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Notes -
For the purpose of this post I will use the following terms in the following ways:
Woman = Biological woman. Man = Biological man
Well it seems like we are on episode >9000 "transgender bathrooms".
There is currently a man named Sarah McBride who has been elected to congress. This person (a man), who wishes to be seen as female, has caused another member of congress named Nancy Mace (a woman) to start whining and complaining on various social media videos and news interviews about her (Nancy's) concern that Sarah will try to use the female bathrooms, lockerrooms, etc. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has said that the policy of the House is that women's restrooms/lockerrooms are for women, and men's restrooms lockerrooms are for men. There are a number of non-gender specific bathrooms around the house grounds that are open to anybody who doesn't want to abide by this.
Here is what I actually think a reasonable framing of this question is: "can men with a cross dressing fetish involve non-consenting women in their crossdress-play?" In a reasonable society I think the answer to this question should be: no, obviously.
Everybody seems intent on being dishonest towards each other when talking about this, so here is what I think is a reasonable answer to "why does anybody care? Just let everybody pee in peace!".
Bathrooms are extremely vulnerable places; they usually have one exit, you are often in there alone, and you are often doing something which makes you physically vulnerable (using the toilet). It seems completely reasonable for women to want to keep men out of these spaces.
To put some additonal context here: I think that the tide is turning pretty sharply on gender ideology within the democratic party (at least for anybody mildly near the center). I've seen several prominent-ish democrat spokespeople openly blame transgender people for the 2024 presidential loss. You also have the UK making it illegal to trans your kids, as well as a recent, prominent NYT article that was critical of transing your children (unfortunately the google index seems very intent on not showing me links to the article, but has plenty of links to people talking about it.
I would propose an alternative framing of the question: "Can people who have official government documents that document them as women, involve non-consenting members of the public in their use of spaces for women?" To which the obvious answer is: yes. Just like my driver's license is valid whether you think I should have one or not.
What is your proposal for how trans men (biological women) who have medically and legally transitioned should be dealt with? Do you think most women who are scared of men would be comfortable with this guy sharing a bathroom with them? While I certainly could imagine a standard that looks like:
I can't see how you could actually write or enforce the laws and social norms around that in a consistent way that actually works out in pratice. The only two reasonable standards are "biological" or "legal documents" in my opinion. Either standard will involve some women sharing a bathroom with some people that they might read as "men", so that can't be the deciding factor.
How far are you willing to take this? Should we systematically look at how certain rooms are used, and if it would ever be the case that there's a woman alone in the room with a man, should we relocate activities or force the man to stand outside or something? Should we have far more women's only spaces than we currently do in society? What rooms besides bathrooms should we be sex-seggregating?
You'd have to codify the actual-but-unspeakable moral intuition that most people have, which is something like: the only sacred/protected category is femininity, and once it has been tainted with masculinity it forfeits its protections. Gender segregation, discrimination and reservations all only serve the purpose of elevating "pure" females.
This is why the anti-trans faction is primarily concerned with MtF as an intrusion upon female privileges and FtM as a threat to impressionable girls, while the pro-trans faction (to a lesser degree) exhibits a preference for focussing on MtF rights as something that men must be compelled to grant and FtM rights as a freedom that women ought to have (and why radfems are a massive nuisance that they would rather forget about). Both sides understand that "protect women" is the only widely shared moral foundation.
Yes. Although this is not a stable equilibrium either. A society that enshrines "protect women" but doesn't enshrine "respect men" ends up becoming horribly biased against men.
Example #1: Ukraine. Women flee the country and are living their best life clubbing with rich Germans. Men are press ganged against their will and go die in a ditch somewhere.
Example #2: Men perform nearly all the dangerous jobs in the U.S. (Probably 99%+). These jobs, which have high rates of death and dismemberment, often pay more. However, any time men make more money than women, there is talk of a "wage gap" which must be corrected.
The recognition that sexes are different must come paired with the recognition that both sexes have special needs and duties. Women are not inherently morally superior, but we've evolved as a species to see them this way because of the intense demands and vulnerability of motherhood. In an anti-natal society women might as well just be weak men.
The male/female dynamic to me appears to very closely mirror the adult/child dynamic and I'm not sure why more people don't frame it this way. Most norms or policies that are criticised as misogynistic are really more paternalistic in my estimation, based on the intuition that women aren't as strong, capable or accountable and so are in need of special protection and consideration from men, who might even be asked to sacrifice their lives, but on the flip side people traditionally see men as much more capable and agentic and independent and generally worth taking seriously.
Women benefit a lot from this dynamic obviously and it's even embedded in a lot of progressive ideas and campaigns if unwittingly, but you can see how it's not exactly as flattering to them as it might first appear, framing them as more of a beloved subordinate than a respected equal.
Such a comparison is "saying the quiet part out loud", and so it's only said explicitly by /pol/acks who don't care about optics and only intend to maximally offend. It's rhetorical suicide in the same way that saying "we want women to have the right to kill babies" would be.
I can't express these thoughts in a more coherent manner right now, so here's an array of tenuously connected musings vaguely related to the subject of women's role in society. If this sucks, let me know.
The Greek-Catholic belt in Eastern Europe, Georgia the country, and the American red tribe have TFR’s ~2. It’s achievable even if I couldn’t really point to the unifying factors- western social conservatism, religiosity, and ruralness, I suppose.
My main concern isn't whether a ~2.0 TFR is attainable, it's whether it's sustainable. The reactionary route of mostly/entirely restricting women to the homemaker role seems to result in fertility rates higher than really needed, and all other approaches seem to converge on sub-replacement fertility. For as much as we've avoided Malthusian collapse, the prospect of population growth outpacing productivity is theoretically sound, and I don't want to push our luck much further.
For nearly all of human history, populations were kept stable despite TFRs of 4.5+ by massive infant mortality, appreciable maternal mortality, and more death in general. The social technologies that ensured fertility was kept that high are now mostly unneeded, potentially harmful, and crippled by the Pandora's box of contraception. In their absence, the paradigms that have emerged haven't been any more adaptive, to say the least. I have no idea what the optimal arrangement for fertility in industrial society might be, but I'd bet it won't be as simple as retvurning to tradition.
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