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And how do you think a trans-woman might feel, when people characterise her identity in such a manner?
The pro-trans side was not the first to use that particular tactic.
No, they also have testicles rather than ovaries; all other biological differences are downstream of the hormones produced by these organs, hence 'sequelae'. (definition)
I have re-read the linked posts and have not found anywhere where I have claimed that you refuse to tell us why you think you're entitled to know about the genitals of complete strangers; I am rejecting your claim that your reasons justify the intrusion on people's privacy.
If you walk into your manager's office and you're like "I want to see all my cow-orkers' complete medical charts, which will help me make Bayesian inferences on which ones are most likely to go postal, so I can shun them.", how amenable do you think your manager will be to your request?
Right: in other words, "sex". I don't propose discriminating on the basis of genitals; I propose discriminating on the basis of sex (in certain contexts). Why then do you insist on using the extremely long-winded phrase "genitals and their sequelae" when the word "sex" would capture exactly the same distinction?
Oh, right. Because gender ideology is such a nonsensical and incoherent worldview that you can't defend it on its own merits, and have to resort to underhanded tactics like implying that anyone who disagrees with it is a sex pest.
To replace the symbol with the substance, i. e., replace a disputed term with its definition.
In what sense is the word "sex" disputed?
You're not replacing the symbol with the substance. You're replacing a common-sense word with a dysphemism that normal people find creepy and alienating. This is a tactic that trans activists have a strange predilection for ("pregnant people", "menstruator", "chestfeeding", "birthing parent"), under the guise of "accuracy" and "inclusion". And trans activists have the nerve to ask why people find them and the way they talk so off-putting.
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While I am somewhat more sympathetic to trans people than @FtttG, I agree with him that I see trans people use this "Why do you want to know what's in our pants? Ewwwww!" framing all the time, and it is really annoying and disingenuous.
No one on the gender critical side "wants to know what's in your pants." Most gender critical people don't think trans women belong in women's spaces whether or not the trans woman has a penis. While some (particularly in the radical feminist fringe) might have a particular horror of penises, it's not just the penis that makes the man, so to speak.
You can disagree with gender criticals and their desire to exclude trans women from women's spaces, but I think @FtttG is justified in being annoyed when you try to reduce it to a cheap accusation of being some kind of pervert obsessed with genitals.
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If someone is loudly parading their perversion around for all and sundry to see, it's not wrong for me to accurately characterise it as such. Rather, you demanding that I refuse to recognise that the Emperor has no clothes (something which is obvious to everyone, including you) amounts to gaslighting.
Woman: Getting changed in front of a male person makes me uncomfortable and I don't think I should be expected to do it.
Trans-identified male: When I put on women's underwear, I
become physically arousedexperience gender euphoria.Celestial-body-NOS: Oh my God, I can't tell the difference – they're exactly as sexually deviant as each other!
Likewise, plenty of trans women just do look ridiculous. Maybe you think it's not polite to point it out, but I know you think it. Don't tell me you look at this person and think to yourself "wow, what a hot sexy lady! I would love to take a gander at those bizarre prosthetics she's wearing under her top!"
To reiterate what I said above: many trans women barely even pretend to hide that their "identification" is just acting out a sexual fetish. You can do this "tu quoque" shit all you like: doesn't mean it's equally true of both sides. Women who want to protect their intimate spaces are not exactly as perverted as gross fetishists who are openly, proudly addicted to sissy hypno porn and hold conferences on how to "overcome the cotton ceiling". In fact, the former group isn't perverted at all.
We can quickly sense-check this by looking at the two groups' stated demands. If, as you imply, gender-critical people's obsession with trans people's genitals is borne of sexual deviance, it sure is weird that they're demanding that trans people not expose said genitals to female people. Is this how we talk about any other kind of kink or sexual fixation? Do people with foot fetishes explicitly object to people walking around barefoot? Do men with a fixation on women's arses generally object to strange women baring their arses in front of them? Gender-critical people are not obsessed with trans people's genitals because it turns them on: they know what's in a trans-identified man's pants and have no desire to see it for themselves.
Meanwhile, trans activists are demanding a) the right to expose their genitals to female people who have made it abundantly clear this behaviour makes them uncomfortable, and that b) female people get undressed in front of them, even if doing so makes them uncomfortable. In other words, on the basis of a claimed, unfalsifiable mental state, trans activists want a special dispensation to commit acts which would otherwise be considered indecent exposure or voyeurism. Call the female people objecting to this hateful bigots all you like – we both know which of these two groups it's more appropriate to level the accusation of sexual deviance against.
A transparent lie. You said:
Would it be fair to say you consider me part of the "anti-trans faction"? No gender-critical person I've ever met or interacted with (and there have been plenty) has ever been the least bit shy about telling me why they disagree with gender ideology, and why they don't want to share intimate spaces with male people. But for some reason you insist that gender-critical people have some secret ulterior motive for wanting to know strangers' sexes which they're refusing to disclose. It's bizarre. I genuinely don't know how you arrived at this conclusion.
If you really, honest to goodness, think that I need to see someone's full medical history in order to accurately tell whether they are male or female, I really don't know how we're expected to proceed with this conversation. Are you blind? Are you composing these comments using text-to-speech?
As an aside: I pointed out to you last time that some other aspects of a person's medical history simply can be inferred just by looking at them. If you're obese, myopic or using a motorised wheelchair, it's meaningless to complain that your right to medical privacy has been violated when people notice this just from looking at you. Likewise, certain mental illnesses. If I get on a train and there's a homeless person who obviously hasn't bathed in days and is loudly talking to himself, you're damn right I'm going to infer that he's probably psychotic and try to stay out of his way on that basis. I'd hazard a guess that you'd do the same.
In your worldview, is this behaviour "ableist"? I would prefer to characterise it as "capable of basic self-preservation".
Also, why would my manager have access to my colleagues' full medical charts? Even your counterfactual reductio ad absurdum makes no sense on its own terms.
I am not equating the sides in sexual deviance, so much as pointing out that accusations of sexual deviance were not first levied by the pro-trans faction.
I believe that a cis-woman uncomfortable changing in front of a trans-woman deserves the same accommodations as a white woman uncomfortable changing in front of a black woman, or an Englishman uncomfortable changing in front of an Irishman; namely, it is reasonable to ask for one-person changing areas to avoid having to change in front of anyone one doesn't know; it is not, in my opinion, any more reasonable to demand a 'cis-women only' facility (or an 'officially people born with female parts only facility', but I doubt trans-men will be welcomed) than it is to demand a 'whites only' or a 'no dogs or Irish' facility.
Is it still an 'intimate space' if four billion strangers are potentially allowed to walk in willy-nilly?
Plenty of cis-women look just as ridiculous.
Yes, there are trans people who are perverts, just as there are cardiologists who are murderers and Chinese people who are robbers. That does not make all trans individuals perverts.
It is not necessarily born of sexual deviance, but that does not change the fact that those parts, and other people's bodies in general, are none of your business. If Alice wants to know the precise dimensions of my private parts out of carnal desire, Bob wants to know for statistical purposes, and Carol wants to know because she thinks she can predict the future by the bodily measurements of a randomly selected person, I am equally entitled to tell all of them to bog off.
I don't agree with your assertion that transness is a perversion.
If Dana averts her eyes because she is uncomfortable seeing Erin's nether regions, or undresses behind a curtain because she is uncomfortable with Erin seeing hers, she has not acted wrongly toward Erin. If Dana demands that Erin not be permitted to use the same facilities, Erin is justified in complaining. This applies if Erin is a cis-woman, and it also applies if Erin is trans.
No, they want to be allowed to do the same things as cis individuals are allowed to do.
No, we don't. I legitimately disagree with you.
I said that before you explained your reasoning.
In the hypothetical, I am referring to someone who wants to know things other than 'was this person born with male- or female- associated biology'. Philosophy Bear's concept of 'inadmissible knowledge' gives the example of someone whose father is a murderer.
You can make educated guesses about someone's medical history by observation, but you are not entitled to know whether your guesses are correct; nor are you justified in declaring what is permitted to one to be forbidden to another based on it, unless you have a very, very, very, very good reason, well beyond the correlations associated with biological sex characteristics.
Maybe I'm terminally Quaker-brained, but I don't think it's generally right for what someone is and isn't allowed to do to vary based on accidents of birth.
Ok and...? My opponent making the same style of argument as I am does not make my opponent correct or refute my argument.
I notice that your examples have the sexes match, implying that it's acceptable to accommodate women who don't want to change in front of men. So you think that it's okay to have sex-segregated spaces. Then the entire question boils down to whether "trans women" are women. You seem to think that "trans women" are just women who happen to not be born a woman, like a woman who has dyed her hair color. In reality, "trans women" are men.
Why do you doubt trans-identifying women wouldn't be allowed in a women's facility?
First off, the number of strangers is going to be limited by geographic area. Over the course of a year, I would estimate the number of strangers for a particular locker room to be orders of magnitude lower, maybe in the range of thousands. Second off, yes, it's still an intimate space. It's a space with the social norm of respecting other people's privacy. In particular, most of them prohibit photo-taking and video-recording, and if one were to just loiter and not do their business of changing but just sat there and watched, they would arouse suspicion from others.
But you can still tell that they're women, and not trans-identifying men.
I'm sure there's some trans people who aren't perverts, but they aren't doing anything to reduce that impression when they don't disavow and shame the "cotton ceiling" activists. I don't see Chinese robbers holding conferences on how good it is to rob places and then getting zero pushback from other Chinese people.
Ok. I don't care about genitals. I care about sex. Luckily, it doesn't matter what kind of privacy an individual thinks they have as to their sex, when 99.9% of the time I can tell someone's sex just by looking at them.
Which things, exactly, are trans people not allowed to do? They can still use changing areas, they just have to use the one that corresponds with their birth sex (which is the same thing a non-trans person has to do).
You seriously think it's just as appropriate (if not more so) to levy an accusation of sexual deviance to females who don't want to undress in front of men, than the men who want females to undress in front of them?
Is this hypothetical person an actual problem that needs to be addressed? Because I'm struggling to think of anyone who would fit the description. Most people just want to know what sex someone was born as.
By this extremely high standard, if I'm a bouncer and I see a man stumbling around, yelling something about "the Jews in the clouds" and he wants to gain entry into my club, I can't declare him forbidden from my club based on an educated guess about his medical history (that he is possibly schizophrenic and mentally ill). Do you think that policy makes sense?
So do you think sex-segregated spaces shouldn't exist at all then? If we follow (your conception of) Quaker-brain to its logical conclusion, determining what you're allowed and not allowed to do based off of a coin flip at birth doesn't seem generally right.
No, but your having made that style of argument first does put you on thinner ground when you claim that your opponent, in making that argument, is behaving inappropriately.
If I were designing society from the ground up, there would not be gender-segregated spaces. A man preferring not to expose himself to women and a woman preferring not to expose herself to men would be accommodated by the same means as a man preferring not to expose himself to other men and a woman preferring not to expose herself to other women.
The examples I gave had the sexes/genders match because I was alluding to precedents from outside the 'what policies ought we have towards trans individuals' issue.
Saying "You think P. In reality, ¬P." does not prove ¬P.
DuckDuckGo results for 'trans man'
DuckDuckGo results for 'trans woman'
Which of these do you think would raise more eyebrows using the ladies' room?
Hence 'potentially'.
Which is still too many people to know personally (last time I checked, the upper bound was estimated at approximately 150.)
Yes! I am in favour of respecting people's privacy! That is why I do not condone requiring people to publicly declare or confirm private information about their bodies in order to use public facilities.
And this would still apply even if everyone involved is the same sex/gender by every possible definition.
I don't think you can.
And has Ms 'I want a locker room without people born with male bodies, and am willing to settle for 20% of the total' disavowed and shamed Mr 'round up all the [anti-trans epithet redacted] and dispose of them'?
(That famous picture of the Nazis burning books of which they disapproved? Those included the library of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, which had promoted the rights of LGBTQI+ individuals during the 1920s.)
Note the bolded part.
"Which things, exactly, are black people not allowed to do? They can still use the bus, they just have to sit in the part that corresponds with their race (which is the same thing a white person has to do)."
Didn't fly then, won't fly now.
I think it is more appropriate to levy an accusation of sexual deviance at a cis-woman who pursues her desire not to undress in front of natal-biology!men not by petitioning for one-person curtained changing booths but by prying into other people's bodies, than at a trans-woman who wants to change clothes without declaring to everyone in line-of-sight that she was born with male parts.
It is a reductio ad absurdum, also known as 'high-energy ethics'.
"And people in hell want ice water."
That is why I said 'unless you have a very, very, very, very good reason'. It helps to read the entire sentence.
WRT your hypothetical, there are two critical differences:
P(anti-social behaviour|schizophrenic and ranting about alleged Jewish conspiracies) >> P(anti-social behaviour|biologically male).
It is reasonable to not let him in solely because of the anti-Semitic ranting, even if he isn't schizophrenic, and has documentation from a dozen psychiatrists attesting to this.
Why? Is there some sort of limited resource of charity, and me making that argument first means I have taken from the resource of charity, leaving my opponents less charity to spare, or something? Or does me making the argument mean it's okay for that argument to be applied to everything, including my argument? Why does it matter who said what first?
I don't accept that just because gender-critical people first said trans people are sexually deviant, that it's appropriate for trans people to levy the same accusation back at them. You can't just apply the same argument to everything or to itself. If I accepted this, I wouldn't be able to call pedophiles sexually deviant.
A: I'm attracted to kids.
B: That's disgusting and sexually deviant.
A: No u! You're the deviant one here because you're actually thinking of fucking kids when you accuse me!
There's more to it than just a woman wanting to not to expose herself to men. Even if there were enough private changing rooms for everyone, there are still safety concerns with allowing men in women's locker rooms just feet away from where women are changing. The safest and most practical way to alleviate those safety concerns is to have gender-segregated spaces.
I don't think you've proven P. On what basis can "trans women" be said to be women when they share 99.9% of their traits with men?
The "trans women", because they look like men.
It's impractical to know everyone personally enough such that one feels comfortable using a locker room, and it's not necessary to do so when the locker room is gender-segregated.
So are you against showing your ID to enter establishments that serve alcohol, then? That's confirming private information about your body (your age) in order to use a public facility.
Also, in what sense can gender be considered "private" when people can tell just by looking at you? That's like declaring hair color to be private. Age has a better claim to being private, since I've never seen anyone who was able to reliably and accurately tell exactly how old a stranger is without pre-existing knowledge, merely give estimates and ranges.
There's a difference between having rules and enforcing them. With gender segregation, there is a strong, bright line against a man entering the women's locker room. If he does so, it's immediately obvious to everyone that he's violated the rules and should be forced out if he doesn't realize his mistake and walk out immediately. Meanwhile, if we can't enforce gender segregation, it's much trickier to deal with rules violators. They can always claim plausible deniability that they're not actually taking photos or watching people, and if the offender is a man it's exponentially harder for a woman to confront him to remove him from the space.
Just because there are 0.001% of cases where this isn't true, that must mean I can't tell the difference between women and trans-identifying men?
I can tell the difference between a door and a fake door, but there was one time I was in a deceitful maze and tried to open a door only to find it was fake. That means I must simply be unable to tell the difference between doors and fake doors.
Yes? The Kiwi Farms is a good example of a mass of anti-trans people that (unfortunately) has very few allies, even with gender-critical people. To the point that many people avoid mentioning the farms at all, and if they must, they always say "this is a place that gathers lots of good information on the crimes of trans people BUT I don't condone doxing or harassment or swatting or deadnaming or misgendering or slurs or..." I remember Ovarit (a gender-critical site) allowed discussion of the farms, but not linking to it on account of all the dox we had.
There are some rare exceptions, but my impression is that the farms' reputation is sufficiently toxic that anyone with even minor notoriety getting sufficient pushback for appearing to support the farms (and by proxy, any alleged harassment/swatting) is going to take the easy path and disavow any of that stuff, even if it means disavowing us.
Are you saying that gender-critical people are aligning themselves with neo-Nazis?
So I can't take notice of other people's bodies at all, even things which are obvious like their hair color? Am I supposed to pretend to be blind and not know what color someone's hair is?
These situations are not analogous. There are more differences between men and women than there are differences between white and black people. Moreover, the nature of male/female differences justify gender segregation, while white/black differences do not justify racial segregation.
I also note that black-designated facilities were almost universally in poorer condition than white ones, while there's no reason to think that men's facilities are any worse than women's facilities (or at least worse to the same degree as blacks' were to whites').
This is quite a lot of tortured logic to characterize keeping men out of women's locker rooms as "prying into other people's bodies". There seems to be an assumption here that "trans women" look and act just like a woman in every other regard besides having a penis, which is simply not true. "Trans women" overwhelmingly look and act like men. And from this assumption that "trans women" pass, you seem to be imagining a Karen who sits at the door of every locker room, asking everyone who enters if they have a penis. That is simply not how gender segregation is enforced. How it's actually enforced is that men will read the sign that says "men" and go into the men's room, and women will read the sign that says "women" and go into the women's room, and should there be any man who (by mistake or otherwise) enters the women's room, the women inside will recognize him as a man, and then notify him and/or other people that he is in their space and will do whatever it takes to get him out of said space if he doesn't leave by himself. None of this enforcement requires "prying into other people's bodies" and I'm struggling to think of how it could be described that way. Unless, of course, merely looking at someone and noticing things like their hair color is enough to be considered prying into their body.
I don't see many trans activists petitioning for one-person curtained changing booths. They overwhelmingly advocate for trans-identifying men to be able to enter women's spaces.
Also, this is a moot point when "she" looks like a man, thus already declaring to everyone in line-of-sight that "she" was born with male parts.
Ok. I'm legitimately confused as to what your point here is then. Obviously, it's not acceptable for someone to go up to a complete stranger and ask verbatim "what's in your pants?"
It's easier for people to tell what sex someone is than for people in hell to get ice water. They can tell just by, you know, looking at them.
You wrote down four "very"s in a row. I assumed that meant the reason had to be extremely rare or held to a very high bar. I thought that "I think he's schizophrenic" would be a good reason, but I wouldn't consider it a "very, very, very, very good reason" because it's an educated guess and I could be totally wrong about it.
I'm really trying to imagine myself in this hypothetical. If I really was a bouncer, I would normally just reject anyone even slightly fishy, on account of the fact that a private business reserves the right to refuse service to anyone (modulo the Civil Rights Act and ADA). But if you told me that I wasn't permitted to forbid people based on educated guesses about their medical history, and I wasn't even allowed to know if my guesses were correct, I would definitely be a lot more cautious about who I reject, including the schizo homeless man.
So it's a matter of degree, and not of kind, then? As Churchill said, now we're just haggling over the price.
And to be clear, unless the club was women's-only or something, I as the bouncer would never reject entry solely based on someone being male. It's a totally different set of rules and expectations when it comes to enforcing gender segregation and ensuring only women are allowed in the women's locker room. That's to say, I don't fully accept even you comparing the two probabilities this way as if that's the only difference between my bouncer hypothetical and gender segregation.
Ok, forget the anti-Semitic ranting then. I only included that to establish that he was schizophrenic, since many schizophrenics do tend to veer into expressing bigoted sentiments despite not actually holding such sentiments deep in their hearts (such as Kanye West).
Because it is relevant to the question of "When, if ever, is it appropriate to claim or imply that someone's position is motivated by sexual deviancy?".
If the answer is "Never.", then a lot of apologies are owed by many people on the anti-trans side, starting with Ray Blanchard.
If the answer is "When they actually are engaging in such." then we have the follow-up question: "How do we define what constitutes that category?".
If the answer to that question is "Anything disapproved of by the Community." then you have the obvious failure mode that, many times, the community is wrong; e. g., inter-racial marriage in pre-1967 Virginia.
Again, that doesn't protect against issues with same-gender dyads, which can still have substantial disparities in strength.
And the trans men don't?
So it isn't possible for someone to be inappropriate towards someone of the same gender?
Age isn't typically considered a 'body' matter.
You can't always tell, any more than you can always tell when someone is wearing a wig.
There are plenty of trans people whom you don't know are trans, and there are cis people who have been mistaken for trans.
This seems analogous to the man who dropped his keys in the bushes and is searching for them under the streetlight because it is easier to see. You have made it easier to tell if someone is violating policy, at the cost of the policy being further away from what you are trying to accomplish.
It is rarer for men to harass other men, or women to harass other women, but it does happen, and one needs to have a policy in place for that contingency; once one does so, one can apply the same responses to cross-gender harassment.
And it's also much trickier to deal with murderers when you can't beat up the most likely suspect until he confesses that his entire family are rabbits, but sometimes we must choose between what is right and what is easy.
It's a lot more than 0.001%; again see previous re toupees.
And most trans activists avoid mentioning the cotton-ceiling crowd.
I'm just saying that we've been down this road before, and Noticing a distinct lack of 'gender-critical people' responding to certain alarmingly-familiar rhetoric with unequivocal statements that, while they would prefer to have women's spaces that do not allow natal-anatomy!men, it is not worth the risk of trans people being sent to death camps.
'Other people's bodies in general', in that instance, was referring to your claim that "Ok. I don't care about genitals. I care about sex.", and referring to whatever biological characteristics are downstream of hormone levels, which in the absence of artificial administration are produced in the genitals, specifically in the gonads.
However, for the sake of argument, we will consider your example.
Noticing that Alice has dark hair and Bob has light hair: ✅
Telling Alice that, because she was born with blonde hair, she will never be anything other than a blonde, and excluding her from a brunettes-only space: ❌
One, you are begging the question.
Two, there were many in the middle of the past century who asserted otherwise, with every bit as much confidence as you.
...other than the part about a trans woman, in using the men's room, having to announce her biological characteristics to everyone in the area, including some who consider her existence to be a personal affront.
The trans women whom you know to be trans.
That's usually how it ends up.
My point is that you are not entitled to information about other people's private medical history, beyond or to a greater reliability than you can gain by observing, even if knowing it would give you an advantage.
'He is schizophrenic' is not a good enough reason by itself. Past or current anti-social conduct resulting from schizophrenia can be.
Ok, so then this goes straight back to my pedophilia example. If I can't even condemn pedophilia because it's "disapproved of by the Community" and the community can sometimes be wrong, then, what, are we supposed to play cultural relativism and pretend that every standard across every society in all of history is just as valid as any other? (After all, the ancient Greeks really loved pederasty.) I don't accept that.
This is an extremely naive view to take. No, it's not true that you can just apply same-gender policies to cross-gender harassment. There's a reason I said that it's exponentially harder for a woman to remove an unwanted man from her space. A woman is unlikely to want to confront a man; she likely fears his almost-certainly superior strength, and especially the possibility of being raped and impregnated. It's much easier for a woman to tell off another woman if the latter is being creepy or weird than for a woman to tell off a man.
Well if your only exposure to trans-identifying women is through online pictures, then sure, they do pass more easily than trans-identifying men. If you actually look at them in real life, though, not so much.
It's not? But is it not information one would want to keep at least somewhat private? I wouldn't like it if a stranger came up to me and asked verbatim "How old are you?"
My other point with providing ID to enter a bar is that your ID also almost certainly has a bunch of other private information about your body on it too, such as weight. (Ask the fat activists if they like sharing their weight with strangers.) So I ask again, how far are you taking this principle of privacy? Is it far enough that you would abolish requiring patrons to provide their ID before entering a bar?
I disagree, see my response to the toupee fallacy.
Really? The policy is further away from what I'm trying to accomplish? How so? Because compared to your proposal of abolishing gender segregation, the policy would result in exponentially less incidents of sexual harassment.
Are you seriously claiming that gender segregation is just like administering extrajudicial violence to a suspect before even convicting him at trial? If you are going to seriously claim this, you need to elaborate on a very convincing argument for how the two are even remotely similar in any way (besides claiming that both situations violate someone's civil rights).
I wrote two entire paragraphs about gender-critical people and the Kiwi Farms. There's much more to it than just "gender-critical people avoid mentioning the Kiwi Farms, so they disavow us." Silence doesn't mean disavowal, it usually just means lack of knowledge. I elaborated on how if someone appears to support the Kiwi Farms by mentioning us in anything less than a negative light, there will almost inevitably be a crowd that forms to call for them to disavow us or else they get canceled, and a majority of those people do end up disavowing us in some way as a result. Now run that experiment again but with trans activists and cotton-ceiling activists. Do you genuinely think the results would be the same, and a trans activist pressed on this matter would disavow cotton-ceiling activists?
You seem to have switched standards. Literally in the preceding paragraph, you said "most trans activists avoid mentioning the cotton-ceiling crowd", implying that silence is disavowal. Now here, you notice silence from gender-critical people, and interpret that as... endorsement of sending trans people to death camps?
Please pick a consistent standard by which people should disavow the more extremist parts of their faction.
I'm confused why you seem to keep tracing things back to genitals and gonads. I don't care about people's anatomy, I care about what gender they are. I don't need to think about genitals in order to look at someone and recognize what their gender is.
Do you genuinely, honestly think that switching genders is as easy as switching hair color?
I'm... not? I am just summarizing my position. If you want me to elaborate on how there are vastly more differences between men and women than blacks and whites, then I can, but you should say so.
This is a fully general counterargument against asserting any claim with any confidence, ever. I can't even assert that the Earth goes around the Sun when there were many people in the 17th century who just as confidently asserted that the Sun goes around the Earth. Or that the Earth is round when there are so many people confident that the Earth is flat. Or that we landed on the moon when there are so many people confident that we didn't. Or that Lee Harvey Oswald alone shot and killed JFK when many people confidently assert otherwise. Or...
A "trans woman" is already announcing his biological characteristics to everyone in the area by simply existing, because everyone can tell he is a man just by looking at him. Unless there's a blind person, in which case they can tell he is a man when he speaks.
You seem to be assuming that all trans-identifying men live in a world where their trans status is completely invisible to everyone around, until they're forced to go to the bathroom. Not so. They're already "outed" as men, they just don't realize it because people are too polite. For how much trans activists fearmonger that there are people out there who want them killed or in death camps, there's a remarkably stunning lack of dead trans people. Trans people are, statistically, one of the safest demographics in America.
Please point me to literally any case where this has happened. Actually, point to at least three, since you said "usually". I've never seen it happen.
Ok. I think this is a noble principle, and it is also a quite banal one that I don't think anyone would disagree with. But it's also just kind of not really relevant here. None of my arguments require knowledge of private medical history.
So this would mean I as a private business wouldn't have the ability to restrict anyone based on potential harm. That we don't have the right to refuse service to anyone (modulo CRA/ADA). Which seems like a pretty radical proposal for how society should work.
No, we condemn or tolerate things on the basis of whether or not they harm other people.
It is not 'naïve' to disagree with you.
The same applies to a 99th-%ile-size cis-man harassing a 1st-%ile-size cis-man. Should we have facilities divided by size as well as gender?
I used online pictures because Markdown does not have a 'link to Real Life' formatting option. The one trans-woman I have knowingly met in person did not appear to be obviously male.
Your response was, anti-quote, "...making a wig look natural is much easier than making a man look like a woman."
Making a dugout canoe is much easier than making a Falcon-9 rocket; does that mean that anyone who thinks that they are connecting to this forum via Starlink is delusional?
'Exponential' does not mean 'big change'; it means that, given equidistant a, b, and c, c / b = b / a, as opposed to a linear relation in which c - b = b - a; if you only have a and b, the difference between 'linear' and 'exponential' becomes meaningless. (Also, it's 'fewer', not 'less'.)
The 'proposal of abolishing gender segregation' was if I were designing society from the ground up. Going forward from the society we have now, acceptable options from my view would include any compromise in which passing trans individuals are not compelled to out themselves, less-than-passing trans individuals are not compelled to confirm any suspicions held by bystanders, and neither are required to affirm the anti-trans worldview, in order to participate in public life to the same degree as cis individuals.
If what you are trying to accomplish is a reduction in harassment, a policy of 'Do not harass others' is closer to your goal than a policy of 'Do not use the cross-gender facility', in much the same way as a policy of 'Do not commit murder' is closer to the goal of reducing murders than a policy of 'Do not possess any scary-looking device'.
No, I am not claiming that one is just like the other; I am claiming that the difference is a matter of degree.
In both cases, one has a justifiable purpose, and is tempted to take a shortcut that will make accomplishing that purpose easier at the cost of adverse effects on a small number of innocent people.
(But the soul is still oracular, amid the market's din
List the ominous stern whisper, from the Delphic cave within
They enslave their children’s children who make compromise with sin.)
And how many trans people are familiar with the cotton-ceilingers?
I am attempting to apply the same standard to your side that you apply to mine.
"Most trans activists avoid mentioning the cotton-ceiling crowd" was a response to your statement about people avoiding mention of the New Zealand Agriculture Webbed Site.
A consistent 'silence = disavowal' standard would support your statement, but would undermine claims of relevance of the more extreme pro-trans voices.
A consistent 'silence = approval' standard would mean that you can blame the trans activists for their more insane allies, but you will then be blamed for the eliminationist attitudes on your side.
A position of 'silence = disavowal when it's the right wing and calls for LGBTQFHTAGN+ to be [insert Deadly Euphemism]; silence = endorsement when it's the left wing and calls for the deadnames of mid-career-transitioned celebrities to be memory-holed' means that I'm not the one who's being inconsistent.
And the dispute at hand is what gender certain people are; thus I am attempting to replace the symbol with the substance.
To point to a category that includes Taylor Swift and Elliot Page, and excludes Breakfastnook Cowcatcher and Caitlyn Jenner, I can either refer to 'karyotype=XX' or 'parts at birth=ovaries'. The former runs into the issue that, sometimes, someone with one set of chromosomes will develop the organs usually produced by the other chromosomes; the hormones, and all other biological features, will follow, and the individual will not know that anything unusual has happened unless they have their DNA tested, which is not a universal procedure.
I wasn't the one who brought up hair colour. You asked, anti-quote, "So I can't take notice of other people's bodies at all, even things which are obvious like their hair color? Am I supposed to pretend to be blind and not know what color someone's hair is?". I was merely applying my principles to your example.
No, it is a caution against asserting that "My claim is different from that one because it just is!" while ignoring that, from outside, they look veeeery similar.
Then why do so many cis-women get accused of being men in disguise?
Dani Davis, Lake City, Florida, 2025.
Jay Rose, Las Vegas, 2023.
Aimee Toms, Danbury, Connecticut, 2016.
Jasmine Adams, Staten Island, New York, 2023. (Not even in a women-only space!)
Kalaya Morton, Tucson, Arizona, 2025.
If Alice is a trans-woman who looks more feminine than 20% of cis-women, the only reason that 'Alice was born with XY chromosomes and everything downstream thereof' isn't considered 'private medical history' is to support the house of cards that is our narrow concept of gender roles, some of which are younger than some members of the U. S. Congress.
That 'right' ought to have gone out the window in the 2010s when a supermarket floated the idea of using Big Data (the predecessor of AI) to identify which customers were on a fixed budget and make their experience deliberately unpleasant so as to drive them away and focus on people to whom they could upsell.
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Do you take the principled stance that any groups being forbidden to go into a place reserved for another group is recreating apartheid? If random adults off the street are prevented from going into the local elementary school's changing room while in use, is this an intolerable breach of their freedoms? They might have a reason for doing it other than to leer at naked little boys.
If you respond to every scenario where Group A is prevented from sitting in the same place Group B by calling it the return of Jim Crow, you are not going to suddenly make everyone realise they are the second coming of the KKK. You are going to make them wonder if Jim Crow was really as bad as it's cracked up to be.
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I'm done with this. You're a naked, unabashed hypocrite. You think that gender identity, like sex, is an innate trait. And you also believe that people of a particular gender identity should be given special treatment, which implies that people without that gender identity should not receive special treatment. By your own admission, you think we should build a separate prison facility for trans-identified male convicts to protect them from the non-trans-identified male convicts who might want to hurt them. What about vulnerable non-trans-identified men who might be at especial risk of violence in prison? Fuck 'em.
You demand special privileges for people who possess what you believe to be an innate trait, an "accident of birth". And then turn around and smear me as a pervert and racist for demanding special privileges for people possessing a different innate trait. The only difference between us is that the trait I'm talking about is falsifiable and can be trivially checked with a cheek swab test.
You believe that male people who claim to identify as women deserve special protection from male people who claim to identify as men, even though there's no inherent reason we should expect a member of the former group to be less capable of defending himself than a member of the former group. But you believe that female people deserve no special protection from male people, even though a mountain of scientific evidence demonstrates, without ambiguity, that male people are vastly stronger than female people (and also qualitatively different, in that male people can penetratively rape female people, but not vice versa).
I think you just don't care about female people's welfare. Strange that this is a feeling I get so often when debating with trans activists, who are basically just crypto-MRAs.
As often happens in discussions that get heated and personal, you are veering into unnecessary antagonism.
"Your argument is hypocritical, here's why" is much less antagonistic than "You're a naked, unabashed hypocrite."
Strive to be less antagonistic, even if the other person is aggravating you.
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Yet those accusations are the bread and butter of the pro-trans faction. "Why do you want to know about their genitals?" [intended with this implication] is kind of the standard pro-trans canard; hell, you're actively using it yourself.
I'll start taking that seriously when [the set of people who are overwhelmingly likely to be pro-trans] stop blood libelling me for being part of the murder gender (and conversely, granting themselves extra privileges for being the should-protect-from-murder gender). Granted, this isn't directly the argument you're making, but it does point to the pro/anti-trans thing being more who/whom, and the actual "gender euphoria" is arguably just as much about ramming your ideology down everyone's throat (remember when 2010s atheists used to say that? Guess that aged poorly) than it is the psychological effects, or personal benefits, of dressing as the opposite gender in public.
Ok, so what about kleptomania or pedophilia (in the "older man hits on your 5 year old daughter" sense- not something that would raise 'consent' issues)?
I'd give you points for being consistent and accepting both on its face (after all, how could mere speech be harmful?)... but if you don't, well, now we're just haggling over the degree of "is and isn't allowed based on real or imagined harms to the participating parties, willing or not".
I'm not interested in the pretense that it isn't a sexual deviance. It pretty clearly is, on its face in fact- what we're actually debating is to what degree that should matter, and who should be forced to accept what.
Which is why the motte of the anti-trans argument centers around "they are completely unwilling to accommodate for anyone else"- something you yourself acknowledge. The bailey is stupid and absurd, but then again, the bailey of the pro-trans argument is "they should be forced at literal gunpoint to accommodate for me" and not merely "they want to be allowed to do the same things as cis individuals are allowed to do".
As [for the purpose of this argument] a cis-person, I don't have the right to summon the State to beat someone into submission should they call me a woman. That is, very literally, what trans-people insist on (or rather what their loudest advocates insist on; trans-people don't actually have a critical mass and most of the fight is an intra-woman conflict, but that's out of scope at the moment.)
I do not condone that, either. An individual ought to be judged by their own actions, not by the actions of an arbitrarily-defined group of people who are of a similar demographic.
A kleptomaniac forbidden from pilfering my personal possessions and a paedophile forbidden from soliciting my five-year old daughter are not being forbidden from things other people are allowed to do, they are being forbidden from things that are forbidden to everyone else.
And what is your definition of 'sexual deviance'? To me, 'it harms people' is a necessary qualification for membership in that category. If one has a 'frowned upon by the local curtain-twitchers' definition, then two men in a lifelong monogamous relationship would have been considered 'sexually deviant' in the 1950s, and a man devoted to his wife and not interested in relations with other men would have been considered 'sexually deviant' in Classical Athens. If one has a 'goes against the Natural Law' definition, we don't have access to a set of tablets on which the True Natural Law is inscribed, and Natural-Law arguments tend to turn into just-so stories about why the Natural Law forbids exactly and only the things that the local curtain-twitchers don't like.
And what accommodation are they not making that they ought to make?
If it is 'allowing people who do not believe that Trans-Women Are Women to continue in their employment', per the initial incident pushing J. K. Rowling towards public TERFism, then you might have a point.
If it is 'they insist that society apply the same rules to trans-woman as cis-women, the same way the Civil Rights marches insisted that black people be allowed everything white people were allowed, and wouldn't/won't let the majority have a little discrimination as a treat', then I do not believe that it is reasonable to expect them to accommodate, just as, if Alice wants Bob to stop bullying her, and Bob wants to continue bullying Alice, Miss Take is completely out of line if she expects Alice to compromise.
So what are trans people forbidden from doing that everyone else is allowed to do?
That would exclude a lot of sexual behaviors clearly outside the norm, such as foot fetishists.
I don't think it's a fruitful exercise to come up with a definition that works for all societies across all of time, or to play cultural relativism and pretend that because societies disagreed on a definition that it must mean nothing (or everything) can fall under the definition. I can play the same game for a term like "rape" too. "Is 'rape' whatever is frowned upon by the local curtain-twitchers? If so, marital rape wouldn't be considered rape in the 1950s."
The entire crux is whether or not "trans women" are women, or if they are men. If they are men, then it's not discriminatory to treat them like men, like it would be if white people and black people were treated as different people.
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Also, literally, an entirely different chromosome in every single cell of their (our) bodies, with a big chunk of DNA that they share with no biological woman.
But nobody does this, because everybody knows perfectly well which damn sex people are. What they want, and what you are adamantly against, is to be permitted to notice it and take action on it in public. As with race, your unique deontology seems to require fingers in the ears and eyes firmly shut, lest you see or hear things that lead you to sin.
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