Markass
Not the worst
User ID: 3843
Markass
Not the worst
7d 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
8d 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
8d 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.
Markass
Not the worst
8d ago
I think you can agree that people overshare on the Internet while also being against the mass surveillance necessary to ensure the number of minors on the Internet is zero.
Markass
Not the worst
8d ago
Yes, it is a difficult problem and I'm not sure if there's a solution to it. I just know that age verification won't do anything. To me, it's a coordination problem, because one household deciding to clamp down on technology use isn't going to move the needle for a whole country and everyone else is going to treat them like the Amish, so there's no good incentive for the first few hundred (maybe even few thousand) people to start increasing control over their kids that way. In an ideal society, we wouldn't have a culture of handing kids Internet-connected devices and not monitoring them one bit, but that's exactly what we do.
I still remember the early days of the Internet, when everyone was advised not to share any personal information with strangers online. Now, a lot of people and especially the younger generation do just that, and get into exactly the trouble one would expect from doing so. And now we're being told we need to share even more personal information to save the younger generation from themselves. It's all so tiresome.
Markass
Not the worst
8d ago
The Internet and the courts: One step forward, one step back
Two recent US decisions just happened related to the Internet, one I think is good and the other, not so much.
First up, we have Cox v. Sony, decided by SCOTUS. Sony sued Cox (an ISP) for alleged contributory copyright infringement merely for providing Internet services to people who infringed their copyrights. The jury found in favor of Sony, and ruled that Cox had in fact contributed to copyright infringement just by providing Internet access. If not overturned, this would have been a troubling precedent to set since the liability for copyright infringement would have expanded massively, forcing ISPs to clamp down even more on their users, potentially leading to (even more) mass surveillance.
Thankfully, SCOTUS reversed the lower courts and found in favor of Cox, ruling that a service provider is only liable for contributory copyright infringement if the service induced or was specifically tailored for such infringement. Since Cox did not do either in any way, it is not liable.
Second, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Youtube liable for the plaintiff's social media addiction that developed during her childhood. Her lawyers said that design features like infinite feeds, autoplay, and notifications were a substantial factor in causing her harm, while the defendants pointed to her turbulent home life and that none of her therapists identified social media as the cause of her mental health. And I also would sooner find her parents more responsible for letting her be on screens all day than the social media platforms themselves.
Regardless, a decision like this one is sure to accelerate the trend of requiring "age verification" (doxing yourself) to use anything on the Internet. The laws and courts are increasingly taking the position that the optimal number of minors on the Internet is zero. After all, everyone keeps getting sued for having underage users, but no one's getting sued for the inevitable data breaches that will happen when there's databases of people's dox floating around. If you don't want to lose tons of money in lawsuits, forcing people to dox themselves seems like the safer bet.
California has introduced age verification for all operating systems, and yes, this includes all Linux distributions, and yes, some of them are actually going to implement it. Brazil has also passed an age verification law. Apple has already implemented age verification, at least in the UK. I'm not aware of a jurisdiction that has taken a clear and unambiguous stance that doxing yourself to use the Internet is a horribly massive invasion of privacy, only jurisdictions that haven't taken a pro-doxing stance yet. Sure, some age verification laws, like Louisiana's, will get struck down for being unconstitutional, but like gun control laws, these cases will take months to work their way through the courts, and they will probably slightly tweak their laws to be juuuust different enough that any cases challenging it will have to start from scratch every single time.
It used to be that society expected parents to watch their children and monitor their Internet usage. But by and large, parents seem to have abdicated that responsibility, and as a consequence, the responsibility has shifted to the government, who have shifted it to Internet platforms, who have now shifted it to the entire rest of society, diminishing everyone's freedom in the name of protecting children. I think the biggest and cruelest irony is that, like gun control, none of this effort will do anything to actually protect children.
Markass
Not the worst
9d ago
Markass
Not the worst
10d ago
This may be the case, however it is not specific to common vs roman law. You have common law countries like UK or Australia which are significantly easier to misuse. For instance in case of defamation the US has apparently strict standard of proof of malice where burden of proof is on plaintiff. In Australia the burden of proof is on defendant who must prove that what he said was true and they are much more tyrannical when it comes to government officials successfully suing private citizens despite having common law and jury system.
My point is that both systems have pros and cons and they are much more complex. There is not single "EU law" as there is not single common law - see the difference between US or Australia. As people say, shit is complicated.
You seem to be misunderstanding what I am comparing. I am not comparing common law and Roman law. I am comparing America to the rest of the world. Freedom of speech is uniquely an American right that citizens in other countries don't really have.
I'm not even saying America is better in every single way. I'm just saying that America is better when it comes to being able to criticize whatever, whoever, and whenever you want, especially when that criticism is directed towards the government, and especially when the government has unambiguously wronged you. I'm saying free speech is one thing that America (and only America) got right, and this case is a good example of why.
Okay, so US federal government probably employs some CIA precrime unit akin to Minority Report if only one out of 200 prosecuted people is actually innocent. Amazing investigative competence. And now some other bedtime story.
Do you have any actual reasons to doubt the statistics, or is this just vague non-specific irrefutable hand-wavey skepticism?
Markass
Not the worst
11d ago
The whole time you're scared of a car side swipping you because there's giant machines going 40 mph zooming past your frail human body.
It's unlikely for a driver to do that unless they are malicious, drunk, or distracted. The actual danger is at intersections, which separated bike lanes do nothing to protect.
Markass
Not the worst
11d ago
I will say it's more reassuring to see a cryonics company with actual experimental results, even images they can show you, than the existing state-of-the-art that seems to function mostly on prayer and hope their procedures will work.
Markass
Not the worst
11d ago
What do you actually know about countries based around roman law legal system? I have attorneys in my family and they routinely sue government for this or that overreach or damages or bad tax ruling etc.
I know that in most of them, you would easily lose any case that anyone (and especially the government) brings against you for your speech. I never claimed that you couldn't sue the government in other countries. I just said that in most of them, you wouldn't be able to win if they sued you (or charged you) for speech.
It can also be very important the other way such as with O.J. Simpson and many other cases.
The prosecution fucked up in the O.J. Simpson case. I wouldn't expect any jury to return a guilty verdict with how shoddy the police work was.
Again, judges have quite different powers also in other countries.
How many judges have less powers in other countries?
Plus there is plenty that corrupt judge can do - for instance he could have used JNOV and to overturn jury. Which can in fact be then used as a defense from corrupt or biased jury - e.g. such as when jury full of some tribe makes mockery of justice.
JNOV is a bit limited; in a criminal trial it can only be used to overturn a guilty verdict, and even then the prosecution can appeal it. Now this was a civil case, so JNOV can be used in favor of both parties, but it's such an extraordinarily rare step that it would be scrutinized and almost certainly appealed. I also find it less likely for a jury to be corrupt or biased than a judge.
But despite that, staggering 99.6% of federal criminal cases end up in conviction, mostly because 97% of people rather plead guilty. In true Kafkaesque manner, the process is the punishment. Once people see what their tyrannical government prepared for them, they rather plead guilty even if innocent. So much freedom.
Or it's because most of those people have a really bad case and the plea deal is genuinely better than going to trial? Surely you don't think that even a significant portion of people charged with federal cases are innocent. I'm not saying innocent people can't be charged or plead guilty, or that it isn't a problem worth worrying about, but you seem to be exaggerating the scale to which it happens.
Markass
Not the worst
11d ago
My evidence is that I have watched the bloody news for the past quarter-century!
Ok. Point to at least three news stories that would back up your claim.
Markass
Not the worst
12d ago
No, but your having made that style of argument first does put you on thinner ground when you claim that your opponent, in making that argument, is behaving inappropriately.
Why? Is there some sort of limited resource of charity, and me making that argument first means I have taken from the resource of charity, leaving my opponents less charity to spare, or something? Or does me making the argument mean it's okay for that argument to be applied to everything, including my argument? Why does it matter who said what first?
I don't accept that just because gender-critical people first said trans people are sexually deviant, that it's appropriate for trans people to levy the same accusation back at them. You can't just apply the same argument to everything or to itself. If I accepted this, I wouldn't be able to call pedophiles sexually deviant.
A: I'm attracted to kids.
B: That's disgusting and sexually deviant.
A: No u! You're the deviant one here because you're actually thinking of fucking kids when you accuse me!
If I were designing society from the ground up, there would not be gender-segregated spaces. A man preferring not to expose himself to women and a woman preferring not to expose herself to men would be accommodated by the same means as a man preferring not to expose himself to other men and a woman preferring not to expose herself to other women.
There's more to it than just a woman wanting to not to expose herself to men. Even if there were enough private changing rooms for everyone, there are still safety concerns with allowing men in women's locker rooms just feet away from where women are changing. The safest and most practical way to alleviate those safety concerns is to have gender-segregated spaces.
Saying "You think P. In reality, ¬P." does not prove ¬P.
I don't think you've proven P. On what basis can "trans women" be said to be women when they share 99.9% of their traits with men?
Which of these do you think would raise more eyebrows using the ladies' room?
The "trans women", because they look like men.
Which is still too many people to know personally (last time I checked, the upper bound was estimated at approximately 150.)
It's impractical to know everyone personally enough such that one feels comfortable using a locker room, and it's not necessary to do so when the locker room is gender-segregated.
That is why I do not condone requiring people to publicly declare or confirm private information about their bodies in order to use public facilities.
So are you against showing your ID to enter establishments that serve alcohol, then? That's confirming private information about your body (your age) in order to use a public facility.
Also, in what sense can gender be considered "private" when people can tell just by looking at you? That's like declaring hair color to be private. Age has a better claim to being private, since I've never seen anyone who was able to reliably and accurately tell exactly how old a stranger is without pre-existing knowledge, merely give estimates and ranges.
And this would still apply even if everyone involved is the same sex/gender by every possible definition.
There's a difference between having rules and enforcing them. With gender segregation, there is a strong, bright line against a man entering the women's locker room. If he does so, it's immediately obvious to everyone that he's violated the rules and should be forced out if he doesn't realize his mistake and walk out immediately. Meanwhile, if we can't enforce gender segregation, it's much trickier to deal with rules violators. They can always claim plausible deniability that they're not actually taking photos or watching people, and if the offender is a man it's exponentially harder for a woman to confront him to remove him from the space.
I don't think you can.
Just because there are 0.001% of cases where this isn't true, that must mean I can't tell the difference between women and trans-identifying men?
I can tell the difference between a door and a fake door, but there was one time I was in a deceitful maze and tried to open a door only to find it was fake. That means I must simply be unable to tell the difference between doors and fake doors.
And has Ms 'I want a locker room without people born with male bodies, and am willing to settle for 20% of the total' disavowed and shamed Mr 'round up all the [anti-trans epithet redacted] and dispose of them'?
Yes? The Kiwi Farms is a good example of a mass of anti-trans people that (unfortunately) has very few allies, even with gender-critical people. To the point that many people avoid mentioning the farms at all, and if they must, they always say "this is a place that gathers lots of good information on the crimes of trans people BUT I don't condone doxing or harassment or swatting or deadnaming or misgendering or slurs or..." I remember Ovarit (a gender-critical site) allowed discussion of the farms, but not linking to it on account of all the dox we had.
There are some rare exceptions, but my impression is that the farms' reputation is sufficiently toxic that anyone with even minor notoriety getting sufficient pushback for appearing to support the farms (and by proxy, any alleged harassment/swatting) is going to take the easy path and disavow any of that stuff, even if it means disavowing us.
(That famous picture of the Nazis burning books of which they disapproved? Those included the library of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, which had promoted the rights of LGBTQI+ individuals during the 1920s.)
Are you saying that gender-critical people are aligning themselves with neo-Nazis?
Note the bolded part.
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?
"Which things, exactly, are black people not allowed to do? They can still use the bus, they just have to sit in the part that corresponds with their race (which is the same thing a white person has to do)."
Didn't fly then, won't fly now.
These situations are not analogous. There are more differences between men and women than there are differences between white and black people. Moreover, the nature of male/female differences justify gender segregation, while white/black differences do not justify racial segregation.
I also note that black-designated facilities were almost universally in poorer condition than white ones, while there's no reason to think that men's facilities are any worse than women's facilities (or at least worse to the same degree as blacks' were to whites').
I think it is more appropriate to levy an accusation of sexual deviance at a cis-woman who pursues her desire not to undress in front of natal-biology!men not by petitioning for one-person curtained changing booths but by prying into other people's bodies
This is quite a lot of tortured logic to characterize keeping men out of women's locker rooms as "prying into other people's bodies". There seems to be an assumption here that "trans women" look and act just like a woman in every other regard besides having a penis, which is simply not true. "Trans women" overwhelmingly look and act like men. And from this assumption that "trans women" pass, you seem to be imagining a Karen who sits at the door of every locker room, asking everyone who enters if they have a penis. That is simply not how gender segregation is enforced. How it's actually enforced is that men will read the sign that says "men" and go into the men's room, and women will read the sign that says "women" and go into the women's room, and should there be any man who (by mistake or otherwise) enters the women's room, the women inside will recognize him as a man, and then notify him and/or other people that he is in their space and will do whatever it takes to get him out of said space if he doesn't leave by himself. None of this enforcement requires "prying into other people's bodies" and I'm struggling to think of how it could be described that way. Unless, of course, merely looking at someone and noticing things like their hair color is enough to be considered prying into their body.
than at a trans-woman who wants to change clothes without declaring to everyone in line-of-sight that she was born with male parts.
I don't see many trans activists petitioning for one-person curtained changing booths. They overwhelmingly advocate for trans-identifying men to be able to enter women's spaces.
Also, this is a moot point when "she" looks like a man, thus already declaring to everyone in line-of-sight that "she" was born with male parts.
It is a reductio ad absurdum, also known as 'high-energy ethics'.
Ok. I'm legitimately confused as to what your point here is then. Obviously, it's not acceptable for someone to go up to a complete stranger and ask verbatim "what's in your pants?"
"And people in hell want ice water."
It's easier for people to tell what sex someone is than for people in hell to get ice water. They can tell just by, you know, looking at them.
That is why I said 'unless you have a very, very, very, very good reason'. It helps to read the entire sentence.
You wrote down four "very"s in a row. I assumed that meant the reason had to be extremely rare or held to a very high bar. I thought that "I think he's schizophrenic" would be a good reason, but I wouldn't consider it a "very, very, very, very good reason" because it's an educated guess and I could be totally wrong about it.
I'm really trying to imagine myself in this hypothetical. If I really was a bouncer, I would normally just reject anyone even slightly fishy, on account of the fact that a private business reserves the right to refuse service to anyone (modulo the Civil Rights Act and ADA). But if you told me that I wasn't permitted to forbid people based on educated guesses about their medical history, and I wasn't even allowed to know if my guesses were correct, I would definitely be a lot more cautious about who I reject, including the schizo homeless man.
P(anti-social behaviour|schizophrenic and ranting about alleged Jewish conspiracies) >> P(anti-social behaviour|biologically male).
So it's a matter of degree, and not of kind, then? As Churchill said, now we're just haggling over the price.
And to be clear, unless the club was women's-only or something, I as the bouncer would never reject entry solely based on someone being male. It's a totally different set of rules and expectations when it comes to enforcing gender segregation and ensuring only women are allowed in the women's locker room. That's to say, I don't fully accept even you comparing the two probabilities this way as if that's the only difference between my bouncer hypothetical and gender segregation.
It is reasonable to not let him in solely because of the anti-Semitic ranting, even if he isn't schizophrenic, and has documentation from a dozen psychiatrists attesting to this.
Ok, forget the anti-Semitic ranting then. I only included that to establish that he was schizophrenic, since many schizophrenics do tend to veer into expressing bigoted sentiments despite not actually holding such sentiments deep in their hearts (such as Kanye West).
Markass
Not the worst
12d ago
they are being forbidden from things that are forbidden to everyone else.
So what are trans people forbidden from doing that everyone else is allowed to do?
To me, 'it harms people' is a necessary qualification for membership in that category.
That would exclude a lot of sexual behaviors clearly outside the norm, such as foot fetishists.
I don't think it's a fruitful exercise to come up with a definition that works for all societies across all of time, or to play cultural relativism and pretend that because societies disagreed on a definition that it must mean nothing (or everything) can fall under the definition. I can play the same game for a term like "rape" too. "Is 'rape' whatever is frowned upon by the local curtain-twitchers? If so, marital rape wouldn't be considered rape in the 1950s."
If it is 'they insist that society apply the same rules to trans-woman as cis-women, the same way the Civil Rights marches insisted that black people be allowed everything white people were allowed, and wouldn't/won't let the majority have a little discrimination as a treat', then I do not believe that it is reasonable to expect them to accommodate, just as, if Alice wants Bob to stop bullying her, and Bob wants to continue bullying Alice, Miss Take is completely out of line if she expects Alice to compromise.
The entire crux is whether or not "trans women" are women, or if they are men. If they are men, then it's not discriminatory to treat them like men, like it would be if white people and black people were treated as different people.
Markass
Not the worst
13d ago
I am not equating the sides in sexual deviance, so much as pointing out that accusations of sexual deviance were not first levied by the pro-trans faction.
Ok and...? My opponent making the same style of argument as I am does not make my opponent correct or refute my argument.
I believe that a cis-woman uncomfortable changing in front of a trans-woman deserves the same accommodations as a white woman uncomfortable changing in front of a black woman, or an Englishman uncomfortable changing in front of an Irishman;
I notice that your examples have the sexes match, implying that it's acceptable to accommodate women who don't want to change in front of men. So you think that it's okay to have sex-segregated spaces. Then the entire question boils down to whether "trans women" are women. You seem to think that "trans women" are just women who happen to not be born a woman, like a woman who has dyed her hair color. In reality, "trans women" are men.
(or an 'officially people born with female parts only facility', but I doubt trans-men will be welcomed)
Why do you doubt trans-identifying women wouldn't be allowed in a women's facility?
Is it still an 'intimate space' if four billion strangers are potentially allowed to walk in willy-nilly?
First off, the number of strangers is going to be limited by geographic area. Over the course of a year, I would estimate the number of strangers for a particular locker room to be orders of magnitude lower, maybe in the range of thousands. Second off, yes, it's still an intimate space. It's a space with the social norm of respecting other people's privacy. In particular, most of them prohibit photo-taking and video-recording, and if one were to just loiter and not do their business of changing but just sat there and watched, they would arouse suspicion from others.
Plenty of cis-women look just as ridiculous.
But you can still tell that they're women, and not trans-identifying men.
Yes, there are trans people who are perverts, just as there are cardiologists who are murderers and Chinese people who are robbers. That does not make all trans individuals perverts.
I'm sure there's some trans people who aren't perverts, but they aren't doing anything to reduce that impression when they don't disavow and shame the "cotton ceiling" activists. I don't see Chinese robbers holding conferences on how good it is to rob places and then getting zero pushback from other Chinese people.
It is not necessarily born of sexual deviance, but that does not change the fact that those parts, and other people's bodies in general, are none of your business. If Alice wants to know the precise dimensions of my private parts out of carnal desire, Bob wants to know for statistical purposes, and Carol wants to know because she thinks she can predict the future by the bodily measurements of a randomly selected person, I am equally entitled to tell all of them to bog off.
Ok. I don't care about genitals. I care about sex. Luckily, it doesn't matter what kind of privacy an individual thinks they have as to their sex, when 99.9% of the time I can tell someone's sex just by looking at them.
No, they want to be allowed to do the same things as cis individuals are allowed to do.
Which things, exactly, are trans people not allowed to do? They can still use changing areas, they just have to use the one that corresponds with their birth sex (which is the same thing a non-trans person has to do).
No, we don't. I legitimately disagree with you.
You seriously think it's just as appropriate (if not more so) to levy an accusation of sexual deviance to females who don't want to undress in front of men, than the men who want females to undress in front of them?
In the hypothetical, I am referring to someone who wants to know things other than 'was this person born with male- or female- associated biology'.
Is this hypothetical person an actual problem that needs to be addressed? Because I'm struggling to think of anyone who would fit the description. Most people just want to know what sex someone was born as.
You can make educated guesses about someone's medical history by observation, but you are not entitled to know whether your guesses are correct; nor are you justified in declaring what is permitted to one to be forbidden to another based on it, unless you have a very, very, very, very good reason, well beyond the correlations associated with biological sex characteristics.
By this extremely high standard, if I'm a bouncer and I see a man stumbling around, yelling something about "the Jews in the clouds" and he wants to gain entry into my club, I can't declare him forbidden from my club based on an educated guess about his medical history (that he is possibly schizophrenic and mentally ill). Do you think that policy makes sense?
Maybe I'm terminally Quaker-brained, but I don't think it's generally right for what someone is and isn't allowed to do to vary based on accidents of birth.
So do you think sex-segregated spaces shouldn't exist at all then? If we follow (your conception of) Quaker-brain to its logical conclusion, determining what you're allowed and not allowed to do based off of a coin flip at birth doesn't seem generally right.
Markass
Not the worst
13d ago
I take that as seriously as I take his song about "Licc'em Low Lisa". That is to say, it reads like a joke to me. When I was young, I used to think inserting three K's randomly into words was the height of comedy. That doesn't mean I was seriously pushing a race-based narrative.
Markass
Not the worst
13d ago
He was verging on the border of giving free legal counsel to the plaintiffs and didn't even thank the jury when they reached a verdict that he clearly was not expecting or wanting.
Markass
Not the worst
14d ago
isn't it safe to assume that the guy who made "because I got high" was probably in posession of narcotics?
To assume that he smokes weed? Of course, though it's legal in Ohio. To assume that he smuggled drugs? That requires more evidence. Unfortunately, there hasn't been much of an investigation into why the Adams County Sheriff's Office so erroneously believed that he smuggled drugs or kidnapped people. The warrant even said he has a basement dungeon (the house doesn't have a basement at all).
Markass
Not the worst
14d ago
Not that it makes it any better, but it seems like his house was raided during daylight hours. And other countries still do house raids.
I think the problem here was a judge rubber-stamping the warrant and not scrutinizing the evidence closely. (Some news sources have said it was an informant. Who was this informant, exactly, and how did they find out that Afroman allegedly trafficked narcotics and kidnapping victims?) However, to my knowledge, other countries don't have rules for investigating when the justice system harms the people in a case like this, and e.g. cleaning house on judges who rubber-stamp warrants.
Markass
Not the worst
14d ago
The intersection between a fruitless and perhaps poorly considered search and alleged lesbianism and tendency towards cunnulingus is not apparent to me.
Afroman is not seriously alleging that "Licc'em Low Lisa" does, in fact, licc 'em low. He is making a joke. This is the same guy who sings comedic songs about smoking weed.
Markass
Not the worst
14d ago
The best way to win as a black man against white cops:
Don't make it about race.
Also, being in the legal and moral right certainly helps.
This is the story of Afroman, a rapper most known for the hit single "Because I Got High". Then his house was raided by the sheriff's office of Adams County, Ohio, based off of... almost nothing, as far as I can tell.
They damaged his door, gate, and security cameras. They were looking for narcotics smuggling and kidnapping victims, but instead found a few blunts and unused pipes, and filed no charges. The repairs cost $20k, not a single cent of which was paid by the officers, who also kept $400 of his cash.
So Afroman did what anyone would do if the cops came and unjustifiably kicked down his door and paid nothing for it: He made songs making fun of the raid, complete with his own security camera footage of the cops. This led to the production of such classics like "Will You Help Me Repair My Door", "Why You Disconnecting My Video Camera", and "Lemon Pound Cake" (about the officer who was eyeing a rather delectable slice of lemon pound cake sitting on his countertop). And in a sane world, this would have been the end of it, and the raid and associated songs would have faded into obscurity.
So of course, the Adams County Sheriff's Department decided to do the dumbest thing possible: Sue Afroman.
Somehow, the case went to trial, with the deputies unironically arguing -- with a straight face -- that Afroman's videos seriously defamed their character and reputation, enough to cause $4 million in damages. This led to a hilarious examination where a female officer cries on the stand as "Licc'em Low Lisa" plays. Afroman played his defense straight, pointing out that the entire situation was caused by the cops fucking up and raiding his house for basically no reason, and that he has a First Amendment right to criticize and make fun of the police. Also, he was wearing a badass suit covered entirely in the American flag.
A couple culture war takeaways here. First, I think the biggest factor in his success was not playing the race card at all, even though he easily could have. Instead, he stood behind the freedoms that every American has, and demonstrated that this could have happened to anyone, black or white. Every American has the right to not have their privacy invaded or property damaged, and when that right is violated, they have the right to speak freely and mock those who violated their rights. The race card would have only served as a distraction at best and polarized the jury at worst.
Second, this verdict could have only happened in America, where there is a strong legal tradition of freedom of speech. If it had taken place in a European country like Germany, where calling the government "parasites" gets your house raided, he would have lost. Having a jury trial was also very important in this case, because the judge was almost blatantly biased in favor of the plaintiffs. If this case had taken place in a country like the United Kingdom, which is seriously considering scrapping most jury trials, he also would have lost. Turns out, jury trials are there to protect the people from corrupt judges.
The point is that though Americans may be stereotyped as being irrationally fearful of a tyrannical government, this fear is entirely justified, and this case is a good example of it. Or at least a good example of how small town cops abuse their power, which seems to happen an awful lot in small towns across America.
Markass
Not the worst
14d ago
There are too many lolcows in the world to have a thread for every one of them on the Kiwi Farms, and the standards for a thread have dramatically risen since the heyday of Christian Weston Chandler back in 2013. Most threads nowadays are only successful if there's plenty of content to laugh at, along with sufficient interest from other users posting in the thread. When a thread clearly falls below standards, users often deride it as NYPA (Not Your Personal Army) and mock the OP instead, oftentimes because OP brings a misconception that they can sic harassment on a lolcow by creating a thread on them.
Markass
Not the worst
14d ago
Perhaps because it's an explicitly 18+ site (while NSFW content is allowed, all of it must be spoilered). I always browse with a VPN so I never have any issues with my WiFi network blocking the site.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So you concede that it's not going to happen, then? Most societal changes don't require a full rebuild of society to happen.
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?
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.
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.
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?
To echo @FtttG (replace sex with gender):
And as for this:
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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