I don't really care about tra's or anti tra's or any activists that deny reality, anymore than I care about flat earthers. Though it seems flat earthers are easier to argue with because at least the earth isn't called flatland.
Facts don't care whether you care or not (and nether do I). TRAs are the people we are FORCED to deal with, whether we like it or not. They have political allies on the middle-left and far left who will try to push the trans agenda through against the will of the public. For the moment, that has been staved-off in the UK with April's Supreme Court ruling, but it is within the bounds of possibility (however unlikely) that the legislature could simply change the law. It would be deeply unpopular with the general public, but I would not put it past Starmer and his extreme trendy-leftie pals to try it on. Of course, the next Tory government (or Reform if they ever get any power) would likely just change it back.
He will also have worked out that more than half the voting population are adult human females.
It doesn't actually fix anything. You just end up with transgender identified males insisting that they're every bit biologically female as any other female.
www.foxnews.com
What's the "role" of "woman"? What does that entail, and how do you tell whether someone is a "woman" or not?
As a stepping stone from this, I ran across an argument from a teenager recently, that sort of baffled and appalled me.
Yep. This is part of why so many of us view the entire approach as deeply misogynistic and regressive. It inherently reinforces limiting and prescriptive stereotypes, in a way that will do far more harm to female humans than it will to male humans. It's going to drop us right back to the 1930s.
Alternatively... "sex is a spectrum and brain sex is way more important than body sex, and brain sex totally can't be discerned by looking at chromosomes, it's all about thoughts!"
This is fallacious. I get what you're trying to do, and I appreciate it. But it doesn't actually work that way. And right here, even if you don't realize it, you have accepted a TRA premise that is flawed.
If the rules say "participation is based on sex or gender identity" then it doesn't matter if you change the label from "women's swim team" to "female swim team" or even to "beaver swim team" or "paperclip throwing team".
It's considered reconstruction. Similarly, if you're in a car accident and end up with a couple of broken teeth, medical (not dental) insurance will cover partial plates, even if you can still eat just fine on the other side of your mouth - it's reconstructing what was there prior to the injury or illness. Insurance doesn't cover massive knockers as implants after a mastectomy, they're generally required to be more or less the same size as they were prior to the medically necessary removal.
Just because you can clearly see that the emperor has no clothes doesn't mean that the rest of the audience isn't loudly proclaiming how extraordinary the emperor's new outfit is, and how stunning and brave they are for wearing it.
On the highly questionable assumption that you're interested in an actual genuine discussion rather than just tossing around sarcasm for the internet points...
Here in tolerant CA, Darren Merager was simply behaving like any other women in a shower, spa, or changing room, by having her dick and balls out.
We've been saying this for over a decade, and they haven't listened. But hey, welcome to the party
One of the bizarre features of this particular debate is what happens when you try to tell someone that you're okay with them using "woman" to mean anyone who feels constrained by the norms of femininity (whether they like it or not) if they are okay with you using the same word to mean adult human female. After all, words typically have multiple meanings and there's no need for us to be prescriptivist about how other people use words.
If we take his argument seriously, there is no clearly discernible concept of overarching "sex," only the various components such as gametic sex, chromosomal sex, morphological sex, etc. and their various subcomponents, some of which were listed out. How to roll these up into something both quantifiable and bimodal is left as an exercise to the reader, which is a major shortcoming of the article.
It is perfectly appropriate to fault him for this omission, especially given the inclusion of a faux graph.
I'm pretty sure he'd say that the goal is to describe actual complexity that exists because of natural variation (or something similar) but he'd probably agree that it's not about evaluating people for the sake of assigning sex in an overarching sense of the term.
The sort of people who tend to think of sex as a spectrum wouldn't try to put a dotted line somewhere in the middle and declare "males to the right of this line." That would be trying to arbitrarily impose a binary upon a spectrum, from their POV.
The main feature of alternative medicine is the lack of scientific support for the treatments, so we'd have to ask whether gender affirming medicine suffers from this shortcoming.
No. If we take his argument seriously, the sex is definable and quantifiable, you could graph it, and doing so would produce a bimodal distribution.
Indeed, you can't actually do that if your purpose is to breach the barriers of sex segregation.
The sort of people who think of sex as a spectrum don't want to accurately describe it at all. They want to make it as muddy as possible.
It does, we know it does, it's obvious it does, and the fact that he doesn't even touch on that sort of gives the game away.