Cont: Transwomen are not women part XII (also merged)

[Lplus]

Maybe I'm being a Western chauvinist, but it seems to me that this kind of gender segregation is the hallmark of not very nice societies, be it those dominated by religious fundamentalism or in societies where male sexual violence is rampant and implicitly allowed (probably a good bit of overlap in these categories)

The integration of women and men in the public sphere strikes me as an unambiguously good thing, but I suppose opinions can differ.

An integral part of the discussion is about where people perform bodily functions

That isn't the public sphere, unless you live in SF I suppose.

 

[Darat]

Fair enough, in which case clearly the male is theoretically barred from a Women's refuge where sex segregation is by biological identity and thus "woman" is female. I assume that's the answer you were looking for.

That said, the male is clearly a dependent of the mother, so may well be treated as an "extension" of the mother's identity with regards to access, and it seems that provision for the occasional male dependent would not be beyond the wit of man (or woman). Since this has happened before, what was the outcome?

The point of the hypothetical was to demonstrate that even types of sex segregation that are introduced for the best of reasons can have unwanted consequences when moved into the real world. Folk in this thread have said that trans women should not be allowed - even if they are victims of domestic violence - into a women's refuge because they are not females. That approach then means a refuge would be turning away females with male children. Which means in the UK thousands of women with a male child would be turned away or told they can be helped but not their child, they would have to find other services to care for the male child.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

An integral part of the discussion is about where people perform bodily functions

That isn't the public sphere, unless you live in SF I suppose.

I would consider a public swimming pool or a public gym very much the public sphere.

 

[Darat]

Can we safely assume the women at Boxfit studios disagree?

Have you asked them?

ETA: Just out of curiosity, would gender segregated clubs also be a step backward?

You'll have to define what you mean by gender - in this thread lots of times people use different definitions to each other.

 

[Darat]

An integral part of the discussion is about where people perform bodily functions

That isn't the public sphere, unless you live in SF I suppose.

That is very much the public sphere - that is why we passed laws to force the likes of railway companies to provide toilets in their buildings for woman and not just men. Women not being able to go to the loo when out and about is an invisible but very real limitation to their ability to interact in the public sphere.

 

[JoeMorgue]

- "Gender" is a ******* horoscope sign at this point. The term could not be more meaningless and more and more I think how meaningless it is is the point.

- We all get (I hope) that public/private is a fuzzy edged distinction with overlap.

 

[Hercules56]

Maybe I'm being a Western chauvinist, but it seems to me that this kind of gender segregation is the hallmark of not very nice societies, be it those dominated by religious fundamentalism or in societies where male sexual violence is rampant and implicitly allowed (probably a good bit of overlap in these categories)

The integration of women and men in the public sphere strikes me as an unambiguously good thing, but I suppose opinions can differ.

So you oppose sex-seperated bathrooms? Locker rooms? You consider it all to be unfair discrimination??

 

[Lplus]

The point of the hypothetical was to demonstrate that even types of sex segregation that are introduced for the best of reasons can have unwanted consequences when moved into the real world. Folk in this thread have said that trans women should not be allowed - even if they are victims of domestic violence - into a women's refuge because they are not females. That approach then means a refuge would be turning away females with male children. Which means in the UK thousands of women with a male child would be turned away or told they can be helped but not their child, they would have to find other services to care for the male child.

Agreed, and I pointed out that specific accommodation could be made for dependents - and thus, if necessary and not in the same places, for the frightened males who consider themselves at risk (do you think they would number in the tens, hundreds or thousands?)

That is very much the public sphere - that is why we passed laws to force the likes of railway companies to provide toilets in their buildings for woman and not just men. Women not being able to go to the loo when out and about is an invisible but very real limitation to their ability to interact in the public sphere.

Bravo... The provision of toilets is a concern for the public sphere. What occurs within them is most definitely private - at least it is where I live.

 

[Ziggurat]

I'm not being evasive.

Of course you are. As always.

What's the harm being done when blacks are forbidden to join a white's only club?

Sex is not equivalent to race. If you can't make your argument without appealing to race, you can't make your argument.

The discrimination itself is an affront to dignity, and that applies in both examples.

Whose dignity? Yours? Seems women find their dignity violated when men are allowed into private female spaces.

And as far as I can tell, your "argument" does not permit any sex segregation at all, in any context. I'm not generally fond of appeals to popularity, but we do live in a democracy, and in our society, when people get a say in the matter, that's a losing argument.

 

[Darat]

...snip...


Bravo... The provision of toilets is a concern for the public sphere. What occurs within them is most definitely private - at least it is where I live.

That may be the case if you are female but most toilets in the "public sphere" for males in the UK have urinals. These days they are often separate urinals rather than the old fashioned continuous trough kind but they are anything but private.

 

[d4m10n]

Ok, it's the same harm done by other forms of discrimination.

This is almost certainly a drastic oversimplification to say that all forms of discrimination perpetuate the same harms in the same way. Sometimes people use "race" as a criterion in an attempt to diversify all or or part of the student body, e.g. admissions at Harvard or in selecting students to live in Ujamaa House at Stanford. The mere fact of race-consciousness in the selection process does not imply either motivations or results we'd ordinarily associate with Jim Crow.

The two main schools of thought here can be summed up by quoting from Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Sotomayor:

Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. and Justice Sonia Sotomayor have expressed differing views on the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race. Chief Justice Roberts, in the Supreme Court's 2007 Parents Involved decision, stated: "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." Justice Sotomayor, in the Court's 2014 Schuette decision, stated: "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination."​

Roberts will most likely rule against Harvard's race-conscious attempts to diversify their incoming class later this summer, and Sotomayor will doubtless join the dissent if she doesn't write it herself.

What I find curious here is that progressives seem to be arguing from CJ Roberts' position, saying that any discrimination—even when designed by/for historically oppressed groups—will invariably have the same pernicious results as discrimination done for the sake of racial oppression. This strikes TG as so obvious that they leave the exercise to the reader, even as SCOTUS prepares to lay out their reasoning in support of that same simplistic approach.

 

[Elaedith]

The point of the hypothetical was to demonstrate that even types of sex segregation that are introduced for the best of reasons can have unwanted consequences when moved into the real world. Folk in this thread have said that trans women should not be allowed - even if they are victims of domestic violence - into a women's refuge because they are not females. That approach then means a refuge would be turning away females with male children. Which means in the UK thousands of women with a male child would be turned away or told they can be helped but not their child, they would have to find other services to care for the male child.

The argument is that female-only options should be provided. That doesn't preclude offering other types of services to meet different needs.

 

[JoeMorgue]

The argument is that female-only options should be provided. That doesn't preclude offering other types of services to meet different needs.

"We'd call it 'Separate but Equal' but for some reason that didn't poll well with the focus group."

 

[d4m10n]

Have you asked them?

Perhaps you should ask them why they appear to be striving for their own workout spaces rather than "fighting against sex segregation" as you claimed.

You'll have to define what you mean by gender - in this thread lots of times people use different definitions to each other.

One's internal subjective sense of being a man or woman or neither.

 

[Lplus]

That may be the case if you are female but most toilets in the "public sphere" for males in the UK have urinals. These days they are often separate urinals rather than the old fashioned continuous trough kind but they are anything but private.

Urination isn't the only activity that occurs in toilets, male or female, but that aside, this thread is primarily concerned with the effects on and behaviour of females.

 

[Ziggurat]

Ok, it's the same harm done by other forms of discrimination. I'll leave it an exercise for the reader to figure out what that means.

It doesn't mean anything, because different forms of discrimination do different harms, or sometimes no harm at all. Prohibiting blind people from getting a driver's license is discrimination. It doesn't do harm.

 

[lionking]

Strange that all this weird discrimination based on sex occurred despite it not being a social construct. What a coincidence.

What a strange cowardish position to take.

 

[Ziggurat]

What a strange cowardish position to take.

More than that, it just makes no sense. There's far more justification to discriminate on the basis of non-culturally constructed differences than culturally constructed differences.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

What a strange cowardish position to take.

I don't really understand. Sex may be a biological fact, but nearly all the societal implications of that fact are entirely a social construct. The long history of sex discrimination is proof positive of that.

I suppose you could say that sex is not a social construct, but gender absolutely is, and you can't really disentangle the two so that's just being pedantic.

 

[d4m10n]

It doesn't mean anything, because different forms of discrimination do different harms, or sometimes no harm at all.

I'm afraid many people think "discrimination" is a morally loaded term like "murder" rather than a morally neutral term like "homicide," but if so then I don't know what word to use for justifiable acts of discrimination such as exclusively offering IVF or abortion services to a specific subset of patients with uteri rather than offering it to anyone who asks.