"We have always been here"

[DiamondThrone]

Been noticing this a lot. It seems to be the new #TWAW #nodebate #bekind, after those didn't work.

I mean - lots of things have "always been here". Like women, for instance 😄

Just interested in new terms that arise, and how they are used to try and shut down comment.

I very nearly completely agree with this. But I think gender is more complex than a spectrum. If we take the 'gender stereotypes' (social constructs, but in a sense they exist in our society and somewhat differently in many other societies) there is not just one axis of gender. There are many axes of gender, each of which is often considered to be on a spectrum from very masculine to very feminine. Examples which are sometimes seen as gendered include aggressiveness and sentimentality. Obviously women and men can be anywhere on these axes, and it makes little sense to make any assumptions based on them. Basically, they are not very useful.

There are also other spectra of personality - introvert to extrovert, serious to frivolous, optimist to pessimist, and so on, which I think are not usually seen as gendered. Each of these could reasonably validly be seen as a spectrum, but I don't think there is only one axis of gender or only one axis of personality.

Each of us is a complex mix of these, and of course it is perfectly possible to be more optimistic (say) one day than another day, or to be more extrovert in one mood than in another, or to be entirely serious in one forum post and then very frivolous in the next. When it comes to 'gendered' spectra, they may or may not - I am not sure - vary in validity. But they are all simplifications and generalisations, and there is no self-evident reason why what is considered to be 'masculine' has to apply to the personality of all men, or not to apply to the personality of all women. And there is no self-evident reason why a woman cannot be excellent at something society sees as typically the province of men or vice versa.

The only limitations are the limitations of our biology, our personality and our experience. For example, my DW asks me to get things down from a high shelf, and she tends to deal with any complex interpersonal stuff because she's better at that.

So yes to 'gender' being more like a spectrum than a binary, but absolutely no to 'gender' being on a simple scale from Barbie to G I Joe, and therefore it follows that gender can neither 'match' sex nor 'match' the opposite sex, because absolutely no-one is at the 'very masculine' or 'very feminine' end of all the spectra that can be considered 'gendered', and even if they were, I suspect that other aspects of their personality would confuse the picture.

I agree.

Why on earth should "likes handbags" be seen as closer to "cries easily" than "good at maths"? Indeed, why would "cries easily" have to be a distance away from "good at maths" anyway?

It's not even a spectrum. Every single factor is on its own sepatate scale from "very" to "not at all".

If I imagine it, it's a whole bunch of separate dots scattered all over an n dimensional space. It's like a join the dots where the dots are thrown randomly at the page.

There's no way all those gendered points can be linked into a coherent spectrum because they don't correlate to each other in reality at all. The only connections are the ones made through a cultural lens.

I certainly see 'gender' as something at least two dimensional and probably n-dimensional where I have no idea how big n should be. I see lots of axes of personality traits, some of which in a particular society (or subsection thereof) may typically be seen as 'gendered', in some kind of woven or tangled relationship to each other. Genuinely a unique personality for each person, even the ones seen as the most stereotypical. And it is very sad that 'gender' has been elevated to being the most important defining characteristic of some people's identity.

Even if 'gender' was something immutable as a concept, it would only be a part of one's identity. Our identities change through the aging process (with some life stages, such as puberty and presumably menopause having a major impact), through life experiences (such as physical of emotional trauma, or falling in love, or becoming a parent), through education and scientific, philosophical or religious discourse, and no doubt a lot of other things.

Tbf, I think in the past they just went into the women's loos and most people ignored it. Difference is the massive increase in numbers and all the women with big beards and cocks.

Surely everyone's heard of the Tytrannosaurus?

Adult humans have spent tens of thousands of hours experiencing real life. hearing, it, smelling it, tasting it. Accumulating memories of comments and sights we didn't understand at the time. Reading books, understanding how to rank their value and reliability, reading academic articles and news reports, using online resources, learning how to evaluate them. Listening to people. Everything from those tens of thousands of hours is accessible. The longer we live, the more we get.

All of which help us to notice how subject to bias the AI resources are, and how much they leave out.

Those men who were always using women's loos. I've always been puzzled, since childhood, as to why in some (a minority) of public loos there would occasionally be evidence that a previous user had peed on the seat and the floor. I was inclined to blame hoverers, hoverers always denied that indignantly. I couldn't understand how any woman, even one injured by a botched obstetric procedure, could do that.

But now I've been told about those 'always been there' men, there seems to be a likelier suspect.

Well. There you have it. Let the world take note; AI is biased, redundant and has no further application.

Someone has come up with a theory about why they found wee on public toilet seats when they were little.

I have no doubt that there will be lots and lots of further application of AI, and some of them will be useful and productive. Many of them will be redundant. So far the evidence is that they what they produce is banal simply because they cannot, by their nature, include any imagination or originality. And yes, bias gets built in.

What is your problem with an adult human female coming up with a theory based on a variety of evidence accumulated over many years?

Evidence, mark you, no AI could have.

Is your position that machines are allowed to theorise but women are not?

How did you jump from that post to "AI has no further application"? That's a hell of a vault over a void totally empty of logical connection😂

I'm not sure they did - I can't recall men going into the public loos in the 70s for example. If they had done, they'd have been hauled out. There were words for men like that which described them very accurately.

I have a memory of a man being escorted out of the female toilets by a security guard, this would have been the late 80s, I was a small child.

So I agree, I don't think it was tolerated back then. It would have been viewed with huge suspicion.

Yes the social construct back then meant that grannies beat the men with their walking sticks, called them predators, and women hounded them out while the police were called and other men 'dealt with them' (belted them to within their life) so they never dared enter ever again. So it's nonsense to say it was accepted back then. On the contrary, back then it was not accepted and was called out, and the men that did it, if they survived the shame and stigma and survived the beating, didn't repeat it, that's for sure!

April Ashley used women's toilets, and there's pre-GRA case law saying it's acceptable post-surgery. Everyone was a bit more genitals-focussed in those days, like that's what makes a man.

Jasmine Alibhai-Brown met that Jan Morris in a toilet once:

x.com/faintlyfalling/status/1775079875801444730

Yes, there were post-op transsexuals using the ladies in the old days, and nobody invited them but they were so few in number that it had little impact.

That was before self-ID became the shiny new object and a huge Batsignal was sent up telling every man, no matter what his agenda, that he could use women's spaces and not be challenged.

I've long believed that, though the GRA was bad law, they could have kept the GRA settlement indefinitely as long as the numbers were tiny and everyone understood there was gatekeeping. But they had to get greedy, and now we're having to take back the whole mile including the original inch.

Some loos had very ferocious permanent attendants. Not just to make sure everyone put their coin in the slot, but to make sure nothing criminal was going on. And probably, in retrospect, to keep out any and all men that tried to get past the turnstile.

I believe that doctors working with what were described as transsexuals back in the day made using women’s facilities as part of men ‘proving’ that they were serious about transitoning

of course none of those doctors thought to ask if women minded this…

Absolutely. Male doctors said that using the ladies' loos was part of 'living as a woman' and so their male patients did just that, and no one gave a shiny shit, let alone a thought, about the actual women who might be affected.

Tbf, I never saw them much in public loos but then again I rarely used them. My point of reference was them using the ladies loos in nightclubs.

A few months ago I was queuing for the ladies at Waterloo station and a drink, portly gammony sort of man decided it would be tremendous fun to have a canter around the ladies loos. A ferocious attendant did indeed appear and told him to leave then stood in front of him clapping her hands loudly and briskly until he fucked off.

brave woman and she shouldn’t have had to do it. Just goes to show that some men like transgressing boundaries and need to be told ‘no’

Hilarious.
"I met Jan Morris in the women's toilets once and he asked me about my underwear" is maybe not the killer point you think it is.

Quite. We all know about Jan Morris. Even more so since his death. Typical middle-aged male heterosexual transitioner (with wife and children who he treated appallingly).

I think you and I might have a different idea of what constitutes evidence when it comes to speculation over wee on a toilet seat.

I mean I know JKR has proposed photography in public toilets but I'm guessing you don't have access to such images from your childhood?

I think you are aware that there's one demographic that's rather keen on photography in women's toilets.

No, I don't have 'images' of the excessively wet (not confined to seats) and smelly public loos that I have encountered very occasionally throughout the last six decades (except in my memory).

Three reasons: one, only an antisocial weirdo takes photographs in public loos; two, the memories include olfactory stuff, very vivid, not recordable, and not accessible by AI; three, in the olden days we hadn't been bamboozled into the ludicrous 'pictures or it didn't happen' notion that entered the popular imagination some time in the last couple of decades.

Human memory is evidence.

"It follows that women are more likely to leave a bathroom clean, while men assume someone will clean up after them."

😠