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

[Hercules56]

Where I predict the changing-room controversy will end up, years from now, in progressive states, is that anyone who self-identifies as a woman will be permitted to use the woman's changing room, but that most venues will have policies against any display of visible penises or representations thereof (prosthetics, strap-on toys, tattoos, inflatable novelties, etc.) in that room. That rule will apply to everyone using that room.

"But that's illegal gender-identity discrimination!"

"How? Having a penis has nothing to do with gender identity, unless you want to call into question the whole basis of gender self-identification."

"Well, then, it's sex discrimination."

"Yes it is, but that's explicitly permitted by law in this case which is why there are sex-specific changing rooms in the first place."

"Well, um, maybe we can sue to require having a penis being considered a disability?"

This doesn't give relief to those objecting to their own biologically female bits being seen by biological males. A combination of changing attitudes and increased privacy measures (which don't necessarily have to go all the way to completely enclosed private booths to be at least partially effective) might suffice there.

What happens when a man decides he wants to identity as a woman....who is a butch masculine lesbian who has facial hair? We gonna let "ze" use the ladies' room?

 

[Darat]

Huge difference in numbers between selfID and GRC.

Annual number of GRCs issued is below 500; cumulative total c 7k.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/gender-recognition-certificate-applications-and-outcomes/gender-recognition-certificate-applications-and-outcomes

??

 

[Darat]

Seems likely to me that any standalone units would be popular with plenty of cis people who have interest in personal privacy or modesty unrelated to the existence of trans people. US bathroom design is a real mess and I don't really understand why people accept it other than it's just the way it's always been. It's common for bathroom stalls to be made with large gaps at the edges where people can see into the stall. Truly terrible.

Over here you are seeing gyms advertising themselves by highlighting their private changing.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I'd argue that the parents' response to a stranger questioning a 9 year olds sex was quite mild. Loudly and quite explicitly labelling this person a pervert is the correct response, and they seemed only to imply it.

Hmm...

It's often quite embarrassing to be known as the person who casually and wrongly throws around such insults.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

Hmm...

Nothing casual about correctly identifying the self-appointed gender police as perverts.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

Over here you are seeing gyms advertising themselves by highlighting their private changing.

I don't think I've ever been to a private gym that hasn't built or retrofitted their showers to have privacy stalls or at least curtains. Private changing cubicles seems the next frontier for a gym trying to distinguish itself with nicer amenities.

 

[Myriad]

What happens when a man decides he wants to identity as a woman....who is a butch masculine lesbian who has facial hair? We gonna let "ze" use the ladies' room?

Nothing, and yes, in my state currently.

But allowing facial hair doesn't imply any necessity of allowing exposed penises. There are plenty of places where visible facial hair is permitted but a visible penis is not. For instance: just about everywhere.

 

[Ziggurat]

An individual with XX/XY chimerism

That's the only case where someone can be anything other than male or female, and even then, they're both, not neither and not some third option. So calling sex binary isn't really contradicted by such cases. Even in those cases, each cell is still either one or the other, not both.

And such cases are sufficiently rare as to be completely irrelevant to this debate anyways.

 

[Emily's Cat]

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?

On the other hand... parents are castigated with derogatory terms if they try to stop males from competing against females in sport.

Seems like to you the "right" answer is for females of all ages to just shut up, sit down, stop overreacting, and just let males do whatever males want to do.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

On the other hand... parents are castigated with derogatory terms if they try to stop males from competing against females in sport.

Seems like to you the "right" answer is for females of all ages to just shut up, sit down, stop overreacting, and just let males do whatever males want to do.

That's some real tortured logic to justify some old creepy man deciding to interfere in a 9 year old girl's participation in a school event because she wasn't sufficiently femme and her parents were a couple lesbians.

Then again, I don't envy your position of having to explain why it's good the policies you support are resulting in an open season for the most reactionary freaks alive to speculate and comment on the appearance and femininity of women and girls in public. Seems difficult.

 

[mumblethrax]

So calling sex binary isn't really contradicted by such cases. Even in those cases, each cell is still either one or the other, not both.

If an individual is both male and female, they cannot be classified as male or female. And I'm providing examples of sexually ambiguous individuals, rather than cells, because classifying individuals, not cells, is the task at hand.

And such cases are sufficiently rare as to be completely irrelevant to this debate anyways.

Chimerism isn't particularly rare in some mammalian species. And how many examples do you think I need to falsify the claim that all individual mammals can be classified as male or female?

 

[Emily's Cat]

Cite an example of an individual in the class mammalia that in the natural course of events, cannot be classed as either being of male sex or female sex, according to the accepted scientific/biological definition of the sexes

1. The female sex, capable of producing large gametes (ovules)

2. The male sex, capable of producing small gametes (spermatozoa)

In other words, an example of a mammal that is a third biological sex.

Note: Wise-arse answers quoting edge cases such as birth defects where an individual is born without reproductive organs will not be accepted as valid answers.

Two clarifications:

First, Capable of producing gametes is not a requirement to be of that sex. Prepubescent males of the human species do not produce sperm, they're not capable of producing sperm at that age. But they're still male. Same thing goes for menopausal females. An accurate definition is that the female sex are those that have developed along the reproductive pathway that has evolved to produce ova; males are those that developed along the reproductive pathway that has evolved to produce sperm.

Second: Among mammals, if a fetus does not develop reproductive anatomy, the fetus is unviable and fails very early in the gestation cycle.

 

[Paul2]

If an individual is both male and female, they cannot be classified as male or female. And I'm providing examples of sexually ambiguous individuals, rather than cells, because classifying individuals, not cells, is the task at hand.

Here’s how I look at it:
1. If A gets an apple, and B gets a banana, and C gets an apple and a banana, how many different types of fruit do we have?
2. The way sex works in humans - as a system for propagating the species - is not with three sexes, it’s with two. A chimera may be many things, and may not be (solely) male, and may not be (solely) female, but it is not a third sex.

 

[Ziggurat]

If an individual is both male and female, they cannot be classified as male or female. And I'm providing examples of sexually ambiguous individuals

It's not ambiguous. We know exactly what they are. And there's still just two categories: male and female. That's a binary. It's just possible in edge cases to belong to both categories. That doesn't actually make a third category.

Chimerism isn't particularly rare in some mammalian species.

Mixed sex chimerism seems to be rare in humans. And there's what, one known case where it affected reproductive anatomy?

And how many examples do you think I need to falsify the claim that all individual mammals can be classified as male or female?

More than one for this to actually matter to the trans debate, which really has nothing to do with mixed sex chimerism or even disorders of sexual development.

And if you want to get pedantic, let's do it correctly: someone who is male AND female is also male OR female. Are they male? Yes. Are they female? Yes. In English, "or" is not automatically exclusive. The only way to not be male OR female is to be not male AND not female, which such an individual isn't.

 

[Paul2]

If an individual is both male and female, they cannot be classified as male or female. And I'm providing examples of sexually ambiguous individuals, rather than cells, because classifying individuals, not cells, is the task at hand.

This brings up an important distinction I got from Jerry Coyne’s web site: there’s a difference between defining sex and diagnosing sex. The issue at hand is how we define sex (as in how many sexes are there) as opposed to diagnosing (but not in the pathological sense) what sex a particular individual is, who may have some characteristics of one sex and some of the other.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Mixed sex chimeras are possible in mammals, and could be described as both male and female, but not a third sex. But that's very much an edge case, and really not part of the transgender debate.

Mixed sex chimeras are possible, but in 99.9999999999999999.... % of cases they can still be described as either male or female, not both.

I hold out that incredibly rare 0.000......1% possibility, as it's hypothetically possible for a mammal to be born with compete and even chimerism of the reproductive organs.

Note I say hypothetically possible, as it has never been documented.

The closest we have is one single case of a human that had the chimeric form of ovotestisticular disorder, had a male reproductive system, and had fathered children with their fertile sperm from one testicle, and whose other scrotal organ was comprised of ovarian tissue... and which on post-mortem examination suggested that perhaps at one point in their past, they had released an egg from that ovary.

But given that this individual had a complete male reproductive system AND had the added benefit of being proven fertile, this individual would be classed as a male. The existence of an ovary alongside their single testicle in their scrotum doesn't make them not male. It doesn't make them both.

Some disorders of sexual development are more common in other species, because other species have different methods of sex determination. Chimerism is more generally more common in birds than in mammals, due to birds being WZ with the female carrying the mixed pair. Chimerism is also more common in animals (both mammals and birds) that have multiple embryos during gestation (litters or clutches). It's also more common in animals that are artificially inseminated - including livestock. Freemartin cattle are chimeras. Chimerism occurs in a few different ways. It can happen when the egg begins division prior to being fertilized, and ends up fertilized by more than one sperm - this is more common in birds and has something to do with how eggs develop but I'm shaky on the details here. It can also happen when a single, non-divided egg gets fertilized by more than one sperm, in which case the zygote is comprised of a mix of cells from each sperm's haploid. The other way it can occur is when two different eggs are each separately fertilized, then those two separate zygotes fuse.

IIRC, that last type is where we get conjoined twins, because the zygotes are only partially fused. It's also how we get freemartin cattle, because two different sexed fetuses share a fused umbilicus, and the female twin gets partially masculinized because it receives blood that has been shared with the male, and which contains the male's masculinizing hormones. The freemartin remains female, however.

Anyway, that's a lot of unnecessary words to say that chimerism occurs, including mixed-sex chimerism. It's more common in birds than in mammals. A mixed sex chimera is still almost always going to be one sex or another - because sex isn't determined by what characteristics the individual displays but rather by the reproductive anatomy that it develops during gestation.

Mosaicism is something different, and I don't fully understand it. It's a lot more common overall, but rarely causes any deleterious conditions. Mosaicism is responsible for tortoiseshell and calico cats. That's about where my knowledge runs out .

 

[Emily's Cat]

An individual with XX/XY chimerism, two ovotestes, and ambiguous external genitalia.

Most mixed sex human chimeras don't have ovotestes, and those that do almost always have female reproductive anatomy.

Ambiguous external genitalia is actually more likely to occur in non-chimeric disorders of sexual development, and it's usually related to either a damaged SRY activator gene, or a damaged SRY receptor apparatus.

 

[Emily's Cat]

How do you intend to do that without relying on inferences made from the results or drivers of sexual determination, which, as you have defined things, are "not sex"?

From the EXACT SAME POST that you're responding to:

It turns out that in 99.999999999999% of cases, species is pretty easy to determine from visual cues, so it's not difficult. And in the exceedingly rare cases that it is difficult for some reason, we don't rely solely on visual cues.

Misinformation of the genitals of some sort only occurs in about 0.02% of births. Of those, most are identifiable by a well-trained OBGYN as being incompletely formed male genitals, or very very rarely, embryonically masculinized female genitalia. There's only a very tiny number of cases where the genitals are so much in the middle that it needs a deeper look... and in those cases, almost every one of them will not have ambiguous internal reproductive organs, so a simple ultrasound is usually sufficient. In the vanishingly rare few cases where internal organs are also ambiguous, we get into genetic testing.

 

[Emily's Cat]

It is.

Difficult to classify is not the same as unclassifiable.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Where I predict the changing-room controversy will end up, years from now, in progressive states, is that anyone who self-identifies as a woman will be permitted to use the woman's changing room, but that most venues will have policies against any display of visible penises or representations thereof (prosthetics, strap-on toys, tattoos, inflatable novelties, etc.) in that room. That rule will apply to everyone using that room.

"But that's illegal gender-identity discrimination!"

"How? Having a penis has nothing to do with gender identity, unless you want to call into question the whole basis of gender self-identification."

"Well, then, it's sex discrimination."

"Yes it is, but that's explicitly permitted by law in this case which is why there are sex-specific changing rooms in the first place."
"Well, um, maybe we can sue to require having a penis being considered a disability?"

This doesn't give relief to those objecting to their own biologically female bits being seen by biological males. A combination of changing attitudes and increased privacy measures (which don't necessarily have to go all the way to completely enclosed private booths to be at least partially effective) might suffice there.

This makes it into something other than a sex-specific changing room. This makes it a "predominantly female changing room that males can use at their leisure provided they keep their dicks tucked away"

And that's not something that I think most females are all that okay with. Of course, there's always the question of whether or not legislators bother to actually consider the females being affected, or whether they're all just relegated to the otherness of "non-men" whose views don't count to RealMen^TM.