Transwomen are not Women - Part 15

d4m10n said:
Adding a (self-identified) gender marker is not deception, it is a different datum than birth sex. I'm not arguing for replacing sex with gender, no more than I'm arguing for replacing eye color with hair color.

They don't have a legitimate interest in the fact that I've green eyes, unless you count that it helps to identify me.

I'm willing to bet without even looking that passports are nearly always utilized by living people who are wearing clothes.

(Clothes which they bought either in the men's or the women's section, depending on their sense of gender.)
Click to expand...

It's ridiculous, for reasons which others have outlined, and you touch on here.

Your original proposition was that "individuals who've gone undertaken years-long efforts to resemble the opposite of their birth sex" should be accommodated in this way. But who decides who is included in this and who isn't? Let Blaire White have a female passport and when do you stop? You'll have furious and offended men with bad wigs and a touch of makeup insisting that they should have one too.

Now you're simply saying that the passport should reflect what clothes you wear. What's the point of that? Anyone may wear male-style clothes one day and female-style another. I usually travel in a t-shirt or hoodie, jeans and trainers, carrying a rucksack. I'm recognised as female by my face, and the shape of the body under the clothes, not by the clothes. Which sort of passport should I have?

It's nuts. There may be a case to be made for dropping sex altogether, but replacing it with some vague "gender" marker that anyone can frustrate simply by changing their clothes is mental.
 
d4m10n said:
They don't have a legitimate interest in the fact that I've green eyes, unless you count that it helps to identify me.
Click to expand...
I do. So does the government.

Gender, however, does not actually help identify you. Because it isn't an immutable characteristic.
 
Rolfe said:
It's nuts. There may be a case to be made for dropping sex altogether, but replacing it with some vague "gender" marker that anyone can frustrate simply by changing their clothes is mental.
Click to expand...
In fairness to d4m10n, he did say to supplement sex with gender, not substitute. But that's still stupid. It's the equivalent of putting your favorite color on your passport.
 
There's no value in it. A marker to say whether this person wears clothes bought from the men's or the women's department? Seriously? T-shirts and hoodies don't always come in male or female in the first place, and even when t-shirts are available in these "women's cut" styles, most women wear the neutral-cut ones as far as I can see. I'm sitting here now in jeans and a hoodie. The jeans were bought as "ladies" because my natural body shape can't wear men's jeans. Some women can and do though. The hoodie is generic. It's very easy to tell that I'm female, by my body shape, my feminine face (and absence of male pattern baldness) and the fact that my trainers are a size 4. That's a European 37, if that helps. What gender marker is supposed to be on my passport? Who would it help?

Not only that, I would strongly object to being compelled to have any such marker. I don't identify as any gender. I wear what I please, I do my hair as I please, and I wear or don't wear makeup as I please. It's easy to see that I'm female, but if you were to say, I see you identify as woman gender, I'd probably clock you one.
 
d4m10n said:
What matters depends on context.

Sex matters much more than gender for the OP (powerlifting) but that doesn't mean sex matters more in every possible context. If I'm i.d.'ing a passing trans man by inspecting their passport, seeing an "F" sex marker is going to cause some (avoidable) confusion.
Click to expand...
How much confusion, really?

A man walks up to your customs station. You glance over their passport, see the "F". Look up at them, look back at their photo, look at them again, say to yourself, "ah, right", and carry on.
 
smartcooky said:
More examples of the things that never happen, happening.

Seriously, this medical butchery being perpetrated on children will end up being even bigger, and even worse than the thalidomide scandal of the 1960s. We look back on that generation in horror at how that was ever allowed to happen, and our children and grandchildren will look back accusingly at our generation and have the same questions about children being maimed and disfigured by gender-ideology captured quacks!!
Click to expand...
No kidding. But I think it's less like Thalidomide, and much more like smoking or opioids. With thalidomide, the impact was entirely unknown, and arguably unknowable - we didn't know that chirality could produce massively different effects. When it was first tested and introduced for morning sickness, the manufacturers weren't aware of the risks. Over the course of its use, it actually impacted a relatively small portion of infant, but the impacts were catastrophic. It was pulled a few years later for morning sickness, with a lot less obstruction that we often see from pharma companies.

Smoking, on the other hand, was known to cause cancer for decades while it was still being actively promoted and sold, and the tobacco companies actively tried to suppress and lie about the risks. Similarly, opioid manufacturers knew it was addictive when they first started marketing it as a safer alternative to morphine, and they blatantly lied to doctors and patients about it.

I think puberty blockers are a lot more like cigarettes and opioids than they are like thalidomide. They were in use for decades before they got picked started being given to healthy pubertal kids as a mental health treatment. The adverse impacts and health risks were known well before that, and activists have just blatantly lied about them being safe. We have also known about the adverse impacts of an interrupted puberty on bone density, risk of stroke and heart attack and other conditions, and challenges to cognitive development - people with a variety of DSDs face these issues and they're fairly well documented. We've known that an interrupted puberty isn't reversible for decades before the activists decided to suppress that information.
 
d4m10n said:
This thread is surely deranging and disorientating, but that's bound to happen whenever the basic rules of the social contract are being actively rewritten on anything as fundamental as the nature of sex.

Imagine how crazy-making it would be to argue with people who want to abolish lightweight boxing classes on the grounds that people should not be required to identify with their actual weight because that would be bad for their mental health. Imagine further that the weight-class abolitionists insist that they "trust the science" and have all the major medical establishments on their side. When you complain that this will effectively limit competitive boxing to heavyweights, they shrug and say that they never watch sports and are exclusively concerned with promoting civil rights, regardless of what might be lost in the process. You ask why it's a civil rights issue to think of oneself as a few stone lighter than you really are going by the scale, they start making screwball comparisons to racial apartheid, as if skin color is somehow just as relevant as muscle mass to the art of hitting other people in the face.

When discussing such matters as these with people who are committed to eluding and denying reality, one is constantly struck by the need to glance about for Rod Serling lurking just around any given corner. That will always be part of what makes this thread uniquely interesting, it's the place where self-professed skeptics come to divest themselves of commitment to scientific inquiry in favor of an identity-first approach.
Click to expand...
:bigclap

Well said.
 
Thermal said:
I get that, and I agree, but my observation was more base than that. In This Thread, posters backslap each other and ignore 'their sides' logical absurdities in order to stay on message and in lockstep. Remember the Big 5 post? It's that, writ large.
Click to expand...
What logical absurdities do you believe we've ignored?
 
Ziggurat said:
Gender, however, does not actually help identify you. Because it isn't an immutable characteristic.
Click to expand...
Identifying characteristics needn't be immutable, they only need to be well-correlated with appearance; we don't put headshots and weight on the i.d. because they are invariant over time, we put them on there because they give us useful information which tends to be good enough for the task at hand even though they are bound to change over time.
theprestige said:
On the other hand, sex does indeed matter more than gender, in any context where either one matters at all.
Click to expand...
Personally, I think it is somewhat easier to identify someone when I know in advance (from the i.d. card) that they are a male trying to dress and look like a female, or vice-versa, or someone of either sex trying to come off as androgynous. I've yet to see anyone here provide an argument against adding a gender marker—so long as the sex marker remains in place—that isn't merely an appeal to the dangers of slippery slopes and camel's noses.
 
Last edited:
Also, it's probably worth asking how the trans rights activists would react at the proposal to add a gender marker (based on self-i.d.) while retaining birth sex. I'd ask them here, but alas, this thread has become oddly one-sided when compared to the general population of ISF.

My guess is that they would reject the proposal out of hand, because their goal is not to provide more useful information but rather to continue the process of replacing birth sex with gender identity in law and policy, which has been the central principle of gender ideology for many years now.
 
Last edited:
d4m10n said:
Identifying characteristics needn't be immutable, they only need to be well-correlated with appearance; we don't put headshots and weight on the i.d. because they are invariant over time, we put them on there because they give us useful information which tends to be good enough for the task at hand even though they are bound to change over time.

Personally, I think it is somewhat easier to identify someone when I know in advance (from the i.d. card) that they are a male trying to dress and look like a female, or vice-versa, or someone of either sex trying to come off as androgynous. I've yet to see anyone here provide an argument against adding a gender marker—so long as the sex marker remains in place—that isn't merely an appeal to the dangers of slippery slopes and camel's noses.
Click to expand...

We were discussing whether it might be a reasonable idea to remove the sex marker from passports. You jumped in with this "gender" bollocks, and at first it seemed that you were proposing this instead of a sex marker, which is just mental for all sorts of very good reasons. You've now clarified that you propose it as an addition to the sex marker. That doesn't seem to me to have any relevance to the suggestion that the sex marker should be removed.

d4m10n said:
Also, it's probably worth asking how the trans rights activists would react at the proposal to add a gender marker (based on self-i.d.) while retaining birth sex. I'd ask them here, but alas, this thread has become oddly one-sided when compared to the general population of ISF.

My guess is that they would reject the proposal out of hand, because their goal is not to provide more useful information but rather to continue the process of replacing birth sex with gender identity in law and policy, which has been the central principle of gender ideology for many years now.
Click to expand...

Quite. Also, given that the main point of passports is to keep people from going where they're not allowed to go, putting a mutable characteristic on a passport is absolutely asking for trouble. The ability to change hair length, style and colour is bad enough.

And I seriously hope you're not suggesting that people who don't buy into this "we all have a gender" nonsense should be forced to accept such a marker.

You're essentially saying that a note could be added to some passports to indicate that the bearer may be pretending to be the sex he isn't. I wonder how the transcult would react to that, indeed.
 
Thermal said:
Will get back to you later on this, EC. When you catch up on the thread, you'll see I went over to the Dark Side for a while and am back on a cleanse.
Click to expand...

Since you're back, maybe you could find time to acknowledge that what happened last Saturday was this.

"A group of "grass-roots women" arranged a protest meeting against the government's refusal to implement the SC ruling. With speakers and a programme. Official permission for this was applied for and granted. This meeting went off entirely peacefully, with no scuffles, no clashes and no arrests. Meanwhile a group of trans-activists known as "Trans Kids Deserve Better" solicited people to turn up to disrupt this meeting, with incitement to violence and telling people to "bring their rage". The police kept this group away from the women, but in the course of that counter-protest violence occurred and three arrests were made, including one for interfering with a reporter's camera equipment."

An apology for your repeated insistence that anyone who corrected your mistaken assumptions was lying and/or trolling would be quite nice too.

We might then go on to discuss what the GB News reporter remarked on, that the trans-ally side of the dispute are a bunch of aggressive thugs whose only objective is to prevent women's voices from being heard, and who openly exhort people to come masked and to "bring their rage" to confront the police.
 
d4m10n said:
Identifying characteristics needn't be immutable, they only need to be well-correlated with appearance; we don't put headshots and weight on the i.d. because they are invariant over time, we put them on there because they give us useful information which tends to be good enough for the task at hand even though they are bound to change over time.
Click to expand...
The rate of change is important, isn't it? Headshots, etc., change over time slowly and gradually, and IDs (passports, drivers' licenses) are updated at regular intervals, and that covers the wider changes happening over a longer period of time than the update interval. Gender appearance, however, can change from day to day and can change wildly.
 
Rolfe said:
Since you're back,
Click to expand...
As i literally just said, I'm not back. I responded to an alert that was asking me a question by replying directly.
Rolfe said:
maybe you could find time to acknowledge that what happened last Saturday was this.
Click to expand...
Absolutely. Right after you and others acknowledge the factual criticisms I've given to your posts for about a year now. It'll be a rather long wait, as you will have to queue up.
Rolfe said:
An apology for your repeated insistence that anyone who corrected your mistaken assumptions was lying and/or trolling would be quite nice too.
Click to expand...
I'm at the end of a very long line. You and a couple others are at the front of it. You want integrity and courtesy shown to you? Lead by example.
Rolfe said:
We might then go on to discuss what the GB News reporter remarked on, that the trans-ally side of the dispute are a bunch of aggressive thugs whose only objective is to prevent women's voices from being heard, and who openly exhort people to come masked and to "bring their rage" to confront the police.
Click to expand...
We could discuss that. Then we could discuss whether a few actors are representative of a whole, and the other things you have been ignoring for the last year.
 
Paul2 said:
Gender appearance, however, can change from day to day and can change wildly.
Click to expand...
So can facial appearance, given the possibility of growing or removing a beard (rather commonplace) or surviving an acid attack (thankfully rare). We might well ask how often people who present themselves as masculine change to feminine presentation—or vice-versa—but that will take a bit of research.
 
Rolfe said:
I seriously hope you're not suggesting that people who don't buy into this "we all have a gender" nonsense should be forced to accept such a marker.
Click to expand...
If the drop down menu were to include "masculine," "feminine," "non-binary," & "N/A" that should pretty much cover the spectrum, IMO.

Personally, I'd pick "masculine" since I'm more comfortable wearing men's clothes and don't like shaving my legs.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom