"Biological sex is a multidimensional variable with various components" - Thread 2

[MissScarletInTheBallroom]

The last thread ended with Tandora attempting to sidestep the question about what she would say if her daughter had been raped by a trans woman in a female only space and no longer believed that trans women should be in female only spaces as a consequence.

Her last reply was along the lines of, "The same thing I would say if she had been bullied by a green person at school and said she no longer wanted to go to school with green people."

@Tandora can we have a serious answer?

Criminalising gay marriage then and any public rights or entitlements associated with being in a partnership denied to gay partnerships

But they don't have a single experience specific to the opposite sex.

You're welcome to believe that, I can't stop you.

Your interpretation has not been tested in law.

so we're moving on from racism to homophobia as the false equivalence?

What's next, gender critical are prejudiced against paedophiles?

I highly doubt anyone is going to get permission to go back to the Supreme Court and ask the same question again, slightly rephrased.

The implications of the judgment are obvious to everyone whose opinion actually matters.

I'm talking about transmen. If "To treat a trans woman as if they are a man is to cause acute distress, pain, disorientation to that person." then to treat a transman as if they are a woman would do the same. Surely. So they should be treated as men in all circumstances. Transmen in men's prisons, etc.

On which note, a service for 'birth women' only would, by definition, be treating a transwoman as if they are a man (it's their maleness that sees them excluded), which you suggest would be extremely distressing for them.

It's not about having a 'specific experience' in common with others - what would that even be/mean? We all have different experiences.

It's about having a sense/ understanding/ experience of one's own sex as being other than the sex that they were observed at birth. This is an experience that is completely personal to the person - it's not about you or your experiences.

@Tandora

Accepting and including trans people does not take anything away from legal and social recognition of women and girls and physical body sex.

You have asserted this several times but never explained why you believe this to be true.

Let's start simple.

What word would you use to include all the people that have been recognised as female at birth, and exclude all the people that have been recognised as male at birth?

While I appreciate this will not cover 100% of humanity due to DSDs, it's a valid place to start the conversation, because if you cannot even give that simple approximation, your claim that Accepting and including trans people does not take anything away from legal and social recognition of women and girls and physical body sex is already blown out of the water.

Yes to treat a trans man as a woman is to cause acute distress, pain, disorientation to the person.

That's not to say that we should have a law that mandates what facilities a trans person is ever able to use.

But it is to recognise that we must treat a trans man in a way that is compatible with their dignity as a person, which means respected their lived sex.

Then they should be in the third category of people whose experience of their own sex doesnt correlate with their biological sex. Not in the category, and spaces, of people who are fine with the sex binary and feel like their experience of their own sex matches the sex they were conceived as.

Glad we have actually all reached agreement!

Tandora, we live in a society.

The law isn't there to validate trans people's feelings.

It is there to govern the rights and obligations of all individuals and the relationships between them, so that society can function properly.

Respecting my lived sex as a woman means access to spaces and services where no men are present, even if those men really believe they are women.

Luckily the law supports this.

It's not like that at all.

Marriage is also a private matter between the people involved.

It's worth noting that trans people got the right to same sex marriage long before gay people did.

How do you experience your sex as being the opposite sex to that of the actual sex you are

when you cannot experience any of the things specific to the opposite sex

I appreciate that you're now going to use some big words in a patronising fashion whilst also making no effort to answer the question.

It's a basic principle in a civilised , democratic society that we respect and protect different forms of human diversity - this includes trans people as it does gay people, disabled people, and many other minority groups.

You don't appear to want to extend the same respect and dignity to women who don't claim a trans identity.

Surely the answer is third spaces, which would also accommodate non-binary people, whose existence you seem to be completely avoiding acknowledging.

You can stop a boy from going through male puberty. It is of course highly unethical, but you can do it.

What you cannot do is make him go through female puberty. So he will never have any of the experiences unique to womanhood. It's just not possible. Poor old Jackie Green and Jazz Jennings were lied to.

Name one other minority group whose rights come at the expense of the majority. Just one.

The Supreme Court judgment is about protecting women's rights.

It confirms that trans identifying people's rights don't trump ours. That is as it should be.

How do you experience your sex as being the opposite sex to that of the actual sex you are

You need to ask that question to a trans person and then listen to what they say. They can describe it very articulately. It's not an experience you can relate to but you can understand it if you listen.

when you cannot experience any of the things specific to the opposite sex

Again - this is irrelevant. It's not about experiencing any specific thing in common with another person - we all have different experiences. It's a profound, pervasive, uncontrollable, sense/ awareness/ understanding/ experience of self as being a sex other than their sex at birth, it's deeply persona to the person - it's not about you or sharing any specific experience in common with you.

No @Tandora , it's about the materal fact of having a sexed body in the real world, and how that physical fact and the way others react to you because of it creates inescapable consequences and influences for you that will affect the experiences you have, the choices you get and the risks and challenges you face, all of which affect the person you grow to be regardless of your own inner sense of sex.

No one is saying society should not also have a word and a concept for that personal sense/ understanding/ experience of one's own sex that is not predicated on body types into which trans people's sense of self absolutely would fall, and out of which all sorts of new social norms and expectations and even laws could come.

All anyone is saying that body sex is important and significant as well, and trying to subsume that within whatever it is that trans people are experiencing is a category error because they are simply not the same thing, and so to do that is, whether you intend to or not, undoing something that is also significant and needful. And because one of the heritages of Patriachy is that people are assumed to be "default male body and default male experience", significant and needful for female people in particular because we need the language and cultural space to be seen as different to male.

Their rights are not coming at the expense of anyone else's.

We respect religious people. We don't require everyone else to believe in god, to practise halal or kosher, or to avoid sex before marriage.

You don't have to believe in the reality of trans experience if you don't want to, any more than you have to believe in the reality of being gay.

But as a society you have to accommodate the person and treat them with dignity and respect .

Yes. Trans women are part of the wonderful diversity of men. To accept that is progressive and additive to our understanding of all the many ways people of male body can experience themselves.

To claim they are part of the wonderful diversity of women, and thereby overwrite the significance of the embodied female experience in all its diversity, is the opposite of progressive.