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20th September 2022, 12:08 PM | #1 |
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Transwomen are not women - X (XY?)
No average swimmer can beat an Olympic-class swimmer. What is your point, caller? It has been shown multiple times that if you match élite athletes in a particular sport, men and women, for height, weight and wingspan, then men are still about 10% better than the women. Across the board. |
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20th September 2022, 12:15 PM | #2 |
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20th September 2022, 12:19 PM | #3 |
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This is hilarious. Vixen is attempting a reductio ad absurdum based on a complete misunderstanding of the claim. Also, there's no reason to explain how absurd her argument is. That's her point. She knows it's absurd. What she doesn't know is that her absurd argument is based on her misunderstanding the claim she's trying to rebut.
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20th September 2022, 12:24 PM | #4 |
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You may as well drop the adjective if it's not doing anything.
Have you ever actually met a trans man? I've known a few, and they all pass for young males. They are "societally male" in the sense that people react to them as if they were male from birth. This leads me to believe that passing as male or female is the key element which makes someone ETA: Now that I think a bit more about this, I'd rather avoid this novel turn of phrase altogether. One is biologically male or female, but societally we are (mostly) men or women and that carries rather more and different freight than the biology of sex. |
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20th September 2022, 12:39 PM | #5 |
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Good thing it's doing something.
Quote:
Quote:
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Part of my position on this for a while has been that for the social construct of gender to mean anything at all, it has to mean not (only) how you perceive yourself, but also how others perceive you. A dude can think of himself as a lady all he wants, but in the bedroom his valid lived identity means nothing in the face of how his date thinks of him. A societal male is someone who is or appears to be a biological male. That's all it means. This is less an effort to connect with Vixen's train of thought, and more just an aside to explore a very minor linguistic folly (gazebo, not error). |
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20th September 2022, 12:45 PM | #6 |
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20th September 2022, 12:47 PM | #7 |
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20th September 2022, 12:57 PM | #8 |
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20th September 2022, 01:07 PM | #9 |
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This runs up against something I'd call the central tenet of gender ideology, which can be summed up as "someone’s sex or gender is properly understood to be the same as their gender identity." I may well be wrong about this, but I think the idea that "gender is socially constructed" is a line from second wave feminism, and thus holds little sway in the minds of modern intersectional feminists who adhere to the Central Tenet. That said, I think your position is significantly more defensible.
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20th September 2022, 01:33 PM | #10 |
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20th September 2022, 02:02 PM | #12 |
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Point to just one person who has claimed zero failure rate in sexing clothed human beings. Nobody has claimed that even under normal circumstances, with no attempt being made to deceive.
(Debag these individuals, and we'd soon see.) |
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20th September 2022, 02:02 PM | #13 |
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The Central Tenet of Gender Ideology
Okay so I came across this passage which sums up the core of the issue quite nicely:
Quote:
I'm taking the trouble to paste this passage in from an awkwardly formatted PDF b/c it's nice to see the central issue summed up succinctly in the words of an early advocate. |
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20th September 2022, 02:08 PM | #14 |
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Once your eyes return to their normal operating positions, would you like to address the points I raised here:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com...2#post13906762 Since that post was left behind in the thread continuation, I'll repost it here for your convenience: The whole thing is a sidetrack, really. I'm not here to engage your Devil's advocacy on the ease of observing someone's sex, or the relative significance of edge cases not actually relevant to the questions I have. The questions I have being these: 1. To what degree should transwomen be entitled to access sex-segregated spaces for women? 2. On on what basis, if any, should such access be granted? At the start of this thread, the space I mainly had in mind was women's restrooms, and I didn't really think of it as "sex-segregated". My answers to my two questions would have been: 1. "Total access [to women's restrooms]." 2. "On the basis of self-ID, however I would like to know how we can enable self-ID without allowing predatory males to exploit it, and without having to implement some sort official paperwork ID instead." Nowadays, my thinking about all that has changed quite a bit, for reasons belabored at length and in depth in this thread. And I still haven't seen even any kind of attempt at addressing my concern in question 2. If you have answers or arguments relating to those two questions, I'm happy to continue our conversation along those lines. Especially if you have an answer for my concern in question 2. Otherwise, if you're still on the fence and inclined to more Devil's advocacy, try this one from the other side of the fence: The stipulated position is that fiat self-ID should be the basis for trans access to sex-segregated spaces, and that any kind of "papers please" solution is right out. I'd be interested in seeing your counter-argument to that position, playing the Devil's advocate. ETA: I'd also very much like to see your reasoning for your claim that it is easier to determine someone's date of birth than their sex. |
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20th September 2022, 02:09 PM | #15 |
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20th September 2022, 02:31 PM | #16 |
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I'm probably somewhere in between where you were at the start of this thread and where you say you are now.
I don't have absolute answers to your questions, cause I don't know. A couple months ago I had zero knowlege of this subject, and I certainly am no expert now. But I think my question is pertinent--should the transmen whose photo I linked above (or transwomen if you prefer) be denied access to traditional male(female) spaces or positions simply because they were born in the 'other' biological sex? You (and most here) clearly think they should. I'm not so sure. Which is why I think it's absurd when you ask me for reasoning of why dob is easier than sex determination. To me, it's patently obvious. Whether you think the DSD or intersex population is .1% or 2%--that implies a challenge to the binary sex assumption that just isn't present when you have a timer and watch a baby emerge from a womb. That's why there are several other whole threads devoted to these subjects. Along with gender and gender ID. And how that relates to policy and societal measures is a whole other subject. So I see it as complex--not necessarily as "sex is a spectrum" but also not "Its Man and Woman and that's it, baby!" |
20th September 2022, 02:53 PM | #17 |
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Courtesy of the contrarian's at Spiked, a commentary on the alleged beating of one of the surviving participants at the Stonewall Riots, because he was opposing Trans-ideology...
Quote:
https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/0...hobia-in-drag/ |
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20th September 2022, 02:58 PM | #18 |
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This is nonsense. People with ambiguous genitalia are still either male or female, it just takes more investigation to be sure. There is nobody alive who isn't one or the other, hence they are irrelevant to single-sex spaces. They are not a challenge to the binary sex "assumption", they merely require more care in sorting.
Please, what relevance do you think DSDs have to single-sex spaces? The people with male DSD conditions use the male spaces, the people with female DSD conditions use the women's. We don't have any "you're neither one nor the other" category. In addition, trans people do not have DSDs. The problem is not how to police people with DSDs into the correct single-sex space, the problem is how to keep men out of women's single-sex spaces. Now, your astonishing assertion that it's easier to tell someone's date of birth than their sex was made in the context of a question about whether people who identify as a different age from their chronological one should be able to access services based on their self-identified age. How many people did you watch coming out of the womb, with a stopwatch to check? If you are selling alcohol and a lad insists that he's old enough to buy the stuff, can you, by looking at him, tell his date of birth? Of course you can't. We can only guess someone's age to withing a year or two, at best, getting less accurate as they age. In contrast human beings are about 97% accurate in determining the sex of other human beings, with no clothes or hairstyle clues, just from photos. Someone encountered in real life with more clues than that is going to be easier. How can you possibly say it's easier for a bar tender to know how old someone is, than for a changing room attendant to know what sex someone is? It's ludicrous. We've been over the situation where someone has taken extraordinary steps to appear to be the sex they aren't. These are not the people we're concerned about. We're concerned about the bloody obvious men waltzing into women's spaces to perv, leer, plant hidden cameras and see if they can manage a grope. And you start talking about very rare medical disorders and assuming everyone's exact date of birth is permanently tattooed on their forehead. |
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20th September 2022, 03:34 PM | #19 |
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Paul2 wrote:
Quote:
"In other words, your post has serious problems. __________________ It's nice to be nice to the nice. Aristotle, so far as I know, was the first man to proclaim explicitly that man is a rational animal. His reason for this view was one which does not now seem very impressive: it was, that some people can do sums. - Bertrand Russell" [ends] I can recommend N Tinbergen's the Study of Instinct. As you probably know, Tinbergen got a Nobel Prize for his work. The rationale for having this on a reading list is that because Psychology by its very nature is the study of human behaviour, before you can go anywhere near 'what makes people tick?', you need to have a firm grasp of where that behaviour arises from, hence the need to study physiology, especially the brain, the ANS, the CNS and all of the various hormones, heredity factors, psychopathology, animal behaviour. Then you can move onto strip out social psychology by looking at different cultures (social anthropology and kinship systems), then there is sociology, economics (transactional psychology) and criminology. You need to root out the artificial from the natural (Nature versus Nurture). So if people are going to affirm that 'biology is destiny' as Darwin states, then it follows that our question needs to be how much of gender ID is biological? Simply looking at genitals (so to speak) doesn't answer the question set. |
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20th September 2022, 03:38 PM | #20 |
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20th September 2022, 03:52 PM | #21 |
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the prestige wrote:*
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Consider sexual attraction. Generally speaking, this has a necessary social component. If you're attracted to males, what makes someone male (and potentially attractive) to you is their male sex that you have observed. A man can cosplay his sense of "womanhood" all he wants, but unless he's passing, he's still societally male because of his observed sex. Trans activists wish it were so easy to just erase our ability and instinct to observe and register someone's biological sex." The easiest way to determine sexual attraction is to just the follow the eyes. For example, when a group of people enter a room you will instinctively look at someone you find attractive, as your subconscious often registers something before your intellect does. You can look at your companion and see what their eyes follow. If you have a partner with wandering eyes you might not like what you see. *Sorry about this mess, I have to cut and paste from the previous thread to answer. |
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20th September 2022, 04:01 PM | #22 |
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The point was about 'cheating' in sport. There is no denying that as margins get ever smaller and competition ever fiercer there are a thousand and one ways to cheat and get away with it. (For example, there was an Olympic cyclist who used the fact he had asthma to take a whole load of ephedrine to improve his performance [he was found out]. With muscle building sports, athletes can take anabolic steroids for years, then lay off for the specified time period so it no longer shows up, yet they stilll have an unfair advantage.)
Yes, Sharon Davies is correct that those East Europeans cheating with testosterone should be rightly banned. However, men pretending to be women are only one side of the cheating that goes on. There are female athletes who look like men but I daresay that because it says 'female' on their birth certificate they get away with it. In the every day world (how many of us are Olympic sports persons?) there are no nanoseconds margins to worry about so less need for furtive cheating. Better for an athlete to be open about being transgender than to be furtive about it. |
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20th September 2022, 04:05 PM | #23 |
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Have you ever listened to the pop song, 'Lola' by the Kinks? Ray Davies who wrote it is as heterosexual as they come (as it were) but nonetheless he had no problems with 'Lola' a transgender getting down her knees (the imagination boggles here but I think we get the drift), which he says is based on a real life experience.
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20th September 2022, 04:12 PM | #24 |
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20th September 2022, 04:18 PM | #25 |
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Nope. It was the guy 'encountering' Lola that was on his knees, and not voluntarily; it seems like he fell over, probably drunk (if you look at the provenance of the song).
Lyrics: I pushed her away I walked to the door I fell to the floor I got down on my knees Well, I looked at her, and she at me |
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20th September 2022, 04:23 PM | #26 |
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20th September 2022, 04:36 PM | #27 |
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What about contact sports? Is it okay for a male bodied transwoman boxer to beat up women? Rugby? Where women have been seriously injured by transwomen.
And what about professional sports? Why should women have their livelihoods impacted by people who went through puberty as males and merely self identify as female (like Lia Thomas)? |
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20th September 2022, 04:46 PM | #28 |
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The only arguments for letting males compete in women's events work just as well as arguments for abolishing sex segregated events completely. That may be the objective, of course.
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20th September 2022, 05:27 PM | #29 |
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20th September 2022, 05:35 PM | #30 |
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However, this thread is about transwomen, and as I have pointed out before, this is not a symmetrical situation.
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20th September 2022, 05:54 PM | #31 |
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20th September 2022, 06:02 PM | #32 |
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20th September 2022, 06:07 PM | #33 |
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For me, chess is the weirdest one. As far as I know, there's no rule barring women from competing with men, but there's a separate list for women grand masters. This might be one case where lack of proper support explains the disparity. But this might also be a case where the women land in the hump of the bell graph, and the men land at either extreme.
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20th September 2022, 09:05 PM | #34 |
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20th September 2022, 09:10 PM | #35 |
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21st September 2022, 04:40 AM | #36 |
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21st September 2022, 04:49 AM | #37 |
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Chess is traditionally male dominated because of its predominance in the Eastern bloc (USSR Russia). As for the bell curve, yes, it has been observed that boys/males tend to cluster at the tail ends of the curve. However, there are plenty of females who are classed as having 'learning difficulties' plus there does seem to be a higher number of persons unexpectedly at this side of the bell curve, possibly because intelligence is not necessarily 100% a normal distribution (which the Gaussian-curve measures) but only approximates to it. It is important to avoid sweeping generalisations such as 'men are more intelligent than women' simply because statistically there are more of them on the outlying +/- 3sd. This could be accounted for by for example, congenital abnormality that results in learning difficulty or extreme growth development.
So the idea that 'men are better at chess' or 'men are better at football' could well be a simple matter of boys being more likely to play these games at school from an early age, whilst girls have to be extra determined to participate int he face of scepticism and prejudice. It is specious to equate lesser muscle power with lesser intellect. (Given that the brain is composed of fat, not muscle.) |
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21st September 2022, 04:50 AM | #38 |
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21st September 2022, 04:53 AM | #39 |
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Rugby, like football, is largely a game of agility. I doubt very much an 18st man would ever condescend to join a team of ladies. There is a taboo against men appearing to be 'cissy'.
Few men would ever dream of presenting as female in any way. My ex- would fret if his t-shirt was too long as he didn't want anyone to think he was wearing 'a skirt'. |
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21st September 2022, 05:07 AM | #40 |
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