Does the Transgender community have a problem with well evidenced science? Does the community only ever accept favourable reports, AKA confirmation bias, or is it something deeper?

[HydraDominatus]

Every piece of science or news thats not entirely supportive is buried under accusations of transphobia or bias

Why is this a political debate rather than a mental and physical health issue?

Cancer care isn't bias and politicised, trans health care shouldn't be either. Surely it's all about properly designed and researched programmes, with the outcome not predetermined, that we should be entirely standing behind?

Would the community ever stand behind rigorous, transparent, and ethically conducted research into transgender health care that did not align with its previous, deeply held views? If not, isn't that a problem?

tl;dr Is the Transgender community bias to it's own detriment?

(inspired by recent UK changes which do seem to be well researched, evidenced and guided by true support for people with genuine issues, it just does not line up with existing trans community narrative)

If your too busy chanting TWAW on a thread about scientific data and how biased GC are but TRAs aren't, I don't think you are going to grasp much in your religious ferver tbh.

I mean its not as if the actual law is relevant to believers in Stonewall law is it?

Ok. Let's assume for a second that gender identity exists as a scientific concept, the same way that sexual orientation exists, although both of them cannot be measured yet. Let's also assume it's innate. Does a male with a female gender identity have the same offending pattern, in terms of sexual offence, than a female with a female gender identity? We already know the answer and it's no. So why should there be access to female spaces where females are vulnerable? Even if it's innate.

I'm suggesting that there are stats that will show many demographics are an elevated risk of various things...that doesn't mean you take a blanket approach against the entire demographic, (People would use such an approach to target lesbians and ethnic minorities).

But non are so elevated as male against female. Just think about that, @suggestionsplease1, before you advocate for mixed sex prisons and sports. No other demographic has a rate of 98% to 2%. So yes, to ensure basic human rights to safety, dignity and the right to participation in society, by far the easiest solution is to segregate based on sex.
For the small minority of transgender people if possible additional facilities can be offered, like individual changing rooms, single occupancy toilet, separate wing in prison, which the transgender person can opt to use. What they cannot use, is the facilities of the opposite sex as that infringes on the basic human rights of others.

Now I know that the right to a private life is often used to say why this would be wrong as it would 'out' a person, but even the ECHR have said in the past that there are certain situations whereby the right to a private life does not prevail when it negatively impacts other peoples rights.

I suggest that you stop leveraging people who are same sex or both sex attracted into your argument. It is not a comparable situation.

People who are same sex attracted (or to both sexes) were subject to illegitimate discrimination. They were not asking for special treatment under any safeguarding principles or indeed, in life. They were asking, and rightfully so, for EQUAL treatment and equal protection.

Male people demanding access to female single sex spaces are demanding ADDITIONAL accommodations be made because of their gender identity. This is not a demand for EQUALITY based on a protected characteristic.

You are trying to use the wrong comparator in your argument and you are doing it using emotionally manipulative tactics to try to force the comparison.

It was always wrong to deny a person legally able to consent to sex the freedom to be in a relationship with another person legally of the age to consent (providing the age of consent is set to an age where it is reasonable to expect a person to be able to consent to sexual activity).

Homosexual male people were wrongfully discriminated against based on no statistical evidence at all, just prejudice. This has, rightfully, been prevented with law. Because it was statistically inaccurate.

The fact remains that the comparator should be and only should be 'does one group of male people have a lower risk profile compared to ALL other male people in the UK' ?

The answer for gay male people is 'no' and it was likely always no. Besides, they were not seeking unequal treatment.

If you are arguing that any male person over about 8 should be included in any single sex female space, you need to provide evidence that the group of male people you are advocating for have not just a lower risk of committing sex crime than all other male people in the UK. You also need to provide evidence that they commit sex crime at the same or lower rate than all female people in the UK.

It is NOT wrong to exclude male people from a female single sex space because they are male. The protected characteristic is SEX not GENDER in this instance.

So no. It is not 'pretty much what is happening now at times'.

If you are arguing that any male person over about 8 should be included in any single sex female space, you need to provide evidence that the group of male people you are advocating for have not just a lower risk of committing sex crime than all other male people in the UK. You also need to provide evidence that they commit sex crime at the same or lower rate than all female people in the UK.

Even if this evidence could be provided, this should not give them the right of access to female-only spaces. Males are excluded because they are male, with male bodies, not because they are necessarily a danger to women.

And you know that I, of course, agree.

Male bodies are excluded from female single sex spaces also on the grounds of privacy and dignity.

One group of male people have no extra rights over other male people in demanding that they have privacy involving being completely separated from other male people in a facility designated as single sex for male people. Again, singling out same sex or both sex attracted people to be excluded, would be illegitimate discrimination.

This is, of course, not the case for excluding all male bodies from female single sex spaces, except for male children under a particular age who would require care from a female person.

Again, the situation in excluding males with a trans identity is not comparative with the past treatment of homosexual and bisexual people.

Gay men wanted to be able to get changed in the mens changing rooms rather than being hounded out, or being told that it might be more appropriate if they used a toilet cubicle or get changed back at home. Lesbians had the same experience

I have no idea what went on in men's chasing rooms, but I have never known any woman hounded out of the changing room because she was gay - and I've known a number of lesbian women. Nobody takes any notice of anyone else - you just get changed and get on with it.

Despite IW's claim that "predatory lesbians" are a threat (Question Time), I've never met one or feared meeting one. I've never heard of them committing offences in changing rooms or anywhere else. I daresay there are some about, but the number must be vanishingly small.

Predatory men, however . . .

As far as I am aware, this thing about lesbians and gay men being denied use of single sex facilities it total nonsense, made up by youngsters who look at the past and try to find patterns in the overwhelming, complex, mainly unknown and poorly understood world around them. Pulling a fact from here and a fact from there and mashing them up even though they do not historically belong together- like a poorly researched costume drama.

I would like to ask if anyone actually alive in the 70s or 80s remembers there being anything resembling the segregation of gay men and lesbian women from single sex spaces? Single sex schools had quite a lot of homoerotic or even homosexual activity - through anecdotes at the time. Although gay men were denied positions in the army, the rationale was more about the need to not have soldiers shagging eachother in dorms, so women weren’t given certain roles either. The laws against cottaging were the only thing I ever heard about, which could be anything remotely akin to limiting homosexuals in toilets/changing rooms. There would be some gossip and bullying of children who looked a bit too long at eachother in school changing rooms for being lesbian or gay, or getting hard-ons in group showers, but not actual exclusion.

Is this claim of homosexuals being excluded, just some confused youths learning about anti-cottaging measures, homosexuality banned from the army, and school bullying of gay boys and lesbians, who perhaps also learned about racial segregation in America at the same time, and they concocted there was something like the separation of drinking water fountains for gay men and lesbians?

I'm a lesbian who lived in London from 1982 to the mid-noughties, was a member of my local lesbian community and worked and went clubbing and socialising in central London — and I have no idea what you're talking about. I had (still have!) some butch/androgynous-looking lesbian friends who were on occasion accused by other women of being men when they used the Ladies, but as soon as my mates smiled and explained that despite their short hair and trousers and Doc Martens they were women, everything was fine. It still happens on occasion and usually ends up with laughter and apologies.

Have your young acquaintances got themselves confused about Section 28? Do they think we were sectioned off or something?

Have your young acquaintances got themselves confused about Section 28? Do they think we were sectioned off or something?

Maybe that’s it? They think it’s like a prison wing. All the lesbians and gay men were marched off and confined to ‘Section 28’ - somewhere like a cross between ‘Room 101’ and ‘Hangar 18’.

@DadJoke

The difference is that most gender critical people think that gender identity is a belief. Not a single person has provided any peer-reviewed evidence that this is true. Most scientists use the term to mean an innate sense. They research its causes. They don't question its existence, any more than you would question the existence of sexuality at this stage in history.

If gender critical people acknowledged that people have an innate sense of their gender, which usually aligns with birth sex, we can then discuss how we as a society can deal with that.

This quote is an important one, because it states that we must acknowledge the existence of a concept which is unfalsifiable (not amenable to scientific testing to find if it exists in all people or not) before we can even discuss this very question, i.e., if gender identity, defined in this exact way actually exists.

Science, based on our current arsenal of scientific concepts, can't address unfalsifiable concepts such as whether angels or demons exist, whether transubstantiation is real etc.

The concept DadJoke describes here is a belief which the gender identity ideology is forcing on all of us, the way religious beliefs are forced on people in theocracies.

You have to read carefully to see that a very particular definition of 'gender identity' is used here:
It is supposed to be 'innate', implied to exist in everyone, and only happening to 'align' with biological sex of the person, rather than being based on it.

When someone is asked why that person accepts the label 'woman' or 'man', it's not at all clear that the answer wouldn't be based on what the sex of that person is. Indeed, I would argue that for most of us it IS based on our sex, on what others told us about the name of people of our sex, and on how the society treats us, on the basis of that sex.

So when someone says that everyone has a gender identity that person might mix together definitions which indeed equal that innate-not-based-on-sex one with definitions which just mean that people know what sex they are or that they know what their society calls people of their sex.

TLDR: Science can't address the question of whether unfalsifiable concepts exist or not. That's why we mostly try to keep religion and science separate from each other.

I don't understand why according to @DadJoke we must believe and not question those who say they have a gender identity, but when WE say that we don't have a gender identity and can't relate at all, we are not believed and we are arbitrarily disbelieving something that is "not questioned", even though it is very much questioned in the same sense that atheists question religious beliefs that they do not share and can't relate to at all.

Yet again we are brought back to the question "What is a woman?", "What does being a woman 'feel' like to know whether one is or isn't?" What makes up this "innate feeling" of woman-ness?

With that in mind, I found this an interesting read - AMAB Trans perspective on the question/definition "What is a woman?";
https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/1bfoffy/the_answer_to_what_is_a_woman/?sort=new

NOTE; Please do NOT engage in the above linked thread, just lurk and read.
I am posting it here just because I thought other would find the AMAB Trans perspective on this question/definition interesting, especially given that within the comments they can't seem to agree amongst themselves at all.

That thread! Trying to twist themselves into whichever version of ‘a woman is whatever men say it is’ they think is a brilliant gotcha.

The best reply was The answer to "What is a woman" is "Ask your mom, she'll tell you."

It would be amusing if it wasn’t so depressing that we have got to this.

I saw it yesterday evening and was tempted to start a new thread here based on it, but wasn't sure if it would be against MN guidelines so Err'd on the side of caution - I really do think that subreddit is an eye opener above all others though honestly.
I imagine there's a lot there MNer's are already aware of in terms of thoughts/feeling/opinions, but still I'm often left gobsmacked at some of the things they will say to each other, gaslight each other over, or just flat out lie about medical impossibilities to one another, it's the very epitome of an echo chamber.
Some of it is genuinely 'out there'.

There is no scientific test for this any more than there is for gender identity.

Actually, there are scientific tests for sexuality. They involve sensors for temperature and pressure being attached to or inserted into people's genitals and then showing them lots of photos of people. Likewise, you can image people's brain activity whilst showing them photos of people.

Interestingly, sensors attached to the clitoris more reliably match women's self-reported sense of arousal than sensors in the vagina do.

I thought he just vetoed everything discussed on a Friday morning unless he or his mates benefited from it.

Your sister is not a lesbian. She may be bisexual.

HTH.

What I've found is what I expected - most gender critical people are Team Pope, not Team Science. As a result,. I am out.

Posting this on a thread about science literacy has me absolutely convinced DadJoke is team GC on the wind-up That post was chef's-kiss-perfect proof of what OP means.
Hat's off.

I was straight and fancied boys when I was 8 but I didn't have a sexual arousal response at the time.

The literal definition of "fancying someone" is being sexually aroused by them. You didn't "fancy" boys. You might have mentally rehearsed the responses to boys that you thought you'd be expected to have when you grew up, but you didn't "fancy" them.

Neither. That person rejected the assumption that they would date the opposite sex at an early age and coincidentally that matches their adult orientation.

Boys disgusted me when I was young and I was adamant that I would never date one. I discovered my attraction to women years before I realised that I also fancy men, turning out bisexual. It's not a given that a child will grow into what they think they will.

Male people are an inherent threat to female people because they are bigger, stronger, and can force us to risk pregnancy against our will by raping us. Lesbians are not a threat to women. Gay men are not a threat to men.

HTH.

Has to be done.

https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/18973/pdf/ page three.

Male-born trans people are massively overrepresented as sex offenders in British prisons. This is not anecdotal.

I hypothesise that lesbian and bi women are probably overrepresented in prison because there's a correlation between family rejection and non-violent crimes like shoplifting and drug abuse, and there's a causal relationship between being same-sex attracted and being rejected by your family. Most women in jail are there for non-violent crimes.

These lesbian and bi women don't pose a risk to straight women.

None of that means that anyone born male should be entering a women's dormitory or jailed in a women's prison or attending female-only rape victims' group therapy.