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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!
Absolutely true, and is probably the origin of a large share of discussions here on the Motte. People will tend make a true observation ("Blacks are lower IQ and more criminal than whites, on average"; "women tend to be hypergamous"; "Jews have disproportionate influence in Hollywood and finance") and overgeneralize to fit their biases ("Blacks are violent and stupid "; "Women are faithless sluts"; "Jews control our society").
I've already acknowledged that the sensationalized stories are, well, sensational, and I know the vast majority of trans people are not waving their penises at women or trying to get them to wax their balls, or taking medals from them in sporting events. But the fact that a small number are, and the ones who aren't will not allow any sort of guardrails that might prevent this, means unfortunately you are basically siding with the predators.
I mean, that seems unfair. I'm off in the middle saying "no, I think some guard rails are fine, obviously this 100% self-identification experiment failed". How is that siding with predators? What would I have to do to switch sides, if that's not sufficient?
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