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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.
Ok, we seem to have gotten off-track on this one. So to clarify what I'm saying, I'm saying that by your standards, I can't say pedophilia is sexually deviant because the community says it is, because the community can be wrong, and because the community can be wrong (after all, the ancient Greeks thought pedophilia was fine), we have to play cultural relativism and pretend that any standard is as good as any other absent some other justification that can't be based on the community. Do you agree with that?
I didn't say your view was naive just because you disagreed with me. I said that your view is naive because you seem to not be considering the many important differences between men and women, which have been enumerated to you before.
No, the same does not apply. There are many more important differences between men and women than "one tends to be small and the other tends to be large". The smaller man doesn't have to worry about being forcibly impregnated by the larger man, for instance. We divide by gender because of the many important differences, not just because men and women differ by height.
The many trans-identifying males I have met in real-life look like men. If I wasn't paying attention, was inebriated or was looking at them from a sufficient distance, I might mistake them for women. But either way, in normal conditions I would see them as men, especially when they speak. The only way that trans people can pass is through online media.
No, that was not my response. That was a tangent and not something critical to the main point of my post. I explained how in a world where wig-wearers (claim to) feel oppressed for wearing a wig (much the same as trans people (claim to) feel oppressed for being trans), social norms would be established to not tell obvious wig-wearers that they were obviously wearing a wig, and this would result in many obvious wigs.
Your response is also confusing, even if "making a wig look natural is much easier than making a man look like a woman" was somehow my only point. I pointed that out because the "toupee fallacy" argument seems to rely on the assumption that the only differences between men and women (for the purposes of recognizing gender) are hair style, makeup, dress, maybe even body hair. In reality, there are perhaps hundreds of subtle differences that people may not be able to explicitly make legible but still factor in to their assessment, and most of them are not within reasonable control of the trans-identifying person wishing to present as the opposite gender. Whereas the only difference between successfully passing wigs and obvious wigs are, well, just the wigs.
My argument was not "X is easier than Y, therefore not-Y" as you seem to be implying.
This seems extremely confusing. I don't understand whatever you're saying about my use of the word "exponential" or how it's relevant to my argument, so I'm just going to say that if you don't like me saying "exponentially less", I can say something like "a significant reduction in" instead, as long as it properly conveys the point that gender segregation would is clearly a superior policy when comparing how many incidents of sexual harassment there are with it vs. without it.
So you concede that it's not going to happen, then? Most societal changes don't require a full rebuild of society to happen.
What's the practical difference between this and abolishing gender segregation entirely? A "passing trans individual" doesn't exist. A less-than-passing trans-identifying man (i.e. all trans-identifying men) is likely to be confronted by a woman or a security guard as a result of his entering the women's room, and if he can't be compelled to confirm people's suspicions that he is a man, then... he just gets to go in the women's room anyway? Meaning that any man who calls himself a woman can legally waltz in to the women's room, since no one can do anything about it. Is this not just doing away with gender segregation?
Policies are not mutually exclusive. We can and should have both policies of "don't harass others" and "men are prohibited from using the women's room." At no point did I say we should have only the latter policy.
There is also an important disanalogy with weapon bans, in that disarming average, everyday citizens places them at a severe disadvantage from criminals, who will ignore the law and arm themselves anyway, preying on the unarmed. "Gun-free zones" are just zones full of future shooting victims. Meanwhile, if I as a man am prohibited from going into the women's room, that doesn't disadvantage me in the slightest.
Exactly which adverse effects are there? If I as a man am not allowed in the women's room, where's the adverse effect? I'm perfectly fine with going into the men's room.
Meanwhile, in the other direction, if men are allowed to enter the women's room, there would be a tremendous amount of sexual harassment that would occur. Arguably, abolishing gender segregation is a shortcut to accomplishing the "justifiable purpose" of... making it so trans-identifying men can deny reality... at the cost of adverse effects on innocent women. Well, I suppose an important difference is that the number of innocent women affected would not be a small number.
My standard is more nuanced than that. I explained how if someone appears to support the Kiwi Farms, they will be confronted with the mainstream narrative that we facilitate harassment, we're linked to 3 trans suicides, we swatted MTG, etc. Regardless of the fact that all these claims are false, the person will be asked to disavow this lest they be considered a supporter of harassment/suicide/swatting, and more often than not, they will indeed disavow harassment/suicide/swatting.
So it's not as simple as "silence = disavowal" or "silence = approval". It's "silence = unknown, ask for further clarification". Now I ask you again, and I want you to answer the question this time: Do you genuinely think that, if a trans activist was asked to disavow the cotton-ceiling activists, that they would do so?
To echo @FtttG (replace sex with gender):
And as for this:
The former is an extremely rare issue and not a reasonable consideration for which word to use 99.9% of the time. If you need to disambiguate, you can just say natal women or even cis women, neither of which requires reference to genitals or gonads.
I brought up hair color as an example of an obvious trait to notice, as obvious as gender. I was not bringing it up as an example of a trait that's easy to change (which gender is not), or for any other purpose.
Why does it matter what they look like from the outside? If you want to discuss the validity of a claim, I'm happy to elaborate and make arguments for it. If you want me to elaborate, then say so. But what it looks like from the outside is not really relevant.
Again, if I have to care about what my claims look like from the outside, then I can't assert that the Earth goes around the Sun because from the outside, that claim looks very similar to the claim that the Sun goes around the Earth.
I was referring specifically to enforcing gender segregation by someone who asked everyone who entered, even obvious women, whether they had a penis. That just never happens, but you asserted that "usually happens", hence why I asked. Even in your examples, people only asked "are you a man or woman", nothing about genitals. So again, since enforcing gender segregation does not require asking about genitals, I would not characterize it as "prying into other people's bodies".
But since you brought up several instances of women accused of being men, I will address those too. I think there's an important confounder here with any cases like these, and this can be seen most clearly in the Staten Island case. It's obvious to me that the shopkeeper had a short temper, or was looking for an excuse to assault the woman. That he called her a "transvestite" doesn't mean that he assaulted her solely on the basis that he thought she was a man. (It doesn't even mean he thought she was a man, he was probably just insulting her looks, but that's tangential to my main point.)
My point being, there's always going to be people who start confrontations and incidents, because they had a mistaken belief, or even because they had a bad day and were looking for an excuse to take their anger out on someone. The fundamental attribution error applies here: I wouldn't attribute these incidents to anti-trans sentiment, any more than I would attribute a guy angrily pounding on a vending machine to him being the sort of guy who's just angry as opposed to external circumstances I don't have knowledge of.
I don't believe that abolishing gender segregation would have prevented these incidents, because the instigators were just looking for something to be mad about and would have found a different reason without gender segregation. However, abolishing gender segregation is sure to create a significant amount of sexual harassment, particularly from men directed toward women.
As for your claim that "so many cis-women get accused of being men", well, the number of cases here falls within lizardman's constant. I don't think there's an epidemic of women being falsely identified as men, that we have to abandon the use of our eyes lest we misidentify a woman as a man. I think that 99.9% of the time, women are accurately identified as women. In particular, I think the number of such incidents pales in comparison to the number of incidents of sexual harassment that would happen were gender segregation to be abolished.
I sincerely doubt that there is a "trans woman" who looks more feminine than 20% of women. And why exactly should gender be considered private medical history when... people can just look at someone and see? It's just like hair color. (No, I am not saying that we should segregate based on hair color, or that it's easy to change gender like it is to change hair color, or anything else besides that hair color, like gender, is obvious.)
And, gender roles? Exactly who is pushing gender roles, and what exactly are those gender roles? Because I would say narrow gender roles are being enforced when someone sees a boy playing with dolls and declares him to be a girl, and trans activists are far more likely to do exactly that than gender-critical people are.
I don't understand what this has to do with the right to refuse service. And even if it's true and even if it's morally justifiable in some "you wronged me, now I can wrong you" sense, it's not like literally every private business in the world participated in feeding their customers to Big Data in this way. There are many private businesses who have done no wrong, who should keep their right to refuse service to anyone.
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