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Wake up babe, the definition of woman just dropped.
The year was 2020, trans issues have already made their way through our social consciousness, and some women were getting frustrated at the inability to congregate without trans women showing up, and - in the minds of the TERF inclined - spoil the party.
Enter Sall Grover, a bold enterprising spirit, that recognized two facts:
She quickly joined the dots, and thus the Giggle app was born. In order to register you had to upload a selfie, which would be run through a sex-recognition AI, and non-females would be automatically rejected. The AI was deliberately calibrated to minimize false negatives, wanting to spare cis-women the humiliation of appealing the process, Grover figured it's better to let a few false-positives through and deal with them manually. For a while, the whole system worked wonderfully, and the women congregated, giggling happily.
But, as we all know, there is no Giggle without a Tickle... In February 2021, Roxy Tickle uploaded a selfie to the Giggle app and the AI was so amused at the word pun, it forgot it was supposed to be an image recognition algorithm. Roxy got through! Her joy lasted for several months, until she was caught by manual review as she was applying for premium features of the app. After a short and unsuccessful appeal attempt, she decided that the only way to resolve this dispute is in court.
Roxy Tickle argued that this was an outrageous injustice, that she was being discriminated against for being trans, and that this constitutes a violation of the Sex Discrimination Act of 1984. Sall Grover argued that this is nonsense, that Giggle does not discriminate against trans people, it merely excludes people on the basis of sex. The law hasn't outlawed sex-segregated spaces over the 30 years it was in effect, Roxy Tickle was treated no different than any other male-sexed individual, and therefore no illegal discrimination has taken place. The judge had to rule if Giggle excluded a man, and was well within it's rights, or if it excluded a woman and indirectly committed discrimination against a trans person. He was therefore forced to settle that ancient question - what is a woman? Last week we finally received the verdict, and the way I understood it is "a woman is anyone who the state identifies as a woman". It turns out that sex is mutable, and that Ms. Tickle is a woman because she has a state issued document saying so. Australia's legal system seems a bit complex to my eyes, but at first glance that seems to also boil down to "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman".
The consequences of the verdict might be more interesting than the verdict itself. After all, if an app for women cannot keep an AMAB out, how can all the other controversial spaces like sports, prisons, waxing salons, etc.? We've covered enough of these cases over the years that I think it should be clear this isn't a hypothetical, and as connoisseurs of TERF content will know, hacking "gender violence" laws has become a pretty regular occurance in countries that lean on the self-ID side of the debate. More importantly, and/or ammusingly, normie men are deciding all that male privilege just ain't worth it, or perhaps the Spaniards are just more cheeky than average. In any case, if any such self-ID laws / rulings are to be maintained, I think they'll require some major qualifications.
1:
Quillette published an article about the verdict, too:
https://quillette.com/2024/08/27/tickle-vs-giggle/
2:
The verdict didn't surprise me because I'm already working from the sad assumption that in the woke West, biological sex is no longer recognized as real by anyone in a position of power. What was once a woman is now a “uterus-haver”, a “pregnant person” or a “chest feeder”, but such people have no collective rights. Those collective rights now belong to those who merely identify as women, even if they have penises and testicles, which means that there is no longer any legal basis for having female-only spaces, online or offline.
What confuses and angers me is that the judge will not even explain that state of affairs in clear terms, instead insisting that this was a case of discrimination based on gender identity. But that's literally impossible! Giggle is an app for women, and Tickle identifies as a woman, so whatever discrimination Tickle faced cannot have been based on gender identity (and it wasn't: it was based on biological sex).
That's also clear from the paragraph here:
Again, the decision was based on the fact that Tickle did not look biologically female, not that they looked insufficiently woman-identifying. In fact, Tickle looks exactly like a male who identifies as a woman. So the Giggle moderators, correctly, clocked her as a male and banned her for that reason. That is sex-based discrimination, which may or may not be illegal, but definitely not gender-identity discrimination.
So de facto the situation in Australia is as follows:
I don't agree that this should be the law, but this is what it is in practice. Then why can't the judge explicitly say so? Is he that stupid? Or is banning discrimination based on biological sex while claiming you are banning discrimination based on self-identification some elite power play that I'm too unsophisticated to understand?
3:
As for normie men increasingly identifying as female for the benefits:
I suspect that a lot of these benefits in practice are only afforded to biological females and to males who make enough effort to signal that they are serious about their gender identity.
The normie dad who changes his legal sex in hopes of getting custody of his children will be sussed out as faking it and will not get the benefits associated with women and real transwomen.
This all reminds me of an old but good article by The Last Psychiatrist, The Nature of the Grift, where (in section IV) he explains that to get asylum because you are persecuted as a homosexual, it's not sufficient to declare yourself homosexual, you have to play the part too. Officially there is no rule on how gay you must act to be considered homosexual, and in practice many people fake such a claim, but it's still a requirement that you fake it convincingly.
According to Spiked:
I think it's reasonable to assume that a male who's unwilling even to change his name to signal his commitment to his newly discovered gender identity is unwilling to remove his testicles or undergo hormone therapy.
The author of that Spiked article has a hilariously large blind spot. She claims it is outrageous that men can change their legal gender to get around 'gender-based violence' laws and to get higher salaries and pensions. She apparently has no problem with laws that give women arbitrarily higher pensions and salaries, and which protect only female victims of domestic violence and only if the aggressor is male.
A lesbian abused by her partner (bearing in mind that lesbian relationships are the most abusive type of the three male-female pairings) has no such protection, neither does a man victimised by a male or female partner.
Well, of course not. Why would she? Feminists believe that women are oppressed by living in a patriarchal society, and publicly mandated higher pensions and salaries are a band-aid intended to ameliorate the differential treatment women receive as a result of their sex. When male people claim to be women to take advantage of these policies, they're taking something which by rights they aren't entitled to, no different from stolen valour, or malingering to receive disability compensation you don't deserve. You might disagree with one or more points of her worldview (is it accurate to characterise the way women in the West are treated as "oppressive"? are Western women worse off than Western men, ceterus paribus? are higher pensions and salaries a fair or effective way of remedying this treatment? is the way Western society treats trans people qualitatively and/or quantitatively similar enough to the way it treats female people that trans people deserve the same compensation? etc.), but it's far from inconsistent.
I've heard this asserted so many times, but I've seen precious little hard evidence to back it up, and the more I see an assertion being made without any supporting link (e.g. "there are parts of the US where it's literally not a crime to murder trans people!") the more uneasy I get. I'm not saying this claim is false or made in bad faith, I would just really like to see some actual evidence in support of it rather than taking it for granted.
This article gives victimisation numbers of
66%61% for bisexual women, 44% for lesbians and 35% for straight women. It does cite its sources but when I crtl+F for 66 I can't find anything, frustratingly. I think its citing this study. Pages 1&2 have the headline figures which match up.Thanks for the link, this is really helpful. Unfortunately, the second link suffers from a limitation I suspected the last time this topic came up: not specifying the sex of the perpetrator.
This is obvious in the case of the proportion of bisexual women who've been victimised (i.e. that finding is perfectly consistent with 100% of the bisexual women who reported victimisation having been victimised by a current or former male romantic partner). But less obviously in the case of lesbians reporting victimisation: just because you currently identify as a lesbian doesn't mean you always did, or that you were never in a romantic or a sexual relationship with a person of the opposite sex. There's no contradiction between currently identifying as a lesbian and previously having been in a relationship with a man who beat you up or stalked you. There's even a hypothetical causal mechanism worth investigating baked into the finding as it stands: if a significant proportion of lesbians are "political lesbians" who decided to swear off men after being abused by an ex-boyfriend or ex-husband (and straight women are disproportionately likely not to have been abused by an intimate male partner), then you would logically expect the proportion of lesbians who've been abused by a male partner to be higher than among straight women. Given the wording of the question as it stands, it's entirely possible that many of the bisexual or lesbian women surveyed have never been in a romantic or sexual relationship with a woman.
Going even further than the above, I've met more than one woman who called herself a lesbian despite currently being in a romantic/sexual relationship with a cis male boyfriend. There are probably plenty of women in relationships with trans women who still consider themselves "lesbians" (while being penetrated by their "girlfriend's" feminine penises, but that's neither here nor there). The wording in the study is sufficiently ambiguous that I can't even be confident that the set of "women" surveyed doesn't include trans women: maybe some of the lesbians and bisexual women reporting abuse in that study were trans women who'd been abused by a current or former romantic partner who was also a trans woman (in other words, male-on-male domestic abuse).
None of this is to argue that female-female romantic relationships aren't more likely to be abusive than male-female romantic relationships: the data you've presented are entirely consistent with that hypothesis (which I'll call Hypothesis A). My point is that the data are equally consistent with the alternative hypothesis (Hypothesis B) outlined above, in which many of the lesbians and bisexual women who report intimate partner violence were actually abused by current or former male partners. To properly disambiguate which of the two hypotheses has better explanatory power, you would need to ask followup questions like:
Minimally ambiguous language like the above would give us a more accurate impression of the relative sizes of the four populations (females abused by female romantic partners, females abused by male romantic partners, males abused by female romantic partners, males abused by male romantic partners) and give us better insight into whether Hypothesis A describes reality more accurately than Hypothesis B.
A caveat to the above: if I'm reading table 5 on page 20 correctly, zero lesbians reported being forcibly penetrated by a current or former romantic partner, which is far more consistent with Hypothesis A than with Hypothesis B.
I would say that the data are potentially consistent with your hypothesis, but I certainly wouldn't say they are equally consistent. If you're determined to find an explanation for lesbians reporting the highest rates of domestic violence victimisation, without accepting that lesbians might be perpetrating the largest amount of domestic violence, then your hypothesis can seem plausible. To me, it looks like an isolated demand for rigour.
I don't see why it's an isolated demand for rigour. If we lived in a world in which:
then the statement "X% of self-identified lesbians report having been abused by at least one romantic partner" would be synonymous with the statement "X% of female people who exclusively date other female people report having been abused by at least one romantic partner, who was female". But there are lots of ways in which people using language in sloppy or careless ways complicates this simple definition:
In fact, it's not "isolated" at all: I think essentially any survey of this type suffers from the lack of specificity described above. If you carried out a survey on what proportion of people with or without mental illnesses had been victimised, the self-diagnosis trend would make the data trivial to contaminate: you've no way of distinguishing between people formally diagnosed with depression by a qualified healthcare provider vs. people who diagnosed themselves (because they feel sad sometimes). Without knowing the relative rates of the truly mentally ill vs. malingerers, your data tell you essentially nothing.
Either design a survey with better questions, or collect hard data. Healthcare providers can make inaccurate diagnoses, but as a rule, statistics on how many people have been diagnosed with depression cannot be contaminated the specific way surveys can. Likewise criminological data: if I was shown evidence that the proportion of female people who've been convicted for battering a female romantic partner was twice as high as the proportion of male people who've been convicted of battering a female romantic partner, I'd be satisfied. (If such evidence was presented, someone would probably make the counter-argument that police and directors of public prosecutions look the other way when a man batters his wife, but come down like a tonne of bricks when a lesbian playfully slaps her girlfriend, because Muh Patriarchy™. I would not be the one to make that counter-argument.)
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