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Notes -
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.
I blame the whole concept of gender. We didn't always have gender, it's a recent invention. We used to have sex and civilization ran pretty well with that alone.
I'm waiting for a non-self-referential definition of gender that doesn't just mean 'sex'.
So far, nobody has answered me.
(Hello! I'm new here and this is my first post, so apologies if I'm messing up any social norms here. Please feel free to call me out! :))
That seems like a pretty easy challenge. Here's my definitions:
External Gender: When people greet me, they say "ma'am" instead of "sir". There's a wealth of subtler behaviors, but the basic idea here is that people perceived as "female" get treated differently than people perceived as "male".
Internal Gender: I prefer being called "ma'am", and am happier when my external gender is "female". In a lot of magical stories, a character has their sex transformed by some magic. "Internal Gender" is when a character wants to transform back, which is fairly common. "Internal Gender" is the idea that if you body-swapped with your mom, you'd still want to be called "him" despite the uterus.
Sex: the biological reality. A messy mix of chromosomes, hormones, and anatomy.
This is self-referential. "The meaning of female gender is treating a person like a female, and a person who is of female gender is one who wants to be treated like a female."
So are you saying all subjective categories are self-referential? "Republicans are people who vote for other Republicans" and such?
To me, I'm looking out at the world and seeing "Objectively, society classifies people into two clusters, which it calls male and female."
For historical reasons, these clusters tend to correlate with biological sex, but are clearly independent of it - even cis people get misgendered. I think we can both agree that gender does exist as something independent of sex? In the classic case, gender seems to be something like "best guess as to your genitalia", but people can still guess wrong. In trans-positive spaces it's more like "my best guess which pronouns would make you comfortable", which removes the legacy connection to genitalia entirely
This all sounds perfectly sensible - until you apply it to literally any other trait based on a biological substrate, at which point the reasoning collapses and the motivated reasoning is exposed.
One of the things people most frequently say about my physical appearance is that I look much younger than I am: people from all walks of life consistently place me at about four-five years younger than I actually am (and I've gone to no especial lengths to bring about this state of affairs other than regular exercise and moisturising my face when I remember to). Does it therefore follow that I have an "age identity" which is wholly distinct from my physical age? In the classic case, "age identity" seems to be something like "my best guess as to how much time has passed since you were born", but perhaps in trans-age-positive spaces "age identity" is more like "my best guess as to which age you would feel most comfortable if people thought you were that age". Which implies that Madonna's "biological age" is 66, but her "age identity" is 21. Perhaps it would be trans-age-phobic of me to remind her of her biological age (like sending her out an automated email urging her to get checked for breast cancer, as her age puts her at high risk for that condition), rather than "affirming" her age identity at every turn.
You don't have to be Rachel Dolezal to be mistaken for someone of a different ethnic group. I've had people start talking to me in Finnish unprompted, even though I'm not Finnish, have no Finnish ancestry and have never even set foot in Finland. I have Mexican friends who get driven up the wall by people thinking they're Brazilian. Does it therefore follow that everyone has an "ethnic identity" wholly distinct from their actual ethnic background?
Sometimes you think someone's skinny, then you weigh them and it turns out they're heavier than they look. Does it therefore imply that...
Rather than having to invent this whole elaborate set of epicycles around gender as a trait wholly distinct from sex, I would propose what I feel is a more elegant solution. "Humans are constantly observing and categorising other humans. Over time, they build up expectations of what a typical member of a given exclusive category looks like (or acts like, or sounds like etc.). Because everyone's training data is different, no one's training data is perfect, and there is huge variability in what the members of a sufficiently large category will look, act or sound like - inevitably some amount of humans will miscategorise Person X as a member of category A when they are in fact a member of category B. It does not therefore follow that Person X really is a member of category A in some kind of mysterious ineffable spiritual sense which transcends mere biology. The above is true of any category with a sufficiently large number of members - for any given sex, ethnic group, sexuality, age, height, mass, disability status, annual income, profession, dietary restrictions, level of educational attainment, criminal record etc. there will always be some amount of people who get categorised into the wrong category by one or more people. This is a normal human error, and the appropriate response is a simple 'oh sorry, my bad': we are not required to invent elaborate ancillary concepts and entire academic disciplines to explain and elaborate upon this discrepancy between individual expectation and observable reality."
People routinely get surgeries to try and look younger. There's a rather huge industry around catering to people's "age identity" and trying to "pass" as a younger age than they really are. It is in fact considered rude to go around pointing out that people are older than they look.
No one is going around calling women in heels "deceptive" even if it does make them seem taller.
Given all that, why should I feel bad about taking advantage of your classification errors to get myself called "ma'am"?
I really don't get how this analogy is anti-trans. Presumably if someone has transitioned and grown breasts, we should acknowledge that reality and send them emails suggesting they get checked for breast cancer now that they're at risk? And equally, I don't think a trans guy who has had a double mastectomy is at huge risk, here.
Right, but just because someone looks younger than they really are, that doesn't mean that in some ineffable spiritual sense they are younger than their actual physical age. In my experience, most people who undergo extensive cosmetic surgery to try to reverse the effects of aging (the Bogdanoffs, Madonna, Simon Cowell etc.) are widely ridiculed for being in denial about the plain reality of their own bodies. Truth be told, I do think it's rather sad and pathetic seeing someone who refuses to simply accept the fact that they've become older and don't look the same way they used to.
I notice that you completely side-stepped the transracial analogy even though in principle exactly the same arguments should apply.
If a woman of average height started wearing high heels and began claiming to have a "height identity" distinct from her physical height (and complaining that she wasn't being offered basketball scholarships or modelling contracts), I think just about everyone would react with bafflement at best and derision at worst.
I'm not saying you should feel bad about anything. You do you. If it makes you happy to dress in conventionally feminine clothes and have people mistakenly assume that you have a set of reproductive organs which you do not in fact possess, go for it, more power to you. I just reject the claim that, because people sometimes incorrectly classify you into a category of which you are not strictly a member, that therefore means that you really are a member of that category in some kind of spiritual intangible sense. Such a framing would imply that my "ethnic identity" is Finnish in some sense, despite the fact that I have no Finnish ancestry, am not a Finnish citizen, don't speak Finnish or have any connection with the culture, don't know any Finnish people and have never set foot in the country. Like "I'm not a female person, but I look female" is a perfectly coherent statement; likewise "I'm not Finnish but I look like I could be" or "I'm 35 but I look like I'm 25". But statements like "I'm not Finnish, but I have a Finnish ethnic identity" or "I'm 35, but I have a 25-year-old age identity" would widely be derided as incoherent - and I'm arguing the same is true of "I'm not female but I have a female gender identity".
Many trans activists (not necessarily including you, I don't know where you stand on this issue) get very irate and defensive when people make plainly true assertions like "it is impossible for a person to change their sex", "only female people can menstruate or be impregnated" or "trans women are at no less risk of prostate cancer than cis men". My point is, if it's mean to remind people of true facts associated with their anatomical sex instead of constantly affirming their stated "gender identity" (even if the reason you're bringing up these facts is in their own self-interest), then by the same token it should be seen as cruel to remind people about true facts associated with their physical age (such as propensity to various cancers) rather than constantly affirming their "age identity" (i.e. pretending that they really are the age they're attempting to pass themselves off as).
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