Who Is a Woman: Sex, Gender and Policy Making

[aseriesofstillimages]

I’m not sure if this paper by Daphna Joel and Cordelia Fine has been noted on this forum before, but I had not come across it.

https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/article/2/2/211/htm

It seemed to me the most helpful, clear, balanced discussion I’ve seen of how to approach these issues. I’d be interested in your thoughts.

That's long; I'll read it later. However, the abstract looks clear.

Good grief. Makes you wonder how society has managed to procreate if it's that difficult to define the two sexes?
Fortunately sex is binary - only women have the capacity to give birth so that pesky biology will keep on ignoring all the fantasies, the delusions and the academic ponderings.

If someone wants to consider the harms to women and balance with the harms to trans-women if you exclude them, I mean OK, but trans-activists are going to place all emphasis on trans' needs and trans-inclusion and GC feminists are going to place all emphasis on women's needs and well what business do males have to be accessing women's spaces anyway.

Let's say you have a trans girl/woman in education and she/he could benefit by being included in the women's sports teams. How much weight should we give this benefit? Compared to say fairness?

I'm inclined to say that the possibility of benefit is simply irrelevant, as they just aren't in that category.

"And, of course, the possibility of gains from greater diversity within women’s spaces from the inclusion of trans women should not be overlooked."

No privacy from the opposite sex, can't rule out sex attacks, but it will mean more diversity!

I'm ambivalent about this. Good that there's clear acknowledgement of conflicts of interest. Disappointing to see Cordelia Fine adopt activist gender language, even if it's with a pro format qualifier.

We can just let all men in, then women's spaces will be really diverse, yes?

It is long, but I thought clear and reasonably concise. I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts once you’ve read it.

Isn’t that a bit defeatist though, to assume that neither ‘side’ will ever give any consideration or weight to the other’s concerns? Also this isn’t really aimed at either ‘trans activists’ or ‘gender critical’ people - it’s aimed at those responsible for making policy decisions across a wide range of areas, who don’t necessarily have their own strong position.

I thought the detailed examples about how one might weigh different factors in different contexts were particularly helpful.

And on the sport question, did you see the bit about rugby, and the suggestion that safety might well trump all other concerns because of the specific context?

the reason I came across this article was because I read her review of Barnes’ Time to Think - in it she comes across as quite GC, and I was previously a fan of her work, so I googled to see if she’d expressed any views elsewhere.

I’m not ‘gender critical’, but I’m always looking for people who write on these topics in ways that seem to be led more by evidence and careful consideration than personal bias and preconceptions - and my sense is that Fine (like Barnes) is one of the best from that perspective.

It’s a shame that people here seem to be so much more interested in getting outraged over something in the Guardian than discussing a constructive proposal for how to approach policy making that involves issues of sex and gender.

The paper appears to adopt, as its starting premise, an unduly narrow description of what they refer to as the expansion in the term transgender - by failing to mention that the ‘many other subjectivities’ now covered by the term transgender include erotic cross-dressing.

“The term ‘transgender’ was introduced in the 1990s and, as described in more detail later, has gradually developed into an umbrella term that encompasses many other subjectivities within the concept of gender identity, such as genderqueer, genderfluid, agender, and non-binary, and regardless of whether individuals experience gender dysphoria or desire or undertake medical or social transition”

If the paper ignores the motivations of erotic cross-dressers as one of the factors to be considered when assessing whether women’s single-sex female-only facilities and services should be permitted to exist or should be withdrawn from women and transformed into mixed-sex facilities open to males, then the paper will be of limited value for use in policy-making.

Or more accurately it will be of high value to those males wishing to have access to facilities and services which are currently single-sex female-only provision. But of limited value other than for that purpose.

I think the article you gave is really quite limited in nature. A lot of it is common sense, or the suggestions may be OK in some situations.

But it doesn't claim to be able to settle the clash of values that people have.

If you think policy makers should take a "middle ground" and be wanting to balance benefits with harms, fine, perhaps that's what will happen in the future.

But as a principle, I just don't think that males should ever be in a women's prison for example. There may be a few that are actually safe, but they aren't women, so why would you do it? I don't see the advantage in switching over to a gender identity approach. For one thing, it's a prison, it's about punishment. I don't give a fuck if you would be happier in a women's prison!

It is an interesting article and I appreciate the authors started by providing definitions of some of the terms, acknowledging the conflict and acknowledging that the gender identity terms are lacking in non circular definitions.

But, and this is a big but, why are they still advocating that instead of ensuring the mens services and facilities are safe and comfortable to use for transwomen, do they still find it acceptable to willfully exclude women and girls by opening up womens services and facilities?

Some of their suggestions have merits like third spaces and affirmative actions whereby a certain percentage is reserved for women. Or that an old school transsexual who has had genital surgery might need to be treated differently than a self identified transwomen who hasn't.

They also float the idea of social experiments to monitor what the effect is on women and girls when sex segregation is replaced by gender identity segregation. I don't know if they realise but every country that has implemented self id is running that experiment. All they need to do is go monitor those countries or get those countries governments to actually give a fuck about women and girls and do some monitoring of their own.
None of the countries with self id do any research into the impact of self id on women and girls, hence the feedback that self id is great for transpeople and that there are only 'incidents' with women being hurt or excluded.

Overall, nice to see someone trying to find a way out. But their starting point is still that women need to budge up and make room. Why?

I am not interested in policies that involve gender.

I thought the unpicking of the different aspects of sex categorisation was helpful and not something I have seen explained so clearly before - and I think it’s crucial, before you start assessing what should happen in relation to any particular sex segregated space or service (eg whether it needs to be sex segregated at all, and if so, whether any trans people should be allowed to use the women’s space/service) you need to understand very clearly the reasons for separating men and women in that context, and what the relevant differences between them are.

That applies to prison equally, and you probably have to assess on an individual basis in that context - ie does this trans woman pose any sort of threat to female inmates, will the way the trans woman presents cause female inmates distress, will the trans woman be at risk in the male estate, how much distress would it cause them to be housed in the male estate.

on running experiments/pilots, I imagine the point is that policy makers in this country won’t have any way to set up detailed studies of the impact of measures being taken in other countries, and also won’t know whether other differences between the uk and those countries would affect the results - so the answer is to set up pilots in this country which can be organised in the most appropriate way and carefully assessed.

So it's back to passing. The problem with that is who makes the judgement call. A trans person may pass to one person but not another.

The issue of balancing advantage to transwomen versus harm to women is you are comparing apples and oranges. If there is any harm the answer must be no or all you are doing is taking from women to give to males.

Realistically hardly any of them pass as women.

This sounds like you're advocating for mixed sex prisons. I ask how that benefits women and the only answer I can come up with is that it doesn't. So that's a no from me.

Although no choice of language is politically neutral, we have sought in this manuscript to use terms responsive to the different concerns in these debates. In order to respect individuals’ gender identification, we use ‘trans women’ as a contraction of the term transgender women. We also consider that using the unmodified term women to refer to adult human females would, in the context of discussing questions as to who is included in policies ‘for women’, implicitly presuppose an answer. However, we also recognize the legitimacy of concerns about the use of the term cisgender women. We therefore use ‘cis’ for anyone who doesn’t self-label with a non-normative identity, such as, trans or non-binary. This is similar to Serano’s (2007) ‘cissexual’, which means anyone who does not have a sense of incongruence with regards to their sex.

So basically, they don't care that women reject the whole concept of "cis" as ideological, they make a performance about not wanting to offend anyone but they go with the TRA term.

'you probably have to assess on an individual basis in that context - ie does this trans woman pose any sort of threat to female inmates, will the way the trans woman presents cause female inmates distress, will the trans woman be at risk in the male estate, how much distress would it cause them to be housed in the male estate.'

Any male will present a threat to female inmates. AT BEST women will find a male threatening. The rest of the questions are redundant.

The male prison service manages to look after various vulnerable males who are vulnerable for all sorts of reasons - the women's estate is tiny in comparison and is not set up for nor obliged to cater for the wishes of males.

on running experiments/pilots, I imagine the point is that policy makers in this country won’t have any way to set up detailed studies of the impact of measures being taken in other countries, and also won’t know whether other differences between the uk and those countries would affect the results - so the answer is to set up pilots in this country which can be organised in the most appropriate way and carefully assessed.

I disagree. Mistakes made in legal implementations in other countries should be take into account and preferably laws should be adjusted to avoid these mistakes are also made. For example, other countries show that self id leads to many male prisoners rightly or falsely claiming to be trans and requesting transfer to male prisons. It also shows statistic collection can be drastically impacted if you suddenly start registering someone's gender as sex.

I take it you are for the Uk doing similar social experiments and then try and capture, just as badly, what the negative impact is on women. I will ask you why should women be forced to take part in government driven social experiments?

I also see that you have not responded to my question why women should bear the burden of transwomen being discriminated and harrassed by men and not men?

And, of course, the possibility of gains from greater diversity within women’s spaces from the inclusion of trans women should not be overlooked.

Gains for who, exactly?

It's a depressing example of the extremes that some will go to to make the unacceptable"palatable". If we just accept that some men "pass", if we just focus on "lesser" crimes than rape, sexual assault and paedophilia, if we're just kind and use long words where one will do.

There's nothing wrong with women saying no. We don't have to contort ourselves into a simpering mess in order to pander to men. There's nothing wrong with women having boundaries.

Remember, as Trans pride admitted yesterday "Sarah and many others in our community hold a lot of rage and anger and they have the right to express that anger through their words".

So very true and precisely why these men have no place in women's spaces.