Transwomen are not Women - Part 15

[theprestige]

Beards and muscles are clearly not sex indicators, as I know females with beards and muscles?

They're certainly not gender roles in society.

I'm a male, I didn't say I was a man as that's the very gender labels that I'm arguing against.

Nobody is this confused.

Gender roles should have long gone, but they're still here unfortunately.

What are the defining characteristics of one of the gender roles you have in mind?

Don't get hung up on the word 'role', in this context it just means things that you do that in society other people do too.

What are three things women do, that define them as women rather than men?

Already answered above.

Hopefully this discussion will continue.

Performing? They are females that don't fit the gender stereotype? I'm not talking about roles on a stage that you have to perform or anything, i'm talking about behaviors that people naturally fall in to in our societies.

Nothing practical in terms of public policy, then.

 

[Elaedith]

It seems to be the gender stereotypes, in a similar way to males going for the social woman stereotypes. There seems to be a attraction for some trans people to conform to social gender roles which is strange. I think that people in general should be trying to get away from gender roles.

If you think people should be trying to get away from gender roles, it it bizarre that you are so attached to the idea of 'man' and 'woman' referring to gender rather than sex. If 'man' just means 'adult human male' you can have any personality, role and self-expression and still be a man because all you need to do to be a man is be adult and male. If 'man' refers to gender and that is separate from sex, you have to do things to be a man other than be adult and male, and these things always involve conforming in some way to stereotypes.

 

[d4m10n]

What is wrong with having two distinct but related senses of the term, @Elaedith?

 

[theprestige]

What is wrong with having two distinct but related senses of the term, @Elaedith?

Nothing, in principle. In fact, that's what we had up until very recently. Gender was distinct from sex, but very closely related to sex. Directly informed by sex, even.

However, a lot of gendered concepts were held by feminists to be either sexist, outdated, outright misogynistic, or some combination. So feminists began diligently excising these anti-social stereotypes, and deprecating "gendered" concepts altogether.

So far, so good.

Then the TRAs came along, and sought to repurpose gender as completely decoupled from sex, in order to reestablish gendered concepts as the gateway to overriding sex segregation (which they worked diligently to rebrand as "gender segregation").

But now it turns out that gender becomes practically meaningless, when the relationship to sex is removed. So the feminists (i.e., the anti-TRAs) have reverted to sex-based distinctions as such, because those are the only distinctions that matter in this context. And the TRAs, of course, have moved from recontextualizing gender, independently from sex, to redefining sex itself - since sex distinctions are the only distinctions that actually matter in this context.

Personally, I'm fine with having two distinct but closely related senses of the term. However, that's with the feminist caveat that most gender-oriented terms and concepts should probably be deprecated anyway. All that really matters is sex, so when I say woman, I mean adult human female. And when I think of women as distinct from men in society, I think in terms of the biological distinctions between the two sexes, not the stereotypical gender roles formerly (and in some regrettable cases) still associated with the two sexes.

 

[Rolfe]

I'm old enough to have read Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. i wonder if it sells many copies these days.

 

[p0lka]

If you think people should be trying to get away from gender roles, it it bizarre that you are so attached to the idea of 'man' and 'woman' referring to gender rather than sex. If 'man' just means 'adult human male' you can have any personality, role and self-expression and still be a man because all you need to do to be a man is be adult and male. If 'man' refers to gender and that is separate from sex, you have to do things to be a man other than be adult and male, and these things always involve conforming in some way to stereotypes.

It's not me that's attached to gender labels but rather society. Society keeps doing irrational things like making sports categories separate according to gender labels and not sex, then moaning about it. Society insists on labeling toilets as man woman rather than male female, then moaning about it.

 

[Ziggurat]

Okay, but how would you persuade someone trying to follow the executive order—in good faith—that they should treat individuals who have testes and will never produce any ova that they belong "to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell" for purposes of complying with federal policy? There might be an argument that really works here, but I've yet to see it.

You have yet to see it? The obvious solution (not just argument) is staring you in the face.

From the point of view of federal policy, there's no issue with treating CAIS as female. Seriously, how do you think federal policy is generally going to determine sex? By genetic testing? By tissue samples of the gonads? No. They're just going to go off what the birth certificate says unless they have reason to doubt the birth certificate. And what's the birth certificate going to say? Female. Because that's what they're going to look like. Both at birth and as an adult. For the purposes of complying with federal policy, CAIS people will be treated as female. That's obvious.

You are inventing a problem which doesn't actually exist.

 

[theprestige]

It's not me that's attached to gender labels but rather society. Society keeps doing irrational things like making sports categories separate according to gender labels and not sex

No. Society keeps doing rational things like segregating things like restrooms, shelters, prisons, and sports by sex. And then in some cases some subsets of society bow to irrational demands from trans rights activists, to pretend they meant gender all along, and that sex is either irrelevant or changeable by personal fiat.

The whole opposition to trans rights activism is the opposition to it taking over more and more of society with its nonsense. There's no reason to concede victory to them ahead of time, as you are doing. The trend is reversible, not a done deal, as you seem to think.

 

[smartcooky]

It's not me that's attached to gender labels but rather society. Society keeps doing irrational things like making sports categories separate according to gender labels and not sex, then moaning about it. Society insists on labeling toilets as man woman rather than male female, then moaning about it.

As you have been repeatedly told, it wouldn't make any difference if they were labelled "male" and "female" - out there, right now, there are fully-intact, trans-identified biological males, complete with bollocks and penises, who insist they are biologically female - I kid you not...

Trans women are ‘biologically female’? That’s not what I was taught at medical school

The Fife health board is the latest NHS trust to be challenged on their policy relating to female changing facilities. Sandie Peggie, a nurse, has taken the health board and Dr Beth Upton to tribunal after being suspended following an incident on Christmas Eve 2023. She has lodged a complaint of...

www.yahoo.com

Ms Peggie believed this person was a male and felt unhappy about their using the women’s facilities. Dr Beth Upton, who was born male but now identifies as female, later proceeded to make a formal complaint, with Ms Peggie being suspended from work and investigated for bullying.​

​

However, in evidence to the employment tribunal, Dr Upton has rejected the claim of being male, stating: “I’m biologically female”, and saying, “The term biologically female or biologically male is completely nebulous. It has no defined or agreed meaning in science, as far as I’m aware.”​

These morons will just go right ahead and use your female-labelled facilities anyway. Furthermore, TRAs, and their sycophants is this very thread (we all know who they are) will support them in their claim.

Relabelling all single-sex facilities "male" and "female" will cost a LOT of money, and will achieve exactly nothing!

 

[smartcooky]

You have yet to see it? The obvious solution (not just argument) is staring you in the face.

From the point of view of federal policy, there's no issue with treating CAIS as female. Seriously, how do you think federal policy is generally going to determine sex? By genetic testing? By tissue samples of the gonads? No. They're just going to go off what the birth certificate says unless they have reason to doubt the birth certificate. And what's the birth certificate going to say? Female. Because that's what they're going to look like. Both at birth and as an adult. For the purposes of complying with federal policy, CAIS people will be treated as female. That's obvious.

Its not obvious to the wilfully blind though!

You are inventing a problem which doesn't actually exist.

Exactly!

 

[Aber]

Society insists on labeling toilets as man woman rather than male female, then moaning about it.

McDonalds uses male and female.

 

[Rolfe]

McDonalds uses male and female.

Assuming that's right, which toilet do trans-identifying men use in McDonald's?

 

[Rolfe]

You have yet to see it? The obvious solution (not just argument) is staring you in the face.

From the point of view of federal policy, there's no issue with treating CAIS as female. Seriously, how do you think federal policy is generally going to determine sex? By genetic testing? By tissue samples of the gonads? No. They're just going to go off what the birth certificate says unless they have reason to doubt the birth certificate. And what's the birth certificate going to say? Female. Because that's what they're going to look like. Both at birth and as an adult. For the purposes of complying with federal policy, CAIS people will be treated as female. That's obvious.

You are inventing a problem which doesn't actually exist.

There is a genuine issue with sports, because they will test positive for the SRY gene and some people think they may have an edge. However the only properly worked out policy I saw recently explicitly provided for people with CAIS to be permitted to enter the women's events.

 

[d4m10n]

From the point of view of federal policy, there's no issue with treating CAIS as female. Seriously, how do you think federal policy is generally going to determine sex? By genetic testing? By tissue samples of the gonads? No. They're just going to go off what the birth certificate says unless they have reason to doubt the birth certificate. And what's the birth certificate going to say? Female.

This solution works just fine for CAIS (for non-medical purposes) but I see at least two problems with it.

Firstly, the new White House policy doesn't say anything about birth certificates. It defines sex as a property we have "at conception" so we'd have to come up with binary sorting criteria based entirely on genotype. This is doable, but the criteria should vary depending on the application, e.g. Title IX vs. Selective Service.

Secondly, I can recall plenty of complaining in this very thread when the IOC allowed males to compete in Olympic boxing based on their perceived sex at birth, e.g.

If Khelif is allowed to compete because biological males are allowed to compete as long as it says female on their passport (as seems to be the case), then yeah, that's a trans issue.

Khelif isn't personally transgender—she was competing in line with what it says on the birth certificate—but I agree with you that trans issues are necessarily implicated whenever we endeavor to create a protected category based on sex.

ETA: For what it's worth, I think @Rolfe and @Louden Wilde detailed pretty much what the sorting algorithm for sport ought to actually look like:

L

Post in thread 'Transwomen are not Women - Part 15'

Aug 2, 2024

Flashback Friday! Rolfe posited a definitive solution to the problem of women's sports leagues five years ago on this calendar day:


https://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=12775146&postcount=566

That would mostly work. But Sry's function is to start to a cascade that triggers male development - you can dispense with it if there's another trigger that activates the related gene SOX9, which is the more conserved regulator of male development in vertebrates. Meaning, you could get a case of a functional male that lacked Sry/SRY due to something else...

• Louden Wilde

 

[d4m10n]

Seriously, how do you think federal policy is generally going to determine sex?

Have you considered that active duty servicemembers actually have detailed medical files stored on EMR systems owned by the federal government? Come to think of it, many veterans do too.

 

[d4m10n]

Then the TRAs came along, and sought to repurpose gender as completely decoupled from sex, in order to reestablish gendered concepts as the gateway to overriding sex segregation (which they worked diligently to rebrand as "gender segregation").

I think what happened is even weirder than this. Butlerian post-structuralists went so far as to argue that both gender and sex are social constructed categories which can be deconstructed and remade without regard to the constraints imposed by nature.

 

[Thermal]

McDonalds uses male and female.

You said that earlier in the thread, and I made a point of looking, often stopping in if one was close just to see. In every McDonalds I've stopped in in two US states, they all say men/women, with one near Pittsburgh saying men /ladies. I wanted to take pics but it felt really weird.

Haven't seen anything online noting this unique aberration either.

 

[Ziggurat]

Have you considered that active duty servicemembers actually have detailed medical files stored on EMR systems owned by the federal government? Come to think of it, many veterans do too.

And? You think they have trouble recognizing CAIS individuals as female?

Why would you think that?

 

[Ziggurat]

Secondly, I can recall plenty of complaining in this very thread when the IOC allowed males to compete in Olympic boxing based on their perceived sex at birth, e.g.

No. You are under a serious misapprehension. This is NOT what the IOC did. Their policy for 2024 boxing had nothing to do with birth certificates. Their policy was to use the sex/gender listed on the competitor's passport, which may or may not have anything to do with birth sex (perceived or actual).

Khelif isn't personally transgender—she was competing in line with what it says on the birth certificate

I don't think his birth certificate has ever been made public. We have no idea what that actually says. What we do know is that he isn't CAIS.

 

[Aber]

You said that earlier in the thread, and I made a point of looking, often stopping in if one was close just to see. In every McDonalds I've stopped in in two US states, they all say men/women, with one near Pittsburgh saying men /ladies.

I'm in the UK, and was responding to another UK resident.