d4m10n
Penultimate Amazing
Physical transition comes in various stages (e.g. hormones, breast implants, orchiectomy, etc.).
How much is enough to count in your schema here?
Transwomen are not Women - Part 15
- Thread starter d4m10n
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How much is enough to count in your schema here?
Thermal
August Member
The Big One: should self ID be sufficient to identify sex/gender?
That's where all the problems come in. That's what would allow the pervs access to women's private spaces.
Whether they've transitioned or not is doubly problematic. First, it only affords rights to those who have the time and substantial money for the surgeries. Rights should not be wealth based. Second, how do you verify whether someone has transitioned? Do you require a strip down when entering a bathroom? Seems that would apply to everyone, all the time, at least in theory. There's some awkward right violation issues on that puppy, too.
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
None is enough, in my schema. There's no amount of cosmetic surgery a man can undergo, that would entitle him to a woman's feelings of comfort in an intimate encounter.
Brainster
Penultimate Amazing
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That's really the issue; unless the transwoman is completely nude, how can other women tell they are post-op? Since most/many don't really pass the clothed test.
On thinking about this I assume the issue relates to scenarios where the US government is obliged to pay for treatment. I am used to public health care where you don't need to be in a special category for this.
d4m10n
Penultimate Amazing
One of my major takeaways from The Studies Show podcast is that you'd be surprised how often medicine (not just psychiatry) sort of groupthinks its way into a new standard of care when there aren't really strong randomized controlled trials backing it up. Which is depressing, really, given how long we've known about fads as a major failure mode in human behaviour.
smartcooky
Penultimate Amazing
Quoted for truth!!
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
You're used to public health care where you don't need to be in a medically necessary category, to get medical treatment?
Rolfe
Adult human female
By the time I discover that a man in a female-only space has had his balls chopped off and his penile skin pithed and inverted, things have gone way too far in a direction I don't want them to go in at all. No, there is no special category of man who should be allowed to force himself into our spaces.
smartcooky
Penultimate Amazing
Unfortunately, I see this as a delay tactic... The Australian Federal Government (as well as the Australian Judiciary) is one of the most gender-ideology captured governments in the world. They will do their own review, the terms of reference will be arranged to fudge the results and get the outcome the ideologues in the Federal Government want.
Remember, this is the government that went to bat to prevent lesbians from keeping trans-identified males out of their chat spaces.... and the Australian Judiciary delivered that for them. It was the worst reversal of women's rights since women got the vote.
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I'm tempted to say orchiectomy but I'm not sure.
To the extent that verification is an issue, it's already an issue.
It's a difficult problem. I don't know of a solution that satisfies all parties short of redesigning public restrooms. What I do know is that social engineering to help out a small population when it negatively impacts a large population doesn't make sense.
Thermal
August Member
That's my endgame concern. Trans people make up less than half a percent of the population. I feel confident that creeps and pervs and sexual prredators make up a much much larger percentage. So is benefitting the smaller percentage worth opening the door to the larger group of abusers? On net, I don't think that is fair to anyone. I mean, a real transwoman who is now allowed to use the women's restroom can find themselves confronted with males in there, after all the work she just did to get past that.
I am used to necessary health care being provided publicly rather than privately for everyone, therefore I didn't initially understand why a poster was referring only to whether certain categories having treatment funded by the government rather than to whether or not it should be classed as necessary.
d4m10n
Penultimate Amazing
If you've been wondering whether Trump's Defending Women agenda has been penetrating the Deep State, it might interest you to know that federal employees received the following memo over the weekend.
Emily's Cat
Rarely prone to hissy-fits
Great - and gender isn't sex. Therefore, spaces and services that are separated on the basis of sex should not be altered to address gender.
Emily's Cat
Rarely prone to hissy-fits
Regarding government benefits, public restrooms, and jobs involving physical contact with females...
I understand where you're coming from - you're coming from the assumption that a male who has surgically removed their penis and tesitcles doesn't represent a risk of *rape* to females. And sure, to a degree, you're probably right.
But i'm going to challenge your position on this, because I think you're looking at it from an exclusively male point of view, and you're also assuming that nobody would ever *lie* about it.
Please try to think about it from the point of view of a female. When a person who is physically structured like a male, with male shoulders, height, hand and foot size, facial conformation, etc. comes into the female restroom... how are females supposed to know whether they've physically transitioned or not? Are you expecting them to drop their pants and prove they're not intact? Or are females supposed to just assume that any male who comes into the space is above reproach in incapable of dishonest, and that no male would ever exploit that good-faith?
The same thing applies for the other situations where you're willing to grant that physically transitioned males get to bypass sex barriers. You're placing the burden on females to take it on faith alone that any male is being completely honest. But in reality, there's no way a female could possibly know whether that particular male is intact or not, short of them disrobing.
And, well... most of us do NOT want males disrobing in front of us with a very few, very specific consenting situations
Emily's Cat
Rarely prone to hissy-fits
This risks getting off topic very fast... but there are a LOT of procedures and treatments that are known to be ineffective, or at least significantly less effective than alternative treatments, but which insurers are required by law to cover because someone somewhere in a position of power liked the idea and couldn't be bothered to research whether or not it works or is worthwhile. Spinal fusion surgeries are a prime example of this, but there are tons out there.
Emily's Cat
Rarely prone to hissy-fits
I'm pretty sure it's a whole lot less of an issue than you're assuming.
The vast majority of males are visibly male. That doesn't change when they have an orchiectomy and penectomy. At the end of the day, we're a predominantly physically dimorphous species. There are some few people out there that are truly androgynous, and where an average person genuinely can't tell whether they're male or female... but not many. Children pre-puberty can be a challenge, because kids pretty much all look like kids from the outside. At the other end, you get very obese people, where the fat can mask indicators - but I'm not talking about overweight or "technically obese" because BMI calc says so, I'm talking about actually morbidly obese to a point where the fat on their faces masks the facial indicators associated with sex. And even then, there are frequently visual indicators that make it clear 90% of the time - females have breasts that are still identifiably breasts even if they're super fat; males still have facial hair. The number of people who are not morbidly obese adults who are truly androgynous are very few. It can happen, but it's not at all common.
To follow on from that, let's jump in the way back machine and talk about how things worked 20 years ago. One of the lines that gets trotted out is "you've had transsexual males using your spaces forever and you never knew so why should you care now". Well, the reality is that we DID know most of the time. Maybe once in a while we'd get the rare small-statured male with small feet and hands who'd had a LOT of surgery done including facial feminization and tracheal shaving, and we couldn't tell - but that was rare. Most of the time, we could tell that Lumberjack Leanne was probably actually Larry, but we pretended not to notice, and we didn't make a big deal of it.
We pretended because we had confidence that someone with clinical expertise and care had already thoroughly vetted Larry, and at the time, we believed those clinicians had female interests in mind when doing their vetting. We trusted the doctors to look out for us, so any male that ended up in our spaces trying to pass as a woman had already been deemed "safe". And we assumed that they had all had orchiectomies and penectomies. The past couple of decades has demonstrated that we were woefully wrong on both counts. Turns out that over 80% of those historical transsexuals still had completely intact genitals... and even worse, we've learned that the clinicians that we trusted didn't actually give FEMALES any consideration at all when deciding that "this male is allowed to use female spaces". They didn't consult us, and they had only enough care to help train the male how to not make us immediately uncomfortable so that they wouldn't get called out. There was never any actual evaluation for whether the male in question represented a risk or could exploit our good graces.
And over the last 20 years, the entire approach has shifted radically. Now, transgender activists have pushed to remove ANY gatekeeping at all, as well as ANY expectation of surgical transition, and even support the notion that transgender identified males shouldn't even be expected to TRY to pass. Now, the rhetoric is that anyone who say's they're "a woman" has to be treated as if they're a female, and given access without question to female-only spaces on threat of being labeled a bigot - and in some countries prosecuted for hate crimes.
What trust we used to have is irrevocably lost. Where we're at right now is a complete ban to males in female spaces, with no discussion and no exceptions.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Now, let's take just a moment for some practical reality. Even if the rule is set in stone, and it's no exceptions whatsoever, we're not going to be doing pants-checks at every door. It's impractical and unnecessary. In the rare event that a male sufficiently passes as female (see Blair White for example) that our radar doesn't go off... they're probably not going to be challenged. If they pass enough that we don't suspect that they're male, we're probably going to let it go. But "passing" only works as long as we 1) never see a penis and 2) they don't behave in a way that makes our hackles rise.
Point taken. Still, I have sympathies for men who have physically transitioned.Regarding government benefits, public restrooms, and jobs involving physical contact with females...
I understand where you're coming from - you're coming from the assumption that a male who has surgically removed their penis and tesitcles doesn't represent a risk of *rape* to females. And sure, to a degree, you're probably right.
But i'm going to challenge your position on this, because I think you're looking at it from an exclusively male point of view, and you're also assuming that nobody would ever *lie* about it.
Please try to think about it from the point of view of a female. When a person who is physically structured like a male, with male shoulders, height, hand and foot size, facial conformation, etc. comes into the female restroom... how are females supposed to know whether they've physically transitioned or not? Are you expecting them to drop their pants and prove they're not intact? Or are females supposed to just assume that any male who comes into the space is above reproach in incapable of dishonest, and that no male would ever exploit that good-faith?
The same thing applies for the other situations where you're willing to grant that physically transitioned males get to bypass sex barriers. You're placing the burden on females to take it on faith alone that any male is being completely honest. But in reality, there's no way a female could possibly know whether that particular male is intact or not, short of them disrobing.
And, well... most of us do NOT want males disrobing in front of us with a very few, very specific consenting situations
Most restrooms are part of commercial establishments. That complicates things even further.
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theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
I have sympathy for them as well, but I don't think physical transition makes them female.
I'm going to break this point out into its own discussion. I think there's a lot to unpack, when it comes to stated and and unstated assumptions about what physical transition is supposed to accomplish.
How does it complicate things?