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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

New Zealand: Bill on transgender birth certificates creates big issues

194 replies

TimeLady · 21/11/2018 19:35

Sounds familiar....

www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/108740984/Bill-on-transgender-birth-certificates-creates-big-issues

OP posts:
Rufusthebewilderedreindeer · 23/11/2018 07:59

ove the fox picture btw, but I got that you think transwomen are men without the need for visual aids.

I love that meme as well

Lots of people post on here for lurkers and other posters

Its not all about you....

Karwomannghia · 23/11/2018 08:10

So if you can potentially wrongly assign someone’s sex, that means you can correctly assign, that there is actually a ‘correct’ way.
Or are you saying the gentleman in the pink scarf was wrongly recorded as male at birth? And through the thousands of nappy changes? And through puberty?

And if you say it isn’t the pink scarf that makes him a woman, what is it exactly?

Rufusthebewilderedreindeer · 23/11/2018 08:15

When dd was born i was absolutely positive i was having a boy

For weeks after i used to open her nappy and double check that she still had a vagina and not a penis

Slightly concerned that i may have had it wrong all these years, though mollified by the idea that if i got it wrong so have all the doctors and the midwife...and the health visitor, though she only glanced Hmm

DisrespectfulAdultFemale · 23/11/2018 08:26

women with PCOS

Please don't tell me that some TRAs drag us into the whole intersex nonsense. I am a woman - you know, adult human female - who has had ovaries on my cysts. This makes me no less female.

Rufusthebewilderedreindeer · 23/11/2018 08:32

Yeah some do disrepesctful Grin

Especially as that boosts their figures

Dragon3 · 23/11/2018 08:44

Julj70 Over the last few years, my area has seen an increase in the number of sexual assaults by strangers. It is terrifying.

All of the perpetrators had one factor in common. Without exception.

All of the victims had one factor in common. In every other way they were quite different from each other.

What do you think those factors were?

Datun · 23/11/2018 08:46

For a scientist, you're not using any logic.

This odd appeal:

We don't (well, we shoudn't) make sweeping assumptions about the likely behaviour of a group based upon the behaviour of individuals within it. Any other conclusion takes you into some rather dangerous territory.

Immediately collapses with:

and yet you would put transwomen in the dangerous position of using male facilities.

As ever women can't make 'sweeping assumptions' about men, but transwomen can.

What I won't do is change my position on the basis of rhetoric. I haven't seen much compelling evidence. I'm not really trying to change anyone's mind here, just provide some balance.

Let me tell you something julj70 misogyny and entitlement seems to be something that goes wholly unrecognised by the person demonstrating it.

You are arguing for the deconstruction of sex segregation. Based on criteria of your choosing. I believe you are trying to make a distinction where the criteria appears to be whether someone is genuine or not.

Leaving aside the actual criteria which determines whether you are genuinely female, you are expecting women to budge up on the basis of what a man, or many men, say.

What is repeatedly so striking about this is your inability to see this from anything other than the male gaze. It's all about what kind of men, how, why. None of this is about the fact that many women don't want any men in their space. Irrespective of how that man is thinking at any given time.

Partly because we don't know if someone is a threat or not (and never will - see Schrödinger's rapist), but also because given how many women are subjected to sexual assault, sexual harassment, and domestic violence, the presence of a man when vulnerable is discomforting, irrespective of his intentions.

I don't want to get undressed in front of my father-in-law, or share a changing room with my son's friends. None of whom are a threat.

I certainly wouldn't expect other women to, based on my say so!

Your attitude to women is that their autonomy and boundaries are up for question. Because you see women as 'lesser than', it's obvious and normal to you that their boundries can be challenged for your benefit.

You are demanding 'evidence and balance'.

You demand justification for why women are refusing to allow men in situations where they are disrobing.

You're taking this up with the wrong people. You need to direct your energies to the cause of the problem. Male violence.

But no, let's use that millennia of male entitlement to bang on at women on the Internet about nonsense intersex arguments to force them to give up their hard won single sex spaces.

In the meantime women's boundaries and consent are not subject to your made up balance and evidence.

IAteMyCrumpetIAteItAllUp · 23/11/2018 09:17

Julj70, would you mind looking at my question from 7:45 last night please? Apologies if I've managed to overlook your answer.

Surely the most accurate description of sexing a newborn is "assumed female/male with 98.4% accuracy" (using your statistic of intersex prevalence - I think you've overstated the prevalence there, it's generally accepted to be more in the region of 99%, but that's not material for these purposes)? This is certainly more accurate that "assignment", which implies a large degree of choice and discretion on behalf of the assignor. I suppose that the very tiny minority of intersex babies that have genuinely ambiguous genitalia might be assigned a sex pending further investigation, but extrapolating that process to the 99.9% of people where that is not the case is pretty odd.

You've also raised the issue of where the 1.6% of people who are intersex should use the bathroom. I don't mind where they wee. I think that a 1.6% deviance from strict sex segregation will only fractionally, if it all, undermine the objectives of sex segregation. I am happy to accept that fractional difference in order to accommodate intersex people (to my mind, this is the key difference between intersex use of bathrooms and trans use - a space that is segregated for 98.4% of the population is still segregated for all practical purposes, a space where that percentage is substantially reduced is not). As a further example of this, I also accept that my husband sometimes needs to use the female facilities when he is out with our baby and the only changing facilities are in the female toilets. Again, because I don't think that a small number of men attending to tiny children materially undermines the objective of sex segregated spaces.

StarsAndMoonlight · 23/11/2018 09:22

would you mind looking at my question from 7:45 last night please? Apologies if I've managed to overlook your answer.

Yes, my points seem to have been overlooked too...

Funny that. When there is no response to points made and only some tired old tropes to be wheeled out, there is a deafening silence.

ShotsFired · 23/11/2018 09:23

I've made this handy sheet so everyone can join in the fun!

New Zealand: Bill on transgender birth certificates creates big issues
Juells · 23/11/2018 09:29

As always, stunningly good post from Datun.

This / especially struck me as such a good point, makes the problem with shared-sex spaces so clear.
I don't want to get undressed in front of my father-in-law, or share a changing room with my son's friends. None of whom are a threat.

StarsAndMoonlight · 23/11/2018 09:34

I don't want to get undressed in front of my father-in-law, or share a changing room with my son's friends. None of whom are a threat.

Quite.

I'd much rather be seen in my underwear by a woman I don't know very well than a man who is a friend and with whom I've been on holiday.

SlowlyShrinking · 23/11/2018 09:45

I don't want to get undressed in front of my father-in-law, or share a changing room with my son's friends. None of whom are a threat

Yy, and if men/male-bodied people are allowed access to women’s changing facilities, then a lot of women will no longer be able to go to the gym or swimming or wherever. I don’t understand why men/male-bodied people wanting to access women’s changing rooms trumps my want to not have them there?
Although it might be a bit of an own goal for TRAs, if the women’s changing rooms no longer have any women/female bodied people in them (except the ones who were born with male bodies)

StarsAndMoonlight · 23/11/2018 09:48

I don’t understand why men/male-bodied people wanting to access women’s changing rooms trumps my want to not have them there?

I know. We are constantly being told that, in issues of consent, no trumps yes.

Sex? No trumps yes.
Babies? No trumps yes.
Cup of tea? No trumps yes.
Men in women's spaces? Be rude not to.

homoseXXualmum · 23/11/2018 09:50

*Why do we separate by sex in the first place?

We separate for dignity, privacy, safety, to accommodate biological/physical difference and to meet biological/physical needs.*

Honestly I always saw the MAIN reason being reducing sexual assault and unwanted pregnancies that result form it if you have a bunch of teens or adults of both sexes in the same space, naked (when it comes to changing rooms).

Bowlofbabelfish · 23/11/2018 09:53

These range from some relatively minor conditions like hypospadias

Hypospadias are not an intersex condition.
TRAs are wanting to include them to bump up the numbers of people classes with intersex conditions, but they do not fall within this bracket (neither does straightforward clitaromegaly.) I’ve also seen TRA arguments that everyone with pcos should be included.

This is not correct though

(A hypospadia is a slight abnormal development of the penis where the urethra opens somewhere on the shaft.)

StarsAndMoonlight · 23/11/2018 09:56

Honestly I always saw the MAIN reason being reducing sexual assault and unwanted pregnancies that result form it if you have a bunch of teens or adults of both sexes in the same space, naked (when it comes to changing rooms)

It is. But the TRAs tend to get a bit angsty if you say that so I find it helpful to remind them/others that there are physical needs arising from our unique male and female biologies too.

No point putting sanitary bins in male toilets or inviting men for cervical smears after all...

Bowlofbabelfish · 23/11/2018 09:58

i didn't say that there is no such thing as sex, but rather that sex isn't binary.

This is a bold claim and as such needs evidence to back it up. Do you have any (I bet you post that nature Op Ed piece, in which case go for it, but do explain WHY you feel it shows sex is a spectrum and then I’ll explain why it isn’t.)

Sex is a binary. Do you know what proved this? Sperm and eggs. If sex wasn’t a binary, there would be other sex cells. There aren’t.

Some organisms actually do have multiple sexes (which I’m sure you know as a scientist.) but not humans.

Of course if you e got proof of a third or fourth etc gamete, you’ll be up for a Nobel, because thatvis major, major stuff.

Intersex conditions are errors of sexual development. they are NOT ‘other sexes’.

May I ask what your field is, as a scientist?

Justhadathought · 23/11/2018 10:01

Women just don't want men in their private spaces, uninvited. How difficult is that to understand or appreciate? It is to do with the need for dignity and privacy, as well as safety.

Bowlofbabelfish · 23/11/2018 10:04

All of this boils down to the following.

You can’t change sex
Some people feel like they should be the opposite sex.
They cannot change sex
As they cannot change sex, the only other way of attempting to be like the other sex is to look like, or act like, the other sex
BUT - all that is behaviour, or dress, or stereotypes.
And really, people should be able to dress as they like.
But they can’t change sex
And sometimes, sex segregation or sex treatment differentiation is important.
And because people can’t change sex, for those very few times and places, sex matters.

Allbthe rest of it is smoke and mirrors. The endless wittering about ‘whattaboitintersex’, the threats, the appeals to be nice, the shutupshutup, the twaw.,. It’s all just fiddling about the main point which is:

you cannot change sex regardless of how you look or act or present, and sometimes sex is important.

Scrumplestiltskin · 23/11/2018 10:27

@julj70

So female means 46 XX karyotype and nothing else then? Which has to mean that a woman with CAIS isn't, in your view, a woman and should use male toilets, changing rooms etc.?

Do you have difficulty with reading comprehension? If so, let me repeat myself:
Chromosomes dictate reproductive systems and genitalia, except in the case of intersex people, where birth assignment based on phenotype or condition is what dictates the sex class they are placed into.

Obviously women with CAIS are male intersex; if they were female, they wouldn't be identified as having CAIS. It's MALE disorder. However as they are intersex and will develop to be phenotypically more female, they are "assigned" female.

But presuming guilt rather than innocence isn't fair, it isn't 'Kiwi', and that's (just) one of the reasons I'm proud of my country.

Hmm I suppose you campaign for all NZ spaces being unisex then? After all, if you're presuming all males are innocent (including the trans ones,) and wait until someone has provably perved on, assaulted, or raped someone to exclude them, then to exclude non trans males preemptively is discrimination, and not "kiwi," right?
What's kiwi, actually (sadly) is that we have horrifically high murder rates of infants and young children for our population - see this horrific story, www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=149225 and this one too en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nia_Glassie_abuse_case

That's the kiwi way.

1 in 3 girls in New Zealand will be seriously sexually abused by the age of 16, 1 in 2 if they are Maori.
1 in 5 NZ women will experience at least one serious sexual assault as an adult.
Only 1 in a hundred rape cases reported will get a conviction.

www.helpauckland.org.nz/sexual-abuse-statistics.html

That's so kiwi.

In terms of domestic violence, this article says, "New Zealand has the worst rate of family and intimate-partner violence in the world. A shocking 80 per cent of incidents go unreported — so what we know of family violence in our community is barely the tip of the iceberg."
www.nzherald.co.nz/family-violence/news/article.cfm?c_id=178&objectid=11634543

THE WORST IN THE WORLD.

But that's us kiwis, huh?

How about you don't begrudge the battered, abused, ignored and dismissed KIWI women and girls our own spaces away from a cock and balls, huh? I think it's fairly self evident that our fucking safety does not trump a penis person's desire for validation. But it seems its the kiwi way to throw women and children under the bus, doesn't it? We're so fucking great at that. World class in battery and child sex abuse.

Ereshkigal · 23/11/2018 10:28

Good post on another thread which gets to the heart of this.

No woman or girl should have to share a space with any male where both or either are naked without her freely given and informed consent . Anyone who opposes this is an apologist for rape culture.

Ereshkigal · 23/11/2018 10:30

Allbthe rest of it is smoke and mirrors. The endless wittering about ‘whattaboitintersex’, the threats, the appeals to be nice, the shutupshutup, the twaw.,. It’s all just fiddling about the main point which is:

you cannot change sex regardless of how you look or act or present, and sometimes sex is important.

This this this. So fucking bored of the sophistry, the emotional blackmail, the deflection, the whataboutery.

Just NO.

DisrespectfulAdultFemale · 23/11/2018 10:43

So fucking bored of the sophistry, the emotional blackmail, the deflection, the whataboutery.

And what is why I don't engage with posters like julj.

DisrespectfulAdultFemale · 23/11/2018 10:44

For a scientist, you're not using any logic.

Perhaps the poster "identifies" as a scientist. All it would take is putting on a lab coat.

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