Reconciling competing rights

[GaspingShark]

Let me start by saying I do know what it's like to have my experience disbelieved, invalidated and gaslighted on an large scale, though not as a trans person or a victim of sexual assault. I don't have PTSD but I do know what it's like to have triggerable sources of distress, again, not as a trans person or a victim of sexual assault.

For me, equal rights must include the right to define your own experience, without gatekeepers, and to be very hesitant to consider people delusional.

So I am unsure about this. I would be ashamed of trans friends seeing me saying stuff such as "I err on the side of including them as much as possible", because I don't think that kind of recognition is mine to confer.

OTOH, I don't know if therefore that means I'm not recognising sexual assault survivors distressed by the fear of male people in women-only contexts.

Is this reconcilable, or does it mean one side just has to grin and bear it? I'll read this thread carefully but due to my bad management of a health condition I can't promise to tend it beyond the OP atm.

Not being able to keep your story straight isn't quite the same thing though, is it?

LOL, you just have such a magical knack of just zeroing in on it.

LaSqrrl

@Ereshkigal My apologies, having checked back you are indeed in not one of the enthusiastic misssexers I was thinking of.

The cotton ceiling, I'm not being evasive. I've never been cotton ceilinged, the Sisterhood and I have been carrying on a proxy Mumsnet thread about it on our patch for few weeks now, it's been quite a barney, but AFAIK nobody has been or knows anybody who has. I'm sure it happens but no more than all the other kinds of pressuring into sex so forgive me if I see it as tendentious scaremongering.

Watch yourself there Squirrel, or the reader person will be here to complain about the fawning again.

I'm sure it happens but no more than all the other kinds of pressuring into sex so forgive me if I see it as tendentious scaremongering.

Request denied.

@thebewilderness. If you didn't take "female woman-type-creature partaking of the gay" to indicate a less than total embrace of any particular identity then I would put it down to an unwillingness to deal with nuances you don't understand.

And if you're refusing to read a ground- breaking work on gene-centred ethology because its author is tangentially a knob 30 years later, well, my hopes of you understanding anything you don't want to aren't high.

forgive me if I see it as tendentious scaremongering.

Forgive me if I believe the people who have told me it has happened to them, and the huge amount of evidence of that rapey, coercive make entitlement to lesbians mentality online. But you do you.

Male entitlement

If you didn't take "female woman-type-creature partaking of the gay" to indicate a less than total embrace of any particular identity then I would put it down to an unwillingness to deal with nuances you don't understand.

That's not fair. It's just a bizarre, laboured description of a lesbian. Neither she nor anyone else is necessarily going to assume it's code for your personal identity issues.

Actually I though they thought they were being too clever by half and lost interest in trying to have a conversation with a person I view as not very.

It's just a bizarre, laboured description of a lesbian.

It's arch and kind of wanky but it's not a description of a lesbian. There are plenty of definitions of lesbian and I don't fit quite a few of them. I use "gay" as a compromise between bisexual and lesbian because neither feels quite right all the time and "queer" has political connotations I don't aspire to. I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear at the time, it was an obviously false economy in terms of the amount of typing I had to do, but I didn't want to lay claim to anything to which I'm not entitled.

That's fine by me, thebewilderness. Nice to see the Dunning–Kruger effect doing some good for a change.

humpty.jpg

Hi @GaspingShark

Just to say you used a word that is not normally 'accepted' in your comment and I believe some trans activists look for that word as proof of transphobic intent. Which I believe/know you did not mean. I will not repeat it but you can see it XXed out below...

"A temporary solution at the moment would seem to me to be to segregate the XXXXXXX into third spaces until everyone calms down, it's dehumanising but hey that's society for you."

To engage with that thought, as I believe you intended it, why wo9uld this need to be a temporary until everyone (does that mean women) calms down. Calm down dear is generally a bit offensive.

But most importantly, why is it dehumanising?

If one is a trans person, why is it dehumanisiing to be recognised as one?

Trans women are not, in fact, biological women but that does not stop them being human. One cannot stop being human anymore than one can change biological sex.

So surely recognizing that fact someone is trans is not a dehumanising thing.

I know once, a long time ago, the number of males wanting to be thought as female, and vice versa, was very low. Society had very rigid ideas of how males and females dressed and acted. Now, many of the those rules/ideas are gone, or at least in the process of going. Or should I say they were until we began defining children by the kind of toys they played with and whether they liked dresses or not!

But if we could get back to the pathway we were on in he 70s and 80s when toys were for anyone, clothes were for anyone, when Beckham wore a sarong and no one really cared etc, then many males who feel inclined to frilly clothes etc could just be that, men who wanted to dress a certain way.

There is room in society for the very small number of people who are genuinely dysphoric to gain a GRC in the route they can now and be courtesy accepted as 'honorary' members of the sex class women. But like all males I would expect them not to be going after jobs which would place them in conflict with women. Like women's sports.

Keep chumming the water, GaspingShark, someone is bound to take the bait.

This discussion has touched on non-binary or gender neutral issues.

I watched an interview with Owl and Fox. Owl was talking about being non-binary. Then Piers Morgan asked her which prison she would go to if she had to go to prison, guess what, the female one as she has a GRC.

Because when in a 'crunch' situation she did not want to be incarcerated with a load of men. I think a lot of women would feel just the same way, so although I respect people's right to identify as non-binary I must say that when the chips are down people may well see that biology is a real factor of life that cannot actually be so easily ignored! And I agree with whoever said upthread, or might have been on another thread that we need prison spaces for trans people, so they can be safe. I totally get that.

It's at 11 minutes in.

@GaspingShark "I would like you to consider the possibility that somebody else has a different experience of the world, of their gender from yours and it is equally valid. "gender is a kind of social expression" is not a fact, it's a hypothesis. It is you who are telling them what to believe and who to be when you insist "Just trust me, Poppy, once you believe it's ok to play with trucks you'll feel alright."

Just to be clear toilets, prisons etc in this country are segregated by sex, not how one feels about oneself. I cannot really know how someone else feels about themselves. I am generally happy to believe people that they 'feel like a boy/man' or 'feel like a girl/women' but I can't prove how they really feel and neither can they.

But even if they could, prisons and hospital wards are not segregated on how one feels.

Plus regarding gender as a social construct, I'd argue it is actually more than a hypothesis. There seems to be plenty of evidence 'gender' is socially constructed and no evidence that it is innate.

All the brain scan stuff is very disputed.

To me, it is clear that some people are unhappy in their birth sex, I would not deny that. Some people will never feel happy no matter how normal it is for girls to play with trucks or boys to play with Barbies. And I think the latter is probably a long way off, where as girls playing with trucks is considered quite normal.

So for a small number of people they will feel very uncomfortable in their birth sex and I'd like them to get all the help they can to feel comfortable, even if that means medication and surgery as adults. But even that does not alter the fact that gender' as we are all discussing it really is constructed socially.

snowflakeespecial.tumblr.com/post/114684943185/social-construct-masterpost

The problem with all the gender and nuancing is that laws about who can do what etc need to be clear. So people who want to be identified as the opposite of their birth sex have a process they can use right now. Which ensures they get help for crippling dysphoria. Potential new rules that anyone can identify as they like, will take away that safety net for trans people and for women.

Sorry that is long but I just read the whole thread and wanted to comment!

I would suggest that segregating people because apparently nobody else wants to share a space with them is the dehumanizing bit, Italiangreyhound.

Personally I think the increasing pink/blue divergence is an effect of consumerism. They can sell twice as much if your son and daughter won't share.

@GaspingShark

"I would suggest that segregating people because apparently nobody else wants to share a space with them is the dehumanizing bit, Italiangreyhound."

How far do you want to take the forced sharing of spaces? I don;t feel dehumaized if my 80 year old father in law doesn't want me in the toilet with him, or changing alongside him. Why would I?

Men who claim their humanity is damaged by not being put in prison with vulnerable women are not thinking about humanity.

Hospital wards, showers, toilets, prisons etc are segregated for safety and for dignity by sex, not by humanity, we are all human.

Expecting young girls and old ladies and everyone else female in between to share toilets with the opposite sex is denying them dignity, that to me is dehumanizing. Society only segregates certain things by sex, and other things it gives an option (male or female doctor or nurse, or carer in a care home) and others no option at all (who serves me at Tesco).

Saying that I, as a woman, do not want to shower naked next to a male is not denying them their humanity, saying I get no choice in the matter is denying me my dignity.

Likewise expecting female althlets to complete against men is ensuring the end of female sports.

Men's dignity as men does not rest on their right to be in intimate spaces with women. This is false. And if you catch them saying this, rest assured that it's not a question of humanity. The human race is male and female and we all understand that. We segregate on sex for some things.

BUT "Personally I think the increasing pink/blue divergence is an effect of consumerism. They can sell twice as much if your son and daughter won't share" I 100% agree with you there.

It's dehumanising to tell a man "no"?

@GaspingShark

I asked you a question you didn't answer and you may have missed. I'm going to put it again given that you are a Dawkins Fan and I'm very interested in your answer:

You said:

I would like you to consider the possibility that somebody else has a different experience of the world, of their gender from yours and it is equally valid

And I would like to ask:

If someone perceives and thinks they have experienced the presence of a specific god, is it reasonable for them to believe that god exists?

And is it reasonable for others to believe that specific god (or any) exists just because the person tells them they have experienced its presence?

I'm not a Dawkins Fan, he's a prick.

a) yes, b) no

But it's not comparable, because God's existence or otherwise is (probably) an objective fact.

It's an objective fact, that we can't know either way, surely. Exactly the same.

Theists who believe in a specific god draw on their personal belief system. Other people go on the fact that we only have subjective personal accounts of that God.

Which position has more material evidence?

People who believe in an innate gender identity draw on their own personal belief system. Other people go on the fact that we only have subjective personal accounts of that innate gender identity.

Where is the material evidence compelling enough that we should reorder society to benefit a minority of people and disadvantage another protected group who make up 51% of the worlds population?

Yes but still, if God exists it really exists outside of people, like Saturn or Pythagoras's theorem. My love for, say, Joy Division, exists only within me. I assure you it's there though.

The bottom line is that I don't believe we're reordering society to benefit a minority of people while disadvantaging another protected group. I believe there's a net and indeed overall benefit.