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Transwomen are not Women - Part 15

d4m10n

Penultimate Amazing
d4m10n
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Paul2 said:
If there is a document (driver's license or ID card for non-drivers) that is used as identification with objective characteristics (sex, DOB, hair color, etc.), then other documents or objects, like the license plate, can be individually customized without harming the objective identification function of the license/ID card.
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The core function of both the card and the plate is to identify the bearer thereof; for whatever reason(s) we allow ourselves to have more fun with the latter than the former, using them to broadcast sundry personal statuses, fandoms, or interests to those stuck behind us in traffic. Why is it okay for the state to print a license plate which identifies the owner as "Animal Friendly" or "Autism Aware" but not a license card which says they refuse to identify as either man or woman?

Paul2 said:
Oh, and the state can charge more money for a customized license plate.
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As the bearer of a custom plate, I'm fully aware. ;)
 
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A critique of the Cass Review by a team of international scientists and physicians:

https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/documents/integrity-project_cass-response.pdf

The Cass Review was commissioned to address the failure of the UK National Health Service to
provide timely, competent, and high-quality care to transgender youth. These failures include
long wait times—often years—and resulting delays in timely treatment by skilled providers.
Instead of effectively addressing this issue, however, the Review’s process and recommendations
stake out an ideological position on care for transgender youth that is deeply at odds with the
Review’s own findings about the importance of individualized and age-appropriate approach to
medical treatments for gender dysphoria in youth, consistent with the international Standards of
Care issued by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and the Clinical
Practice Guidelines issued by the Endocrine Society. Far from evaluating the evidence in a
neutral and scientifically valid manner, the Review obscures key findings, misrepresents its own
data, and is rife with misapplications of the scientific method. The Review deeply considers the
possibility of gender-affirming interventions being given to someone who is not transgender, but
without reciprocal consideration for transgender youth who undergo permanent, distressing
physical changes when they do not receive timely care. The vast majority of transgender youth in
the UK and beyond do not receive an opportunity to even consider clinical care with qualified
clinicians—and the Review’s data demonstrate this clearly
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d4m10n said:
The core function of both the card and the plate is to identify the bearer thereof; for whatever reason(s) we allow ourselves to have more fun with the latter than the former, using them to broadcast sundry personal statuses, fandoms, or interests to those stuck behind us in traffic. Why is it okay for the state to print a license plate which identifies the owner as "Animal Friendly" or "Autism Aware" but not a license card which says they refuse to identify as either man or woman?
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Because their functions are very different even if they both can be brought under the broad heading of “identification.” Drivers license or ID card is a fundamental form of ID. You cant bring your license plate into a bank and use it as ID to cash a check.
 
Paul2 said:
Because their functions are very different even if they both can be brought under the broad heading of “identification.” Drivers license or ID card is a fundamental form of ID. You cant bring your license plate into a bank and use it as ID to cash a check.
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I'm aware of some differences, but it remains unclear why we ought to have a general rule against including information that speaks to the bearer's psychological state. It feels to me like the rationales given thus far are not the true ones.
 
d4m10n said:
I'm aware of some differences, but it remains unclear why we ought to have a general rule against including information that speaks to the bearer's psychological state. It feels to me like the rationales given thus far are not the true ones.
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I don't think it would be the end of the world if there was optional or individualized information on an ID card, but it's just not the time or place for that type of thing. Sure, the state was pushing that rationale aside at least a little bit to offer personalized license plates, but the license plate is not an official ID of a person like a driver's license is.
 
It should also be noted that the personalized license plate is still also an accurate and unique key to the car's registration status. "69420" might be amusing to me, but it's still supremely useful to police, DMV, and hotels inventorying their parking lots overnight.

This is why I'm in favor of legal name changes being reflected on government ID.
 
Paul2 said:
I don't think it would be the end of the world if there was optional or individualized information on an ID card
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Optional info isn't that big a deal, if it's merely in addition to the important stuff. The substitution of arbitrary info in place of objective info, though, that is a real problem. So replacing sex with gender is a problem. Having gender in addition to sex is a bit silly, but not really a problem.
 
d4m10n said:
I'm aware of some differences, but it remains unclear why we ought to have a general rule against including information that speaks to the bearer's psychological state. It feels to me like the rationales given thus far are not the true ones.
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In part, privileging one set of preferences over another offends people who don't have that preference. Why list gender rather than, say, religion? That privileges people who care about advertising their gender over those who care about advertising their religion. Not that big a deal, but really, what do you expect?

More importantly, what really raises people's hackles is the substitution of those preferences for reality. Because that causes actual real-world problems. When male sexual predators are put in female prisons because they claim a female gender identity, there can be devastating consequences (well, not for the middle and upper class TRA's who aren't subject to those predations, but there are for somebody). And that's what the TRA's are pushing. Gender identity on ID's isn't supposed to be in addition to biological sex, they want it instead of biological sex. And that's at the heart of this conflict. Can someone's preferences override reality? TRAs are saying yes, their opponents are saying no. ID's are just another battleground in that conflict.
 
d4m10n said:
I'm aware of some differences, but it remains unclear why we ought to have a general rule against including information that speaks to the bearer's psychological state. It feels to me like the rationales given thus far are not the true ones.
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I feel like you're willfully missing the point. Honestly, I can no longer tell if you're playing devil's advocate or not.

So let's back this up a bit. You suggest that we want a general rule against including information that speaks to the bearer's psychological state on official identification documents.

Your assumption is incorrect. It's not that we want a rule against it, it's that we think it's 1) completely irrelevant and 2) being requested by people who want that irrelevant information to grant them special privileges that we don't think they should have.

Do you think that transgender identified people want gender identity markers on their IDs solely because it makes them happy? No, not at all. This isn't like wanting their ID card to have puppy dogs on it, because it makes the holder happy to see puppies everytime they have to demonstrate that they're old enough to buy booze.

They want gender identity markers on their IDs so that they can use that marker to compel other people to treat them differently, and so that other people are obligated to allow them to circumvent sex-based restrictions on spaces and services.

That's what we object to, and that's why we don't approve of placing gender identity markers on IDs. Gender identity markers do not serve to actually identify the person, nor do we think they should provide legal standing for people to compel special privileges from others.
 
Ziggurat said:
Optional info isn't that big a deal, if it's merely in addition to the important stuff. The substitution of arbitrary info in place of objective info, though, that is a real problem. So replacing sex with gender is a problem. Having gender in addition to sex is a bit silly, but not really a problem.
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It depends entirely on what is implied by that gender identity marker. If it has zero policy implications, then fine, it's up there with putting your favorite ice cream flavor on your ID: useless but harmless.

On the other hand, if that gender identity marker gets used to override sex restrictions on spaces and services, then I think it's a problem. If it creates a situation where Eddie Izzard can walk into the female showers at the local Y, drop trou, and parade their twig and giggle-berries around and say "See, my ID has and F on it! You can't make me leave" that's a problem.
 
Shadowdweller said:
A critique of the Cass Review by a team of international scientists and physicians:

https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/documents/integrity-project_cass-response.pdf
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It might have been better to post this under the Cass review thread in Science and Medicine (I was thinking of posting it there when I've had time to go through it in detail).

This is largely a hit piece written by proponents of current models of GAC for minors, including those associated with WPATH and those whose own research was rejected as low quality by the Cass review. For example, every piece of research published by Jack Turban (one of the Yale authors) was rated low quality and rejected from the final Cass synthesis.

The body of the paper is not even coherent, in that the different sections contradict each other. I'm not sure if they are written by different people and some of them haven't even read the systematic reviews commissioned for Cass. For example, section 2 complains that the review doesn't define evidence quality, in contrast to standards like GRADE. But the systematic reviews did not use GRADE and they do explain how they defined evidence quality. The critique seems to be complaining that high quality evidence as defined by GRADE means placebo-controlled RCTs and that most evidence in medicine can't meet this standard, but the reviews for Cass used NOS which is for non-randomised trials, meaning that a study can be rated as high quality without being a placebo-controlled blinded study or even an RCT. The authors therefore appear to be either ignorant, or deliberately obfuscating and playing into the misinformation distributed by activists that studies were downgraded by Cass for not being double-blinded RCTs (while avoiding saying this directly).

That's just one section I'll give more thoughts when I get more time.
 
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Ziggurat said:
Optional info isn't that big a deal, if it's merely in addition to the important stuff. The substitution of arbitrary info in place of objective info, though, that is a real problem. So replacing sex with gender is a problem. Having gender in addition to sex is a bit silly, but not really a problem.
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Emily's Cat said:
It depends entirely on what is implied by that gender identity marker. If it has zero policy implications, then fine, it's up there with putting your favorite ice cream flavor on your ID: useless but harmless.
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Here I disagree. Putting extraneous information on an ID document detracts from the usefulness of the document. It makes it more difficult to read, requires more cognitive load to sift the document's signal from the document's noise.

Even if the effect is miniscule, it's still a detrimental effect.
 
Ziggurat said:
Optional info isn't that big a deal, if it's merely in addition to the important stuff. The substitution of arbitrary info in place of objective info, though, that is a real problem. So replacing sex with gender is a problem. Having gender in addition to sex is a bit silly, but not really a problem.
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Agreed. I would argue that it is of at least some usefulness for the person attempting to match an individual to their government name to know in advance whether the person in question identifies as a gender which doesn't match their sex, if only because some people pass really well as the opposite sex and it would be good to know whether to be looking out for that possibility.

Ziggurat said:
Why list gender rather than, say, religion?
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Possibly because atheists look much the same as Protestants, whereas gender identity is correlated with gender expression.

Ziggurat said:
More importantly, what really raises people's hackles is the substitution of those preferences for reality. Because that causes actual real-world problems.
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I'd argue we can easily prevent such substitution by making it clear that sex and gender are two separate variables, whereas keeping only sex on the document invites the usual confusion.

Emily's Cat said:
They want gender identity markers on their IDs so that they can use that marker to compel other people to treat them differently, and so that other people are obligated to allow them to circumvent sex-based restrictions on spaces and services.
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I'd argue we can easily prevent such compulsion by making it clear that sex and gender are two separate variables, whereas keeping only sex on the document invites the usual confusion.
 
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d4m10n said:
I'd argue we can easily prevent such compulsion by making it clear that sex and gender are two separate variables, whereas keeping only sex on the document invites the usual confusion.
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That is an argument the people who want this insanity are never, ever going to accept. Their commitment is to the total elimination of biology as an identifying factor - the elimination of words such as mother, father, male, female. They want the ONLY identifying factor for a man or a woman is down to what they individual feels.
 
smartcooky said:
That is an argument the people who want [gender ideology] are never, ever going to accept.
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Judging by the replies to #2521 they are in good company here. Evidently both sides want just one marker, and they each want it to mean exactly what they mean by it.
 
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d4m10n said:
Judging by the replies to #2521 they are in good company here. Evidently both sides want just one marker, and they each want it to mean exactly what they mean by it.
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That marker is and always has been biological sex. The trans activists want to replace that marker by the nebulous, unscientific, and ill-specified "gender identity".

They've failed to make a convincing case. There's no symmetry here.
 
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theprestige said:
Here I disagree. Putting extraneous information on an ID document detracts from the usefulness of the document. It makes it more difficult to read, requires more cognitive load to sift the document's signal from the document's noise.

Even if the effect is miniscule, it's still a detrimental effect.
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Perhaps, but I think your objection is largely one of aesthetics and efficiency, not one of policy or appropriateness. On this point, it circles back to damion's post regarding custom license plates which do the same thing you complain of here - the add extraneous info the plate and make it less immediately useful, more difficult to read, and requires more cognitive load to sift out the number and state from the background noise.
 
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