sizeable majority of the general public in most of the Southern US states were not in favour of granting civil rights to black people in the 50s/60s.

"A turning of the tide" hehehehe. I guess when one delights in mocking and denying transgender identity, wishful thinking must come in very handy.

Am I to take it that you're on the pro-rapists-in-prison-with-their-victim-pool side of history?

 

[Rolfe]

Yes, it's one of the oddities of this whole situation.
The field says "Sex." It is completed with the term for sex: M or F, male or female, not the terms for gender (since they are no longer synonyms) "Man" or "Woman."

One thing that has occurred to me before is that if we were to apply the updated language retroactively, there would not be rooms labelled "Men" or "Women." Instead, they would be labeled "male" or "female." I think the original labelling envisioned sex, not gender, but it was not anticipated that at some future point there would be a difference.

This is why I think you can't just look at the word on a legacy usage and apply the current definitions. You have to examine each instance and determine if what was applicable was sex or gender.

Does that make any sense?

Nobody but a few gender studies academics ever imagined that in the context of human beings, male and female meant anything different from man and woman. And frankly it still doesn't for the vast majority of people, and indeed for dictionaries other than the ever-changing online ones that have caved to pressure from the trans lobby. "Current definitions"? Whose? The way the words have been used for hundreds of years and the way they are still used by the overwhelming majority of native English speakers, or the definitions a tiny activist lobby is trying to impose by diktat?

The other point is, if you say the sex field should be completed with the new-fangled idea of gender instead, how? There are hundreds of the bloody things and people are inventing new ones every day. Are we going to build separate toilets and changing rooms for every single one? How do we keep up?

 

[TomB]

Nobody but a few gender studies academics ever imagined that in the context of human beings, male and female meant anything different from man and woman. And frankly it still doesn't for the vast majority of people, and indeed for dictionaries other than the ever-changing online ones that have caved to pressure from the trans lobby. "Current definitions"? Whose? The way the words have been used for hundreds of years and the way they are still used by the overwhelming majority of native English speakers, or the definitions a tiny activist lobby is trying to impose by diktat?

The other point is, if you say the sex field should be completed with the new-fangled idea of gender instead, how? There are hundreds of the bloody things and people are inventing new ones every day. Are we going to build separate toilets and changing rooms for every single one? How do we keep up?

What I'm getting at, is that retroactively applying new or altered definitions to previous usage alters the meaning of that usage from the original intent.

If X originally Meant A and Y = A (so X=Y), but you now define X = B and Y = A (so that X no longer = Y), you can no longer use X and Y interchangeably in your equation. You have to rewrite them using Y to indicate A in order to preserve the original meaning.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Erm... LJ is doing no more (and no less) than pointing out the fact that mainstream medicine now considers transgender identity to be a valid condition (as opposed to a mental health disorder)*.


What's perhaps troubling in a so-called critical thinking forum is the number of so-called "critical thinkers" who either a) don't know this fact, or who b) do know this fact but who try to ignore/rationalise/misrepresent it in their "arguments". Consequently, it's embarrassingly noteworthy when "critical thinkers" try to argue that they know better than the actual experts, that they know the very notion of transgender identity is some sort of unscientific woo, and that they know what transgender people actually require/deserve is diagnosis and treatment.

Fortunately, the actual medical experts and legislatures (yep: the "adults in the room" in this context) understand the situation correctly and appropriately. The non-adults are perfectly at liberty to get all righteous and angry in toxic threads in backwater internet forums, or indeed in the carnival-barking town square for morons and extremists that is Twitter. Thankfully, the adults know otherwise, and the adults know better.

You know what's really, really embarrassing? Is that a so-called sceptic keeps repeating this unsourced, unsupported claim... all while blatantly ignoring that actual medical establishments in first-world countries like Finland, Sweden, UK, and I believe Spain now, are actively taking an entirely different view on this than what this so-called sceptic keeps spewing.

At this point, I'd like a definition of what you consider to be "actual medical experts and legislatures" given that the experts and legislatures IN YOUR OWN COUNTRY do not agree with you.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Being gay is seen in nature.
Transgenderism is also seen in nature with the mainstream science saying:

(JSTOR)


Is this really safe for human females to be in sex-segregated spaces with such instictive pretenders though? I think it warrants a pause to think about it a bit more as the results as it affects human females are less than stellar so far.

Perhaps male humans are super unique in that none of the strategies of the animal kingdom apply as they do almost everything else, and despite what mainstream scientists say. These are the experts, after all.

Sexual mimicry in nature is an act of deception and predation.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I don't think we can reasonably expect men to solve this problem by themselves so long as the suffragists have their way.



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Why not?

Because this stuff gets decided by politics, and women have the vote.

I'm going to need more elaboration, because this reads as if both d4m10n and Zig are saying that this trans issue is all the fault of females somehow.

 

[Emily's Cat]

First off, nobody ever cares about the problems of a group they don't belong to as much as the problems of a group they do belong to.

Transgender identified males belong to YOUR group, not mine.

 

[Emily's Cat]

It's interesting that protests are increasing now, and not just in Scotland. I think that while there are a lot of captured woke handmaidens, even there a fair proportion of them simply can't or won't see the consequences of what they're promoting (but may well do in future), the vast majority of women have no freaking clue what's going on and are going to be mad as hell when they find out.

I think a whole lot of people out there are genuinely working from a false premise. I have lost track of how many times I've been subjected to an argument where the implicit assumption is that all transgender identified males are delicate, small things who have had all the surgeries and hormones, and all look like Blair White. They're working from a very skewed assumption that very masculine presenting, masculine behaving, masculine males would *never ever* identify as trans.

They've got their heads in the sand, working from a wishful place, while actively ignoring the reality around them.

These are the same people, by the way, who will in complete honesty and with no malicious intent ask why females haven't said something before this recent bout of males speaking up.

To which I respond that we HAVE been telling them. They just don't listen to females.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Governments never realize they're on the wrong side of an issue. They only realize (often belatedly) that they're on the wrong side of voters. Until voters wake up, it doesn't matter how many scandals happen.

There is some hope that they are starting to. But such changes of public opinion are hard to predict. Often it doesn't manifest as a gradual transition, but as a preference cascade. Forces build up under the surface until a tipping point is reached, and then everything changes quickly and dramatically. But it's hard to predict when that tipping point will occur.

One of my worries with this is that the eventual "course correction" will overcompensate. I worry about the force-pairing of T with LGB... and I am concerned that there will end up being a regression in rights for homosexuals. All because some lying liars stuck a T on the end of some letters, and has been determinedly framing any friction with T objectives as being "Anti LGBT".

 

[Ziggurat]

I'm going to need more elaboration, because this reads as if both d4m10n and Zig are saying that this trans issue is all the fault of females somehow.

I'm saying nothing of the sort. Please, give me more credit than that, you should know by now that such a position isn't in my character.

But blame is somewhat beside the point I was making. The question was how to solve it, and in regards to public policy, it's only going to get solved by voters demanding solutions. And women have the same vote as men. They have to be part of that solution. Women cannot sit this out and expect men to solve it, ala Rolfe's suggestion. That may not be fair, but it's the reality of the situation.

 

[Rolfe]

Sexual mimicry in nature is an act of deception and predation.

While homosexuality is certainly seen in nature, and is a normal part of the reproductive cycle in some species ("lesbian" behaviour is normal in cows in pro-oestrus, for example), there is nothing even remotely comparable to human transgenderism in any other species. As you say, sexual mimicry is something quite different. (It can be a defence strategy as well as a predatory one.)