Transwomen are not Women - Part 15

[d4m10n]

I maintain that your conflating of DSD and trans issues is still unwarranted.

I've been pretty clear throughout this discussion that Khelif and Lin are not literally in the same category as Thomas and Hubbard; though they all suffer the misfortune of seeing themselves as female when they are actually not, the origins of this mismatch are readily distinguishable.

We were debating whether you can separate the DSD issue from the trans issue.

Of course we can, but why exactly do we need to separate one group of males who think of themselves as females from another group of males who think of themselves as females if the policy solution in both cases is to screen for SRY (or SOX9) along with bioavailable androgens?

Most DSDs are still clearly one sex or the other, so handling them according to that sex is appropriate.

Most GIDs are still clearly one sex or the other, so handling them according to that sex is appropriate.

 

[Ziggurat]

I've been pretty clear throughout this discussion that Khelif and Lin are not literally in the same category as Thomas and Hubbard;

Aren't they? They're all male. That's what should keep all of them from competing in the women's category, right? How are they different in any way that matters here?

though they all suffer the misfortune of seeing themselves as female when they are actually not, the origins of this mismatch are readily distinguishable.

The origins of the mismatch are irrelevant.

Of course we can, but why exactly do we need to separate one group of males who think of themselves as females from another group of males who think of themselves as females if the policy solution in both cases is to screen for SRY (or SOX9) along with bioavailable androgens?

You're the one saying we cannot tackle the question of how to handle trans people without dealing with DSD's. But if the solution is the same (keep out the males), then why do we need to talk about the DSDs? Why do you keep bringing them up?

Most GIDs are still clearly one sex or the other, so handling them according to that sex is appropriate.

I agree. The TRAs don't. That's the source of this thread. We don't need to rope the DSDs into this to muddy the waters.

 

[p0lka]

No. He's using a definition of "man" as "adult human male". There's no confusion involved.

I didn't say there was any confusion, I said they were still mixing up gender and sex labels. They are using male (a sex label) and man( a gender label) to describe a thing? Why not just use one.

Depends on what definition of "woman" they are using. Which can be hard to determine, as so many of them refuse to provide that definition.

See, gender labels can cause a lot of problems, they don't seem functionally meaningless to me.

 

[Ziggurat]

I didn't say there was any confusion, I said they were still mixing up gender and sex labels.

There's no mixing up either. Your definition of "man" isn't controlling. "Man" isn't a gender label when I use it.

They are using male (a sex label) and man( a gender label) to describe a thing? Why not just use one.

"Man" is only a gender label under some (generally unspecified) definition. Under the "adult human male" definition, it's a sex label, not a gender label. But your question is somewhat incoherent (starting with the fact that you put the question mark on a statement and used a period for the question). I'm assuming you're asking about the redundancy of using two sex labels instead of one sex label and one gender label. That would make sense as a question, although the answer should be obvious. Even as sex labels, they are not in fact synonymous and thus not redundant. Leaving aside cross-species applicability, infants cannot be men, but they can be male.

See, gender labels can cause a lot of problems, they don't seem functionally meaningless to me.

Saying that gender labels cause problems seems like an odd way of demonstrating their functional meaning. And they wouldn't cause problems if they were used as sex labels instead of gender labels, which is how most people use them most of the time.

 

[d4m10n]

How are they different in any way that matters here?

You tell me! You're the one insisting that we only need to talk about Hubbard and Thomas but not Lin and Khelif. I'd say that everyone who underwent male puberty but (one way or another) thinks of themselves as female needs to be screened out in order to keep the playing field level.

The origins of the mismatch are irrelevant.

Then presumably you have some other justification for why only the former two athletes are worth discussing here.

 

[p0lka]

There's no mixing up either. Your definition of "man" isn't controlling. "Man" isn't a gender label when I use it.

"Man" is only a gender label under some (generally unspecified) definition. Under the "adult human male" definition, it's a sex label, not a gender label. But your question is somewhat incoherent (starting with the fact that you put the question mark on a statement and used a period for the question).

Thanks for the grammar advice. Also, you are free to use whatever definitions of words you want, until they hit up with reality.

I'm assuming you're asking about the redundancy of using two sex labels instead of one sex label and one gender label. That would make sense as a question, although the answer should be obvious. Even as sex labels, they are not in fact synonymous and thus not redundant. Leaving aside cross-species applicability, infants cannot be men, but they can be male.

Saying that gender labels cause problems seems like an odd way of demonstrating their functional meaning. And they wouldn't cause problems if they were used as sex labels instead of gender labels, which is how most people use them most of the time.

No , I was pointing out the ridiculousness of moaning about gender labels whilst including them in your definitions.

 

[Ziggurat]

You tell me! You're the one insisting that we only need to talk about Hubbard and Thomas but not Lin and Khelif.

Hold up. I'm not saying you can't talk about Khelif. But you're making unjustified assumptions about Khelif. You're claiming that Khelif has a DSD and is not transgender. But that has never actually been established. There are no public medical records indicating any DSD. Maybe Khelif has a DSD, but you don't actually know that.

So let's be clear: what I object to is not specifically talking Khelif, but about trying to shoehorn in DSD issues with transgender issues.

Then presumably you have some other justification for why only the former two athletes are worth discussing here.

Because this thread is a thread about trans issues, not trans + DSD issues. That's the justification for only discussing trans here. It's both off topic and unnecessary. As you yourself admit, even if we accept Khelif as having a DSD and not being transgender, our preferred outcome would be identical in either case. So there is no additional accommodation that needs to be made for Khelif on the basis of any DSD, and no need to consider DSD issues here.

 

[Ziggurat]

Thanks for the grammar advice. Also, you are free to use whatever definitions of words you want, until they hit up with reality.

What reality are you referring to? That "man" always means gender and not sex? No, that's not reality.

 

[p0lka]

What reality are you referring to? That "man" always means gender and not sex? No, that's not reality.

Man and woman are societal gender labels that mostly conform to the actual sex of the individual, but not always. Some people just say 'don't tell me what to do'.

 

[Emily's Cat]

That's all great, and I agree, but it's not what theprestige and I were talking about.

theprestige likes to frame the dilemma as "all men want the ability to transgress sex segregated spaces any time they want".

That's not theprestige's framing. Their framing is essentially males who claim a transgender identity want the legal *right* to transgress sex segregated spaces any time they want; the functional outcome of giving this *right* on the basis of self-declaration is that all males would then be able to transgress those boundaries at their whim.

Not all males want that right; but if you give the right to some males then you have de facto granted it to all males.

There's quite a bit of question begging baked in there. Most obviously, the "trans exemption" doesn't apply to all males. Like, it has nothing to do with me, and over 99.5% of other males.

Why on earth do you think this? For it to only apply to some specific subset of males, there has to be an objective and easily verifiable way to sort males into the category of "real trans" and "other". How, pray tell, are we supposed to do that?

How would a random female human tell the difference between you in a skirt being not-trans and Eddie Izzard being real-trans?

But secondarily, it bakes in the idea that a rest room was and always has been a sex segregated space. If it was, we wouldn't be having this debate.

I'm really tired, Thermal. Regardless of your intent, you're effectively playing a game here. Bathrooms haven't be *legally* separated on the basis of sex - but only because we didn't use to *need* a law about it. Everyone in the damned country knew - and still ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ knows! - that they are separated by biological sex as convention, and have always been intended to be such. Nobody, even the truest true believe thinks they were unisex and it was just a serving suggestion. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it. So please, please stop playing this game of "Oh, it's not true that they've always been separated by sex!"

It's always been a little wishy washy, with routine casual transgressions and no legal enforcement for "violating" it.

It hasn't been "wishy washy", it's been discretionary. Prior to about a decade ago or so, females had the discretion to tolerate males if we decided to... but we also had the authority and the accepted functional right to evict any male that we did NOT want to be there. And the entire rest of society would support our eviction.

I don't believe that you can't understand this shift, and why it matters.

 

[p0lka]

We know all of the above is true because this has always been the stated position taken by TRAs....this is who and what they are, something they show us every . single . day!!


I look around and I see no women who are anything other than female
I look around and I see no men who are anything other than male
I look around and I see no transwomen who are anything other than men (males) cosplaying as women (females) while under the self-delusion that they are female.

Reality is what it is, it doesn't care about how much you insist something is correct or incorrect. Those 'I look around' statements seem almost like religious prayers?
You're denying reality, I have to say.

 

[Thermal]

You said that theprestige said that they all did. Here, let me remind you:

You quite explicitly said that theprestige made a claim about what all men want. theprestige never made any such claim.

You know what?. You're right, conceded. I don't know why I put it that way, other than being in a hurry and not proofreading well. I meant to say something along the lines of "all men *who* want to be able to override, etc", but it didn't make the final cut. Mea culpa.

Yes, any time they want, IF they want.

Still no. It doesn't even apply to you or I, unless we give a verbally false ID. It's only in fevered imaginings that restrooms are suddenly overrun with Beavis and Butthead claiming to be women. I live in such a scenario. It is not happening.

He never claimed (as you said he did) that they all want to. See, that's the distinction between your first and second use of "want" in the above claim.

Under self-ID, what is the definition of transwoman? It's any man who says he's a transwoman. Which any man can do.

No its not. Its a male who self identifies as a woman. We went over the definitions long ago. "Identifies" doesnt mean "chooses an identity based on whatever criteria I make up". The usual definitions go "Gender self-identification, or self-ID, refers to the concept that a person's gender is determined by their own internal sense of self, rather than by external factors like medical diagnosis or legal requirements."

If you don't have an internal sense of being a woman, you can't identify yourself as one.

So any man who wants it (conditional) can have it. So yes, his claim is absolutely true, and you're in denial.

Still no. It doesn't apply to men at all.

 

[d4m10n]

You're claiming that Khelif has a DSD and is not transgender.

Is this a claim worth discussing here, in your view?

(I'm going to go ahead and do so, but interested to hear your answer nevertheless.)

There are no public medical records indicating any DSD.

Assuming the IOC (and her family in various interviews) didn't lie about the circumstances of her birth, she was assigned female at birth.

Assuming the IOC issued correction was not misinformation, they admitted that Khelif "not a transgender case" while disclaiming the original unscripted claim that Khelif was "not a DSD case."

https://twitter.com/x/status/1819667573698445793

While you are correct that her medical records have not been made public (unless we count Le Correspondant as a credible source) the DSD hypothesis seems much stronger than the hypothesis that she undertook a course of gender affirmation contrary to her birth sex while growing up in a nation overwhelmingly dominated by Sunni Islam.

 

[d4m10n]

…what I object to is not specifically talking Khelif, but about trying to shoehorn in DSD issues with transgender issues.

The evident confusion of top-level IOC representatives between these two issues strikes me as a good enough reason to discuss them together, especially considering that we already agree that the optimal solution is the same in either case.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I'm fully aware there is. But is 'heat register' a term that's known outside the US? Having looked it up, it seems to be peculiar to the US, something of which Americans may be unaware. It's a very idiosyncratic use of the term 'register'. Warm air heating systems are not common in the UK (they were in vogue in the 70s, before oil prices rocketed, I think), and where they are installed they don't typically have floor vents.

Wouldn't be at all surprised if it's not common terminology elsewhere. Also bear in mind that the US is really big, and we have climates that range from tundra to taiga to rainforest to tropic to desert. Some parts of the US drop to as low as -10F (-23C) in the winter and up to +100F (37C) in the summer - Omaha, Nebraska for example. And a huge amount of our homes were built well after electricity became commonplace, we don't have any really truly old buildings . So it's quite common for our houses to be built with duct-work in place for forced-air heating and cooling. Thus, air registers.

Lots of variation by location though. When I lived in WA, the majority of homes didn't have central cooling of any sort; in AZ a lot of homes don't have central heating. A fair number of homes in the northeast have radiators for heating, and wouldn't have registers for those.

 

[Emily's Cat]

What is the relevance of this nitpicking derail?

Innocuous side conversation? It's not at all relevant, but also not disruptive IMO.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Sort of. I dont think men advocate that much at all. I think transwomen do, and their supporters, NONE OF WHICH refer to them as "men". Do you understand the difference?

I don't give a good goddamned how some males refer to themselves, they're still males. And since they are still males of the human species, the term "men" is appropriate.

Don't ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ split hairs based on coercive language - see the thread title if you need an idea of where this is coming from.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I cannot self ID as a woman, because I don't identify as a woman.

You 100% CAN do so. That you would not choose to doesn't mean you can't. You could wake up tomorrow morning and declare to the entire world that you identify as a "woman" and rather large contingent of people will proceed to embrace you as stunning and brave, and demand that you should now be able to get your dick out at the local korean spa.

And because you said the magic phrase, the policies under discussion would then give you the legal right to strip down in the female showers with all your dangly bits getting some air, and the females can't do any ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ thing about it. And if you happen to live in California, and you were to end up in jail for some reason or other, you could then demand to be placed in a female prison solely on the basis of your words.

Because there's literally no way at all for someone else to determine whether you are genuine or not.

 

[Emily's Cat]

OT: as an American, I rarely hear "heat registers" used outside of professional jargon. Most laypeople just call them vents or heat vents, even when they also provide air conditioning in a combined central system. Sometimes you will hear "grilles" too.

Most of the houses I grew up in had vents in the ceiling for A/C and registers in the floor or baseboards for heat. That's what my family called them.

According to google, vents can't be closed or directed, registers can. Did not know that.

 

[Ziggurat]

Is this a claim worth discussing here, in your view?

Not really, because we don't have any solid evidence in either direction. It's all supposition, including on the part of the IOC. Plus, it would make no difference either way. Your desired outcome and my desired outcome of Khelif not participating doesn't change whether Khelif is trans or DSD.