So ... Does this indicate that you CAN be 'born the wrong gender'?

[Garrick]

www.mirror.co.uk/news/real-life-stories/im-girl-meet-twin-boy-6348318?

Summary: Twins Alfie and Logan, 4yo, are both boys. Logan has insisted on wearing girly clothes, doing girly things, and that he is a girl since the age of two. His mother, who sounds brilliant, reports him wishing his willy would fall off.

I'm somewhat flummoxed. When I were a lass, little boys like this were described as camp (behind their fathers' backs) and, as far as I know, mostly grew up to be camp and fulfilled their rightful destinies. Rather like Ugly Betty's brother.

But this is what some transwomen say they felt like as children, isn't it? And I have rubbished it because I find it hard to believe in gender as an innate feeling. I'm not sure whether I think little Logan proves me wrong

But my point was slug how can you say for certain that person is a man?
There's not many occasions in toilets or changing rooms where people's genitals are exposed.

You could well see a fully functioning man like my dh in a female space but he looks female enough to pass.
But then you could end up feeling threatened by a very butch women who does not and has never had a penis.

In the vast majority of cases men do not pass well as women. Where they do pass, women are unlikely to care but that is still an encroachment on women's spaces. The difference between that and a butch women is that the woman is actually a woman.

"I don't see why a trans person's fear is more important than mine"

It is because they are males and therefore matter more than us females who can be pushed around.

Slugs

We live in a society where male bodied people have been separated from female bodied people for certain matters for decades.

In a way, this is in itself irrational because the majority of male bodied people would not attack a female bodied person even if she lay naked in front of them.

So the rational solution for everyone would be individual privacy regardless of body type.

Different cultures draw the line in different places eg mixed nude saunas, cultures where topless women are the norm as much as topless men.

I really don't want to get onto toilets again if possible as I think this discussion is more interesting than that.

"you can't determine if a person can't enter a female space because "you still have your penis""

We shouldn't have to. Claiming to "feel like women", they should understand why this is a problem for women & have the sense to stay the hell away from female spaces until they have a female form.

"But then you have a social science like economics where the variables are massive. Billions of people, various governments, political systems etc.
So it's very hard to predict what the outcome will be in various scenarios. Eg you apply quantatative easing expecting it will achieve X but actually it achieves Y."

The thing is, there is a massive confounding factor that means that the methods that are useful in a chemistry lab aren't really useful in society - and that is the social itself. People are not molecules and they do not behave in completely predictable, rational ways - rather, they exist in a social, political, cultural world that is full of all kinds of inequalities and ideologies. It is not that these structural and ideological features distort some baseline 'real' that subsists underneath them, as if they are some kind of gloss over the material - they ARE the real - and if you use only quantitative methods drawn from positivistic and materialistic sciences to try to investigate the social, it's extremely likely that you'll miss huge features of interest.

In terms of hypotheses: again, these work well in a lab where the whole point is to reduce variables and thus uncertainty to isolate specific mechanisms. But in the social domain, that's often impossible to do. And even if it were possible, it's not necessarily going to get you to the heart of the issue. If you think about any question (and a hypothesis is to some extent always a kind of question), it is framed in a given context, to given assumptions - and it is those assumptions 'behind' the kinds of questions that are asked that are often the most interesting and revealing things because it is here that ideological and structural factors are at play. (In gender terms, this might be investigating why women are seen as weaker-minded by looking at underlying assumptions about gender. In analysis of a bit of poetry, it might suggest that what is meaningful lies not in anything you can count but in something about language).

None of this devalues the place and power of something like inorganic chemistry in its own sphere. I, for one, am not advocating a return to the world of pre-scientific medicine and technology! Rather, it sets some limits to the somewhat imperialistic tendency of science to think that it can describe every truth everywhere in the universe for everybody, suggesting that other methods might be more useful and applicable to the social, artistic and historical domains - and, indeed, that these might be shot through with differences of culture and perspective that we should not attempt to reduce or remove.

Oh God, another epic cross post with buffy!!

Again it's bordering on semantics. My main point is why is my fear of male violence less valid a reason than theirs

It does sound like a bit of a semantic arguement. Kind of a Schroeder's penis arguement (you don't know it's there unless you actually check inside the underwear).

My problem with the - why is my fear of violence less valid than theirs? Is that you end up having an arguement about which group is the biggest victim.
With some saying look at women as a group, they suffer high levels of rape and violence.
But then others point out that trans people as a group also suffer high levels of violence and have horribly high rates of suicide. And the arguement kind of stalls.

I'm also not massively convinced by the arguement that women's spaces are safe from men anyway. In most female spaces there isn't actually anything there to stop a man from wandering into a toilet / changing room.
A lot of these places have male cleaners (and signs to warn you they are there).

If someone feels that they are safe in a women's toilet it's a bit of a false sense of security. Sadly there isn't actually anything stopping a man wandering into a public loo and assaulting a woman.

The thing is, there is a massive confounding factor that means that the methods that are useful in a chemistry lab aren't really useful in society - and that is the social itself. People are not molecules and they do not behave in completely predictable, rational ways

I think again we kind of agree (at least in part).

Now you obviously can make very firm conclusions about what happens in the chemistry lab.

Yes when you apply the scientific method to a social system the huge number of variables make it much harder to reach firm conclusions.

So with economics it is an incredibly soft science. The variables are so massive and changeable you can't really make any firm conclusions about economics. But I still think social sciences are worth perusing even if any evidence provided is on decidedly shaker foundations than for example chemistry.

I still think it's important to try and provide evidence to support your position. Otherwise you risk going down the Freud route - "I've had a jolly hard think about this topic and this is my conclusion"

Thanks Buffy, I understand what you mean. (Might need to go back and reread some big words )

WhenSheWas - (I think that safe spaces, women's toilets etc have been covered a lot so sorry for repeating) but who do you think should be allowed to use women's public toilets? Which people exactly? Anybody who feels like it at the time? Because they aren't really man-free anyway, so they might as well be a free-for-all is kind of what I'm taking from your post.

"My problem with the - why is my fear of violence less valid than theirs? Is that you end up having an arguement about which group is the biggest victim. "
"My problem with the - why is my fear of violence less valid than theirs? Is that you end up having an arguement about which group is the biggest victim. "

I disagree. "Which group is the biggest victim" has no relevance. The answer is that both women and transwomen should be protected from the violence they fear, regardless of who has suffered more in their lifetime. And that transwomen should not be coddled at the expense of women.

The question what that isn't so makes a good point, imho.

The question why that isn't so, rather.

"
So with economics it is an incredibly soft science. The variables are so massive and changeable you can't really make any firm conclusions about economics."

That is not true. I'm getting the feeling that people making these comments on this thread have not actually studied this subject so it's perhaps best to move on to others.

whenshewas - I agree that evidence is needed, but my whole point is that the evidence is entirely different in nature! It's not simply that there are 'too many variables' for the scientific method to work in the social domain, it's that the scientific method can't touch the structural and ideological levers that are in play (it has been explicitly designed to ignore their existence, in fact!)

I brought your tea Buffy, and those biscuits you like....

...oh.

So I guess where I am falling down Buffy is that I'm not very familiar with exploring questions using a none scientific framework.

How do you look at social systems that doesn't just involve having a really good think about a subject? That's not goady it's a genuine question.