Posie Parker on Triggernometry

most likely driven by a gut emotional reaction to the idea of a man who purposely removes his penis still being a man

Castration anxiety is a powerful propeller!

Pages behind. I just watched this, it's a fantastic interview!

@Triggerpod

You think this is a 'women's issue' because it hasn't affected you much yet because you are men. You think we should 'compromise' but none of the suggested areas of compromise actually affect you. None of the compromises so far have been demanded of men, they have all been demanded of women.

You care about sport, you romanticise the 'trans child' (while not sparing a thought for the ~90% of these children who would likely desist if they were supported to go through normal puberty) - but you don't give a shit about women.

At around 43:40 you talk about sport. Here, you are perfectly capable of recognising that men are bigger, stronger, faster ... you can clearly see that male bodied people have an advantage. It offends your sense of fair play.

Why does that knowledge go out of your head when you think about whether women should have to share our spaces with male people? How is it that this group of people are bigger, stronger and faster than women on the sports field, yet when everyone heads for the showers these apparent advantages all melt away and women should just be kind?

Do you think male violence against women and girls isn't really a thing, or do you think that male people who say they are women do not have the same risk of committing sexual violence as other male people?

Do you not think that women deserve a bit more than a fair sporting chance in the very spaces we fought for ourselves, in order to participate more safely in public life, despite the ubiquity of male violence against women and girls?

Even if girls and boys were born with significantly different brains, and it could be proved that some men had female brains, what does it change?

Women and girl face disadvantages because of our reproductive role, not our brain. We still need sex segregation and class analysis based on that, not our brain function.

Really great interview and well done to all. I've got both my teenage daughters to watch it.

Another thought on the brains issue.

A few years ago there was a lot of press over the so-called "god region" of the brain, an area which lit up on MRIs when subjects (who said they were religious believers) reported having religious experiences, but was pretty dormant in non religious people. Furthermore, it worked the other way too: stimulating that part of the brain could induce "religious feelings."

The researchers were at great pains to stress that this merely gave insight into the neurology of religious experience - it told us nothing about whether there was a god or not.

Suppose such a region were to be identified in the brain which seemed more similar in women and biologically male people who identified as transwomen than either group was to men (pace my comments upthread about d values and overlapping distributions and not making the mistake of thinking there's such a thing as a "male" height).

This would only tell us why some people, born male, said they "felt like a woman." It still wouldn't answer the philosophical question (see the fabulous submission to Harry the Owl's judicial review by Kathleen Stock) of whether they were actually women or whether they were men who felt like women.

(NB thought experiment, because although I've seen one study which claimed to have found this, it had tiny sample sizes, very flaky methodology - eg no quality control on the data, and no attempt to bootstrap the data to get confidence intervals).

For the purpose of full disclosure even I was sort of where he was a few of years back. In the -what's the harm in acknowledging the small number of true transsexuals as women phase.

The extremism and absurdity that has occurred since has convinced me that going along with a legal fiction as if it were real is just too harmful and damaging. It opened a Pandora's Box.

I know andy

I think he will get there in the end. He's almost at the finish line!

Quite Datun

The argument goes like this:

Him: But what about those people (note the use of people - already mentally moved them out of the man box) who have all the surgery, the full op and everything?

Me: Still men, they're men with a lot of cosmetic surgery. You can't change sex.

Him: But what are they meant do after going through all that?

Me: I don't know but it's not the problem of women to solve. Men who have extreme cosmetic surgery is not a women's issue.

Him: That seems mean.

Me: Women saying no is always framed as mean.

And round we go. He thinks everything else about gender ideology is ridiculous but has a total blind spot to this one aspect. I assume because it's too difficult to deal with within the spectrum of acceptable male behaviour so it must be made into woman's issue.

OvaHere

"still resorts to thinking a small number of men can be women based on their level of deserving."

My wife is a scientist, specialising in RNA/DNA and she is very shocked when I tell her stuff like this, so am I as a qualified personal trainer.
This is absolutely crazy, humans can never change sex, they cannot undo what biology has given them.
Men will never be women, and women will never be men.

most likely driven by a gut emotional reaction to the idea of a man who purposely removes his penis still being a man.

Exactly.

I assume the thinking goes, oh come on, he's done that, for fucks sake. He's actually cut it off.

A man without a penis is a eunuch, not a woman.

It's a sexism that says women are not human beings in their own right. A category where they share the same characteristics. Characteristics which no man has.

There's not a woman on the planet who has cut her penis in half, created a hole in her perineum and lined it with said penis. It's something that is impossible for women to do.

Men need to sort this out, safe spaces are about male violence. Men need to stop giving other men shit for expressing themselves in all the ways, and stop expecting women to budge up to "widen the bandwith of what it means to be a woman." To paraphrase Magdalen Berns.

It's because it's solidarity and respect for a man really trying hard to do something. It's entirely removed from a true understanding of what being a woman means.

I also found it very interesting how you took the normal male view of "what if a trans person has spent a long time / effort in their transition, doesn't that make a difference." line of questions to her.

This is so true. My husband, who in general takes a very dim view of men in women's sports, prisons and the usual self iD guff, still resorts to thinking a small number of men can be women based on their level of deserving.

It's resulted in quite a few heated debates where I repeatedly ask him how someone can actually change their sex. He can't answer of course but that's because his default opinion seems to be that men who try very hard at something should automatically get what they want.

I'm chipping away though and I think if he can get past his misplaced pride at being a 'logical thinker' he might realise the argument he is presenting is anything but logical and most likely driven by a gut emotional reaction to the idea of a man who purposely removes his penis still being a man.

Given the current rates of suicide in the male population I think what you mean is "men have more money and repressed feelings"

Ooof.

Anyway, I'm not going to engage further on this issue as I doubt we'll ever agree on it.

The grin at the end suggests a joke, Triggerpod, but if you’re serious, you’re rather defeating the spirit of free speech and debate.

I’ll be checking out more of your show, by the way. Never heard of it before, but intrigued.

Nobody treats India like a woman. Women are talked over, and given less time to put their point across
Thanks for this line Datun
India is a Trans woman that's given a lot of TV air time, I wonder why nobody treats India like a woman?
No prizes cause most of us know the answer.

It's as an argument for transgenderism that I find so weird. Sexism, yes I can understand that. Transgenderism absolutely not.

It relies on the brain of a female somehow ending up in the body of a male. Like some kind of Freaky Friday, sci-fi film.

It also discounts how so many men with the apparent brain of a woman, can't stand women, have no affinity for women, and don't have the slightest comprehension of what it's like to actually be one.

Not to mention your autogynephile, arguably one of the people who most wants to be a woman, displaying behaviour that is, statistically, confined 100 percent to males.

As an argument for gender dysphoria, or transgenderism, it's the weakest one. No logic, no rationale, no evidence.

@Triggerpod - you say male and female brains are different. As a working scientist (and one with a fair number of citations to my name) - can I have your peer reviewed sources for that, please? (Ideally open source, so that everyone can have a look at them).

Then get Gina Rippon or someone of similar stature on Triggernometry to discuss it. In fact ideally two - maybe one neuroscientist who agrees with you, one neuroscientist who disagrees.

From what I have read, for aspects of cognitive performance where there are measurable differences in the means of the male and female population, the d values (difference in means divided by product of standard deviations) is tiny, much smaller than for height, for example. And furthermore, this is a difference which can be explained by brain plasticity as easily as by innate characteristics.

Even with a difference on average in brain performance/structures on an MRI (hell, even that most obviously sexually dimorphic feature of all, brain weight, much beloved of the Victorians as an explanation of why women were suited to home and hearth), that wouldn't establish that there were "male brains" and "female brains".

Consider being asked to bet a tenner on someone of height 5'10" being male. Done repeatedly, you'd be quids in - that's what the statistics tell us. But you might not want to do it as a one-off and that tenner was your train fare home. And it would be clearly absurd to suggest that that difference in averages in overlapping populations meant there was such a thing as a "male height" or a "female height".

Insofar as any cognitive differences are measurable, you'd probably not want to bet more than about 10p on brain differences.

May be late to tthe party but it looks to be back on youtube

"This is the problem with identity politics, it leads you to assume that everything that happens because of your membership of an identity group."

Being a woman, like being black, is not an identity but an unyielding physical truth. Jewishness, like being gay or vegan, is a behavioral identity.

Nationalism is an arbitrary identification humans have for the made-up lines on maps enforced by social custom, but the physical truth of being Chinese, Native American, or Scandinavian doesn't change like the map lines do.

I sound like I'm moaning a lot at you, but I do enjoy your YT channel. You said you've been lurking on here to learn and unless you're told/challenged you don't know...

You should also know, in real life, every woman I know agrees with Posie's views about trans women.

@resistsexism Thank you - that's the point of TRIGGERnometry.

I questioned her more than others because I disagree with her more than with others

I think that this is fair, TBH. You didn't attack her personally. You challenged her on her opinions and gave her plenty of time to respond. That's a healthy way to engage.

The fact that you disagree with her didn't come across either. You were both pretty neutral.

Another example: I went to a Crime author talk at a library couple of weeks ago: One man 3 women - man spoke at least half the time...

Datun has a point. I watched Triggernometry Reasons people voted for Brexit - edited to be about 27 mins long I think, 4 people: 3 men, 1 woman. 5 minutes for the woman, at least 7 mins each for the men (yes I was counting).

Now I know you probably didn't mean to be biased like that, much of it isn't intentional, but it's everywhere. I blame Caroline Criado-Perez for enlightening me on this. And this is why female only spaces are so important: men take over.

Another example: I went to a Crime author talk at a library couple of weeks ago:

Another example: Meghan Murphy talking about press censorship and free speech on a panel talk I watched recently : two women one man. The man spoke way more than the women in the end the audience told him to shut up and let the women speak.