Can't make this add up.

[MVDC]

I've been writing this in my notes for several days because I'm really struggling to get my thoughts straight on this.

I'm finding myself completely tangled up in my own brain here. I've read a LOT on MN about gender critical views and I agree with a great deal of it - the unfairness of trans women in women's sports, the importance of single sex spaces from a safety perspective, the potential for abuse inherent in self-ID, the growing social contagion, the ridiculousness of gender stereotypes, the huge safeguarding risks of early affirmation and transition, etc etc etc, all of this makes total sense to me.

But i find that so hard to parse with the lived experiences of my trans friends. I know a fair number of trans men and women, all of whom have endless stories of the ways in which society victimises and sidelines them on a daily basis, and it's undeniable that policy centring GC views would make their lives worse. Trans women are not welcome in female spaces, but also aren't safe in male spaces. Being continually misgendered on various admin systems, the many barriers to medical transition and the huge hoops that need to be jumped through in order for them to live authentic lives - all of these things mean that my friends are living with a huge burden every day.

I can't get my head round it. Keeping trans people safe comes at the cost of women's safety. But keeping women safe puts trans people at risk. Of course, at the heart of the matter, when you get right down to it, men are the problem, but knowing that doesn't actually give us any solutions! How do we square this circle?

I don't know what I'm expecting to get out of this, because if there was an easy answer we'd have it already, but does anyone else feel this same disconnect? It seems like there's no way to align the common sense of GC views with considerate safeguarding of genuinely trans individuals.

The comparison you make to hypothetical crime statistics doesn't work, because when it comes to male violence the traffic is all one way.

When you refer to having to "pander to a religious belief" you are entirely overlooking the fact that "religion or belief" is a protected characteristic in the Equality Act (which Maya Forstater's Employment Appeal Tribunal ruled covers gender critical beliefs) - as indeed is sex.

Hmm, yes, it is an almost unreachable utoipan ideal. It would be like having to provide seperate toilets and facilities for disabled people, or putting baby changing facilities in men's toilets, or any other improvemements that have been made in our world to benefit disadvantaaged groups.

Much easier to make women give up their rights. 🙄

Part of the problem is that some people have set their heart on a set of considtions they think will make them happy, which aren't really possible.

People are not going to stop noticing that male people are male people, and female people female. And as a reflection of that many systems are going to be built around it. It's one of the basic, really probably the most universal and ubiquitous, divisions in human life.

Anyone who in their daily life is going to work against the average is sometimes going to have adinsistrative faff. It happens to everyone at some point in their lives, and for some it happens a lot. If you were born in another country and your citizenship is different, for example, if you have medical issues, etc.

In a lot of ways gender transition is not a great solution to dysphoria, because the fact is that there will still be plenty of reminders of one's biologocal sex in daily life. Just like other ongoing medical issues.

As for the safety thing, in most cases transwomen are perfectly safe in male spaces and those are the most appropriate for them to use. Most people are not on a regular basis in the kinds of situations where that is a risk. Where they are (prisons) they need other solutions but the lack of safety in daily life is over-egged.

Also with regards to access to healthcare.

Healthcare needs to be given on the basis of good medical practice. Even before the current era when sex reassignment was carefully used for a few individuals who were very well vetted, medical transition was not a clear win in terms of medical outcomes. It is a very phusically invasive and potentially dangerous set of interventions with outcomes that aren't that great.

If we used the same approach as any other medical intervention, its not clear that it would be used, in fact some places stopped doing sex reassignemnt because it was felt that the outcomes didn't justify the risk.

Medical treatments need to be based on teh kinds of medical decision making, do no harm, that are normative in medicine. Which aren't in general about just doing what people want.

When I got interested in this I read a twitter thread by a landlady who had 2 regular trans customers. She described them as 2 lovely people who were part of the community. However what she did add was that whenever they needed the loo they would get the key for the locked toilet as they were aware that their presence could upset the women customers. They understood that on some occasions that sex was important. Their own acceptance of their differences helped them be accepted by those around them.

There seem to be some strong parallels between medical transitioning and lobotomies. Revolutionary treatments that seemed to solve a previously unsolvable problem and were taken up enthusiastically by some parts of the medical establishments, without sufficient assessment, testing and follow-up, and without clarity over which patients the treatments could help. And which were eventually found to cause more harm than help, and often did not truly 'cure' the original problem.

Thank you for you interested engagement. Confusion is reasonable, a lot of people are saying a lot of very confusing things and when you change the meaning of words it can cause a real barrier to communication.

So FWIW so far as I'm concerned this is a conversation about manners, etiquette, respect and boundaries. In a society which remains incredibly sexist.

It's the difference between respecting, even liking a person and agreeing with a belief system. I'm an atheist but it doesn't mean I hate Christians, or that I have no Christian friends or that I'm pro murder. But I might disagree with a Christian about WHY you shouldn't kill someone. A Christian might say "you shouldn't murder someone because it's a mortal sin / against the 10 commandments, and you'll go to hell if you do."

I'm prepared to respect someone's right to believe but expect them to respect my right to not believe. I can totally see how "a girl soul in a boy body" can make perfect sense to a person who believes in souls but as a person who doesn't believe in souls I'm clearly not going to believe that that is literally true.

The word woman means (for me/GC) adult human female. It is NOT a set of standards which I /we am to be judged against but a simple descriptor of the biology I'm working with as I walk through the world.

The idea of judging women's dress, deportment, what we say and the way that we say it are NOT IN ANY WAY NEW. In my youth the word used was 'ladylike' everything we did was judged and 'policed' by parents, relatives, teachers, neighbours etc. and we were constantly assessed on how 'ladylike' we were.

I, amongst many many others, fought to be able to use the word "woman" to describe ourselves and be free of the endless burden of judgement the word 'lady' carried.

So for me it was not at all progressive to see these nebulous attitudes attach themselves to the word woman. When we tried to explain that we couldn't give men control of this word as it was already in use we were told we could /should give up the word "woman" safely because if we ever needed a neutral term to describe our biology we could always use the words "female" and "male" this particular 'reasonable compromise' seemed to last about a year.

Sex is knowing who might get pregnant
gender is how you feel about your son taking ballet lessons

@toastfairy

I like that.

Emily Bridges was on a podium with other members of the Notts Cycle Team and there was no sense of distance with the other members of the team.

I've not seen any objections to Iszac Henig competing in the women's swimming events.

Grayson Perry, Miranda Yardley and Fionne Orlander report using the Men's public loos without incident.

I'm not sure that the OP is using the correct comparator group when making some of the assertions about relative safety.

me too but I can't take credit

@JellySaurus

"We can extend trans people the same respect and compassion as we extend to all people, while still not taking responsibility for their emotions, beliefs and desires."

Nail meet hammer. Absolutely spot on.

@MVDC Trans women are not welcome in female spaces, but also aren't safe in male spaces

If that is the case, why is the trans community so gungho about so-called sex work? Why aren't TRAs warning transpeople away from what is universally known as a dangerous occupation for anyone involved in it? Why would transwomen place themselves in such danger if they have no capacity to deal with violent johns. I can't see how public bathrooms pose more danger than someone servicing a john in a private location..

I'm not sure what your point is on the crime stats - it wasn't a directional question- more can you lump a whole class of people together and effectively taint them by the whole-
On the religious bit- i know its protected by the equality act- however we still have the right to question whether things should be. Religious discrimination etc being protected does at time conflict with other rights - or cause grey areas -

@Notcreativeatall

Isn't it less about tarring all men with the notion that they are sex offenders and more about recognising that they do have a higher propensity to a degree that it is hard to ignore societally and also recognising that the average woman doesn't have the capacity to fight off the average man (and that the consequences would be really awful for her if she couldn't - risk of serious injury, rape, pregnancy etc), so it is really a sensible rule of thumb safety-wise? I mean, society can't police toilets to such a degree that you'd only let a bloke in when there was also a single woman in there if there was a woman who was a similar (or greater) weight and height but with a black belt so could definitely take him down, could you? I mean, why are women told to walk home in groups, use well lit roads etc etc if not for an additional sex based threat? Single sex spaces mean that there is a social stigma factor / informal policing that discourages people (men) who might attack women from chancing their arm - you can see this in the fact that unisex spaces are statistically less safe for women. It's not saying all men are rapists.

Same with prisons - not sensible to get prisoners into a scenario in which violence or pregnancy (even consensual) could occur.

Or sports - presumably you understand why we would segregate those for fairness and safety (if contact)?

Plus also the fact that a lot of women do actually value privacy from the opposite sex? For example, if you are me, the days in which you might have to deal with sudden flooding and come out of a cubicle with blood on your hands. In the ladies, you know that any looks will be sympathetic. Whereas, you are hyper aware of what your male colleagues might be thinking in a unisex space.

I think it's pretty natural to ask why it is ok to use things like crime statistics with regards to segregating men, but not with say, segregating an ethnic group when there is a strong correlation to something like crime. We teach kids this is wrong from early on, we expect people like the police to disregard their intuition when it has been formed by being exposed to disproportionate rates of crime.

And I think in a lot of cases we dance around the reasoning, which is actually not just about raw numbers, but the nature of the risk ad why it happens.

The reason men and women have issues in some shared spaces is not like the reason a particular ethnic group may be over-represented when it comes to something like assault. It's not because of their DNA, their nature as members of a particular group.

But sexual problems between men and women, which may be crime but also may be just people feeling uncomfortable, pressured, etc, are based in the nature of sexual attraction between men and women. Which is a very close to universal human experience. It's just not uncommmon, even apart from crime, for people to make bad decisions around sexual behaviour. It's a very powerful, basic drive, and it underlies male and female relations to a significant degree, even when those relations are very good, and sometimes even when there is no real sexual interest.

So things like seperate toilets or the social expectation that we might only have same sex caregivers for intimate care if possible - these exist because there are times when that element of human sexual response is just better out of the picture. In some instances it's almost universal, no one seriously thinks men's and women's prisons should be mixed, anywhere. In some other cases there is some variation in what's culturally normal say with saunas or other places like that. But in all what underlies it is this fact about human beings that is something 99.5% of people feel in their bones.

To some extent western countries have tried to let on that either this isn't a universal experience in any way that mattered - I saw a broadcaster try to argue this, supposedly from a feminist standpoint, just recently. Or that is it is, in so far as it exists, a bad thing that needs to be extinguished. Well, good luck - no one is going to manage to accomplish that, and it's been a mistake to try and act as if we can.

And by no one seriously thinks prisons should be mixed, I mean no one but ideologues.

In our local swimming baths (and most others I've visited) it's mixed changing so cubicles with locks this seems a simple way to be inclusive. Mixed changing rooms in shops wouldn't offend me if there were doors rather than curtains. Toilets that are individual are safer than cubicles. Not easy though with regards to prisons and hospitals. What there needs to be is better security/policing to protect women as well as obviously a shift in society so that women do not have to fear men.
Sport there's no easy solution, athletics could be categorised by weight/height etc rather than gender but that would potentially push women out of a already very male oriented area.

I think perhaps none of this was a problem until self-Id became a thing? Seem to recall Allison Bailey saying something similar in her recent tribunal.
Under the old GRA rules and gatekeeping, numbers were kept small and the "non genuine" filtered out, and it wasn't an issue.

I think perhaps none of this was a problem until self-Id became a thing?

It was at least contained. But allowing the official deceit in the first place was the thin end of the wedge - once you allow official falsehoods, the whole system inevitably dissolves in time, as you can't use reality to justify doing or not doing things.

If you're going to allow a deceit for some group, based on nothing real, you can't deny it to anyone else.

Some interesting stuff showing that in practice in these Reduxx pieces about California prisons.

ACLU Claims Denying Male Sex Offenders Transfer to Women’s Prisons is “Discriminatory”
“Trailblazing” Trans Inmate Slams Prison Self-ID, Wants Prisons to Apologize to Women

So the ACLU is arguing in the first piece:

"Similarly, CDCR cannot deny a transgender woman's transfer request based on her convictions or disciplinary history so long as it incarcerates cigender women with similar records in its women's prisons, as that would run afoul of the non-discrimination provision".

And they may well be right, given the state of the law there, unless you can argue it would contravene a higher human rights claim from the women inmates.

In the second article, someone points out a potential future legal attack in the other direction:

Norsworthy also noted that despite SB-132 being in effect, no transgender female-to-males have been sent to a men’s prison, and says that the official reluctance to move biological females who identify as men to the gender-specific institution exposes the ultimate intention of the law.

“They’re never going to allow a [female] to walk on a man’s yard because they know the men’s side is different,” Norsworthy says, “Those [female-to-males] are either going to have to start saying they’re women again in order to stay [in a women’s prison], or, if they are recognized as men — you gotta’ get them out of there! Because if you don’t, the male inmates are going to figure that out.”

Norsworthy warned that there will be no legal basis to keep any male inmate out of women’s facilities if trans-identified females are allowed to be legally recognized as men but avoid transfer to a male estate.

“That’s where the problem lies. The problem lies in the contradictions. And it is a very obvious game being played by these advocacy groups who got into California lawmaker’s ears and sold them a story.”

See - if "transgender men" can be held in the prison estate, then it would be discrimination to stop "cisgender men" - so men shouldn't even have to bother with the "self ID". With sex removed from the law, there's no remaining basis to prevent that. "Transgender men" and "cisgender men" have to be treated the same.

That claim probably won't be made by ACLU, as they're all about the trans, but someone could certainly bring it.

I know a fair number of trans men and women, all of whom have endless stories of the ways in which society victimises and sidelines them on a daily basis, and it's undeniable that policy centring GC views would make their lives worse.

Genuine question: why?

GC feminism doesn't mean anything about being treated as male except in very specific situations, where it matters for women's safety and dignity. I don't think it's making someone's life harder to say they should compete in sports with the rest of their sex, for example.

The one situation I can think of is toilets and if a transwoman passes then no-one is going to bat an eyelid.

So the real problem is non-passing trans women. Those people do unquestionably get a lot of grief but I doubt much of it is because of feminism and I think it will be true whatever toilets they use- until we succeed in dismantling stereotypes about what clothes the two sexes 'should' wear.

In what way are trans women not safe in male spaces? This seems to be stated a lot but never clarified.

This was a problem in some male dominated spaces like tech workplaces before self id. I remember being annoyed about someone constantly leaving the loo seat up in one the ladies toilets at work 30 years ago, there were so few women and a large site so I never bumped into anyone when I was using the ladies female or otherwise but it felt like someone was ‘marking’ their territory. I moved office nearly 20 years ago to avoid a massive male colleague who was aggressive in the ladies if I didn’t play at girly talk (and used to follow me whenever I went to the loo). I took a tech professional exam maybe 10 years ago and noticed the transwomen outnumbered the women (and they physically blocked me and froze me out of any conversations with other candidates). Now the transwomen dominate speaking about women in tech and make it pointless to try and organise any mutual support organisations for women.

It just wasn't a problem for many women then, it is getting so much worse and widespread with self id.

I think it will be true whatever toilets they use- until we succeed in dismantling stereotypes about what clothes the two sexes 'should' wear.

This is at the root of why it doesn't add up.

Sex and gender are two different things. You can't map them together on a straight line - you need a 2-d graph with one on each axis. (Of course, 'gender' in itself isn't one-dimensional so even that is a massive simplification).

The huge error has been the false logic of pretending gender == sex, or worse that gender > sex.