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One is imposed on people to deny them opportunities, the other emerges from what people choose and is not mandatory.
Then, for 'Black' substitute whatever subaltern group is closest to hand. (There were times when Irish people fell, or were shoved by Englishmen, into this category.)
It is 'neither here nor there' because the demands in question differ in one crucial aspect; the Muslim extremists are demanding superiority, that you follow the rules of their religion, under threat of violence, while they are not similarly obligated to follow the rules of yours; racial/ethnic minorities are seeking equality, and a redress of the far more legitimate grievance that no person ought to spend their entire life on probation because of the circumstances of their birth. The same applies to the notion of expecting half of humanity to accept being treated as sex-offenders-in-waiting.
No, it is entirely possible that you might be the normal one and I might be the weird outlier; however, sometimes the weird outliers are right and the normal ones are wrong.
...in the thought experiment you gave. "You aren't allowed to learn anything else about the applicants other than their age and sex." In actual reality-based reality, I would be allowed to learn other things about the applicants, interview them, ask for references, &c. Furthermore, my child might very well have opinions of their own; these could also be a factor.
One, the phrase 'certain key areas' miiiight be doing a lot of the work there. (see below)
Two, there is no shortage of historical examples of times when the overwhelming majority of people were in favour of something which wasn't right. How many stood against the Laundries?
I do not claim that the conclusions were universally adopted so much as that they have been put forth and I find them credible.
Unfortunately these past eleven years, many people have been crawling out of the woodwork who don't acknowledge that racial discrimination is wrong. As their policy proposals carry with them an alarming possibility of some very ugly outcomes, I can only conclude that, if we set precedents which have the potential to be used in an attempt to justify said actions, we are playing with fire, and risk being very badly burned.
My proposals:
Each sport decides for itself (trans-activists and TERVes can direct their advocacy to the sporting bodies and hopefully turn down the temperature knowing that the other side gaining the upper hand won't be for all the marbles), defaulting to a definition based on hormone levels.
If you must have changing rooms divided by sex, use the 'currently possessed anatomy' or 'hormone levels' definition, the former of which would shield people from having to be exposed to the other genitals; also have a sufficient quantity and quality of one-person gender-neutral changing rooms that they are regularly used by both cis-men and cis-women.
Designate one facility specifically for trans-women; if you cannot protect a trans-man among cis-men, designate one for trans-men.
I was unaware that there were sex-specific hospital wards, other than for sex-specific conditions; there will still be male and female doctors even in a single-sex ward, and the patients are unlikely to be in a condition to cause much if any harm.
What is the difference? You just answered a question with a question (or rather, with a Russell conjugation). What is the difference between "discriminating" against people based on an inherent trait they have no control over, and drawing a "social distinction" between people based on an inherent trait they have no control over? I choose to give drunken male people a wider berth than drunken female people. No one forced me to do this, so it's not mandatory. Couldn't you therefore say that I'm not discriminating against male people, I'm just drawing a social distinction between male and female people?
That seems to be exactly what you're threatening, even if you're doing it on behalf of another group of which you are not a member.
Oh, so you mean that in reality you would come up with some pretext to preferentially hire a female babysitter over a male, but insist that it's just because the girl is more "experienced" than the boy and their sex has nothing to do with it. Just like a suspiciously large number of white anti-racists just so happen to live in gated communities which are 90%+ white. Try not to twist your arm from patting yourself so hard on the back.
Of course your child would: nine times out of ten, your child would feel safer being left alone with a female babysitter than a male, because "discrimination on the basis of sex" is instinctive, not learned. "I think it's wrong to discriminate on the basis of sex – but the female babysitter was more qualified than the male, and my kid liked the female babysitter better, so I hired the female babysitter. Complete coincidence that I ended up making exactly the same decision as every other parent who would never leave their child alone with a male teenager, I swear to God."
An extremely noisy and unreliable metric, given that male puberty imparts permanent changes to bone density and lung capacity.
Trans activists sometimes accuse TERFs of being perverts who want to subject everyone to mandatory genital inspections before they're allowed to get changed. Interesting to see the shoe on the other foot. Note that such a rule would prevent ~95% of trans-identified males from using female changing facilities: advocating for it might get you tarred as a TERF by your erstwhile fellow-travellers.
You realise what will happen, don't you? All of the male inmates who suddenly "realised" they had a female gender identity immediately after being convicted will be transferred to this shiny, comfortable facility. For a few months, all will be well in this facility. But eventually the number of "trans women" being transferred to this facility will reach the point at which the population density in this facility is the same as any other male prison, with all the opportunistic violence and rape that that implies, and "trans women" will be no safer in this facility than they would be in an ordinary men's facility. Actually, if you look at the prison population as a whole, the proportion of prisoners who've been convicted of at least one sex crime* includes a disproportionate number of trans women, and trans women are nearly three times more likely to have at least one sex crime conviction than ordinary men are: hence, it's entirely possible that trans women would be more at risk in the dedicated trans women facility than they would be in an ordinary men's facility. Meanwhile, the overrepresentation of sex offenders in the dedicated trans women facility would mean that, in the popular imagination, people would quite reasonably think of the trans women's prison as being "the prison where all the nonces are". As an advocate for trans rights, is this really the kind of connection you want to impart to the general public?
Perhaps you'll say that admission to the dedicated trans women facility would be made conditional on some kind of gatekeeping. Now would be an excellent opportunity to suggest what that might look like.
No need: convicted trans men are staying put in the women's prison because they know they're safer there. Per this article, of requests for trans people to be transferred to the opposite-sex facility, 96% came from male inmates. There are even examples in this article of trans men being incarcerated in the male facility, realising they weren't safe there (presumably shortly after learning that the sun rises in the morning and that water is wet) and requesting to be transferred to the women's prison. So much for their "male identity".
Yes, but doctors are gatekept and subject to safeguarding requirements. The only requirement for a patient to be admitted to a hospital is that they be sick. Hospitals cannot simply turn patients away because they are violent or prone to sexually assaulting other patients. There is simply no way that admitting male patients to women's wards does not greatly increase the rate of sexual assaults therein.
Incorrect.
*Before you ask: no, that does not include prostitution.
I was referring more to the choices made by the people between whom the distinction is drawn, and whether they have the ability to opt out of it if they personally choose to. It is the distinction between an Englishman choosing to attend a Protestant church and an Irishman choosing to attend a Catholic church, either being able to diverge from this if he so chooses, versus a charity giving food unquestioningly to a hungry Englishman while giving a hungry Irishman the third degree over whether he might fall short of perfect virtue in some way which would allow the charity matron to leave him to starve while thinking her own hands clean.
No, I am merely observing that, when one racial/ethnic group keeps its collective boot on the neck of another, karma has a tendency to bite the first group in the derrière.
This is no more the same thing as one group demanding that another group bare their neck to its boot, than 'Kyiv threatens to bomb Russia unless Russia stops invading them' is the same thing as 'Moscow threatens to bomb Ukraine unless Ukraine resigns itself to being Belarus writ large', or than the Easter Rising is the same thing as Bloody Sunday.
No, I mean that I would judge on the same characteristics as were I choosing between two applicants of the same sex.
I just happen to disagree with what seems to be your assertion that "allow rapists and sex pests free reign to rape and sexually assault to their heart's content" and "keep half the planet on a de facto sex offender registry from womb to tomb" are mutually exhaustive. (If this is not your assertion, what precisely do you acknowledge as being between those?)
I doubt that it would be that often, but I acknowledge the possibility that my child might agree more with you than with me, thus "I think it's wrong to discriminate on the basis of sex – but my child disagrees with me, and I believe that attempting to force the issue risks undermining both my efforts to teach them the things previous generations had to learn the hard way and my strategy for protecting them from abusers, sexual or otherwise, and regardless of any definition of the would-be perpetrators sex or gender."
Also, "my child might very well have opinions of their own" was referring to a broader category, which could include other, less one-sided, subcategories, e. g. the often-depicted-in-media 'opposite sex has cooties' phase. (I'm not sure whether this actually happens, and doubt that it is anywhere near as common, but if it happens, it could tilt the decision either way depending on whether I have a son or a daughter.
(In my response to the artificially constrained Gedankenexperiment posited earlier, note that, following the coin toss, I specified that I would take measures to prevent abuse by a male babysitter; they just happen to be the same measures I would take to prevent abuse by a female or intersex babysitter, both due to the fact that, even conceding your statistics arguendo I do not want to be the one individual in thirty-seven who loses everything betting at the roulette wheel on 'Albania' only to see it come up 'Ghadaffist Libya', and due to the fact that what I believe to be the most effective way of protecting a child from nonces can't be applied selectively. To the best of my knowledge, a sexual predator does not go from zero to Epstein in a single day. Like a tiger¹ unto Cervidae, they seek the most vulnerable; instead of a sambar with a broken leg, they seek a child who has been taught that (1.) they have no rights that their parents, or anyone given in loco parentis authority by their parents, are bound to respect, and that any word of complaint will be met with a total dismissal of the substance thereof in favour of a laser-focus on the sheer temerity of a child having any response to anything decreed by their
ownersparents other than a joyous acceptance² that makes an LLM chatbot seem like the enfant d'amour of R. Lee Ermey and Oscar the Grouch³, and (2.) anything involving certain parts of their body is (a.) deeply inherently shameful, and (b.) somehow their fault (even if they were praying the whole time that they would wake up and realise that it had been a nightmare).)I'm not advocating for it, per se; the operative word there is 'if'.
If you must have changing rooms divided by biological sex,
Dividing by natal anatomy is more intrusive than by current anatomy, as the former involves digging into other people's medical charts as well as their genitals. If a woman walks into the women's changing room, takes off her clothes, and lo and behold! that individual has a vagina, than no woman had to see a penis in the designated penis-free zone; mutatis mutandis for the men's room.
They should not be the only facilities available, compelling pre-operative trans people to use the facilities of their assigned-sex-at-birth, or the majority of them, making the use of the neutral facilities marked⁵ as indicative of transnessosity. Either would, in addition to exacerbating dysphoria and outing trans individuals, also demands that they endorse the anti-trans position; compare a Protestant schoolteacher demanding that the 80% Catholic student body recite the version of the 'Our Father' with 'trespasses' instead of 'debts'.
Of the 87-95% (your link gave a range, 95% being only one end of which), how many have no intention or desire to undergo that part of transition, and how many have been denied the opportunity?
Perhaps I should have said 'one or more'; my point was that, if you cannot protect trans-women in the same facility as cis-men, and you cannot protect cis-women in the same facility as trans-women, then I don't know what else you can do but to treat trans-women as their own category in this instance.
What is not morally acceptable is to, whether it be motivated by personal animus or purely by bureaucratic indifference, decide that it is too inconvenient to fulfill the duty, inseparable from the practise of incarceration, of protecting all of the people one has deprived, even for the most solidly founded of causes, of the capacity to defend themselves⁴; this is the kind of thing that calls for people to end up in the dock at the Hague.
¹My comparison is solely in terms of tactics; I do not intend to insult the character of these magnificent animals, whom I do not begrudge for their need to eat, any more than a military historian comparing the battle doctrine of an Allied general to his Axis counterpart is (at least prior to c. 2015) claiming any moral equivalency between them. Wildlife people, please do not send me angry letters again.
²If the sole determinant of entry into heaven is one's indirect effect on the prevalence of the sexual abuse of children, Aella will have had time to have an affair with every mutually consenting adult in the afterlife long before her mother's sperm donor (for he does not deserve any title a myriadth as respectable as 'father')⁶ has a snowball's chance in hell of coming within sight of the Pearly Gates. (And that's before considering the violent abuse.)
³Yes, I know they are both male; that is not in any way more than the most trivial obstacle, compared to the fact that one of them is a puppet.
⁴The same principle applies to the Ludovico Technique; if we posit an alternate universe, call it A Wind-Up Tangerine, in which Mr DeLarge either is never afflicted with or is cured of the part of the conditioning gives him an aversion to classical music, but is still incapable of violence, even if you think this is a improvement over the status quo, they shouldn't just abandon him to be victimised by everyone else.
⁵"The Joy Is Not Optional", Knowingless, May 2025
⁶"Marked Absent", Outlandish Claims, July 2024
I'm not being the least bit facetious when I say I've read this passage four or five times, and I still have absolutely no idea what point this "analogy" is meant to illustrate in the context of the trans debate. In this analogy, is the Englishman a trans-identified male and the Irishman is a female person? Is the Englishman a male person and the Irishman is a female person? Is a charity matron leaving a hungry Irishman to starve meant to be analogous to a trans-identified male being denied access to a female-only bathroom or sporting event?
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