Cont: Transwomen are not women part XII (also merged)

[Emily's Cat]

What does it matter if the canary in the coal mine dies? Why do you care about birds so much? It's not even your bird.

 

[LondonJohn]

It does have that echo, doesn't it? That argument was disingenuous when it came to gay marriage. I don't think it's disingenuous when it comes to transcending sex segregation, because the two circumstances are not analogous.

Why do you believe that someone should have the right to transcend sex segregation in public policy, simply because they say they want to?

That's the big way in which the two circumstances are not analogous. Other than the right to not be discriminated against (which trans folks also already have), gay rights amount to being left alone to do whatever they want with whichever consenting adults they want. Gay sex? Live and let live. Public displays of gay affection? Live and let live. Effeminacy? Butchery? Stereotypical flamboyance? Live and let live. Gay marriage? Live and let live. None of these rights require any significant imposition on anyone else. Anyone offended by the idea of homosexuals holding hands in public is a homophobe.

But the trans rights we're talking about, the ones that aren't already settled matters of constitional law, all involve making significant impositions on other people. You should be well familiar with this refrain too, by now.

ETA: TRAs are losing some women as allies not because these women are transphobes - obviously, since they wouldn't have been trans allies to begin with if they were. No, they're losing allies because these trans-inclusionists are beginning to understand what's actually being imposed on them, what's actually being demanded of them. They're beginning to realize it's not "LGBT", we're all in this together. It's transwomen versus women, them versus us. Gay rights never had to burn that bridge, because they never had any interest in that further shore. Gay rights was never about sex denialism. Gay rights was never about dragging others down to prop themselves up. Transsexual rights are necessarily a zero-sum game with women's rights.

Where should a trans man (who, for the sake of argument, has had affirming surgical and medical treatment) change to use the public swimming pool - if the only options are "men's" "women's" and "disabled"?

It intrigues me as to why so many anti-transgender individuals are firmly coupling two issues: 1) the matter of transgender identity itself, and 2) the possible ramifications around how society should accommodate and protect transgender people. I mean, I know the nasty little reason why they do this coupling, but it's still unedifying to see the dregs of anti-trans campaigners using (2) to justify a fundamental opposition to (1). While many people claim to be concerned only with (2), almost invariably those same people also take little care to hide their opposition (and often their disgust) at (1).


By the way, on the "debate" over whether JK Rowling is anti-trans (and she's another one who claims she supports trans people and is only concerned with the impact on women's/kinds' rights etc)... one of her very first (and most well-known) tweets was mocking the use of the term "people who menstruate", and proffering her opinion that the term they should have used was "women". Yet to mock the term "people who menstruate" and claim that instead the correct term should be "women" is, literally, a straight denial and mockery of transgender identity. Why? Because many trans men also menstruate.

 

[LondonJohn]

Their definition doesn't even do lesbians the respect of referring to them as "women". Lesbians are defined as "non-men".

Here are some of the responses to that:
I'm a Woman. Don't Call me a Non-Man

You probably ought to know that biologically-female lesbians themselves coined that definition of the term "lesbian", and quite some time before that (obscure) students' handbook definition.

Maybe do a quick google search. It might enlighten you.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I'm guessing more anti-trans obsessives have read this webpage than actual university students. Seems to be an odd fascination with reactionaries to seek out some powerless document from a college or university to get mad about.

I don't recall ever even reading my college's student handbook, nor do I think many of my peers did either. The authors would probably be glad that at least someone thinks it's important.

Hey, look at that! Even very engaged pro-trans people had some negative feedback on this.
Response from Allegra Chapman, Co-Creator of Watch This Sp_ce, an award-winning diversity and inclusion consultancy.

I am a bisexual woman and I was deeply horrified by Johns Hopkins using this language.

In the most charitable possible interpretation, I feel it's a clumsy attempt to include non-binary and gender non-conforming people. But, in my opinion, it should have been obvious to the people making this change that this was not the right way to do it.

It's also concerning that they apparently didn't want to include non-binary and gender-non-conforming people in their definition of "gay".

In my role as co-founder of a diversity and inclusion consultancy, I often run workshops with clients to help them build directories of definitions of inclusive terms, and we always stress the importance of involving staff and key stakeholders in this process, rather than these terms being dictated from above.

Clearly, not enough voices from within the lesbian community were involved in creating this definition. I think this shows how woefully lacking we are in language to describe non-binary and gender-nonconforming people, and how difficult a space this is for organizations to navigate.

Of course, this commenter is a female, so I'm sure their view won't count to you. It's really just an "anecdote" that doesn't matter.

 

[LondonJohn]

A lesbian can give birth. A trans-identified man cannot. We needs laws that a trans-identified man has the right to have babies.

Umm... what?

(And it's "trans woman", not "trans-identified man". That Kool-Aid must be tasting horribly sickly-sweet by now, no?)

 

[Emily's Cat]

Ok, let's broaden this out a bit. How does this page meaningfully impact anyone? Hell, how does it meaningfully impact students and employees of Johns Hopkins or anyone else in that community?

Evelyn Okpanachi, 46, from London, is a leadership and women's empowerment expert

In my view, Johns Hopkins describing women as a "non-man" is outrageous and an insult to women everywhere, especially those who want to be known as women.

I believe it strips us of our biological makeup and makes identity more complex. In my opinion, it suggests that women are irrelevant, and it tramples on women's rights and equality that we have fought so hard for.

In my experience, the majority of women in the workplace are happy to be identified as such. It's part of our identity. I feel that this has a lot of wider implications long term, especially around equity.

Johns Hopkins is a prominent research university and one of the first of its kind. A lot of research and opinions that come from the institution are used worldwide. This could mean other institutions calling women "non-men", which is a term I personally do not gravitate towards.

It puts us back years as there is more to fight for. The adoption of this term in the workplace is problematic too, as it brings into play the gender bias that we are fighting so hard against.

Of course, that's just the opinion of some female, it's really just an "anecdote" and doesn't count, amirite?

 

[LondonJohn]

But who’s the “pervert” here? The guy asking the official if it’s a co-ed event and saying it looks like a boy is competing against the girls? Or Heidi Starr, the mom, loudly asking if this guy wants to see her daughter naked? If Tesar’s telling the truth, it was Starr who escalated this and made it sexual.



And you’ll feel exactly the same way if it turns out *Starr* was the one who invoked genitalia and introduced the idea of someone seeing her daughter naked, and happily made this a big public spectacle, yes?

Right now I share Ziggurat’s view: no way to know for sure what happened, but for now the odds are good that neither one behaved particularly well.

I'd say that a parent would be justified in getting pretty angry if a nutter started loudly and publicly accusing their daughter of being a male and trying to stop her from competing in a race. Perhaps you yourself would react in a sanguine and measured fashion at that sort of thing?

 

[GlennB]

Umm... what?

(And it's "trans woman", not "trans-identified man". That Kool-Aid must be tasting horribly sickly-sweet by now, no?)

It might be a riff on Monty Python's 'Life of Brian'. "Loretta" etc

 

[Emily's Cat]

I guess I don't understand the point of citing an institution like Johns Hopkins unless that authority or whatever is supposed to be meaningful.

If this just boils down to "I don't agree with the opinion of some policy page that doesn't impact me (or anyone) in any meaningful way", then I'm wondering why it's interesting at all.

Well, it's just females, and they're nothing more than non-men. Which I suppose makes it uninteresting to people who are men-men instead of those dismissible and unimportant non-men.

Using the term "non-man" to describe women seems to me like a poor attempt to avoid wading into the complex waters of gender; yet it ends up erasing all female identities.

In my view, it takes away all of our hard-fought-for agency and reverts us to something from the past—degrading us to beings that only exist in relation to men rather than as our own, unique and varied people.

It also highlights something most women have experienced, which is having your identity defined by your relation to men.

I recently had a dentist tell me: "If I was his daughter" he wouldn't prescribe me antibiotics for a wisdom tooth infection. I was left untreated, in pain, and feeling belittled. I was angry with him but also myself, because I hadn't pointed out that I was his patient and not his daughter. I ended up needing surgery.

Given Johns Hopkins' role as a prestigious scientific institute, to me it acts as yet another indication of how often women are failed by doctors. Not just in my case, but in the case of every cis woman I know.

For many, it takes years for common disorders to be diagnosed, because our pain and symptoms are chalked up to hysteria.

For example, I know several people who had to wait years for their endometriosis to be finally diagnosed, despite it being a common illness that roughly 10 percent of women in the U.K. experience.

Describing everyone who identifies as a woman as "non-men" others us. I believe it implies that men are the norm, and we are not. In my eyes, it's outdated, has no place in society. We deserve to be seen for the complex beings we are.

 

[LondonJohn]

Evelyn Okpanachi, 46, from London, is a leadership and women's empowerment expert


Of course, that's just the opinion of some female, it's really just an "anecdote" and doesn't count, amirite?

https://rainbowandco.uk/blogs/what-were-saying/the-history-of-trans-non-binary-lesbians

https://warwickpride.org/lesbian/

https://queerdom.fandom.com/wiki/Lesbian

 

[d4m10n]

(And it's "trans woman", not "trans-identified man". That Kool-Aid must be tasting horribly sickly-sweet by now, no?)

Linguistic prescriptivism bolstered by moral grandstanding, yet again.


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[Emily's Cat]

Saying "every non-man gender that's sexually attracted to women is a lesbian gender" muddies the waters so thoroughly it can only have come from a muddied brain.

It's fascinating but also kind of creepy how the more you look at trans-inclusionary concepts and rhetoric, the more it looks like the most regressively patriarchal thing since Vladimir Putin took over the Russian Federation.

Like... there's men, and then there's everyone else. Female-attracted non-binary? Lesbian. Never mind that up until this very moment, "lesbian" has been a clearly woman-gendered term. Never mind that you don't identify as a woman. Johns Hopkins has declared that linguistically, you're now a lesbian. Because? Reasons.

There's a really strong thread of highly regressive patriarchal nonsense wrapped up in a cloak of "civil rights". The deeper you look, the more it starts to smell an awful lot like RealMen^TM are making a play to get anyone they deem not "man enough" relegated to the most othery of others... "women". Ends up being a world divided into RealMen^TM and All Those That RealMen^TM think are superfluous except for maybe housework and cooking. Unless it's a fancy restaurant, then the chef needs to be a RealMan^TM.

 

[Trausti]

You're probably best off asking this question to one of the actual experts in this field. Because the aggregation of world's experts in this field - including every single medical organisation (including paediatric organisations) of any consequence - have deemed that transgender identity is a valid human condition (and not therefore a mental health disorder), while someone claiming to identify as a different age or a different race is suffering from some form of mental health disorder.

Maybe you can ask the experts why - given their aggregated hundreds of thousands of years of knowledge, education, skill and experience in this field - they now consider transgender identity to be a valid lived condition (in very much the same way as a similar cohort of the world's experts previously deemed that homosexuality was a valid lived condition rather than a mental health disorder)?

Personally, I'm inclined to trust the views, opinions and practices of the world's experts.... as opposed to trusting either my own view or the view of anyone else who's not an expert in the field. I trust that the tens of thousands of actual experts are many orders of magnitude more likely to get this difficult issue right than a bunch of uneducated, wholly-inexperienced and unskilled nobodies. Maybe that's just me - YMMV.

You cannot change your sex. There is no objective basis to state that body dysphoria changes sex. If a person sincerely believes they’re Napoleon that doesn’t mean they are.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Oh, it's against both gay men and lesbians. Most trans-identified people are hetrosexual. So they try to gaslight others by saying that attaction is based on gender, i.e., whatever I say I am, and not biology. Lesbians gotta learn to enjoy lady dick.

Don't worry, we've been repeatedly told in this thread that that never happens, it's all just a right wing conspiracy to create a moral panic.

And besides, when it does happen, it's just outliers. They don't count - they're just anecdotes.

And if we have a lot of anecdotes, well, that's okay, it's a really small volume in the grand scheme of things - and we've got to break some (female) eggs to make some omelets, amirite?

 

[Emily's Cat]

Kinda seems like you're reading a lot into this rather than perhaps just assuming a misunderstanding is happening.

I'm guessing the strained definition is a result of trying to figure out how non-binary or otherwise gender non-conforming people fit into the traditional definition of lesbian. It strikes me as probably a fool's errand, but it's not really something to get bent out of shape about considering the non-existent stakes.

Funny how there was no effort made to include non-binary or gender non-conforming people into the traditional definition of "gay man" though.

It's also entirely possible whoever wrote this is quite a silly person with silly ideas. Likewise going to have to file this under "who cares" considering it's a non-binding document.

A whole lot of females care. Of course, those silly females don't matter, they're just being hysterical, right? They're only half the population, they don't count.

 

[Trausti]

Umm... what?

(And it's "trans woman", not "trans-identified man". That Kool-Aid must be tasting horribly sickly-sweet by now, no?)

The party said 2 + 2 = 5.


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[Emily's Cat]

There's nothing at all in the story to suggest that either girl is a lesbian.

It's a man harassing a nine-year-old girl for having short hair.

And it seems a bit peculiar to me that you're all to happy to treat this as a stand alone phenomenon, disconnected from anything else. I mean, the accusations of pedophilia, grooming, and genital mutilation...they seem a bit familiar to me.

It's all part of the same problem. It's the fairly foreseeable backlash and overreaction to a faith-based concept being pushed as a civil rights agenda, in a way that materially disadvantages females.

It sucks, and I'm angry about it. Part of the reason I'm angry is because it reinforces sexist stereotypes. Like this - this idiot got angry because we've now come full circle. When I was young, we were told that young females can have short hair if they want to (Grace Jones, anyone?) and young males can have long hair and wear make up (Poison?) and that didn't make them any less of a female or a male.

Now we've gone round the bend... and any person with short hair must be a male.

It's bringing the bad old regressive stereotypes back with added oomph. Like angry old males who yell at young female athletes.

 

[Emily's Cat]

This just isn't true. I told you what the x-axis would be--statistical confidence. Given that we're talking about a system of classification with two classes, confidence in membership of one class will decrease as confidence in membership in the other increases. So, take your pick. Either graph confidence of femaleness or confidence of maleness.

This is not the difficulty that people make it out to be.

Statistical confidence of... what exactly? How do you measure maleness of femaleness?

Additionally, you are directly acknowledging that you have two discrete classes in your description. You're looking at a mixed distribution that includes two discrete classes in the population sample. Not one population with two means; two populations.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Went for a meal and the restaurant had toilets marked "non-binary, cubicals only" and "non-binary urinals and cubicals". I thought that clever, but it still does not get round the issue of biological women who for very good reason, do not want to share intimate spaces with anyone other than biological women.

That's a step up from the handful I've seen that have a "gender neutral" toilet... and a "men's" toilet.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I'm unclear on why you think this matters.


This argument relies on the same sophistry that the usual argument does.

"Sex is a reproductive role, a developmental pathway, a body plan, distinct from sexual determination, and there are only two sexes in this sense."

Fine, that's perfectly reasonable.

"Sex is observable."

Well, not in the abstract sense that's just been supplied. If we want to "observe" sex, we'll need to either make inferences from the drivers/results of sexual determination (which will not allow us to exhaustively classify every individual as male or female), or proffer a new definition.

Sex is generally observable, as external genitalia are in agreement with sex in about 99.98% of cases. Although the technical grouping of Disorders of Sexual Development is larger than 0.02% of the population, only that percentage have ambiguous or misaligned genitalia. The other disorders affect later development, usually at puberty, or affect fertility.

And for those 0.02% of cases where there is ambiguity... the sex of the individual can be found with additional testing.

Every individual in the class mammalia can be classified as male or female. None is unclassifiable, none is something other than male or female, none is mafemale or some in-between thing. That doesn't mean that it's always EASY to classify. But they are all classifiable.

I mean, I'm not super interested in doing this, but the idea that sex cannot be understood as a bimodal distribution because we have nothing to put on the x-axis is completely wrongheaded.

Sexual-linked characteristics can be understood to be bimodal, if you don't separate your population by sex. Foot size among humans is bimodal, if you don't separate female from male. Once you separate them, however, each displays a single mode within their distribution.

I suppose you could technically make the argument that scrotum volume is bimodal if you don't separate your population by sex. You'll end up with one node and a well-defined distribution for males... and a spike at zero for females.

If you want to get technical... I'll give you a W. You could plot a mutlivariate distribution of "femininity" and "masculinity" measuring a selection of several characteristics against an arbitrary ideal, in which case you would probably end up with a bimodal distribution. But I would also counter that this would not be at all indicative of SEX being bimodal.