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I do not think that describing trans women as 'men with a cross dressing fetish' is very close to reality.
There is a small fraction of people who are genuinely very uncomfortable with their biological gender. They sometimes take hormones, get surgery and go through byzantine legal processes to change their legal gender. They kill themselves at elevated rates when forced to conform to their biological gender. This is not just some kink.
Different cultures have dealt differently with non-conformists of all sorts. Killing them at the earliest opportunity is certainly a popular choice.
Modern liberal democracies generally frown on that and try to do better than just applying whatever solution would suit the majority of people. We don't accept "most straight men would prefer if they knew for certain that the man peeing next to them was not sexually attracted to them" as an excuse to kill all the gays and bisexuals, or even kick them out of the military.
The bathroom issue is simply an issue of trade-offs. Having to use a gendered bathroom which belongs to a gender one does not identify as clearly can be humiliating. Imagine getting told that you are too small or weak to qualify for the men's bathroom, or that you are too large, ugly or flat-chested to qualify for the women's bathroom.
On the other hand, there is both a perception of danger if people who are not cis-women are allowed in women's bathroom as well as possibly some actual danger.
I think that the actual danger is over-rated. With the possible exception of Hogwarts, gender restrictions in bathrooms are not strictly enforced. Someone who is entering a women's bathroom to commit rape is unlikely to care that he will also break some trivial statute about not going to the women's bathroom. Nor would punishing someone who disregards the gender sign on a bathroom (for example, to avoid waiting time) with a lengthy prison sentence be proportionate.
There will probably be some sick fucks who like to jerk off in the women's bathroom who can use the excuse 'but you see, I actually identify as a woman' if they are seen entering or exiting, but this is a lesser concern.
At the end of the day, it is a numbers game. If half of the rapes are committed by men in women's bathrooms who had previously invoked their gender identity as an excuse to be there, then I would agree that this was a huge fucking problem and we should restrict access to improve women's safety.
As things stand, I don't think it is a huge practical issue. At the risk of sounding like some woke, I think most women I know would very much prefer having to share their bathrooms with trans women to losing access to abortions.
A decade ago, Scott argued for drawing a more complex gender boundary than 'has Y-chromosome' as a cheap and easy way to improve outcomes for a lot of people. I think that his article is still spot on.
I think that the bathroom safety argument frequently is used by anti-trans people not because preventing rapes is their first and foremost concern, but because it is one of the few issues with trans rights that the average person will care about.
I don't think it's an issue of just humiliation. A trans woman who is on estrogen for a substantial amount of time and has developed breasts or had bottom surgery is likely to be at risk of sexual assault if she is forced to use a men's bathroom or a men's locker room. There's also the risk of regular non-sexual assault by transphobic men against someone who has had the hormone profile of a cis woman for years and has the accompanying muscle mass. I agree that bathroom assault risk is pretty low for each individual use, but a trans woman in a space where 99% of the other people are cis men has two orders of magnitude more encounters with potential assailants than a cis woman in a woman's room where 1% of the users are a trans women.
I have a trans friend, she passes pretty well now but a thing I witnessed happen a couple times when we were hanging out in bars earlier in her transition was men hitting on her without realizing she was trans, realizing she was trans as the encounter went on, and getting aggressive once they figured that out. I would fear deeply for her safety if that encounter was playing out in private in a men's room and not in a crowded bar where she had friends around. To say she's forced to use men's restrooms is to force her to take on a substantial risk of assault (sexual or otherwise) to exist in public, and frankly for some people I think that's the point, to exclude trans people from public life.
I mean, the solution for this poor unfortunate is to work through whatever issues drive interest in transgenderism rather than transitioning. Make your bed and now lie it, I suppose- using the men’s locker room is a risk for some biologically male transgenders, but society oughtn’t to be in the business of protecting individuals from the consequences of their own bad decisions at the expense of people who haven’t made such bad decisions.
This proves too much¹; your argument could be adapted to defend either cancel culture or Jim Crow laws!
or
Your argument also begs the question² of whether transitioning is a bad decision; furthermore, even if it were, if the 'consequences of a bad decision' include extralegal violence, protecting people from it is one of the most fundamental functions of society, and protects you from somebody else deciding that some aspect of your life-style is a 'bad decision' that they are entitled to assault people over. (You still Kant dismiss univeralisability.)
¹Proving too much: an argument which, if valid, would also prove something known to be false; elaborated here.
²In its older sense of 'a proof of P that assumes P'.
This question, on a fundamental level, resolves to postulates, and postulates are unfalsifiable so this turns into idiotic definitional debates.
Transgenders larping as women should learn self-defense, I guess. Society has to pick and choose whose safety to prioritize in this instance and it should come down hard on the side that's doing what its supposed to do.
Prioritise the safety of whoever is in more danger.
And where will you stand when the leopards eat your face? When someone bigger and stronger than you decides that something about your life, that contravenes no legal code in the jurisdiction, is 'not doing what you are supposed to do', and that he is entitled to suppress it by force?
Consider Thomas More:
A transwoman, in existing publicly while appearing as the gender opposite that associated with her genitals at birth, has broken no law of Man (at least in North America or Western Europe); do not cut down Man's laws against assault, lest you call up that which you cannot put down.
This is just slave morality.
The strongest argument for it, actually. If the only proposition made by Sklavenmoral were that 'the weak ought to be protected from the strong', and the only proposition made by Herrenmoral were that 'the strong ought to be able to do to the weak whatever they feel like', the former would be called 'morality' and the latter by the sort of words discussed in the 'Taboo vocabulary' category on Language Log.
The strongest argument in the other direction, on the other hand, is their respective attitudes towards those who Accomplish things, such as ending the almost-nine-year gap during which America Could Not Into Space.
(cf. Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman, Astral Codex Ten, July 2024).
I don't find the proposition that the argument in favor of the the weak is self justifying convincing at all.
There have been plenty of successful societies throughout history that considered such a principle to actually be evil. And I don't see their arguments as any less self serving.
Why should we acquiesce to ressentiment? Why ought the weak be protected from the strong.
Divine command maybe the only argument I can actually contenance for this position, and even then God (the one of Abraham) is weary of weakness as an animating principle and gives not a command to submit all ressources and efforts towards it but demands the weak be shepherded by the strong. Establishing a specific subsidiary position where the weak's concern may not jeopardize the operation of all of society.
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