Transwomen are not Women - Part 15

[p0lka]

If someone is incapacitated inside, you can get inside even with the door locked.

What belongings would you be putting on the floor? The only thing I've ever put on the floor of a public bathroom is luggage at an airport. That's not exactly easy to grab even under the gap.

There is generally a coat hanger hook on the inside of the door if you need to hang something like a purse.

No. The same debate is happening with changing rooms and prisons and sports, where the gap isn't relevant. It has nothing to do with the gap, and everything to do with whether or not males should be able to access female spaces.

I'm sorry for all the massive gap people, but that gap is always relevant.
If you have grown up with it and think it's ok well fair enough, that's what religious people say.

But to anyone else that hasn't grown up with that massive gap, wow what an invasion of privacy.

edit: when I use the public toilets I take my backpack off and put it down with whatever bags I'm carrying, because I can do so without worrying about someone grabbing them from under the massive gap. Your public toilets seem to me to be anxiety inducing which is not conducive to your health.

 

[Ziggurat]

I said gender, your reply was to split it to gender and gender roles then accuse the TRA's of being obsessed with gender and gender roles whilst stating that the gender critical folks aren't.

Well, yes. Gender roles are a real thing. It's just that gender critical folks don't care about them, and don't think government should have anything to do with them.

That's a completely stupid solution.

You don't actually give any reason for this claim. You state it, and then state your preferred solution, but never once actually say what's wrong with this solution.

They should have said that woman means gender then changed all the spaces they think are relevant to female or male spaces.

You keep proving that you don't understand this issue at all. Why should they have said "woman" means gender when the people who wrote the laws in question didn't think "woman" meant gender? It DIDN'T mean gender until the TRA's tried to make it mean gender, which is a very recent thing. Why should everyone else warp their language to satisfy the whims of the TRAs? How is that a solution? It isn't. If we concede "woman" means gender and try to fall back to "female", that just moves the line of contact to what "female" means. It doesn't solve anything. Because it has never, EVER been about the definitions. It has ALWAYS been about the goals.

Get that through your ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ head. I'm tired of this deliberate ignorance on your part.

 

[Ziggurat]

I'm sorry for all the massive gap people, but that gap is always relevant.

It's not relevant to situations where there is no gap.

But to anyone else that hasn't grown up with that massive gap, wow what an invasion of privacy.

To anyone who hasn't grown up with "woman" referring to males, wow what a perversion of language.

 

[John Freestone]

Making gender separate from sex solves almost all the problems that you and other posters are complaining about.

Separating gender from sex solves that.

Gender is mixed up with sex all the time. If women prisons had been called female prisons I think transwomen wouldn't have been able to legally argue their way in there in the first place. That's one problem solved. Instead my government has made it vague by not splitting sex from gender.

1. Isn't this just wishing, though? It's like saying, "If we separate borrowing things with permission from stealing them, that solves the problem of theft," when we're dealing with societies that have forgotten to make that distinction.

There's something in what you're saying that I resonate with (I can't say I agree, because I'm not sure I understand you yet). For example I am fine with 'gender nonconformity" for either sex (within certain limits), or I was before we got into in this post-trans mess - now instead of thinking a male in a dress is just nonconformist and fine, I assume he thinks he's female. On the other hand, I agree that single-sex spaces should be maintained as such, 'transition' is not a thing, etc. We appear to disagree mainly on the association between "male" and "man" or "boy", and that between "female" and "woman" or "girl". It seems to risk increasing confusion to advocate that "man" and "woman", etc., are "genders" - indeed it seems to pander to the trans lobby's wishes to identify genders at all. Maybe the next question will help clarify where you stand. Furthermore, those terms have been defined as associated with the sexes for hundreds of years, maybe thousands. A woman is an adult human female.

2. Do you think there are male women and female men, not to forget the non-binary folk of each sex? You might have just been using "male" and "female" as nouns, and that way round - "manly women" and "effeminate men" gets closer to what I was saying I was cool with. But making the "effeminate" or the "manly" into the nouns, "woman" and "man" breaks that entirely.

3. Which government is that, if you don't mind saying? ETA: Oh, I think I just got that from another poster. Hello, fellow Brit.

 

[John Freestone]

They should have said that woman means gender then changed all the labels of the spaces they think are relevant to female or male spaces.

And all the dictionaries, and all the biology books, and all the medical leaflets and websites, and all the media and the police statements. Why insist on redefining perfectly good words - man, woman, boy, girl - to relate to the spurious and entirely subjective referent, "genders"? It's idiotic. It is a large part of gender ideology itself.

 

[John Freestone]

I'm sorry for all the massive gap people, but that gap is always relevant.
If you have grown up with it and think it's ok well fair enough, that's what religious people say.

But to anyone else that hasn't grown up with that massive gap, wow what an invasion of privacy.

edit: when I use the public toilets I take my backpack off and put it down with whatever bags I'm carrying, because I can do so without worrying about someone grabbing them from under the massive gap. Your public toilets seem to me to be anxiety inducing which is not conducive to your health.

Fellow Brit here - I can tell you, there are LOADS of public toilet cubicles all over the damned country with "massive" (significant) gaps at the bottom - just about any motorway services and many in towns. I don't frequent airports often, but I'd be surprised if most airports didn't have them. And it's for the reasons you've been told - safety. And I'm pleased if I find a coat hanger on the door, because there's no way I'm putting my freaking bags on some of those floors if I can help it.

If some gaps are surprisingly big, it might be because of increasing obesity, making it potentially difficult to break a lock and open the door if someone is slumped on the floor near the door, I don't know. There are safety experts who help design these things.

 

[John Freestone]

At the risk of violating my own advice (see signature below) it's worth pointing out that Steven Pinker warned us of this possibility back in 2022.

Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, contends that internecine conflict on the left has become “a profound issue, particularly for those of us who are terrified that the hard woke left will enable the resurgence of authoritarian populism by inflicting damage on the moderate left and center and by driving voters to the right.”​

He was not at all unique in offering this warning, but I think he was particularly prescient about how the damage was done.

OK, maybe I misunderstood your post that I was replying to, I thought it was critiquing my position, but this emphasizes it. Thanks for that, I didn't know that warning from Pinker. Believe me, I'll try not to mention the unmentionable as much as possible.

 

[d4m10n]

This subject has been brought to a head in NZ by the inclusion of a trans woman in our weightlifting teams for the Commonwealth Games.

Anyone in this thread hoping to see SCOTUS rule in favor of transgender athletes in the WV & ID cases?

ETA: Probably not

 

[theprestige]

I wonder if anyone in any thread is hoping for SCOTUS to rule in favor of transgender athletes. I suspect a lot of people are stuck in the same place as Thermal: Committed to the idea of trans "rights", but forced to concede certain things like sports and prisons on unavoidable biological grounds, but hoping there's some part of the debate where they can still take a stand for trans "rights".

 

[smartcooky]

This needs to be spelled out for @p0lka
We could have all signs on toilets changed to read...
"Women only: You must be a biological female to enter this space"

and/or

"Men only: You must be a biological male to enter this space"

And it would not make any difference whatever to TRAs. They are ALREADY claiming that "transwomen" are biological females!!

 

[theprestige]

This needs to be spelled out for @p0lka
We could have all signs on toilets changed to read...
"Women only: You must be a biological female to enter this space"

and/or

"Men only: You must be a biological male to enter this space"

And it would not make any difference whatever to TRAs. They are ALREADY claiming that "transwomen" are biological females!!

At this point, I don't think it needs to be spelled out anymore. It's been spelled out for him several times. He's already been through multiple fringe resets, not taking on any new information provided to him.

He's basically become a textbook example of the problem: Telling people how it is doesn't matter, if the people do not or cannot actually accept how it is.

 

[Emily's Cat]

If the people in power didn't accept the core ideas of gender ideology a decade or two ago, it's worth asking how they were persuaded to do so—or at least pretend to do so.

(I suspect the answer will have to do with other ideas which they already accept, such as the validity of critical theories in general.)

They didn't start with the core ideas of gender ideology in their campaigning. They started with much softer sells. Ferinstance... they started when same-sex marriage was illegal, and made the case that if a male had been diagnosed as transsexual and had been taking hormones and had all the surgeries and was passing as a female in their day to day life, then they should be legally documented as "F" so that they could get married. They started with the accepted gender-bending of the 80s and 90s, and pushed it just a teensy bit farther from "guys can wear eyeliner and gals can have short hair" to "guys can entirely present as female and gals can fully present as male". They started from other cultures that had sex-based roles as the default and allowed some males to take on the role of females in exchange for the loss of some privileges, then mythologized that into a sacred recognition of gendery souls. They started from The Crying Game and the pretense that you can't tell that a male is a male if they put on lipstick. They started from prying social gender apart from biological sex and piggybacking on feminist work dedicated to abolishing sex-based expectations of work, behavior, and comportment.

They started with things that *seem* like reasonable accommodations, things like letting people use bathrooms that align with how they present. And then once that thin end of the wedge was under the frame, they kept pushing until the entire structure is unbalanced and about to topple. As soon as one ask was accepted, they added another less reasonable one, and kept going. Then we end up where we are today.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Hard to know what's real and what isn't these days, but he seems nice.

https://twitter.com/x/status/2010399805198270615

Gee... I wonder why females wouldn't be happy to accept a male like that into spaces where we're naked or vulnerable? It's a complete mystery.

 

[Emily's Cat]

How does the gap help? The gaps are frankly non sensible, someone could reach under and steal all of your belongings that you put down, surely it makes you all paranoid when you just want to sit down in a private space?

Nobody with a lick of sense puts their belongings on the floor of a public restroom. There are hooks on the back of the door for that.

 

[Emily's Cat]

edit: when I use the public toilets I take my backpack off and put it down with whatever bags I'm carrying, because I can do so without worrying about someone grabbing them from under the massive gap. Your public toilets seem to me to be anxiety inducing which is not conducive to your health.

I'm just gonna say "eew" and move on.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Anyone in this thread hoping to see SCOTUS rule in favor of transgender athletes in the WV & ID cases?

ETA: Probably not

I'm tentatively hopeful that they will not, at least based on the wee bits of info I've been catching today.

 

[d4m10n]

hoping there's some part of the debate where they can still take a stand for trans "rights".

I'd've thought employment nondiscrimination (absent BFOQ) would be one such area but who knows?

"guys can entirely present as female and gals can fully present as male"

That's okay, though, right? I suppose that question is a subset of my more general one, which is whether you think we should continue to tolerate the sorts of things you provided as thin edge of the wedge examples.

 

[theprestige]

I'd've thought employment nondiscrimination (absent BFOQ) would be one such area but who knows?

I've pointed that out more than once. It's not enough, because the dispute isn't about rights, it's about privileges. Thermal et al. are in the awkward position of trying to find a trans privilege they can champion, that will be palatable to the gender-critical folks. The privilege being, apparently, the privilege to override sex segregation in public restrooms whenever they want.

 

[Ziggurat]

I'd've thought employment nondiscrimination (absent BFOQ) would be one such area but who knows?

Everyone has agreed to that already, so it's not enough. They need something to fight for.

 

[theprestige]

Everyone has agreed to that already, so it's not enough. They need something to fight for.

They want a privilege, is what it is.