Transwomen are not Women - Part 15

[smartcooky]

It's trivially easy to identify the behavior of a subset of males within the larger group of males.

But its not their behaviour that needs to be identified, its their claimed gender identity, and there is no way to do that instantly.

One of these people in this photo is a transgender self-identified male. Since its, "trivially easy to identify" transgender self-identified males, you will be able to immediately identify which one it is.

The reality is that you will not be able to do this, any more than you could identify which one is a stock-broker, or an Olympic sprinter, or the owner of a restaurant, or a little league baseball coach, or a middle school teacher. This is the problem you would have women facing every day in a world where ANY many can claim they are a women merely by saying so.

 

[Darat]

That looks AI generated to me?

 

[Ziggurat]

That looks AI generated to me?

Because it is.

https://www.freepik.com/premium-ai-image/diverse-group-men-standing-together-confident-multicultural-male-beauty-studio-setting-diversity-concept_161464416.htm

 

[smartcooky]

That doesn't address anything. You say men are too dangerous to be left in the presence of women. In your famed consistency and fairness, do you have the same exclusionary standard for all those dangerous men being left with young boys?

Dangerous ones? Yes

Why are you such a staunch advocate of men being allowed the opportunity to victimize boys?

Strawman

Your arguments collapse under the slightest scrutiny.

Only in YOUR mind.

There are no TRA posters currently in the discussion.

Irrelevant.

This is a discussion among skeptics, who have an interest in the topic beyond the extreme views. You are arguing with imaginary opponents and positions. Not helpful.

I'm not arguing with anyone, I merely state that this thread (and indeed, the whole wider debate about transwomen in public policy) would not now be taking place if "TRAs had not pushed to grant special, but unreasonable extra rights (over and above their already legally mandated rights) for a tiny demographic with a proven track record of physical and verbal abuse, attempted cancellation, deplatforming, threats of violence, and actual violence towards anyone (and the families of anyone) who opposes their view..... and all completely over the objections of women, and at the expense of those women's own rights.". Your handwaving away of this highlighted part doesn't make it go away.

There may be no TRAs currently posting in this thread, nonetheless their influence is here - if you argue than transgender self-identified men should be allowed in women's safe spaces, then you ARE making their arguments. Currectly, YOU are one of those who is advocating for their policies and demands, even if you don't realize it.

We are not talking about background checks for specific employment.

Nonetheless, they are relevant to the discussion. You just want to dismiss them because they do not fit your chosen narrative, and they mess up the hairs you are trying to split.

We are talking about unfettered access by the general public to potential victims, based on their sex, and your insistence that any male cannot be trusted, due to their prevalence of violence. Why aren't you concerned about these men gaining access to young boys? I mean, if there is an ounce of sincerity to your argument.

Of course I am concerned about it, and one of the reasons why these checks exist in the first place is because of the history of abuse of children by males in particular who had authority over them. Larry Nassar is probably the most well known example in your country.

 

[smartcooky]

That looks AI generated to me?

So what if it is... you've entirely missed the point.

 

[d4m10n]

As I have pointed out before, the courts have consistently indicated that the military (not civilian DOD) is exempt from non-discrimination laws that apply not only to private sector jobs, but even civilian federal jobs.

I did not mention the process of judicial review, and (IIRC) the courts haven't definitively ruled on that specific EO yet.

I've never even heard any activist group calling for the removal of trans employment protections.

Jonathan Skrmetti comes to mind, although the people working for him aren't activists in the strictest sense.

 

[Ziggurat]

I did not mention the process of judicial review, and (IIRC) the courts haven't definitively ruled on that specific EO yet.

Sure, but the worst case for TRAs is they uphold it under the principle that the military isn't subject to non-discrimination rules that other employers are. This is very possible. I do not see a scenario where SCOTUS rules that trans identity cannot be protected at all.

Jonathan Skrmetti comes to mind

Why? I can't find anything about him pushing for trans discrimination in employment. Can you point me to such a case?

 

[angrysoba]

Thank you for bringing it up. I'm adding it to my queue.

Great. Would be interested to know what you make of it.

 

[angrysoba]

So what if it is... you've entirely missed the point.

But then you are question-begging.

The argument is better made without resorting to this kind of thing.

If, for example, someone claimed that they COULD identify a transgender individual, and then you showed them an image of non-existent people and demanded to know which one it was then you obviously leave yourself open to the counter that none of them are because they are not real people.

If, on the other hand, you had a company picture of a group of people and asked, "which of these are transgender?" and nobody could figure it out, but then you pointed to one individual and said, "This is William Williamson who now goes by the name Lily Lilydaugher who was a serial ax murderer and now demands to be in a women's prison..." then maybe you would have a better argument. (Of course, I am making this example up as well, but giving an example of what would be more persuasive in my opinion, rather than preaching to the choir).

 

[angrysoba]

Just as a follow-up to the NYT podcast, The Protocol, I remember that FG, who appears in the first episode as the first patient to go on puberty blockers for the purpose of treating gender dysphoria, is someone who I said does not come across as a "well-rounded" person. As in not someone who has truly seemed to be happy following transition. I think I may have even written it before listening to the end when FG goes on quite an extraordinary rant about how things have gone since then.

At one stage FG seems to have a chip on his shoulder about being small, and then also that he had a medical emergency from not being able to pee. I don't think the podcast interviewers followed up on any of this. This is just before FG then goes on to say that he actually despises a lot of the modern transgender movement saying that for many of them it is just fashion or a kind of countercultural movement that went mainstream.

 

[Emily's Cat]

It seems they are arguing for what might be called the “genuine trans” have been hijacked by activists which then led to an intolerant backlash.

I'd agree with that to an extent.

"True trans" or what used to be considered transsexual is fairly rare, and males are still males regardless of how much surgery they have done. But I do think there is a small number of males (vanishingly few females if any) who genuinely have a neural anomaly related to how they perceive their sexed bodies. It's been observed via fMRI for a small portion of homosexual males, where they have abnormal activity in the part of the brain associated with self-perception. It's the same part of the brain that shows similar activation for anorexics and people with BIID. More or less, it ends up meaning that these few people really do have a real disconnect between what their brain expects to see when they look at their bodies, and what they actually perceive. This cohort used to be pretty much the only transsexuals ever approved for surgery. The other males expressing gender dysphoria had sexual motivations, and were classified as transvestites.

The modern transgender umbrella is overwhelmed by the latter, autistic youth who've been gulled into thinking that all of their neurospicy problems will go away if they're trans, and (predominantly) females who have latched on to "transgender" as a way to flee their sexed bodies as a result of childhood sexual trauma... and just plain old pushy male allies who seem hell-bent on making sure females cannot say no to males who want to invade our intimate spaces.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I've already accepted that they should not be in female single-sex spaces.

But how do we set up a society where people cannot be aroused in public?

I know that some people argue that maybe we shouldn't have skantily clad models on billboards, maybe put women in burkas to stop impure thoughts from leading to non-consensual arousal?

Ignoring the silliness of the burka argument , I'll instead give you an actual response.

We can't set up a society where nobody is ever aroused in public. That's never going to happen, we're animals pure and simple, and sex is one of our most powerful drives. There will always be cases where a male sees a highly attractive female out in public and has a physical reaction, there will always be cases where a female interacts with a desirable male and has a physical reaction. That's not the problem. But I assume you can draw a distinction between a male who responds to an attractive female stranger in public, and a male that ogles that female's boobs or makes comments about what they'd like to do to said female, or catcalls them, or starts rubbing their genitals through their pants out in public?

What we can do as a society is to stop venerating and celebrating people's public paraphilias. That would go a long way. We can stop having parades that lionize people with dildos up their butts and dog-masks on, we can stop applauding people exposing themselves as if flashing were somehow benign if it's attached to some progressive message. We can stop inculcating children with scantily clad drag queens in stripper-wear gyrating at them to increase "inclusion". And we can stop treating males who invade female intimates spaces as if they're brave and stunning for violating female boundaries.

We can sure as hell recognize that forcing females to be active participants in some male's sexual role play is not okay, and we can back the females who object to it.

It doesn't seem like all that much to ask for.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Okay, but help me out here, smartcooky, because I don't think you have thought through the argument you appear to be making.

I presume you are saying that topless women would or even should be arrested for indecent exposure.

But these guys are males, so there are not...

Do you mean men should be arrested for being topless?

Presumably if the laws are based on sex, not gender, it makes no sense to say that they should be arrested for having female-gendered chests while being men.

I'm with you... as soon as hordes of dumbfounded ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ stop insisting that they're "women".

If those "protesters" acknowledge and accept that they're males, and therefore "men" there really isn't a problem. But the entire reason they're out there exposing their moobs is because they're males who can get away with it while simultaneously trying to force everyone on the planet to pretend that they're really actually totally women just like any other female.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Airmen, not soldiers. We were living together in close quarters for several years and there wasn't any significant taboo on discussion of pills we were buying over the counter to treat allergies and whatnot. We spent several weeks tromping around Pike-San Isabel National Forest every summer, so it was worthwhile to compare notes on that sort of thing.

People were a bit more reluctant to discuss their prescriptions, but not everyone was all that reluctant and most of the young women were on some form of birth control (rather than practicing either celibacy or lesbianism) and weren't noticeably embarrassed about it. Coming up from the Bible Belt, I remember being truly surprised at the lack of embarrassment on that point, actually.

Personal recollections aside, my point remains that the military has no problem prescribing pills such as hormonal birth control, despite assertions that taking a pill every day might somehow make someone undeployable. If you want to make the case that the U.S. Air Force is better off without Hunter Marquez you will have to come up with a better argument than the notion that the pills are the real problem.

There is actually a difference here that you seem to either be missing or eliding.

OTC allergy meds for hayfever and birth control pills aren't actually necessary. They're optional. I have relatively severe hayfever - particularly sensitive to cedar, juniper, and lilac - and I can get by without meds even though it kind of sucks. I just spent a month without them during flowering season due to limits on what I can have in my system prior to surgery. I sneezed a lot and had a lot of snot coming out of my face, but that's about it. Similarly, BC pills aren't necessary, and if a female service member is deployed, I think there's a general expectation that they're not going to be having sex in the field. I assume gay service members aren't out there porking behind a bush while deployed?

Now I personally think that service members with gender identity issues should be able to go without hormones indefinitely. They're not actually required for medical reasons, and I consider them cosmetic. But do you think the trans service members would be okay with that? If they are okay with it, then I don't care if they serve or not - I've already said this. If they are fine not having exogenous hormones, and not having surgeries, and not requiring cross-sex uniforms, then I don't care if they serve or not because at that point it's nothing more than a personality trait.

 

[Emily's Cat]

You want to restrict the category to transwomen, but as we have seen time and time again, that isn’t actually possible in the real world.

Why not? I don't have a problem with it, nor does anyone else. Pretty pedestrian, come to that. It's trivially easy to identify the behavior of a subset of males within the larger group of males.

How do you tell which male is a regular male and which is a special transwoman male? Please tell me the trivially easy way to distinguish between them, it would be very useful.

Or perhaps you're implying that it's easy to identify bad males because they've committed offenses against females? Sure, that's trivially true... but do you realize that it requires letting females be harmed before any action can be taken? It's tantamount to saying people aren't allowed to lock their doors, they have to leave them unlocked because that makes it easier to find the thieves.

 

[d4m10n]

I can't find anything about him pushing for trans discrimination in employment.

Skrmetti's argument is essentially that "Congress sought to amend Title VII to add prohibitions against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity" and they are the only branch constitutionally authorized to make this particular change to federal law. Should his argument prevail in future cases, Bostock (and anything predicated upon the same reasoning) will be rolled back and private employers will be free to discriminate just as the military does.

I do not see a scenario where SCOTUS rules that trans identity cannot be protected at all.

Not in the near term, given the 6-3 outcome in Bostock, but I expect that decision will be narrowed in scope every time it runs up against any fact pattern where sex differences really do matter.

FG then goes on to say that he actually despises a lot of the modern transgender movement saying that for many of them it is just fashion or a kind of countercultural movement that went mainstream.

Azeen Ghorayshi's retort to this was a bit of a show-stopper; you could somehow see her beaming through the audio feed.

 

[p0lka]

And the picture is actually a demonstration of that advantage, for physics reasons that have already been explained. So I'm not sure why you object to the picture being used to correctly demonstrate an advantage that you agree males have.

Oh i wasn't objecting to anything. If you go back and look I was answering the statement of 'No prizes for being able to identify Wil[lia]m Thomas in that lineup.'.
my answer was
Two of them look like they've learnt 'less time in water equals faster'. Those 3 in the background need to go back to school as the angle they're hitting the water is a mess. I presume the one that's jumped further and hasn't the water yet is the trans person? Maybe they have just learnt more about angles? Maybe that's a bit misogynistic.'. I was judging swimming skill, I didn't get a prize.

It wouldn't. All it would do is change the TRA claim from "transwomen are women" to "transwomen are female".

But then at that point they are denying reality, which would be easy to demonstrate. The whole 'gender equals sex' is wishy washy as it mixes feelings with facts. Better to separate them and say 'take on whatever gender role you want in society, man woman yay go for it, but you can't change your sex with present tech'. Having all the sports and public changing rooms or toilets or anything using male and female instead of man woman would solve the wishy washiness of the sloppy language we use.

 

[p0lka]

Law is downstream from politics. Politics is downstream from culture. Changing the law won't change the culture.

It's not a line, it's a loop.

Law definitely changes culture.

 

[Emily's Cat]

That doesn't address anything. You say men are too dangerous to be left in the presence of women. In your famed consistency and fairness, do you have the same exclusionary standard for all those dangerous men being left with young boys? Why are you such a staunch advocate of men being allowed the opportunity to victimize boys?

You've got to be kidding.

Pedophiles are almost entirely male - there are extremely few female offenders. They're also equal opportunity, pedophiles abuse juvenile males and females at about the same rates.

And we *don't* leave males with young children in a whole lot of situations. It's not necessarily a matter of law so much as convention. It's quite difficult for a male to get hired into a daycare or early childhood educational program, especially if it's a position that is alone with children. It's also extremely hard for a male to get hired as a nanny or even a babysitter.

Even when it comes to restrooms, children under around 10 or so almost never go in by themselves, they almost always have a parent with them. Heck, most of the time, young males are taken to the female restroom by their mothers. That's partly because females are still predominantly responsible for childcare... but at least part of it is also because adult males are a risk.

We as a society go to quite a bit of effort to prevent children - including young males - from being victimized.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I was initially judging it on the angle they hit the water. 3 of them weren't great, 1 was great and 1 was yet to hit the water so i couldn't judge on skill.

I understand that, and I'm saying that the angle is the result of physics. Judging it by the angle in that snapshot, and simply saying "three of them aren't very good" is erroneous. The angle at which a swimmer hits the water has a high degree of variance, based on their height and their strength. I used to swim competitively, and I'm very short. While the ideal is to enter the water close to flat, that's not always possible for a short person - distance covered in air ends up having a greater effect on time than angle does. If I launch to enter close to flat, I end up in the water much sooner than taller competitors. My best times occurred when I launched at a higher angle, which puts my entry to water further away from the wall - that maximized my distance out of water. It also resulted in me entering the water at a steeper angle rather than flatter, but... I'm female and bendier than males in general, so flexing on entry to avoid a dive was pretty easy to accomplish.

At the end of the day, Thomas is male, and is also quite tall at 6'1". Thomas has the strength to launch at a low angle and still massively exceed the distance obtainable by their female opponents. That observation has nothing to do with skill, it's merely physics

As you mentioned the physics aspect and if it's that what concerns you, how would you feel if a female in the race was taller and stronger than all the rest with a wider parabolic arc? or if it was a male that was shorter with a shorter parabolic arc?

There's always going to be some variation, and some competitors are always going to have a natural advantage. But there's also pretty consistent means and variances for those distributions. Males are consistently enough taller and stronger for that to skew the competition in a material fashion. And even a male with an average female height of around 5'5" will be *stronger* and thus able to launch further.

The physical differences between males and females are consistent enough, and well established enough, that dividing sports on the basis of sex is a reasonable and appropriate thing to do. Just as it's reasonable and appropriate to divide competitions by age because there's a consistent difference between adults and children.

My opinion is that males shouldn't be in female sports as on average there's an unfair advantage in most of them.
I wish all womans and mans public spaces would be changed to male and female instead as that solves a lot of the legal conundrums.. they should change every instance of 'woman' and 'man' to male and female, would solve so much.

Meh. I get where you're going, and from a hypothetical position you're not wrong. But from experience over the last decade, it won't fix as much as you think it will, and I'm not particularly pleased about having to relinquish the word that represents a female of the human species just to appease some males who want to redefine everything so they can semantically justify boundary violations. A female horse is a mare, a female bovine is a cow, a female deer is a doe, a female chicken is a hen, a female human is... a woman. I feel like humans should be allowed to retain such nomenclature.

Plus, there are so many people out there who simply won't let "female" stop them. There are a lot of people heavily invested in asserting that sex is a spectrum, or that sex is a social convention, or that you can't ever actually tell someone's sex, or that biological sex is super complex and brain feelings are part of sex so a male with "girly feels" is actually a female. Changing the name won't actually solve the problem, unfortunately.

I will however treat everyone as the gender they want to be, as I think gender is a social construct and as long you don't start arguing against reality I'm happy for you. Though I don't know why people let society dictate who they want to be in first place.

100% with you on this.