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So not only is a woman "anyone that identifies as a woman", not really answering the question of what a woman is, what they're identifying with is an identity, thus also not telling us anything about what the act of identifying is supposed to be, and also the type of identity they're identifying with is a gender identity, "gender" being the category that encompasses men and women.
In other words: a woman is anyone who identifies with identifying as a woman.
I appreciate the efforts to come up with a coherent answer in the aftermath of Matt Walsh's documentary, but I think you guys still have a long way ahead of you.
What would be an indicator of bad faith?
It's not turtles all the way down; the first step, the foundation, comes from the peaks of the bimodal distribution: there are a large number of people who have XY chromosomes, a 🍆 between their legs, a higher T/E ratio, and a certain mental aspect that (if they have it at all) is of a certain type; there are a similar number of people who have XX chromosomes, a 🌮 between their legs, a lower T/E ratio, and a different type of that mental aspect (if they have it at all).
To a first approximation, we call the first group 'men¹' and the second group 'women'. Then, we sort out the edge cases, including those in which the various characteristics do not align with each other, and those in which they impart a visceral feeling of wrongness to their possessor.
There was a time when the Abolitionists had a long way ahead of them.
The following account is an attempt to construct the strongest possible such indicator:
Henry has a long history of opposing gender transition, same-gender relationships, and gender-nonconforming behavior, especially among men. He has multiple criminal charges for harassing and assaulting men, and women he thinks are men, for not living up to his standard of masculinity, including three assault charges for attacking gay couples, one assault charge for trying to hit a coworker's hand with a hammer when the coworker came in wearing pink nail polish applied by his daughter, one assault charge for shoving a visiting Scotsman into a wall for wearing a kilt (Henry wound up in hospital), one charge for leaving a wood-chipper (with an "Insert groomers here" sign) on the front lawn of a local bar owner who hosted a (21+) drag show, and two charges for beating up women who were attempting to use the men's lavatory (one trans, one when there was a long line for the ladies' room).
A public referendum is held on the question of whether trans individuals ought to be allowed to use the WC of their identified gender; Henry campaigns vehemently against it; despite this, or perhaps because of it, the referendum passes with a clear majority,
The next day, Henry announces: "I now identify as a woman; therefore, you either have to let me use the women's room, or make the [redacted]s use the men's room! Either way, they'll get what's coming to them if they don't man up, ha ha ha!"
I would state with a minimum of 95% confidence that Henry is acting in bad faith.
¹Originally we called them 'were-men' and the other group 'wif-men'; 'man' without prefix was gender neutral.
So rapists trying to avoid serving their sentences in male prisons are not acting in bad faith when they suddenly "discover" a female gender identity immediately before going into trial, not even if they make zero effort to medically transition and only the most token effort to socially transition.
The only people you see as acting in bad faith when they "identify" as something they aren't are the people doing so ironically in order to expose how nonsensical your worldview is. You are more comfortable admitting rapists, murderers and pederasts than you are admitting infidels and gadflies.
And you wonder why the trans activist movement attracts so many bad actors.
Some of them may be acting in bad faith. I would advise putting criminals who began claiming to be trans-women after being charged in a separate facility from both cis-man and cis-women; if someone transitioned before charges were filed against her, I strongly doubt that she is lying about her gender identity.
That was the first such case I thought of, but I do not insist that it is the only possible such.
On the contrary, while I disagree with your position, I do not desire that you face legal repercussions for expressing it, nor that you be denied employment, nor that your arguments be suppressed in reaching anyone who is interested in reading them. When they come for the transphobes, I will not remain silent, lest they come for me.
Why?
Well, if we can't put them in the women's facility without endangering cis women, and we can't put them in the men's facility without their being victimised by cis men, I don't know what alternatives we have.
This sounds like an argument for putting men at a high risk of being assaulted in a separate facility, not an argument for putting men who "discovered" they were trans yesterday in a separate facility. Would men who "discovered" a trans identity even face an elevated risk of assault?
At least when I insist on sex segregation in certain contexts, I'm demanding it on the basis of anatomical features which can be directly and unambiguously observed. You are promoting the idea that violent criminals be afforded special privileges on the basis of unfalsifiable psychological states, and seem utterly oblivious to how such a policy is ripe for abuse.
The latter is a subset of the former.
Given how many men object to the slightest hint of femininity in a natal-anatomy!man, I suspect that they would.
No, I am promoting the idea that, when we choose to incarcerate certain persons, thus denying them the ability to either defend themselves or avoid attackers, we have assumed a corresponding duty to protect every single one of them from violent assault to the best of our abilities, and do not have the right to condemn a certain fraction of them to constant victimisation because protecting them is inconvenient.
No, I understand that it is possible that a cis-man might falsely claim to be trans in order to be moved to the trans-women's section; I merely consider this a less bad outcome than abandoning actual trans-women to the ghastly fate to which your proposed policy would lead.
A policy of providing medical care to prisoners having medical emergencies has the potential to be abused, but an occasional criminal getting away with wasting the system's resources is a less bad outcome than leaving them to die on the floor when they actually need medical intervention.
I wouldn't expect men who "discovered" their trans identity immediately prior to being convicted of a violent crime to display any hints of femininity at all. Because they're not men who have been struggling with their gender identity from a very young age, but rather ordinary violent men taking advantage of a poorly-thought out policy.
I can imagine a man who has been formally diagnosed with gender dysphoria and has been cross-dressing from a very young age might have a hard time in a men's prison. I have a hard time imagining that e.g. "Isla" Bryson would face an elevated risk of victimisation in a men's prison compared to the modal prisoner. Because he is a vicious, remorseless thug whose solicitor presumably advised him to take advantage of a poorly-thought out policy.
The fact that every policy implies trade-offs does not imply that all policies are created equal. A policy which is dramatically more likely to be abused by bad actors than to be used by those who legitimately need it is a bad policy on its face. The fact that doctors are allowed to administer morphine inevitably means that some drug addicts will be administered morphine who don't really need it – but a doctor who administers morphine to every patient who requests it, no questions asked, would quickly find the ratio of drug-seeking patients to the legitimately needy becoming unacceptably large. One of the many skills a doctor must learn is distinguishing the legitimately sick from the malingerers: a doctor who failed to learn this skill would be struck off, or ought to.
Your policy would not even accomplish its own stated aims: it does not even optimise for protecting the most vulnerable prisoners. It optimises, as I said, for protecting the prisoners willing to make unfalsifiable claims about their inner psychological states, with no gatekeeping of any kind. I simply don't understand your unquestioned belief that legitimately dysphoric prisoners would be safer if housed in a facility containing every prisoner who claims to identify as female, even if they only began doing so immediately prior to or after conviction. If you were a young man who'd been struggling with his gender identity for as long as you can remember and had partly medically transitioned, who would you rather share a cell with: a cisgender man who'd been convicted of tax evasion and who has never hurt a fly, or a vicious violent thug like "Isla" Bryson? I know how I'd pick.
I really do not how you arrived at your conclusion that the best way to protect legitimately dysphoric prisoners is to house them in a facility with every prisoner who claims to identify as female, even if they only began doing so very recently, even if they're violent offenders, even if they've been convicted of raping male victims. I genuinely don't know why you're patting yourself on the back about how compassionate your proposed policy is when to my mind it seems obviously worse at your stated aim of protecting female-presenting male prisoners, when compared to offering "focused protection" of the most vulnerable prisoners on a case-by-case basis.
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