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Transwomen are not Women - Part 14

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JoeMorgue said:
So you're telling me that you are of the opinion that there is a statistically meaningful number of people out there that I am/would be wrong about their biological sex based on their outward, for lack of a better term, presentation and the fact that I disagree with you about this makes meaningfully angry?
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No dude, the other thing, the 'everyone always really knows who's gay and who isn't' one, and I'm not mad at you, I just deeply, deeply disagree with you and the adrenalin was fear, not anger.

And if your answer to 'it's a smaller circle' is just 'it's not a statistically significantly smaller circle' I'm fine with leaving it there.
 
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JoeMorgue said:
There was a period a year or so back when the discussion was just flooded with insufferable people who thought it was a trump card to post pictures of post-op trans people who had A) where obviously lucky enough to be somewhat androgynous to begin with, B) had obviously had a LOT of work done, and C) were still images taken in perfect lightning that we couldn't see in motion or context and go "Oh so you're saying this person should use this bathroom?" over and over and over and over and over.
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What made me laugh is that they never realized that by doing so they were undercutting their own argument, which is that you can't tell what bathroom someone belongs in by looking at them. They'd show a transman with a full beard and say "Do you think this person belongs in the women's room?" and I'd say "Do you think this person shouldn't be in the women's room?"
 
Emily's Cat said:
We get it, you're "not like other girls". Great for you.
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I think I'm a lot like a lot of other girls. I'm certainly more like other girls than I am like anything else. From where I'm sitting it sounds like you're the one telling me I'm not like other girls just because of a few ways that I don't seem to see things the same way most people see things.

In a discussion that's broadly about outliers, it seems needlessly aggressive to tell someone that it's useless and stupid to the point of disingenuousness to share their point of view on the subject because it's an atypical one.

Oh and I wasn't trying to say I don't think the workplace pressure to dress up is a thing, I was trying to imply it never went away; that there was never a widespread golden age of not having to put on makeup etc to be conidered professionally dressed in most corporate settings etc especially in management, while I've been around.
 
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Paul2 said:
Let’s grant for the sake of argument that trans folk winning sports championships is very rare. It won’t matter, then, to the vast majority of competitors. But it will matter to the competitors that get beaten by the trans person. Those competitors by themselves deserve some sort of accommodation.
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Never mind winning. Just by securing a place on the team, a non trans female has been denied that place.
 
Paul2 said:
Let’s grant for the sake of argument that trans folk winning sports championships is very rare. It won’t matter, then, to the vast majority of competitors. But it will matter to the competitors that get beaten by the trans person. Those competitors by themselves deserve some sort of accommodation.
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Oh, its a LOT worse than just being unfair to those who have been defeated unfairly by biological males competing in female sports.

In the Leah Thomas case (the male swimmer competing as a female), not only were those women denied a pathway to higher honors, they had to deal with him going into their locker rooms and intentionally swinging his salami in front of all the women in there, making them uncomfortable, and then laughing and bragging about doing so. Even worse, the NCAA and UPenn took a "put up and shut the **** up" approach to complaints from the females on the team. Firstly, any women on the UPenn team who expressed a contrary view were told not to make public statements, and were referred to psychological counseling if they objected to having Thomas there. If they still complained, they were threatened that if they didn't shut up about how they felt, they would be kicked off the team and have their scholarships revoked?

These ******* snowflakes are so afraid of criticism that they have to go to extreme measures to silence all dissent.
 
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Emily's Cat said:
First off, "Dude looks like a Lady" isn't about the inability of humans to discern sex. It's about a transvestite.
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Actually, no:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dude_(Looks_Like_a_Lady)

According to Child, Tyler came up with the idea of the song while at a bar and mistaking Mötley Crüe's lead singer Vince Neil for a woman with long blonde hair. Tyler's bandmates made fun of him, joking about how the "dude looked like a lady."[9] Mötley Crüe's Nikki Sixx, in his book, The Heroin Diaries, states that the song was inspired by Neil.
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It was a hair band thing. Male Hippies and Rock n' Roll bands with long hair were told that their long hair made them look like women.
 
Upchurch said:
It's the "cis/transdar is real" bit in this thread. Same conceit, same cognitive bias, just as real.
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The two things are practically opposite: sexual attraction is 99% invisible (you can't know who I'm sexually attracted to unless I make it obvious), while sex is 99% obvious (I can't disguise what sex I am unless I am very unusual).
 
Lithrael said:
Oh and I wasn't trying to say I don't think the workplace pressure to dress up is a thing, I was trying to imply it never went away; that there was never a widespread golden age of not having to put on makeup etc to be conidered professionally dressed in most corporate settings etc especially in management, while I've been around.
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Throughout the 1990s I was working here in the UK for the Bell Labs part of AT&T as a Technical Manager, alternating between line managing about thirty software engineers and project managing about a hundred. As a project manager I attended umpteen meetings in the US and various European countries in which we planned the production and integration of many releases of software for the multiple elements and management systems of large telecomms networks, coordinating the work of about a thousand engineers. At no point whilst working as part of this management team did I wear makeup, a dress or skirt, or anything other than comfortable shoes. At no point did any of my colleagues or superiors so much as raise an eyebrow at my sartorial choices.

Maybe engineers just don't care as much about such things as other professionals. Or maybe sexism actually has got worse again, after so briefly getting better.
 
Matthew Best said:
The two things are practically opposite: sexual attraction is 99% invisible (you can't know who I'm sexually attracted to unless I make it obvious), while sex is 99% obvious (I can't disguise what sex I am unless I am very unusual).
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You can repeat a claim, but that doesn’t make it true. I’ve provided a number of counter examples that no one seems to want to take into account. There is, for example, the photo of the mayor of Nashville’s family that no one could agree on the sex of the people shown. There is the news stories of women’s bathroom gatekeepers who refuse to let cis women in because they are convinced the cis women are biologically male. And then there is Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg, who recently appeared on CNN and was completely mistaken as a trans woman.

In regards to the mythical transdar, folks seem focused on the false negatives given highly conforming cis gendered people, but completely ignore the very definite existence of all the false positives.
 
Upchurch said:
You can repeat a claim, but that doesn’t make it true. I’ve provided a number of counter examples that no one seems to want to take into account. There is, for example, the photo of the mayor of Nashville’s family that no one could agree on the sex of the people shown. There is the news stories of women’s bathroom gatekeepers who refuse to let cis women in because they are convinced the cis women are biologically male. And then there is Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg, who recently appeared on CNN and was completely mistaken as a trans woman.

In regards to the mythical transdar, folks seem focused on the false negatives given highly conforming cis gendered people, but completely ignore the very definite existence of all the false positives.
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The claim is 99% obvious, not 100% obvious. Your examples don't offer any rebuttal.
 
Matthew Best said:
The claim is 99% obvious, not 100% obvious. Your examples don't offer any rebuttal.
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But what are you basing that number on? Is it that humans are super good about determining genetic information on sight or is it that most people's gender expression matches their sex? If the latter, it would suggest that if only 50% of people's gender expression matched their biological sex, would the claim be 50% obvious?

And how would you definitively answer that question? (and don't bother with that study that actually strips out gender expression. That's the thing we're trying to determine.)

theprestige said:
If transdar were real, we wouldn't need preferred pronouns. But biological sex certainly is visible. Which is why we need preferred pronouns.
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Your premise is flawed. Some normative biological sex traits are visible, but so are non-normative biological sex traits and non-normative* gender traits.



* if you believe that sex must be determinative of gender. I don't, but I also know the thread.
 
Upchurch said:
But what are you basing that number on?
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It's a guess, based on the fact that "People are remarkably accurate (approaching ceiling) at deciding whether faces are male or female, even when cues from hair style, makeup, and facial hair are minimised."

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8474840/

Is it that humans are super good about determining genetic information on sight
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It seems that way.

or is it that most people's gender expression matches their sex?
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It apparently holds even if gender expression is removed or minimised.

If the latter, it would suggest that if only 50% of people's gender expression matched their biological sex, would the claim be 50% obvious?
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I think the question is incoherent. Perhaps you can rephrase it.

And how would you definitively answer that question? (and don't bother with that study that actually strips out gender expression. That's the thing we're trying to determine.)
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Whatever you do, don't show me evidence that proves you're right! I don't want to see it!
 
I'm THIS ******* close to demanding someone tell me what gender the invisible dragon in my garage is.

Less flippantly even a "Totally internal personal subjective sense of gender identity" has to pass falsifiability to be meaningful and yet again I'm asking for if it is possible to go "I'm gender so and so" and be wrong.

Again we're back to the core principle of this discussion. "I'm a man/woman" has to mean SOMETHING. Even things of this kind of internal perception can't be 100% detached from reality to the point that they mean nothing.
 
Matthew Best said:
Whatever you do, don't show me evidence that proves you're right! I don't want to see it!
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Yeah, but you see how it doesn't address the question at hand, right? That study is an ideal case where even atypical biological features are minimized. Neat, but not really relevant to real world situations or the question at hand.

How gender expression clues, or even non-normative sex clues, effect our ability to guess someone else's biology is the question. It clearly has some effect or the examples I've given wouldn't exist. Humans might be good, but that could just be because the book often matches the cover. If it turns out that humans are really bad when the book doesn't match the cover, how would we know?


And, taking a step back, this forum was originally associated with the work of James Randi, a man who made his livelihood, both in his shows and with his debunkings, off of the fact that human perception is really bad. Claims that humans are, in general, supper accurate about anything should be met with skepticism and critical thinking.
 
Upchurch said:
And, taking a step back, this forum was originally associated with the work of James Randi, a man who made his livelihood, both in his shows and with his debunkings, off of the fact that human perception is really bad. Claims that humans are, in general, supper accurate about anything should be met with skepticism and critical thinking.
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There's a world of difference between intellectual perception versus perception that's wired into our DNA.
 
varwoche said:
There's a world of difference between intellectual perception versus perception that's wired into our DNA.
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Wow. Now, that's an interesting claim that should be expanded on, and I would love to see support for it.

However, whether intellectual perception or ..."DNA perception", there is an error rate. The size of that error rate has not been formally measured, that I know of, except in one very narrow case.
 
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