Markass
Not the worst
User ID: 3843
Markass
Not the worst
12d ago
Interestingly, your entire line of argument against consensual murder also boils down to this:
I think it's simplest to just not have consensual sex. The benefits are questionable and the costs are enormous.
No, it doesn't. I would never use the same logic to argue against consensual sex. The two don't even remotely compare.
Markass
Not the worst
12d ago
Not a problem because notaries are appointed by the state. How would you even have fake notaries?
You would have a notary appointed by the state, but one that's paid off so they can notarize fradulent consensual-murder documents. You seem to be lacking a security mindset and not at all thinking about the many ways consensual murder could go very, very wrong.
You can throw at me all the nitty gritty problems that might exist in some hypothetical poorly implementation version of them, and okay, I'll grant you that such a piss poor implementation is a really bad idea. I don't see how that changes anything at all.
No, I'm not bringing up some hypothetical poor implementation of the idea. I'm bringing up the challenges that every single implementation would have. These problems aren't avoidable by saying "just get a better implementation, bro". They're inherent and fundamental and will happen unless there's a solution for them. I'm not saying there aren't any solutions, either -- however, solutions aren't exempt from having knock-on effects as well. At what level of hackjob patches, fixes and workarounds, and workarounds to those workarounds will you admit that it's not worth it to have consensual murder anymore? I think it's simplest to just not have consensual murder. The benefits are questionable and the costs are enormous.
Markass
Not the worst
12d ago
But we already have laws against real rape.
I still don't know why you keep qualifying it with "real" rape. What kind of rape isn't real rape? All of the rape I'm talking about is real. Regardless, society has found that general laws against rape are insufficient to protect children from being raped, so it has enacted more. It's no different than having male and female-only locker rooms to prevent sexual harassment, even though sexual harassment is already prohibited. I don't think there's ever been a society that has found it so virtuous to have the fewest laws possible, and I don't think such a society would be workable in the long run.
Innocent people are put in prison for doing nothing wrong
The main cost is to young men. People put in prison for this are mainly under 21 (!), and almost all are under 25
This does not match the cases I've seen. Almost all of the cases I know of regarding people that have been put in jail for having sexual contact with a minor are pedophiles who are older than 30. I'm also curious to see exactly which cases you would point to to support the assertion that innocent people have been put in prison for doing nothing wrong, because I suspect that they, in fact, have done something wrong.
if you are a 20 year old man, and you have the preference that your mate be younger than you, which is a pretty universal preference, you face an extremely unnaturally restricted pool of available mates.
If you're college age, you're probably dating other college age adults and at basically any college you have a sufficiently big dating pool of them. I don't think this is an actual problem.
The most fertile age gap in marriage is 6 or 7 years, so in nature, 20 year olds will date down into the early teens.
How? Are college students regularly meeting and talking with high schoolers or something? Why can't they just date other college students?
Whereas for „creepy old men,“ the law is extremely lenient. They can be in their 50s and date their daughter's high school friend, as long as she turned 18 a few months ago. Then it's all clear!
Is this a problem for you? I thought by your position that you would be celebrating this fact.
They are if the laws and society are reasonable.
I don't think there has ever been a society that operated this way, even despite the massive amounts of people who want it to work that way. For example, the death of George Floyd resulting in the rise of calls to abolish the police. The police wasn't really abolished anywhere (thankfully) because we don't operate on the principle of "fuck up once = your institution/law gets abolished".
But laws that are unreasonable are unjust and a society that is unreasonable is wicked and stupid and should lose political power.
I think it should take a lot more than one counterexample before we declare a law unreasonable and unjust and the society that enforces that law unreasonable, wicked, stupid, and ought to be losing political power.
I haven't seen any evidence that the vast majority of 14 year olds are susceptible to grooming tactics.
What kind of evidence would convince you? Have you tried, you know, interacting with them?
Isn't weird that a bunch of politicians thought they could denounce an empirical study? Might as well denounce 2+2=4 or the existence of matter.
There are entirely valid reasons to dismiss empirical studies. It's not even nearly the same as denying 2+2=4 or the existence of matter. I don't think citing studies is quite the slam-dunk argument you make it out to be. There are many ways to go wrong with studies and this is especially true in the social sciences.
I don't think a reasonable woman feels raped from voluntary sex at 14. Tons of people agree with me, which is why the majority of polities on Earth allow 14 year olds to consent to sex with somebody.
That doesn't mean any adult is allowed to have sex with 14 year olds. I also don't think the standard by which we should have laws is "what are the other nations on Earth doing?"
If she isn't traumatized by banging a 16 year old then she won't be traumatized by banging a 20 year old.
This seems like a severe and unjustified leap in logic. 20 year olds are a lot more mature, and it's easier for them to manipulate a 14 year old than a 16 year old could. It's not as if the 20 year old is just the 16 year old but with "+4" added to the age. Getting older changes people and makes them different. Age is not just a number.
If anything, 16 year olds treat girls like shit while 20 year olds commit more.
A 20 year old guy "committing more" to a 14 year old girl just means he's grooming her.
It was an N=8500 meta-analysis. Yikes.
First, even the Wikipedia page you linked lists rebuttals and criticisms of the study, including studies that contradicted it. Beware the man of one study. Again, I don't think that citing studies is the slam-dunk argument you think it is when there are so many ways to go wrong with studies. I don't think this is a question that can be resolved with "just one more study, bro."
Markass
Not the worst
13d ago
That's only one way to look at it, no? By demanding such "protection" we cause a lot of unnecessary suffering.
It's only "unnecessary suffering" if you ignore the suffering caused to loved ones when someone they knew and loved has died. Most people are distraught when a friend, family member, relative, etc. commits suicide.
If ad infinitum problems crop up, that's a bug of the legal system, not of the moral code behind the legal system. Not every legal system has this issue.
Was the notary licensed at the time of notarization? If so then it's legit. If not no. Shouldn't take more than a few minutes of the court's time with a sufficiently competent legal system.
No, you can't just ignore second-order consequences. Not every change you make to a system is isolated and affects only that one particular area of the system. Laws can interact in sometimes surprising ways. For example, if a state legalizes marijuana, then cops can no longer use the smell of marijuana alone to establish probable cause for searching a vehicle. Or if it's legal in a state to carry a concealed firearm (especially permitless carry) then cops can no longer "stop and frisk" a suspect based on someone saying they're armed, unless they also say they're committing a crime in some way (the standard is armed and dangerous).
Fixing the problems with using notaries as the basis of evidence is not so simple. If we allowed murder in the case of consent, there would be a huge incentive to create fake notaries or otherwise fake documentation supporting the murder. After all, it's easier than getting away with murder by killing witnesses, covering up evidence or the other usual means of doing it. And it's not like the victim can even testify against them. The short story "Infodeath" by Ben Sheffield provides a good example where (spoiler alert) someone gets tricked into signing paperwork saying they wanted to commit suicide by lethal injection, then gets forced to have said lethal injection, and dies nonconsensually.
Markass
Not the worst
13d ago
They vary in their cost/benefit and arbitraryness, and my position is this law is all cost, no benefit, and the most arbitrary one every dreamed up. So it's not worth keeping around.
The benefits are that 14 year olds don't get raped. What are the costs, exactly? That adults don't get to fuck 14 year olds? I think most adults are fine dating someone their age and not having sex with children. I don't think that people are entitled to sex in general nor should they be.
Okay but then I wasn't a child at 14 because I wasn't like this.
Society and laws are not like math where if you find one counterexample the entire premise is invalid. If you weren't like that at 14, then good for you. You were still a child, though, and that doesn't mean that the vast majority of children aren't susceptible to grooming tactics.
How would you know? How did you measure feelings?
The good thing about having a standard based on a reasonable person is that there's no need to measure the feelings of anyone to prove that a crime happened, we can just refer to what a reasonable person would feel instead. So if someone gets raped, we don't have to attempt to measure how exactly raped the victim was feeling by using brain scans or whatever science you think is applicable. We just say that a reasonable person would feel extremely traumatized and emotionally damaged from rape, and prosecute the crime accordingly.
The one study on this topic says trauma from consensual sex is fake.
Which study? And just because there may be only n=1 study in a topic doesn't mean it's accurate or reliable.
Markass
Not the worst
14d ago
But the former: what do you mean by "what they're agreeing to"? They're agreeing to stick their dick into someone they wanted to stick their dick into anyways.
They may have agreed to that. But they don't know about the complex emotions that comes with the act and their minds are not mature enough to handle it. It's more than just the raw physical act that takes place.
I don't see why this is a useful protection to grant.
The theory goes that suicidal people are not in their right mind and if they were cured of their afflictions would no longer wish to die. By giving up this protection we would be causing thousands or even millions of unnecessary deaths.
We're talking about the specific case of someone who no longer values their own life and actively wishes for it to be taken away.
We still do everything in our power to prevent suicidal people from taking their own lives. We don't just ignore them and leave them to their own devices or even actively encourage them to kill themselves.
This would be trivially solved by requiring a high bar of evidence for this defense. Can they produce the amount of documentation that Meiwes and Brandes had on hand, signed and notarized and what have you? 99.9% of murders are not going to have that on file.
It's not just being able to eventually adjudicate the claim, it's also the amount of judicial resources spent on frivolous claims (especially since, as you admit, the defense would only be successful in vanishingly rare scenarios). Do you know the saying, "the process is the punishment"? How the process for resolving disputes or incidents, and it being dragged out for a long period of time, is itself a punishment? Defendants can cause that sort of punishment too. The defendant and/or their lawyers will do absolutely everything they can to keep the defendant out of jail, and that includes claiming defenses that have no hope of success, but still result in delays and time, effort, and resources spent having to rebut the claim by prosecutors and witnesses.
As I said, allowing this sort of defense at all would result in the second-order consequences of spawning endless litigation over whether someone consented to being murdered, especially if there was a high bar of evidence.
"They totes consented to it, the document was notarized by this guy!" "Hang on, is that notary even licensed? Looks like his license expired." "Yes, but, he got it reinstated, so it's valid!" "Yeah but, look at this recent state law, says he has to renew in a month, and he didn't." "Hang on, what about..." and so on, arguments like that, ad infinitum. It's already hard enough to put away murderers, we don't need to make it harder.
Markass
Not the worst
14d ago
Arbitrary line.
So is every other law. That doesn't mean they're not useful or worth keeping around.
How is this different than the usual courting of women by well-off men?
An adult doesn't place the same value on gifts as a child would. A child would do literally anything for a copy of the latest hot video game franchise they enjoy. An adult knows there's more to life than shiny video games and if given the same gift, sure they might feel obligated to do something in return (such as sex) but it's not as overwhelmingly likely as a child would. In other words, an adult is mature.
Okay, then prosecute for forced rape then.
Rape, by definition, is forced. There's no such thing as "non-forced" rape. This is a confusing term to use.
Even causing emotional damage, feelings of powerlessness, lowered self-worth is not a felony level harm. Intelligent motte commenters and society make me feel like that all the time. Am I raped?
I don't think Motte commenters and society in general would cause (to a reasonable person) the extreme level of emotional damage, powerlessness, and lowered self-worth that someone gets from being raped. Is it a nonzero amount? Sure. Is it close in orders of magnitude? Not even in the same ballpark.
Markass
Not the worst
15d ago
I don't know what emotionally independent means
Having a strong sense of identity, of self-worth, being able to handle big problems like running out of money, not having to rely on your parents for typical socialization or emotional support. Things like that.
financial independence doesn't matter, 99% of people don't have this.
Are we speaking past each other? By financial independence, I mean not being dependent on anyone else for money, and the typical signs of this are things like having your own job and owning your own place. I bring up financial independence because a classic groomer tactic is to shower a child with gifts they wouldn't be able to attain themself. An adult is financially independent and can just buy whatever they want so such a tactic would not work on them.
I find it hard to believe that you at 14 years of age could just buy whatever you wanted and wouldn't be susceptible to a grooming tactic like that.
I hope all 14 year olds understand pregnancy and STDs. Is there any other harm? If a man wears a condom, what's the big harm exactly?
Sex is a hugely emotional and intimate act and there's more to it than just wearing a condom. A child is highly likely to feel complex emotions they hadn't felt before if they end up in a sexual encounter, and highly likely to want to back out and stop, but also highly likely to be too scared to say no. The harm is in having sex with the child when they don't want it, and the subsequent emotional damage, feelings of powerlessness, lowered self-worth, etc. not uncommon when someone gets raped.
Markass
Not the worst
15d ago
Sounds like wage theft to me, which is a problem distinct from what you've described. You don't need AoC laws to fix that, you simply need to enforce the existing ones.
The problem wasn't that they weren't being paid for their services. The problem was that they were being raped. No amount of payment makes it ok to have sex with someone who doesn't want it.
typically to their similarly-aged companion of the opposite sex
I wasn't talking about sex between people close in age, I was talking about the hypothetical scenario of a 30 year old having sex with a 14 year old.
Markass
Not the worst
15d ago
This is probably true for some 14 year olds, but not others.
I'd be hard pressed to find a 14 year old for which this isn't true. For it to be false, they would have to be already financially and emotionally independent, mature enough to know the full consequences of sex, have the self-worth and courage to say no, etc. which are all traits that vanishingly few 14 year olds have, if any.
Why do you need staturtory rape laws? On the basis of what harm?
The harm when a minor agrees to sexual acts without fully internalizing what they entail and then being too scared to say no once it starts.
„Onlyfans at 19 is a human right,“
I don't agree with the existence of Onlyfans.
The law does everything it can do to make sure her virginity is blown out by another man at marriage
I'm not aware of any laws in Western countries that prohibit premarital sex between consenting adults.
Markass
Not the worst
15d ago
Is it or is it not fine for a 14 year old who wants to fuck a 30 year old to be allowed to fuck the 30 year old? If not, where is the psychological harm coming from?
No. The harm comes from the 14 year old not knowing what they're agreeing to and being too scared to say no once it starts.
But why? Why should it be illegal if there's ample documentation that the person being killed actively consented to and wanted to be killed?
Because we as a society have agreed to grant as much protection as possible to everyone, even to people who are either stupid or mentally disturbed enough to want to be killed, because we generally value human life. There is also the fact that if consent was an exception, so many murderers would claim the "but they actually consented" defense which would drag out the (already unbelievably long) criminal justice process of putting murderers in prison.
Markass
Not the worst
15d ago
Is there evidence of 14 year olds being uniquely damaged in countries where the AoC is (or was) 14?
Yes. The origin of age of consent laws came about because Britain in the 1880s had literal child prostitutes who were constantly being raped, but no legal recourse could be taken since the defense was always "the 14 year old consented."
Until about 30 years ago the average age of virginity loss was around here, so this is obviously false.
Just because someone loses their virginity doesn't mean they consented to it.
Sure you can- break into a Texan's house. Though this is just splitting the difference over "breaking into a house defended by armed homeowner will definitely get you killed" and "all cases of self-defense are murder".
If you break into a Texan's house because you want to die, that's arguably just suicide that involves a third party, not murder. Suicide by cop, for example, is (sadly) a popular suicide method.
Markass
Not the worst
15d ago
It's easier for a 30 year old to manipulate a 14 year old than a 70 year old can a 22 year old. In particular, young minds aren't fully developed and are susceptible to saying yes to things they don't actually want to do. This is why "but the kid consented!" is not a good defense, even if true. Further, pedophilia in general causes psychological harm to the vast majority of minors, so even if we grant for the sake of argument the many claimed cases of people saying they would've totally been fine if they had sex when they were 14 (or actually had done so), it would be enabling pedophiles who would then go on to harm the many people who are not fine with having sex at 14 years of age. This is similar to why you can't consent to being murdered, and murderers who only murder "consensual" victims are still murderers who are still imprisoned for murdering people. We also want to discourage rules lawyering, and if we allowed exceptions in the case of consent, that would open the door to endless litigation over whether the 14 year old really consented, which would result in adverse outcomes for many cases because most 14 year olds don't consent.
Markass
Not the worst
19d ago
Useful_Mistake is probably more unfairly advantaged by being a janny than by his profile picture.
Markass
Not the worst
19d ago
Shooting into an occupied dwelling is illegal even if no person gets shot
This has also been my issue with abortion in general and especially arguments over whether the fetus is really an actual person. Ok, so let's say for the sake of the argument we truly can't tell if it's just a "clump of cells" or a human being. Fine. Isn't this a case where we should be more cautious, not less? It is quite similar to the scenario of a building that could be occupied. You shouldn't shoot into it unless you know for sure that no one is in there, and if you can't look for whatever reason, that has no relevance on whether it's morally harmful to shoot into it or not.
Markass
Not the worst
19d ago
Didn't @The_Nybbler just explain to you exactly how bodily autonomy can be applied to opposing abortion too?
Markass
Not the worst
25d ago
Monero is easy to use and does not require mixing funds. On the other hand, crypto in general has a lot of friction (even getting Kiwi Farmers to donate crypto is like pulling teeth). On the gripping hand, a determined enough pedophile will probably bypass all the friction he possibly can.
I think the biggest point here is that cops can (and should) take down CSAM groups the old-fashioned way: By doing intelligence work to infiltrate, investigate, identify, and then arrest the pedophiles. It's a far better approach than invading everybody's privacy. The only problem is that law enforcement now have to do actual police work rather than sit on their asses and get everybody's data handed to them for free.
Markass
Not the worst
25d ago
Sites need to have specific support for LaTeX. Doesn't seem like ours does.
Markass
Not the worst
1mo ago
Maybe child molesters make that claim to garner sympathy? It's like a reflex when they're confronted about the crimes they commit, as if being a victim removes their capacity to victimise others. I've said many times that if we had to let go of the pedophiles who were also victims, we would have to let go of every single pedophile.
Markass
Not the worst
1mo ago
In other words, the real rule is to follow the whims of Congress and the American political apparatus.
No, we condemn or tolerate things on the basis of whether or not they harm other people.
Ok, we seem to have gotten off-track on this one. So to clarify what I'm saying, I'm saying that by your standards, I can't say pedophilia is sexually deviant because the community says it is, because the community can be wrong, and because the community can be wrong (after all, the ancient Greeks thought pedophilia was fine), we have to play cultural relativism and pretend that any standard is as good as any other absent some other justification that can't be based on the community. Do you agree with that?
It is not 'naïve' to disagree with you.
I didn't say your view was naive just because you disagreed with me. I said that your view is naive because you seem to not be considering the many important differences between men and women, which have been enumerated to you before.
The same applies to a 99th-%ile-size cis-man harassing a 1st-%ile-size cis-man. Should we have facilities divided by size as well as gender?
No, the same does not apply. There are many more important differences between men and women than "one tends to be small and the other tends to be large". The smaller man doesn't have to worry about being forcibly impregnated by the larger man, for instance. We divide by gender because of the many important differences, not just because men and women differ by height.
I used online pictures because Markdown does not have a 'link to Real Life' formatting option. The one trans-woman I have knowingly met in person did not appear to be obviously male.
The many trans-identifying males I have met in real-life look like men. If I wasn't paying attention, was inebriated or was looking at them from a sufficient distance, I might mistake them for women. But either way, in normal conditions I would see them as men, especially when they speak. The only way that trans people can pass is through online media.
Your response was, anti-quote, "...making a wig look natural is much easier than making a man look like a woman."
Making a dugout canoe is much easier than making a Falcon-9 rocket; does that mean that anyone who thinks that they are connecting to this forum via Starlink is delusional?
No, that was not my response. That was a tangent and not something critical to the main point of my post. I explained how in a world where wig-wearers (claim to) feel oppressed for wearing a wig (much the same as trans people (claim to) feel oppressed for being trans), social norms would be established to not tell obvious wig-wearers that they were obviously wearing a wig, and this would result in many obvious wigs.
Your response is also confusing, even if "making a wig look natural is much easier than making a man look like a woman" was somehow my only point. I pointed that out because the "toupee fallacy" argument seems to rely on the assumption that the only differences between men and women (for the purposes of recognizing gender) are hair style, makeup, dress, maybe even body hair. In reality, there are perhaps hundreds of subtle differences that people may not be able to explicitly make legible but still factor in to their assessment, and most of them are not within reasonable control of the trans-identifying person wishing to present as the opposite gender. Whereas the only difference between successfully passing wigs and obvious wigs are, well, just the wigs.
My argument was not "X is easier than Y, therefore not-Y" as you seem to be implying.
'Exponential' does not mean 'big change'; it means that, given equidistant a, b, and c, c / b = b / a, as opposed to a linear relation in which c - b = b - a; if you only have a and b, the difference between 'linear' and 'exponential' becomes meaningless. (Also, it's 'fewer', not 'less'.)
This seems extremely confusing. I don't understand whatever you're saying about my use of the word "exponential" or how it's relevant to my argument, so I'm just going to say that if you don't like me saying "exponentially less", I can say something like "a significant reduction in" instead, as long as it properly conveys the point that gender segregation would is clearly a superior policy when comparing how many incidents of sexual harassment there are with it vs. without it.
The 'proposal of abolishing gender segregation' was if I were designing society from the ground up.
So you concede that it's not going to happen, then? Most societal changes don't require a full rebuild of society to happen.
Going forward from the society we have now, acceptable options from my view would include any compromise in which passing trans individuals are not compelled to out themselves, less-than-passing trans individuals are not compelled to confirm any suspicions held by bystanders, and neither are required to affirm the anti-trans worldview, in order to participate in public life to the same degree as cis individuals.
What's the practical difference between this and abolishing gender segregation entirely? A "passing trans individual" doesn't exist. A less-than-passing trans-identifying man (i.e. all trans-identifying men) is likely to be confronted by a woman or a security guard as a result of his entering the women's room, and if he can't be compelled to confirm people's suspicions that he is a man, then... he just gets to go in the women's room anyway? Meaning that any man who calls himself a woman can legally waltz in to the women's room, since no one can do anything about it. Is this not just doing away with gender segregation?
If what you are trying to accomplish is a reduction in harassment, a policy of 'Do not harass others' is closer to your goal than a policy of 'Do not use the cross-gender facility', in much the same way as a policy of 'Do not commit murder' is closer to the goal of reducing murders than a policy of 'Do not possess any scary-looking device'.
Policies are not mutually exclusive. We can and should have both policies of "don't harass others" and "men are prohibited from using the women's room." At no point did I say we should have only the latter policy.
There is also an important disanalogy with weapon bans, in that disarming average, everyday citizens places them at a severe disadvantage from criminals, who will ignore the law and arm themselves anyway, preying on the unarmed. "Gun-free zones" are just zones full of future shooting victims. Meanwhile, if I as a man am prohibited from going into the women's room, that doesn't disadvantage me in the slightest.
No, I am not claiming that one is just like the other; I am claiming that the difference is a matter of degree.
In both cases, one has a justifiable purpose, and is tempted to take a shortcut that will make accomplishing that purpose easier at the cost of adverse effects on a small number of innocent people.
Exactly which adverse effects are there? If I as a man am not allowed in the women's room, where's the adverse effect? I'm perfectly fine with going into the men's room.
Meanwhile, in the other direction, if men are allowed to enter the women's room, there would be a tremendous amount of sexual harassment that would occur. Arguably, abolishing gender segregation is a shortcut to accomplishing the "justifiable purpose" of... making it so trans-identifying men can deny reality... at the cost of adverse effects on innocent women. Well, I suppose an important difference is that the number of innocent women affected would not be a small number.
I am attempting to apply the same standard to your side that you apply to mine.
A consistent 'silence = disavowal' standard would support your statement, but would undermine claims of relevance of the more extreme pro-trans voices.
A consistent 'silence = approval' standard would mean that you can blame the trans activists for their more insane allies, but you will then be blamed for the eliminationist attitudes on your side.
My standard is more nuanced than that. I explained how if someone appears to support the Kiwi Farms, they will be confronted with the mainstream narrative that we facilitate harassment, we're linked to 3 trans suicides, we swatted MTG, etc. Regardless of the fact that all these claims are false, the person will be asked to disavow this lest they be considered a supporter of harassment/suicide/swatting, and more often than not, they will indeed disavow harassment/suicide/swatting.
So it's not as simple as "silence = disavowal" or "silence = approval". It's "silence = unknown, ask for further clarification". Now I ask you again, and I want you to answer the question this time: Do you genuinely think that, if a trans activist was asked to disavow the cotton-ceiling activists, that they would do so?
And the dispute at hand is what gender certain people are; thus I am attempting to replace the symbol with the substance.
To echo @FtttG (replace sex with gender):
In what sense is the word "sex" disputed?
You're not replacing the symbol with the substance. You're replacing a common-sense word with a dysphemism that normal people find creepy and alienating. This is a tactic that trans activists have a strange predilection for ("pregnant people", "menstruator", "chestfeeding", "birthing parent"), under the guise of "accuracy" and "inclusion". And trans activists have the nerve to ask why people find them and the way they talk so off-putting.
And as for this:
To point to a category that includes Taylor Swift and Elliot Page, and excludes Breakfastnook Cowcatcher and Caitlyn Jenner, I can either refer to 'karyotype=XX' or 'parts at birth=ovaries'. The former runs into the issue that, sometimes, someone with one set of chromosomes will develop the organs usually produced by the other chromosomes; the hormones, and all other biological features, will follow, and the individual will not know that anything unusual has happened unless they have their DNA tested, which is not a universal procedure.
The former is an extremely rare issue and not a reasonable consideration for which word to use 99.9% of the time. If you need to disambiguate, you can just say natal women or even cis women, neither of which requires reference to genitals or gonads.
I wasn't the one who brought up hair colour. You asked, anti-quote, "So I can't take notice of other people's bodies at all, even things which are obvious like their hair color? Am I supposed to pretend to be blind and not know what color someone's hair is?". I was merely applying my principles to your example.
I brought up hair color as an example of an obvious trait to notice, as obvious as gender. I was not bringing it up as an example of a trait that's easy to change (which gender is not), or for any other purpose.
No, it is a caution against asserting that "My claim is different from that one because it just is!" while ignoring that, from outside, they look veeeery similar.
Why does it matter what they look like from the outside? If you want to discuss the validity of a claim, I'm happy to elaborate and make arguments for it. If you want me to elaborate, then say so. But what it looks like from the outside is not really relevant.
Again, if I have to care about what my claims look like from the outside, then I can't assert that the Earth goes around the Sun because from the outside, that claim looks very similar to the claim that the Sun goes around the Earth.
Then why do so many cis-women get accused of being men in disguise?
Dani Davis, Lake City, Florida, 2025.
Jay Rose, Las Vegas, 2023.
Aimee Toms, Danbury, Connecticut, 2016.
Jasmine Adams, Staten Island, New York, 2023. (Not even in a women-only space!)
Kalaya Morton, Tucson, Arizona, 2025.
I was referring specifically to enforcing gender segregation by someone who asked everyone who entered, even obvious women, whether they had a penis. That just never happens, but you asserted that "usually happens", hence why I asked. Even in your examples, people only asked "are you a man or woman", nothing about genitals. So again, since enforcing gender segregation does not require asking about genitals, I would not characterize it as "prying into other people's bodies".
But since you brought up several instances of women accused of being men, I will address those too. I think there's an important confounder here with any cases like these, and this can be seen most clearly in the Staten Island case. It's obvious to me that the shopkeeper had a short temper, or was looking for an excuse to assault the woman. That he called her a "transvestite" doesn't mean that he assaulted her solely on the basis that he thought she was a man. (It doesn't even mean he thought she was a man, he was probably just insulting her looks, but that's tangential to my main point.)
My point being, there's always going to be people who start confrontations and incidents, because they had a mistaken belief, or even because they had a bad day and were looking for an excuse to take their anger out on someone. The fundamental attribution error applies here: I wouldn't attribute these incidents to anti-trans sentiment, any more than I would attribute a guy angrily pounding on a vending machine to him being the sort of guy who's just angry as opposed to external circumstances I don't have knowledge of.
I don't believe that abolishing gender segregation would have prevented these incidents, because the instigators were just looking for something to be mad about and would have found a different reason without gender segregation. However, abolishing gender segregation is sure to create a significant amount of sexual harassment, particularly from men directed toward women.
As for your claim that "so many cis-women get accused of being men", well, the number of cases here falls within lizardman's constant. I don't think there's an epidemic of women being falsely identified as men, that we have to abandon the use of our eyes lest we misidentify a woman as a man. I think that 99.9% of the time, women are accurately identified as women. In particular, I think the number of such incidents pales in comparison to the number of incidents of sexual harassment that would happen were gender segregation to be abolished.
If Alice is a trans-woman who looks more feminine than 20% of cis-women, the only reason that 'Alice was born with XY chromosomes and everything downstream thereof' isn't considered 'private medical history' is to support the house of cards that is our narrow concept of gender roles, some of which are younger than some members of the U. S. Congress.
I sincerely doubt that there is a "trans woman" who looks more feminine than 20% of women. And why exactly should gender be considered private medical history when... people can just look at someone and see? It's just like hair color. (No, I am not saying that we should segregate based on hair color, or that it's easy to change gender like it is to change hair color, or anything else besides that hair color, like gender, is obvious.)
And, gender roles? Exactly who is pushing gender roles, and what exactly are those gender roles? Because I would say narrow gender roles are being enforced when someone sees a boy playing with dolls and declares him to be a girl, and trans activists are far more likely to do exactly that than gender-critical people are.
That 'right' ought to have gone out the window in the 2010s when a supermarket floated the idea of using Big Data (the predecessor of AI) to identify which customers were on a fixed budget and make their experience deliberately unpleasant so as to drive them away and focus on people to whom they could upsell.
I don't understand what this has to do with the right to refuse service. And even if it's true and even if it's morally justifiable in some "you wronged me, now I can wrong you" sense, it's not like literally every private business in the world participated in feeding their customers to Big Data in this way. There are many private businesses who have done no wrong, who should keep their right to refuse service to anyone.
Markass
Not the worst
1mo ago
A huge confounder is that, as many others in the thread have pointed out, a kid who doesn't have a smartphone is going to be socially othered and considered an outcast. Not just metaphorically but also literally since most of their peers are going to be communicating through smartphones. Again, it's a coordination problem.
Markass
Not the worst
1mo ago
I will concede that freedoms in the private sector are lacking, especially due to the "it's a private company, they can do whatever they want" argument. Youtube deplatforms a creator for publishing wrongthink? They're a private platform, they can do whatever they want. Twitter does the same? They're a private platform. Patreon drops them? Private platform. However in this regard, the First Amendment (and in particular Section 230) is vital to the platforms that do choose to host free speech, such as the Kiwi Farms.
Markass
Not the worst
1mo ago
If the answer to that question is "Anything disapproved of by the Community." then you have the obvious failure mode that, many times, the community is wrong; e. g., inter-racial marriage in pre-1967 Virginia.
Ok, so then this goes straight back to my pedophilia example. If I can't even condemn pedophilia because it's "disapproved of by the Community" and the community can sometimes be wrong, then, what, are we supposed to play cultural relativism and pretend that every standard across every society in all of history is just as valid as any other? (After all, the ancient Greeks really loved pederasty.) I don't accept that.
Again, that doesn't protect against issues with same-gender dyads, which can still have substantial disparities in strength.
So it isn't possible for someone to be inappropriate towards someone of the same gender?
It is rarer for men to harass other men, or women to harass other women, but it does happen, and one needs to have a policy in place for that contingency; once one does so, one can apply the same responses to cross-gender harassment.
This is an extremely naive view to take. No, it's not true that you can just apply same-gender policies to cross-gender harassment. There's a reason I said that it's exponentially harder for a woman to remove an unwanted man from her space. A woman is unlikely to want to confront a man; she likely fears his almost-certainly superior strength, and especially the possibility of being raped and impregnated. It's much easier for a woman to tell off another woman if the latter is being creepy or weird than for a woman to tell off a man.
And the trans men don't?
Well if your only exposure to trans-identifying women is through online pictures, then sure, they do pass more easily than trans-identifying men. If you actually look at them in real life, though, not so much.
Age isn't typically considered a 'body' matter.
It's not? But is it not information one would want to keep at least somewhat private? I wouldn't like it if a stranger came up to me and asked verbatim "How old are you?"
My other point with providing ID to enter a bar is that your ID also almost certainly has a bunch of other private information about your body on it too, such as weight. (Ask the fat activists if they like sharing their weight with strangers.) So I ask again, how far are you taking this principle of privacy? Is it far enough that you would abolish requiring patrons to provide their ID before entering a bar?
You can't always tell, any more than you can always tell when someone is wearing a wig.
There are plenty of trans people whom you don't know are trans, and there are cis people who have been mistaken for trans.
It's a lot more than 0.001%; again see previous re toupees.
The trans women whom you know to be trans.
I disagree, see my response to the toupee fallacy.
This seems analogous to the man who dropped his keys in the bushes and is searching for them under the streetlight because it is easier to see. You have made it easier to tell if someone is violating policy, at the cost of the policy being further away from what you are trying to accomplish.
Really? The policy is further away from what I'm trying to accomplish? How so? Because compared to your proposal of abolishing gender segregation, the policy would result in exponentially less incidents of sexual harassment.
And it's also much trickier to deal with murderers when you can't beat up the most likely suspect until he confesses that his entire family are rabbits, but sometimes we must choose between what is right and what is easy.
Are you seriously claiming that gender segregation is just like administering extrajudicial violence to a suspect before even convicting him at trial? If you are going to seriously claim this, you need to elaborate on a very convincing argument for how the two are even remotely similar in any way (besides claiming that both situations violate someone's civil rights).
And most trans activists avoid mentioning the cotton-ceiling crowd.
I wrote two entire paragraphs about gender-critical people and the Kiwi Farms. There's much more to it than just "gender-critical people avoid mentioning the Kiwi Farms, so they disavow us." Silence doesn't mean disavowal, it usually just means lack of knowledge. I elaborated on how if someone appears to support the Kiwi Farms by mentioning us in anything less than a negative light, there will almost inevitably be a crowd that forms to call for them to disavow us or else they get canceled, and a majority of those people do end up disavowing us in some way as a result. Now run that experiment again but with trans activists and cotton-ceiling activists. Do you genuinely think the results would be the same, and a trans activist pressed on this matter would disavow cotton-ceiling activists?
I'm just saying that we've been down this road before, and Noticing a distinct lack of 'gender-critical people' responding to certain alarmingly-familiar rhetoric with unequivocal statements that, while they would prefer to have women's spaces that do not allow natal-anatomy!men, it is not worth the risk of trans people being sent to death camps.
You seem to have switched standards. Literally in the preceding paragraph, you said "most trans activists avoid mentioning the cotton-ceiling crowd", implying that silence is disavowal. Now here, you notice silence from gender-critical people, and interpret that as... endorsement of sending trans people to death camps?
Please pick a consistent standard by which people should disavow the more extremist parts of their faction.
'Other people's bodies in general', in that instance, was referring to your claim that "Ok. I don't care about genitals. I care about sex.", and referring to whatever biological characteristics are downstream of hormone levels, which in the absence of artificial administration are produced in the genitals, specifically in the gonads.
I'm confused why you seem to keep tracing things back to genitals and gonads. I don't care about people's anatomy, I care about what gender they are. I don't need to think about genitals in order to look at someone and recognize what their gender is.
Telling Alice that, because she was born with blonde hair, she will never be anything other than a blonde, and excluding her from a brunettes-only space: ❌
Do you genuinely, honestly think that switching genders is as easy as switching hair color?
One, you are begging the question.
I'm... not? I am just summarizing my position. If you want me to elaborate on how there are vastly more differences between men and women than blacks and whites, then I can, but you should say so.
Two, there were many in the middle of the past century who asserted otherwise, with every bit as much confidence as you.
This is a fully general counterargument against asserting any claim with any confidence, ever. I can't even assert that the Earth goes around the Sun when there were many people in the 17th century who just as confidently asserted that the Sun goes around the Earth. Or that the Earth is round when there are so many people confident that the Earth is flat. Or that we landed on the moon when there are so many people confident that we didn't. Or that Lee Harvey Oswald alone shot and killed JFK when many people confidently assert otherwise. Or...
...other than the part about a trans woman, in using the men's room, having to announce her biological characteristics to everyone in the area, including some who consider her existence to be a personal affront.
A "trans woman" is already announcing his biological characteristics to everyone in the area by simply existing, because everyone can tell he is a man just by looking at him. Unless there's a blind person, in which case they can tell he is a man when he speaks.
You seem to be assuming that all trans-identifying men live in a world where their trans status is completely invisible to everyone around, until they're forced to go to the bathroom. Not so. They're already "outed" as men, they just don't realize it because people are too polite. For how much trans activists fearmonger that there are people out there who want them killed or in death camps, there's a remarkably stunning lack of dead trans people. Trans people are, statistically, one of the safest demographics in America.
That's usually how it ends up.
Please point me to literally any case where this has happened. Actually, point to at least three, since you said "usually". I've never seen it happen.
My point is that you are not entitled to information about other people's private medical history, beyond or to a greater reliability than you can gain by observing, even if knowing it would give you an advantage.
Ok. I think this is a noble principle, and it is also a quite banal one that I don't think anyone would disagree with. But it's also just kind of not really relevant here. None of my arguments require knowledge of private medical history.
'He is schizophrenic' is not a good enough reason by itself. Past or current anti-social conduct resulting from schizophrenia can be.
So this would mean I as a private business wouldn't have the ability to restrict anyone based on potential harm. That we don't have the right to refuse service to anyone (modulo CRA/ADA). Which seems like a pretty radical proposal for how society should work.
That doesn't mean it's not real rape, it's still rape. We have statutory rape laws to cut the Gordian Knot and head off arguments about whether a raped child really consented, because they almost never do but can be tricked into saying they did out of fear, trauma bonding, or both. We hold adults to a higher standard in adult-minor interactions because they are the older party and are more mature, have more strength, and have more accountability, so it's going to be hard to make the case that an adult truly did nothing wrong by having sex with a minor. If you want to convince me otherwise, then you should cite cases where completely innocent people have been imprisoned under age of consent laws, which I notice you have yet to do.
That doesn't mean any 20 year old can just hit on a 14 year old and have sex with them with no repercussions. The 20 year old would still face negative social consequences for doing this since 20 is viewed as a mature adult and 14 is not. Sure, there probably wouldn't be any legal consequences if 14 is the age of consent, but it's still not a good idea. A society is more than just the laws on the books, it's also the culture and social norms surrounding it. Hence why I'm not very convinced by the typical cultural relativism-esque arguments pointing to the different legal ages of consent in jurisdictions around the world.
The "problem" I was talking about (and argued was not an actual problem) was the one you said was a problem, where you argued that age of consent laws result in an "extremely unnaturally restricted pool of available mates". Your response here confuses me. Are we talking about the same thing? It's not a felony to have a restricted dating pool.
Whose liberties are being abridged here, exactly? For people to have liberties in the realm of sex, it has to all be consensual. Therefore, no one is entitled to sex, because "no" is always a possible answer to consent. If you want to fuck, but the answer is "no", it's not your liberty that's being abridged, but rather it is the liberty of the nonconsenting party that is being protected. So you can't just fuck whoever you want. You especially shouldn't be able to fuck people who don't understand what's going on, who may feel coerced or fearful or as if there is no other choice, or who are otherwise unfairly disadvantaged, such as developmentally disabled adults... or, you know, children.
I'll spell it out explicitly. If you're prevented from fucking children, we don't consider that abridging your liberty, any more than we would characterize preventing you from punching a stranger (without good cause) as abridging your liberty either. In fact, if you're allowed to fuck children (or punch a stranger for a bad reason), it's the other party's liberties that are being abridged, namely, by you.
How does that help your argument? If a 20 year old is more attractive doesn't that give them an easier ability to manipulate a 14 year old?
He's... still grooming her? I don't approve of child-adult marriages either.
Why not? I think it's valid to point out the sampling bias. If you only looked at university students, then you're not looking at the CSA victims too traumatized to go to college. There are also the other contradicting studies and the failure to replicate which you didn't mention.
As I said earlier, studies are not a slam-dunk argument. Especially when you cite only one study, especially when that study is hugely controversial (because ideally studies should at least have consensus from the scientific community at large) and has multiple criticisms, contradicting studies, and fails to replicate. I don't think you need studies to prove that harm exists. I think you only need to look at what the victims have testified to to know that they have been harmed.
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