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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32851 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but I'm thinking about the trans rights debate.

How is asking women to give up their spaces for trans women different to how we asked white people to give up their segregated spaces to people of color back in the day?

  • -17

Why do sex-segregated spaces exist in the first place?

Toilets: because women don't want to disrobe/defecate in places where men will (at best) hit on them

Sports: because women would be excluded from competition in all but a handful of sports like target shooting and long-distance swimming

In short, because there are real physical and mental differences between male and female that necessitate segregation at times if "equality of opportunity" is a goal. Mixed-sex sports means almost no women get to be professional athletes. Mixed-sex toilets (unless single stall) mean women in practice will never leave the house without a chaperone. "Whites only" is not about giving whites equal opportunities but excluding blacks from opportunities/public life, and giving them inferior alternatives. "Use the (inferior) black fountain" is not the same as "use the (perfectly fine) male toilet".

If you mean in general, all societies have deemed various places the proper/improper place of one sex or another, whether it be kitchens, the outdoors, the sporting field, the birthing room, the tabernacle, etc. We have decided that the public world at large must be open to women, so we have created female-only toilets so they may go about in public.

The sport example is terrible. Olympic swimming excludes pretty much all black people due to genetic factors, but we don't have an equivalent Olympic category for just "black people" with the same level of prestige as the open competition, but for some reason women get their own league...

Black people tend to have longer limbs and shorter torsos compared to white people, and having a long torso is beneficial for swimmers because you have less drag in the water. Michael Phelps is a good example of a swimmer with an extremely long torso.

https://www.usaswimming.org/meet-the-team/u.s.-olympic-team

There are still a number of black swimmers on the US team, so it's obviously not insurmountable.

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