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I've hung around the Slate Star Codex space for a while, if it helps. I lurked in /r/TheMotte for a while, but that's been dead for a while.
I figured if I was going to poke the bear, I might as well be open about my identity; I've got skin in the game.
It is indeed a thick skin. I'll admit I'm mostly disappointed with the response; I was hoping for more light and less heat. Your response is a lot more interesting than most :)
I think a lot of people are more open-minded than you think. I think the vast majority of people I interact with either genuinely think I'm a cis-woman, or don't care. I've encountered people that DO care, and they tend to react much differently. Obviously there are many areas of the world where that would be different, but I've done a fair bit of business travel and I feel confident in saying most people just don't notice.
At the end of the day, if you're trying to treat me with respect, I think that's what really matters. When I first changed, it was clear some people struggled to update my pronouns even though they clearly respected me. I'd have been offended if anyone tried to sic HR on them.
Oh boy, that's a complex one...
First off, I don't think anyone is going to transition just to cheat at sports - you're making life long changes to your body, and also we have tons of known cheaters who chose much easier routes.
Second, the evidence I've personally seen (and I'm hardly an expert), suggests that when people do this, they're usually placing middle of the pack, which suggests that transition and hormones and all of that really does have a negative impact on performance.
Conditional on "this person has completed hormonal transition, and performs in the cis-female athletic range", I don't see a strong argument for excluding them from the league - they're going to get trounced in the male league, and aren't exactly setting records in the women's league, so... that seems like a fair competition?
Look at the other direction of transition: If someone is taking testosterone, and performs in the male athletic range, do you really want to keep them in the women's league just because they were born with a uterus?
But to bite the bullet, yeah, IF trans women DO have a clear advantage over cis women, then that defeats the whole point of gendered sports leagues. I just don't think this is nearly as decisively established
(and it does follow that any law made before we've actually established the science is probably premature, although I also can't think of a better way to collect data - run this experiment for a few years and if trans people keep ending up at the top, we made a mistake. If trans people generally end up in the middle, well, what's the problem?)
I think the USA has a really weird culture around nudity. There's plenty of cultures where seeing grandma and grandpa naked at the hot springs is just a normal part of life, and everyone grows up well adjusted. Seeing a penis in the locker room shouldn't be so traumatic. But then US culture acts like any nudity OUTSIDE of a locker room is horrific, which just doesn't make sense to me. If you think seeing genitalia is so bad, we should clearly have single-person gender-neutral locker rooms.
You've got a row of men showing off their penises at the urinal in the men's room. If seeing a penis is so horrible, why are you so comfortable making people endure that?
And, I mean, do you really feel more comfortable in a bathroom full of bearded trans guys? What if they've had surgery and have penises?
But the whole problem is because the US can't decide whether nudity is a normal part of life or some horrifying thing. If nudity is a normal part of life, then seeing a penis in the locker room is nothing. If nudity is some horrifying thing, then get rid of communal locker rooms and urinals and all these other disgusting locations where guys feel free to show off their dick.
I simply don't get the idea that women are UNIQUELY scandalized by penises, but guys should all be totally okay with it.
(and as a trans person, the answer is "I change in a bathroom stall because no matter which choice I make, people seeing me naked are going to get upset", which sucks)
Aww c'mon, that's heat, not light.
Amusingly, pronouns in email is actually something a lot of trans people hate too. Making it mandatory means everyone in the closet has to actively submit the wrong pronouns, and it's usually done in a way that just calls attention to the most androgynous / badly-passing trans people in the group.
So, going the other way: I think one could reasonably say a lot of anti-trans voices are also acting in bad faith. For instance, JK Rowling recently called out an Argentinian boxer as "trans" with... basically zero evidence? And on the "not actually trans" evidence, we've got the fact that she's from a country where transition is illegal, we've got childhood pictures of her, we've got the IOC tests that every other athlete does, and we've got said boxer suing JK Rowling (not exactly a clever move if it really is all a fraud!)
Do you have ANY examples of an openly trans person winning the gold metal in a Women's Olympic event?
I'm still not sure why penises are uniquely traumatizing to teenage girls, but have no harmful effect on teenage boys. I'm still not sure why only penises have this uniquely traumatizing effect, but men can handle vaginas just fine. Again, there's plenty of cultures where nudity is common, and everyone seems to do just fine seeing a penis there. But if you think seeing a penis is this horrifying traumatizing event, why do you keep inflicting it on little boys?
I think this really depends on where we are in the world. There's plenty of countries that make my existence illegal, so I think overall trans people are in a lot more danger than you are. If you meet me on my home turf, I've probably got some ability to make things awkward for you, but I really doubt I could get you fired or cancelled or anything.
"Rates of inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization in the previous 6 months were highest for female inmates (212 per 1,000), more than four times higher than male rates (43 per 1,000)." - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2438589/
If someone wants to be put in with the more dangerous group, I'm not really clear what the controversy is?
There's clearly a huge sexual violence problem to solve here. I'd think solving that would take priority, and then in a few decades we can discuss the 1% of the population that's trans?
Similar to bathrooms, either nudity is a normal and OK part of life and you need to stop being scared of penises, or else you need to stop forcing people to get naked together.
I'm pretty firmly anti-thought-police and anti-censorship.
That said, I'd again assert that most people that meet me don't give it that much thought, and really do just think of me as a woman.
Thanks, it was nice getting a juicy reply that was more than just "no, you're not a woman" :)
Thank you for the response. Apologies if I don't cover every response (a lengthy quote-and-respond chain can get very lengthy), but let me address a few points where I think we either disagree or you misunderstood my objections.
I will take your word and your lived experience for it on this, but my own impression is that (a) most trans women think they pass much better than they do (because most people are polite and aren't going to go out of their way to tell you they know you're trans), and (b) most people are open minded, but you probably think "Accepts my identification and agrees with me when I talk about trans rights means they really think I'm a woman." You might be disappointed if you knew what everyone really thinks. I don't really know, any more than you do, how many people who say TWAW really, truly believe it - neither of us can read minds or hearts. But my own suspicion is that it's less than would admit it.
About trans women athletes: I haven't studied the issue enough to produce statistics, and trans women are sufficiently rare that there probably aren't conclusive statistics yet. We all know the high profile cases like Rachel McKinnon and Lia Thomas and Laurel Hubbard, et al - the cases of mediocre male athletes who suddenly blow away their competition after transitioning are pretty numerous at this point. The response from trans rights activists is always similar to yours: "Trans women don't win every competition they enter!" And what seems to me like a lot of handwaving to deny that having a male-sized, male-muscled body with testosterone (even if reduced post-transition) is a major advantage in pretty much every athletic competition. I mean, if 10 years from now we have solid evidence that trans women do not, on average, perform at a higher level than women of similar age and experience, that would be interesting, but I have to say from the small sample sizes we can see now, I am very skeptical. Certainly every time I see a trans woman standing next to women in a rugby or a boxing match, I cannot understand how anyone can claim there isn't an obvious problem there.
I think as a matter of legality, it would have all go the same way, one way or the other: either trans women compete with women and trans men compete with men, or everyone competes with their birth/biological sex.
I am not aware of any trans men who after taking testosterone have become competitive in a men's sport. Are you?
The fact that (a) we don't see a lot of trans men trying to join men's teams and it hasn't been an issue because (b) any trans men in a men's league would be crushed and everyone knows it, is evidence of my point, that biologically, you are still going to compete with the body you were (mostly) born with.
About locker rooms: look, I agree that in theory, if we had a more open culture around nudity, maybe this would be less of an issue, but my problem is not that I think teenage girls will be traumatized by seeing a penis. (Nowadays, they've probably seen one about five minutes after they first got a smartphone.) My problem is explicitly the bad actors who want to show their penis to women in a locker room, knowing that it will make women uncomfortable. They are, to put it bluntly, exhibitionists if not worse, and saying "Well, if we were all just more comfortable about nudity" is missing the point. Again, I know these trans women are a minority, but I have read enough stories to know they aren't singular incidents either; there is a very small but very aggressive minority of trans women who really seem to get their jollies by making women (and girls) feel uncomfortable in female spaces. Whether it's because they think this is some sort of sitting-at-the-lunch-counter stand for trans civil rights, or just garden variety harassment and exhibitionism, it is definitely doing nothing to convince me they are acting in good faith. And I can't say I am impressed by an argument like this:
Dude (I say with tongue somewhat in cheek), as a penis-haver (past and/or present), you know damn well that we don't "show off our penises" at the urinals. You have to kind of go out of your way to see another guy's junk in the bathroom, unless he's waving it around.
Which is also unfortunately the pattern I have heard from these penis-in-the-women's-locker-room stories. Men and women will both walk around naked in the locker room, but generally speaking, they don't like... display themselves, or go so far as to stand in front of another person giving them a belligerent full-frontal display. How often have you seen that, honestly? If someone walked up to you buck naked in the locker room and just stood there trying to engage you in conversation from an arm's length away while letting it all hang out and no effort to cover anything up, would you not consider that... strange? Especially if they are a stranger? Come on now.
I mean, leaving aside the whole sexual assault survivor thing (some women probably genuinely are freaked out by seeing a penis in what is supposed to be a woman's space), I can say I was at a convention recently that decided (because everyone there is super-woke) that all the bathrooms would be "agender." Most people, of course, still used the "men's" and "women's" rooms as appropriate for their equipment, but while I was standing at the urinal, one woman (who I happen to know is one of those super-woke people and probably calls herself non-binary or something) walked out of a stall and past me. And you know what? I felt uncomfortable. Not threatened or anything, just -- neither of the bathrooms were crowded, so she decided to use the men's room to make a point. And it annoyed me.
Well... I will cop to being a little snarky there, but honestly, Admiral Rachel Levine really does strike me as someone who is cosplaying a fetish. Maybe she really, truly does identify as a woman and has always felt female, but I am pretty skeptical, because her entire presentation is that of a man who knows she looks like a man and wants everyone to know it and dares you to say something about it.
As for Rowling and Imane Khalifa, I honestly don't know enough about Khalifa's status to pass judgment. To my knowledge, Rowling didn't say she was trans, she said she was a man. Which may or may not be true, either biologically or legally. I have defended Rowling in the past because I think a lot of the attacks on her are made in bad faith, but I think Khalifa's case is, at the very least, complicated and she probably spent the first part of her life believing she's a girl, which makes me less hasty to call her a man myself and I wish Rowling had reserved judgment as well. But I'm not a famous billionaire who's made this my personal cause (nor been subjected to attacks over it for years). I think someone who is (most likely) an intersex person with chromosomal abnormalities who grew up as a girl is a pretty edge case and a distraction from central trans issues.
I live in the US so that's where I am talking about, not someplace where you could be killed for being trans or gay. I can't say I find it reassuring that you basically say "Well, I probably couldn't actually threaten you" but it seems like you would if you could.
Okay, I skimmed this paper - can't say I read it in detail, but it sure doesn't make it easy to separate out sexual victimization by staff compared to sexual vicitimization by other inmates. Let's say that women do prey on other women in prison at a higher rate than men prey on other men. I can think of a number of explanations besides "Actually, women are the more dangerous group," but it definitely doesn't suggest that a trans woman being put in a woman's prison is in more danger from the other female inmates than she is to them. Especially if said trans woman used to be a violent rapist and has undergone no physical transition. Yeah, I saw that Orange is the New Black episode where Laverne Cox gets jumped by a bunch of other women. Let's say I was not persuaded of its verisimilitude.
On trans athletes: honestly, I think we largely agree here. I think a few high profile cases don't provide as much evidence about the average result, but I'm certainly open to the idea that it's unfair.
I'm not sure what about this reply made you think I would want to get you fired/cancelled. Could you elaborate? I already said I was against siccing HR on people who used the wrong pronouns for me at work, so that seems like a pretty big disconnect
Presumably we should treat that person like a criminal? Sure, it's a hard problem, but so are the bad actors who want to show their penis to little boys. We still let gay people use the bathroom, though.
Oh, I found that super weird when I was growing up. Quite a few guys discovered I was not comfortable with that, and would go out of their way to make me uncomfortable. But no one seems to want to do anything about that. So... again, why is it okay to expect little boys to handle this, but grown women can't?
It really depends - those big trough-style urinals at stadiums don't leave much to the imagination. Certainly, I've seen penises while using the bathroom numerous times, while I have seen a stranger's vulva exactly zero times. And your whole concern was exactly the sort of guy who is "waving it around."
... okay? What's your point? People feel uncomfortable when I use the men's room, for exactly that reason. If my trans-masc friends show up in the women's room, it makes people SUPER uncomfortable. If it makes you uncomfortable, why do you want more of it?
I mean, presumably we have methods for handling violent rapists in prison? I'm sure there's at least one lesbian violent rapist out there.
The prison thing has a lot to unpack. If you can show some strong evidence that trans women are reasonably safe in male prison AND are a threat to cis women in female prison, I'll have to seriously reconsider my world view. So far I've not seen much evidence of either.
See, the goalposts for everyone else is "uterus". If we change the standard to "vaginoplasty" I definitely feel better. The idea of throwing someone into male prison, despite them having a vagina and breasts, just seems insane on the surface.
If you're willing to bite the bullet and say "anyone with a vagina is female"... I mean, I could still quibble and debate, but I'd honestly consider you more of an ally than an enemy in today's political climate.
Sorry, I misunderstood that part about "I could make things uncomfortable for you." But as I said, I would not intentionally misgender you. I wouldn't tell you "I believe trans women are men" (even if it wouldn't bring HR down on me). I would, however, assume you have a certain set of beliefs and attitudes that make it very risky to draw attention to oneself as potentially not trans-affirming. I realize this might be unfair, but that's how things work nowadays.
Sounds like bullying, and those guys were assholes, and in an ideal world it wouldn't happen, but in the real world kids have to put up with a lot of shit they shouldn't have to. We mostly expect kids to grow out of that behavior, and adults not to have to put up with it.
But the problem is we don't treat trans women who wave their penises around in locker rooms as criminals. Unless they're literally committing assault, someone who does that, even if very blatantly doing it as a display of dominance and exhibitionism, mostly can't be restricted in any way.
A man who goes out of his way to show his penis to a little boy in a locker room might not technically commit a crime, but ya know, people would know and recognize what is happening and definitely take action. Because he's a bad actor and we can identify bad actors. But we are not supposed to identify trans people as being bad actors even when it's pretty obvious that's what they are. The trans woman strutting around with her cock on full display in the women's locker room is doing it to make women uncomfortable, and women who have reported feeling uncomfortable have been told they have no grievance (or even been kicked out themselves).
This isn't comparable to inadvertently getting a glimpse of your neighbor's dick while standing at a trough urinal.
I don't, and I think generally speaking people should be able to use the restroom they "identify" with, and yeah, that means maybe some people are uncomfortable seeing someone who doesn't clock as the "right" sex in their restroom. My point was that I think this woman was being a bad actor (in a very small way). I believe she wanted to make me and other men uncomfortable to make some sort of point. I could be uncharitable in my interpretation of the situation (there are other explanations - she genuinely identifies as male or non-binary, she didn't know which restroom she walked into and she really had to go, she thinks gender is stupid and genuinely thinks no one should care about that, etc.) but it made me think that was a tiny sample of what a woman would feel like if someone with a dick wanted to make sure she saw it in the women's room. I just didn't understand why she didn't use the women's room.
There is probably at least one. But come on, are you not seeing the same news reports I have? How many women getting assaulted/impregnated by a trans woman would be enough to make it a problem? (And yes, ideally there should be zero sexual assaults in prison regardless of sex, but I don't see why we should make an already bad situation even more exploitable by predators.)
I would not agree that having vaginoplasty makes you female (I will still consider them a male who had surgery, sorry), but I would consider it enough of a commitment to living as a woman that women's prison would be more appropriate.
So can we also safely assume that the man strutting around with their cock on full display in the men's locker room is also a bad actor?
Is "strutting around naked" really an unusual thing to do in a locker room? Are your genitalia somehow NOT "on full display" while you shower? We have had very different experiences of the men's locker rooms if you've never seen another guy's cock.
I feel like it's pretty easy to come up with an alternate explanation for why someone might be naked in the locker room, beyond "wanting to make others uncomfortable". But if we really do care about comfort, why not move to single stall designs so that no one has to see unwanted genitalia?
Do you have any statistics there? Are trans women more dangerous than cis women? Are trans women more dangerous than cis men? All the statistics I've seen about assault and rape say that intimate partners are the major threat, not strangers in bathrooms.
I mean, realistically, probably not! Media is a massive bubble of filters, there's dozens of sources out there, and we probably live in different parts of the world.
If I want to understand an issue, I consider news a terrible way to learn. Keep in mind that news reports are mostly heat, not light - the very fact that it made the news means it's unusual enough to report on that event.
Maybe, though I'd be more inclined to think he's just socially oblivious. Generally speaking, men aren't threatened by seeing other guys' cocks.
Walking naked from the shower to your locker, standing naked under the hair dryer, maybe standing naked in front of the mirror while you do your grooming, not really. But ambling around the room sporting an erection (a scenario I've read about happening more than once) would definitely strike me as "weird" if done to other men, and "bordering on threatening" if done to women.
I'm just saying I think if I saw a naked guy in a locker room, I could distinguish between "He is naked because he's in the process of dressing/undressing/showering" and "He is naked because he really wants me to see him naked."
My bad for the confusion there - I was specifically talking about trans women assaulting women in prison.
This is fair, which is why I have tried to reserve some judgment. I don't like LibsOfTikTok style nutpicking, finding the very worst and most deranged examples of trans people and blasting them as examples of what "trans people" are like. Graham Linehan does the same thing - for all that I sympathize with a lot of his grievances, "Here's a trans person who committed a crime" is like 90% of his output at this point.
That said, I'd be less cynical about trans rights if every trans person who does act in bad faith didn't seem to be a hill that trans activists are willing to die on defending.
Again, this seems like heat instead of light if we're talking about "this happened once". I'm sure there's been guys with erections in the men's locker room at least once as well? Sometimes those things happen involuntarily, and it's terribly embarrassing. I remember that much from my time as a guy.
Yeah, there we agree. I've certainly met reasonable trans people, but they're quieter. Even us trans women get shouted down by the loud ones if we try to be moderate, which is part of why I'm here.
In case it's not clear: if someone is deliberately making women uncomfortable, I think we should have procedures to deal with that. I don't think these procedures need to be gendered - I think women making other women uncomfortable, and men making other men uncomfortable is also a reality you've got to deal with there.
At the same time, I think a lot of people try to sensationalize the slightest incident, like "simply being naked", so I'm going to be slow to condemn any specific individual without knowing the full details. In general I tend to be a very "innocent until proven guilty" sort who doesn't like the idea of trying people in the public spotlight.
I mean, definitely more than once. Graham Linehan and various TERFs have lengthy "This never happens" lists of times that happened. I don't because that's not my crusade, but I have certainly read about it happening enough that I don't think you can dismiss these as "Just that one crazy guy and not a pattern."
C'mon, this is disingenuous. You know we are not talking about someone accidentally popping a boner.
Okay, but how? Because in the case of our boner-popping trans woman making women uncomfortable in the locker room, "her" first line of defense will be "Of course I didn't have control over it and I wasn't doing it deliberately to cause anyone discomfort" (which would be hard to disprove) and her second line of defense will be "Women just need to get over seeing female penises in the locker room." It's easy to say "We should just have procedures to deal with bad actors," but we do. The problem is that trans (or trans-pretending) bad actors, specifically, are exploiting gaps in those procedures. A man who walks into a woman's locker room and waves his penis around will be dealt with quickly. A man who walks into a woman's locker room and waves his penis around and when challenged, says he's a woman and you're being transphobic - well, how do you suggest we deal with that? Because clearly "Use common sense and call the bearded dude with the smirk out for what he is" doesn't work.
I understand your desire to extend them the benefit of the doubt. But again, once you've declared that literally anyone can identify as a woman, especially if they don't have to prove they've made an effort at transitioning or even passing, how do you keep the bearded guy with a smirk out of the locker room? Maybe he really does identify as a woman and that smirk is the euphoria of finally venturing into the space she belongs? Sure, mostly these are sensationalized examples, but they happen - repeatedly - and when we aren't even allowed to accuse someone of being fake or "transitioning" for disingenuous purposes, aren't allowed to impose conditions or gatekeeping, you get huge loopholes that predators can and will exploit. Thus the anger you are seeing now.
I mean, I think it is a fair point to say "some of these stories are sensationalist bullshit, trying to tar ordinary human behavior simply because the person hates trans people." I think it is equally valid to say "yes, but there are also real bad actors out there."
The point is, the number of bad actors is not equal to the number of stories out there.
It is really amazingly easy to put together a very long list of horrible things that basically any group has done. I'm absolutely positive I could give you a list of a hundred times TERFs made false accusations, or at least accusations with outrageously little evidence behind them. That does not mean that every TERF claim is false, of course, or even that most of them are.
It just means that in a world with billions of people in it, we can easily create an overwhelmingly large list.
The only antidote I know of for this is numbers. If you're worried about a group of anecdotes, that's what, 100, 200 people? I'm going to suggest you build a functional civilization and sort out those individuals. There's 66 million people in the UK, and you're really telling me you can't handle 100 criminals?
And, I mean, if you can't handle them, that's hardly the fault of trans people, is it? We're, what 0.5% of the population or so? I hardly think there's anywhere near enough of us to stop much of anything. Seems unfair to prevent the other 299,900 of us from peeing in peace just because you can't deal with the hundred that are off fucking everything up for everyone. Certainly, we don't want the bad actors either - they're making everything awful for the rest of us.
(The converse of all of this, of course, is that if you've got numbers showing "Hey, when we give men access to women's restrooms, the rate rape doubles" or "90% of non-surgical trans people are bad actors who haven't socially transitioned", that's a completely different story!)
P.S.: Probably worth noting, every day I meet trans people online. That's at least 365/year. Of the thousands of trans people I've known, I've heard credible allegations against exactly 3 of them. Each time, it's for harming other trans folk. The vast majority of trans people I meet either change in a stall, are post-op, or most frequently: avoid the situation entirely because it's too stressful. I'm getting quite the opposite message you get!
Obviously, I don't think this is proof that all trans people are pure and pristine - I'm just saying, I've probably got 100x as many positive stories as you've got negative ones. It is really, really easy to produce a HUGE list when the world has so many people in it!
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