Transwomen are not Women - Part 15

[Ziggurat]

I suspect he's trying to square the circle of trans being an internal sense of self, and that sense of self being identifiable via self-declaration that cannot be tested and can be a lie.

My preferred solution is to challenge the premise. I simply do not believe it is possible for a male to have an internal sense of a female self. Their bodies and experiences are simply incapable of providing the necessary data for such a sense.

I prefer to rely on the simple fact that the rest of the world has no reason to care about your internal sense of self. So we need not even decide what it is, what it means, or how we find out about it.

 

[Emily's Cat]

"@"ing puts the alert right on your screen. That's why it's called an alert. ETAing can be done without the poster knowing. It's far better to call attention with an "@" when the thread is fast moving.

It doesn't do this for me. It will show up in the notification list (the bell in the upper right), but I don't pay much attention to that. I try to clear it out about once a day because having red-backed numbers makes my brain itch. But it certainly doesn't put any alert in any obvious and visible location for me.

 

[d4m10n]

She's the third of the Three Musketeers, after Blanchard and Professor ◊◊◊◊ Saw.

This is a circumstantial ad hominem^WP at best, not a substantive critique.

If we're going to argue about the existence, prevalence, or scope of AGP it's probably worth asking why it should matter.

If it turns out that AGP is actually very common (or very rare) would that change anyone's mind about the policies we've discussed here?

 

[Ziggurat]

Not all males are an inherent threat. Same as not all females inherently want to steal your husband then ice pick you to death. Aren't you doing the misandry thing?

I don't think so.

You are correct that not all males are a threat. In fact, MOST males are not a threat. But it's sometimes hard to distinguish them from the minority that are a threat. You know one really effective way that males can signal to females that they aren't a threat? By giving them space and privacy when they are changing, using the bathroom, or otherwise in vulnerable states.

And yeah, there actually are female equivalents which your own parallels hint at. Some women will try to steal husbands. You know how a woman can signal that she's not trying to steal your husband? By not sharing a hotel room with him on a business trip, by not going out to restaurants with just the two of them, etc.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Hi John Freestone, I meant to greet you and respond to your earlier post, but as you can see, we got tied up in a pissing match and it slipped my mind.

I get it would take a lot to catch up on my positions, so I'll give you the short version: I'm like 90% in agreement with most of the gender critical positions here. Strict sex segregation where nudity would be expected, no elective gender related body modifications to minors, and all that. Where I am conflicted is mostly on public restroom access. I think it should be pretty much like it has been for generations, men here and women there, and y'all sort yourselves out without force of law in either groups favor. I came to this thread a while back to discuss it more in depth with skeptics.

As we've said many times... there's no reasonable way to go back to this prior standard. Our trust has been completely betrayed, and there's no plausible way to enforce it. Failure to impose sex-based separation based on law results in a gigantic loophole visible from space, which any male can exploit simply by saying magic words when confronted.

Remember that females didn't change the rules of interaction - males professing transgender identities did.

But the majority of the forum avoids this thread like the plague, so the crew here is starved for a TRA to battle against, so they declare yours truly to be a TRA and back me into battling positions far more on the pro trans side than I really am.

I seriously don't understand why you feel like you're backed into battling these position. You take this on yourself, and you do it repeatedly.

Basically, I'm 'live and let live'. If women don't object to the occasional non-conformist in their rest room (as I don't object when a woman comes in ours once in a blue moon), then shrug it off. If a woman does object, she should not be penalized for harassment/discrimination. She has every right to object, just like she would for a woman behaving in a menacing manner.

Unless that female is Tish Hyman, in which case you decide that Tish engineered a confrontation just for public notice, then opine that females who don't want to be confronted with males in the female shower should just completely stop using public spaces.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Interesting, because you use them too. I've had a bunch of 'smartcooky mentioned you' pings on my alerts.
Why do you use them if you don't use them yourself?

I use them because when someone gets to the post it makes it easy to see that you're actually addressing them directly, rather than making a comment about them. But @Thermal, it's on the assumption that you can't time travel, so you haven't yet gone past the post that I just now hit reply on.

 

[John Freestone]

What is it that is causing you confusion?

Oh that, yes. I thought the convo was referring to Thermal (because so much of it had been), and when I saw 'Myriad' I didn't realise they'd contributed earlier. I remembered Myriad from years ago and wondered if they'd had a rename, that's all. I realised soon after but it didn't seem important enough to explain.

 

[d4m10n]

Remember that females didn't change the rules of interaction…

In the U.S. it was the political party favored by females which actually made most of the policy changes in question, so it's a bit of a cop out to say females are off the hook here.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Agreed that the TRAs are the primary pushers for formalizing legislation on the matter. What I'm not clear on is whether that is the cause or effect. Like, I'm not sure if they were pushing back against a movement to exclude them (starting around the time that conservatives started pushing against Drag Queens and the like), or if they were motivated by being tired of being marginalized. Either way, I think the best solution remains to push back against legislation in either direction. Lobby to maintain the older status quo, as you say seems like the ideal.

The TRAs started this.

In UK they pushed to change the GRA, including removing all diagnosis requirements completely, requiring no active treatments, and drastically reducing (eliminating?) the waiting period and cost to change legal documents. When females put together a meeting to talk about what the proposal would mean for female rights, and where there might be some problems... a whole lot of males with transgender identities showed up and threatened and harassed the females so much that the meeting had to be cancelled and moved to a secret venue to avoid abuse. It still resulted in at least one elderly female being physically assaulted by a male with a transgender identity

In the US, much of the issues arose out of Obama and Biden executive orders redefining "sex" to include "gender identity" with respect to Title IX, and requiring that all publicly funded schools allow males to participate in female sports if those males say they have "womanly feelings" of some sort. It also required public schools to allow male students to use female bathrooms and showers. It resulted in several very unhappy female students who rose issue with it all... and were over and over again slapped down as being "bigots" for not wanting a fully intact male to be able to look at them while they were naked. Including a judge declaring that female students have no right to visual privacy while in the showers - thus effectively legalizing voyeurism.

Those were some of the flashpoints. But bear in mind that it's been steadily creeping in for about 25 years now, with males getting more and more blatant about overriding and dismissing female boundaries.

The conservative aspect of this is a new thing. Up until quite recently (last 5 years or so?), it's been almost entirely left-leaning and liberal females (and some male allies) who have been objecting and raising the alarm about this. And I'm fully worn out by the fact that every ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ time a conservative male decides to latch themselves onto this topic, a pile of ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ come out of the woodworks saying "gee, where have all the feminists been on this?" We've been here the entire time, they just don't bother to listen to females.

And just to clarify where my head is at, I very viscerally want the boys in the boys room. But as I talk to women, more seem to say it's not that big a deal to them as I would have thought. They view it largely the way I view a woman using the men's room (in some bars I used to hang out in, it was pretty common). It's a little weird and my guard is up while they are in there, but we tolerate that kind of stuff sometimes.

I suspect you're talking to a narrow range of females, and you're giving significantly greater weight to opinions you agree with than those you don't. ISF doesn't have a large number of female posters to begin with... but a significant majority of females here do NOT want males in female spaces including restrooms. I don't know if you are just unable to process our statements, seeing as you've decided we're all evil bigots who only want to keep males out of female spaces for "bad reasons", or if you've somehow decided we're not females at all. Either way... You just keep ignoring the growing data that demonstrates that views have shifted over the last decade, and that a majority of females now oppose letting males use female spaces. I know it's been shared with you repeatedly - one survey from the UK, one from the US.

I'm also curious how you're framing your question. For example, if you ask "Hey, do you freak out and get hysterical if a male wanders into the female restroom, like sometimes happens if it's busy or they're drunk?" you're going to get an entirely different answer than if you ask "Hey, are you copacetic with any male at all having the right to use female restrooms, as long as they make an out-loud claim of having a womanly gender identity regardless of whether they come even remotely close to passing?"

 

[Ziggurat]

I suspect you're talking to a narrow range of females

The females he's talking to may also have an idealized version of what the question even means.

Are any of those females Ok with sharing a bathroom or changing room with Richard Cox?

 

[Emily's Cat]

Not sure where you are getting that. They can act to gain more recognition, or REact to having recognition taken away from them. Those are not the same things.

There was no action to take recognition away.

 

[Emily's Cat]

You seem to be basing your feelings about this on web pages (and like many here, based on the worst of the worst of them). I base mine on the limited experience I have with real ones. The transwoman I have seen go from a troubled teenage boy to a well-adjusted medically transitioned transwoman is worth more to me than wailing about some tweet from 20 years ago. I believe she is sincere in her belief that she was 'born in the wrong body', which I usually describe as having a crossed wire upstairs somewhere.

Do you use the same metric when considering male violence against females? Do you insist that because you don't personally know any males who have ever sexually assaulted a female, it must mean that females are just cherry picking a few bad apples out of all the great and fantastic males out there?

Or do you perhaps consider that 1) there are a whole lot of males that you don't know, and those that you surround yourself with are more likely to be more like you or 2) they're not going to tell you that they're sex predators in the first goddamned place.

You keep doing this, Thermal. You know a single male with a transgender identity, who seems to be a good person. And because you personally know a single good person, that means that every instance we show of males with transgender identities behaving very poorly, aggressively, and threateningly is somehow made up or we've gone looking for the absolute worst in order to push a false narrative.

It's rather annoying to have you repeatedly mansplain to us why we're the evil nasty bigots because your one friend is great so obviously the vast majority of males with transgender identities are great and we're just being hysterical about it.

 

[Emily's Cat]

It's also about the hypocrisy of males insisting that females must be forced to share intimate spaces with males because they don't want to share intimate spaces with other males. No evidence is apparently required for that preference to be taken as perfectly reasonable and understandable. "I'm male, but I'm a woman in my head, and women don't have to share intimate facilities with males, therefore actual women must be forced to share their intimate spaces with males". It's utterly nonsensical.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Agreed, being up on the studies is essential, but what I am more interested in is how we interact and think of transpeople socially, when the boots hit the ground. I think that informs how we shape policy, and indeed which 'facts' we accept and dismiss. That's been a recurring theme in the discussion for the last year.

I'm not so sure this has been a recurring theme in this discussion. Or at least, you seem to have either completely missed or completely dismissed it. Because pretty much every poster in this thread doesn't care about social interactions. We don't care how people dress, or whether they wear make up or not, we don't care how long or short their hair is, or whether they paint their nails. We don't care if they have effeminate mannerisms or they're very macho in their behaviors. We don't care. More power to them.

We care about single sex spaces, sports, prisons, the sterilization and permanent medicalization of vulnerable youth, and we care about forced language.

Other than that, we don't care. And not caring isn't something evil or bad, it's not expressing a lack of empathy. It's literally expressing that all of those other things are personal preference. It's neither for nor against. It's like when I say I don't care about an interviewee's race; I shouldn't care about race, race is irrelevant to the work. I'm not going to avoid hiring someone because of their race, nor am I going to seek out people of any particular race. I simply don't take race into account at all, it's irrelevant. Same thing here: I don't care about how people dress or present themselves, I don't care how they feel about their inner souls and gendery essence. I am neither for it nor against it, it's irrelevant to me. I care no more about that than I care what their favorite flavor of pudding is.

 

[Ziggurat]

I'm not so sure this has been a recurring theme in this discussion. Or at least, you seem to have either completely missed or completely dismissed it. Because pretty much every poster in this thread doesn't care about social interactions. We don't care how people dress, or whether they wear make up or not, we don't care how long or short their hair is, or whether they paint their nails. We don't care if they have effeminate mannerisms or they're very macho in their behaviors. We don't care. More power to them.

We care about single sex spaces, sports, prisons, the sterilization and permanent medicalization of vulnerable youth, and we care about forced language.

Pronoun usage falls under social interactions. But that's about the only thing we've objected to on that front, and even there, as you said, it's the compulsion that's really at issue. I don't think any of us objects to completely voluntary, uncoerced use of preferred pronouns, except perhaps when used to describe sexual predators to hide their actual sex.

 

[smartcooky]

In the U.S. it was the political party favored by females which actually made most of the policy changes in question, so it's a bit of a cop out to say females are off the hook here.

I don't think that is a valid argument. People support political parties for all sorts of reasons.

 

[Ziggurat]

I don't think that is a valid argument. People support political parties for all sorts of reasons.

I would agree. Liberal women voters largely went along for the ride, he's not wrong about that, but men were driving the car.

 

[Emily's Cat]

First, let's solve for X. We really do need to stop sidestepping that one.

Then, we want to do a chicken wire assessment. Is the proposed wire any better than what was there? Is is going to reduce the instance of X? Or is it some half assed security theatre measure more suited to being able to harass and humiliate the non-predatory animals in the barnyard because we really dont like them?

How many females being intimidated by males while in female spaces do you think is the acceptable amount? What X do you think females should just be obligated to deal with?

And while you're assessing whether better chicken wire will protect chickens better than cheap flimsy chicken wire, let alone better than no chicken wire at all and an open coop door... Would you mind opining on why you think the chickens are evil barnyard bigots for wanting to keep out foxes in the first place?

Seriously, buddy. It's not like there are fifteen different types of humans here. There are two: male and female. You seem to demand that females can only be allowed to want to exclude predatory males, but can't want to exclude non-predatory males. Why on earth do you think that's a reasonable position for you to decide we should have to take? Are we supposed to do an intake evaluation and background check for every male to decide which get to use our bathrooms?

Why does it bother you so much that we want to keep ALL MALES out of female spaces, including bathrooms?

That has to be the bottom line consideration: will these measures do anything? Are the pervs deterred by someone saying "no pervng in this room", or as you suggested earlier, does that just add to the thrill and even possibly increase instances of X?

How about you take that little extra step, and ask "Will removing existing convention and barriers increase the behavior that we don't want?" Or perhaps "Will making the behavior no longer technically illegal increase the likelihood of the behavior happening?"

Because that's come up multiple times. Wi Spa, Evergreen Community College, Tish Hyman's gym. Over and over, we see males engaging in behavior that an objective and reasonable person would consider unacceptable: Showing their fully intact penises to females in female-specific intimate spaces. To any rational person, that's exhibitionism or flashing, and it's predatory male behavior. But a few times now, you seem to have taken the position that because it's legal, it's no longer exhibitionism, and female consent is no longer relevant. It's now become LEGAL for a male to show off their junk to non-consenting females. To which you seem to respond "Oh, it's not illegal" or "There are no reported crimes". As if that means it's not ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ happening! It's happening, but now it's magically okay - now males get to do the bad behavior without any fear of repercussions, because the law defends their right to flash or to peep on females!

 

[theprestige]

Not all males are an inherent threat. Same as not all females inherently want to steal your husband then ice pick you to death. Aren't you doing the misandry thing?

It turns out that the small subset of males who demand access to women's spaces whether women like it or not are exactly the small subset of males that is more likely to pose a threat if their demands are met.

 

[Emily's Cat]

AGP, which as we all know, isn't a thing.

Just because you've taken the novel approach of deciding that a specific form of a DSM-V paraphilic disorder isn't a disorder doesn't mean that you're correct. Because obviously basal cell ganglioma isn't cancer, given that it's a specifier under the heading of cancer. Duh!