To be sick and tired of women's concerns being silenced?

[MerchantofVenice]

Obviously I wouldn't dream of doing a TAAT.

But is anyone else as furious as I am that every time people try to raise legitimate concerns about the legislation about self-identity and transgender people, the whole discussion is shut down?

There's this undertone of 'Oh, you can't say that!!!' when people state scientific facts.

And at the same time, there's this myth that 'MN is one of the only places you can actually discuss the transgender debate openly.' Like fuck it is.

Your average person on the street isn't intimately acquainted with the madness of the debate and will have no qualms about stating facts. You see it on the comments after those nonsense news articles ("Man gives birth"). When you explain the situation to novices (as I did to my husband) they are gobsmacked. They had no idea that it was somehow a hate crime to be literate in biology.

And that's part of the problem; this hushing up colludes with the idea that people are saying something controversial. The debate stays secret and the tide of common sense never comes.

So sick of it.

There was some recent Facebook m drama where a TRA got into a female only group for sexual assault survivors with ptsd, and he was deliberately infiltrating it as he thought it was transphobic because female only. He was posting identifying screenshots of the women on his own page and again it kicked off massively.

I'm sorry that's pretty much sociopathic.

blogs.scientificamerican.com/talking-back/is-the-brain-gendereda-q-a-with-harvard-s-catherine-dulac/# Neuroscientist who says there's virtually no difference in brain structures between male and female.

www.newscientist.com/article/dn28582-scans-prove-theres-no-such-thing-as-a-male-or-female-brain/ New Scientist article stating there's no difference.

www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/04/study-finds-some-significant-differences-brains-men-and-women Study does find structural differences between male and female but not what the TRAs think.

Apparently, men's IQs are more variable than women's, due to the variability of parts of the brain structure.

If one half of the human race holds power, commits 98% of sexual and violent crime and impregnates the other half, that is as a good definition as any of the distinction between the two halves.

Taking a subset of that first half and deciding that the difference relies on how they feel in their head makes zero sense. Why?

Bit late to the issue but there is no possibility of a 16 year old boy in the UK being prosecuted for having a mutually consenting sexual relationship with a 15 year old girl.

www.nspcc.org.uk/preventing-abuse/child-protection-system/legal-definition-child-rights-law/legal-definitions/

Age of consent
The age of consent (the legal age to have sex) in the UK is 16 years old

The laws are there to protect children. They are not there to prosecute under-16s who have mutually consenting sexual activity but will be used if there is abuse or exploitation involved

There has been growing, well proof really, that opinions are as valid as facts.

That personal experience trumps scientific study.

So everyone gets to stick their oars in when clearly, some people's opinion, based on years of scientific study, are clearly worth more than someone who knows for a fact that bumblebees can't fly.

Everyone must be included, even the deluded, the professionally offended, the martyrs, the sick and the sickening.

That's like saying women who work in engineering should henceforth be called boys. It is a bit mental. Its reinforcing the polarisation to say that doing female things and thinking female things completely emasculates you, which is very old fashioned, and I suspect class-based.

I know this is going back about a zillion posts, but I work in a particularly male-dominated area of IT, and more than once I've pulled up male colleagues on some sexism, only to have the response that I don't count, I am one of them. While it's nice to feel included, I am not entirely happy at the implication of this being at the expense of being seen as female.

When I have raised such things with my manager, he's said there's no sexism. Which is partly the point of this thread. Also, I am aggressive, over-sensitive, over-emotional... it's like we're working through the bumper book of clichés for how to manage women in a male-dominated workplace. But mostly it means I don't feel listened to, just dismissed.

Ereshkigal Have a little think, Ceto and JAPAB, about why you're equivocating about sexual violence to make an argument why it isn't a big deal that 11 sex offenders want to become women...

All I did was respond to the comment "There is no such thing as "sexual offences that do not involve any element of rape or personal assault at all" which I thought might be inaccurate. As for whether it is possible to have a sexual offence without sexual violence that involves humans, well even then it is possible I think. Someone finds a phone that a teenage girls has "selfies" on and keeps it, or some kid up a tree being a peeping Tom. Although I suppose you could extend the word violence to include any bad thing someone does that has a sexual component to it, but IMO that devalues the word.

As for the sex offenders who are in prison, whether they committed actual sexual violence or had the worst kind of animated or CGI "child porn", either way I am wary about people with penises being put into female prisons.

Gingernaut There has been growing, well proof really, that opinions are as valid as facts.

There are facts and there are facts. Not all facts have an equal footing in reality. Institutional facts such as legal facts or, say, human-made biological classifications, are fair game to be disagreed with.

Your response was, as ever, an attempt to derail women's concerns JAPAB. It's not clever. No one is interested. Your claim that all these 11 men might possibly just be some kids is seen for what it is. And being a "peeping tom" though you're highly unlikely to go to prison for it, is a behaviour concerning women's privacy. It is not innocent or irrelevant to the matter at hand. It's almost certain that these men have committed physical sexual assault.

So again, have that little think about why you need to do this?

www.feministcurrent.com/2017/08/20/impossible-create-good-policy-transgenderism-cant-even-debate-issues/

This is a good article

say, human-made biological classifications

Reproductive reality of humans is not a "human-made biological classification".

I'm not sure you understand biological classification JAPAB. A fish is still a fish whatever its called. There are a collection of characteristics we can look for on an animal to tell whether it's a fish.
It's all factual, if tomorrow we decided to apply the word "fish" to birds for example, it wouldn't change the fact there are a group of organisms with shared characteristics previously known as fish.

human-made biological classification

Seriously? We might have made up the language to label it, but the classification isn't an invention.

Good Lord. This is exactly the problem. Facts are only facts because someone says so.

This is how you come to a bunch of students agreeing with a 6 foot Caucasian male that he is actually a 5 foot Asian woman. If he says so.

Someone finds a phone that a teenage girls has "selfies" on and keeps it

Why are you SO intent on insisting there are sexual crimes that aren't violent? I don't understand it.

But to explore your hypothetical situation: what do you mean by "selfies"?

There are facts and there are facts. Not all facts have an equal footing in reality. Institutional facts such as legal facts or, say, human-made biological classifications, are fair game to be disagreed with. 😣

That is such a painful violation of the English language, I don't know where to start.

Facts will always be facts. There is no equivocation about that. They all have an equal footing in reality.

Sky is blue. Earth is round (ish). Gravity keeps us stuck to our planet. These are undeniable facts.

Legal facts are laws.

Biological classification is based on the characteristics scientists have observed.

Just because a bird doesn't fly, doesn't stop making it a bird. It's a species within a family.

Opinion is not fact. Feelings are not fact.

Why are you SO intent on insisting there are sexual crimes that aren't violent? I don't understand it.

Its not relevent to this discussion or the original post about the 11 men in prison. Its just a distraction and another way of silencing. Pick out the insignificant details focus on that and miss the bigger picture.
Thats what that poster is doing. I have seen them derail other threads in the same manner.

It is a fact that a 16 year old boy could be convicted of having sex with a consenting almost 16 year old girl.

It is fact that it is CPS policy not to pursue cases such as these with few exceptions.

It is a fact that no adult prison currently houses any 16 year old for this offence.

And yes, possessing pictures of underage girls naked would be a sexual offence. Do you think it shouldn't be JAPAB?

Just ignore the trolling twat - adults are trying to have a conversation

And again, if it were another child in possession of underage photos they would be unlikely to get a custodial sentence, especially if the girl in question consented to them having the pictures. And on the rare occasion that they did, which would probably mean there was other shit going on, the sentence wouldn't be served in an adult prison.

I imagine "finding a phone with nude selfies on and keeping it and doing nothing else with it" would be far more likely to be treated as theft than sex offending. If they distributed the pictures they just so innocently happened to find they are disseminating pornographic (for want of a better word) images of underage children which rightly is a serious sexual offence.

Fair point Jiggly

Yeah sorry he is derailing, and I even called him out for it, and now I'm getting sucked into enabling it. No more.

You're right Jiggly

Thread police

Its not relevent to this discussion or the original post about the 11 men in prison. Its just a distraction and another way of silencing. Pick out the insignificant details focus on that and miss the bigger picture.
Thats what that poster is doing. I have seen them derail other threads in the same manner

Well said.

Just ignore the trolling twat - adults are trying to have a conversation

Also well said.

😂😂