How did we get here?

[StormyPotatoes]

I like to hope with the Supreme Court ruling and public opinion changing rapidly we are finally moving into a new period where women’s rights and concerns matter, and biology prevails. But I don’t really understand how we got here to begin with and I really hope some knowledgeable posters can provide some background on this.

I am mid-to-late 30s. Femboi-emo kids were cute when I was a teen. I had a very huge crush on Brian Molko. Most of my male friends (and my now husband) wore eyeliner. Nobody in my year came out as gay whilst at school as the taboo still existed, but interestingly 3 girls in my mixed sex class of 30 came out as lesbians away from school (yes, they are all actual women - not men).

My exposure whilst a teenage to transsexuals was Hayley Cropper, the sympathetic and kind transwoman-played by an actual woman in Coronation Street; and Nadia, the winner of season 5 big brother, who I had forgotten all about in all honesty and was only reminded about due to current BB. It’s now occurred to me that the gender recognition act passed in the same year Nadia won BB.

At that time trans was unusual - I remember cross dressing being a thing and named, as we know, as transvestism. And I also remember, back then, so many of the historic and well documented serial killers had proclivities in cross dressing, which seems to now be downplayed.

So what happened between then and now? Why did very, very few men manage to influence the change in the Equality Act? Where did this sharp increase of trans people suddenly come from (we know it can’t be the GRA because most didn’t apply for it)?

And I think more importantly - why did both governments and media suddenly become so afraid to call a man a man? And worse, seek to punish a woman who dares to call a man a man. The GRA is one thing, but so many of the men who have been actively labelled as women by both politicians and journalists don’t hold a GRA. Where is the political and journalistic integrity they are supposed to uphold?

What happened? Not so much the boom in trans people but why they became a law of their own?

Of course you don't because your starting place is with the false assumption that that only reproductive traits distinguish sex which they usually don't in practice.
What the hell do you mean by this? What do you think is the difference between men and women? Do you know where babies come from?

I rest my case. There's no discussing reality when you can't accept it.

You also can't seem to comprehend that typical gendered behavioural associations being societally embraced to distinguish men from women is not a prescriptivist argument but a descriptivist one of the societal conventions we built.
Is this a word salady way of saying that stereotypes are based on average/typical behaviour of the sexes? If so, WE KNOW THAT. But a man behaving in a way which is more typical of women is still a man. Men don't become women just because they adopt behaviour more typical of women.

"word salady" = 'anything other than one-dimensional thinking is tooo haaard'

That's not the every day reality you live in. Again most people in practice don't use reproductive sex traits to distinguish men from women in social situations. YOU DO THIS YOURSELF.

Society decides based on The Harm Principle. And globally whether trans people are a harm to women in public bathrooms isn't as settled as you would like it to be.
Why not make everything mixed sex then?

Because harm is dependent on the circumstances. Women's sports? Yes harm because of disadvantage. Prisons? Yes its harmful because of violent offenders. Hospitals? Yes because better health outcomes are dependent on patient comfort. Bathrooms? No. Men prefer to use their own bathrooms & there's no evidence that trans women pose a threat.

Whether there is a need to distinguish sex in situations other than where sex matters isn't the point here. It's how you go about doing it. You are acting as if you don't make an unconscious or conscious sex categorisation when you come across people & you would whether you 'needed to' or not. In fact our brains are wired to do this so fast we don't even notice we are doing it that's why it relies on typical associations.

"And you are entrenched in The Five Factor Model. You seem to depend on it wholly to support the theory you are positing here on MN at the moment."

Whatever you think about the legitimacy of the five factor model as a guide for personality categorisation that has implications on sex distinctions, the facts on the ground support it in terms of real world material choices. IE Employment, consumerist, special interests & life choices etc.

That you can't seem to comprehend self evident facts might be a function of your ideology which is limited to viewing the world only thru the lens of patriarchal intimidation. If anything isn't a serious world view it's one of "the fallacy of the single cause, which is a type of causal oversimplification. It wrongly assumes a single, simple reason for a complex event when multiple factors are likely involved. This fallacy is also known as causal reductionism or the root cause fallacy and can be a form of scapegoating. "

"Yes, all male people do pose a physical risk to female people if they have experienced any male puberty. And it has also been shown in studies that male people who have puberty blockers have delayed growth completion, meaning they are likely to be taller than their final height predicted from birth. This is also an advantage that female people do not have, and it causes an additional risk of injury to female people.
So, it is correct to say that both individually and as a group male people competing in female single sex sports are a physical risk."

Seriously, all males who undergo puberty are a sporting risk to women? Um, there's this thing called 'biological variation' AKA 'short kings' where these blokes would & do get their butts whooped by larger stronger women.

Again depends on the individual & to deny this can only point to bad faith or delusion.

"I have not 'misrepresented' your words. I have correctly pointed out what happens when a male person uses a female toilet as per your 'social' point. Male people accessing female single sex spaces are not accessing those spaces for any benefit to any female person in that space. It is irrelevant why they have accessed that space.

Yes you have & you know that. And It's relevant for the point of the context of the discussion which was why trans women want to be included in women's spaces. But yep let's just avoid that inconvenient truth.

"In the UK, it is democratically decided as per the law. I am glad that you pointed this out."

Not yet it hasn't. An interpretation of law that hasn't been tested in court or maybe challenged by Human Rights Commission isn't 'law' yet. Good luck with that by the way…

Morning! Had your coffee, ready to start the day haranguing women?

I can't be arsed properly wadeing through your stream of consciousness nonsense posts but just two things quickly -

The EQA2010 has been UK legislation since, well, 2010. It's not 'new' law in any sense of the word.

You keep repeating 'there's no evidence that transwomen pose a threat' like it's true when there's been wads of examples of such harm given to you on this very thread. I can chant 'chocolate has no calories!' until the cows come home but it makes just as little difference.

Looking back, this was an interesting exchange.
I don't believe I have on these threads pointed out the negative consequences outside the law to male people if they didn't do what I have been discussing. I have discussed the negative impact on female people when male people demand to be in spaces that are designated female single sex.

"Is this supposed to be comparable to telling women that if they don’t agree with a group of male people that we all know how it ends, like Charlie Kirk & October 7 and the violent and intimidation we receive from protestors and from male people on the internet:"

You have implied that 'mean' words by trans activists incite 'mean' actions upon gender critical feminists (a view I strongly support as an anti hate speech proponent). By your own logic anyone suggesting these actions have ugly consequences is being 'intimidating'. People in glass houses….

Rinse and repeat.

That's not the every day reality you live in. Again most people in practice don't use reproductive sex traits to distinguish men from women in social situations.

Go on then. How do you tell whether a person you've just met is a man or a woman?

You tell me. Xray vision?

Ah, OK. Men do seem to struggle with this more than women.

But I was asking how you personally do this. I can't possibly tell you how you do this. Sorry.

I do what everyone else does, look at sartorial presentation, morphology shape, & skin. I've found some trans women are obviously 'male bodied' but others are indistinguishable from women particularly if they haven't been thru a male puberty or are on hormones.

Your turn.

Exactly. Men prefer to use their own bathrooms so why are they so intent on invading women’s , I presume you’ve heard that mean toilets, as we don’t have public bathrooms in the uk? If men’s toilets are so nice, all men can use them. Even those wearing dresses. You said it yourself.

No. Men are not women,and don’t belong in any female spaces. I know it makes them sad, but that’s reality. And your post upthread showing you don’t believe males with a trans identity are truly women shows exactly why. Either you believe males with a trans identity are women for all purposes or you don’t believe they’re women. Why would you exclude a woman from women’s sports? You said upthread males should be excluded. Therefore you accept they are not women and you are treating them like the men they are.

We really have come to the point where it seems that some people cannot believe that those male people cannot be expected to act with respect if they know that their access to female single sex spaces is against the law. And it seems impossible to think that they would respect female people’s needs to have them included even if there is no law and it was simply a matter of respect and kindness.

That is really interesting, in my opinion. Imagine women collectively being told to be kind all the time, with no expectation that the group of male people we are told to be kind to have no intention of reciprocating that kindness. I think these exchanges and all exchanges we have with male people shine a light on this very brightly.

I take it this is not a flippant answer but a genuine belief of yours.

Humans are as likely to become the opposite sex as they are to develop superpowers such as this.

What is the relevance though? I don’t care about people’s sex in any circumstance other than where sex matters. This is where misogyny and misandry come in to play - wrongly treating people unequally because of assumptions made about a person because of their sex.

We are talking about instances of fairly and legitimately treating people differently because of their sex and expecting self-policing to use the provision in line with their sex. Being able to tell if someone is male or female doesn’t come in to it.

There’s a branch of cognitive psychology dedicated to pattern recognition. There’s quite extensive evidence showing how humans tell that a dog is a dog, even though it is significantly different from other dogs. Theories are proposed relating to those who are better and worse at this, and why that is. As I said, I am not sure what posters reporting how they think they tell the difference between males and females offers. Many transwomen think they pass when they don’t, we could move the discussion to why this is, but I don’t think that is relevant to this thread either.

💯

Females giving up single sex provision to enable a subset males to access female only provision = basic kindness and decency

Males wanting/ expecting females to give up female only provision = ???

The question marks should not be replaced with feelings after the fact (e.g grateful), the question is about the feelings arising alongside the expectation that this is something females should sacrifice.

The only answer I’ve ever heard is ‘desperation’. However, that isn’t an acceptable equivalence because many women are desperate for single sex provision but are still expected to ‘be kind’ and give it up.

They’re all male bodied, because they’re all men. HTH.

I am always amazed at the amount of TRA's who seem entirely happy making themselves look like utter fools by claiming that it's impossible to tell men and women apart due to (eye roll) supposed changes to morphology and what was it? 'sartorial choices'

'Oooh, that person is wearing a spinny skirts, we can't possibly tell! Out with the x-ray glasses!'

X-ray glasses, ha ha! Those X-ray specs kids had back in the last century. My boy cousins had them for the primary purpose of seeing through girls' clothes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_specs

Whoever would've thought we'd need them nowadays for determining the sexes?

Let’s remember this was contained in one of the links we have had repeatedly posted.

www.researchgate.net/publication/274956064_Gender_Differences_in_Personality_and_Social_Behavior

"facial features –nose length, eye size, face width, and so forth –show considerable overlap between genders when they are considered one by one. However, their combined effect results in nearly complete separation between male and female faces, and indeed, human observers can classify faces by gender with more than 95% accuracy".

I have links to other papers on this as well.

And this is just correctly identifying sex from faces. Not other body cues and with other interaction such as extended observation and hearing voices. The combination of these physical elements is going to be much higher than 95%… which is already high. And those body cues cannot be changed with surgery, plus the reality is those male facial surgeries don’t seem to be all that successful in removing male facial cues.

No clothes or any other cues are necessary.

But apparently, those people who are not highly likely to correctly identify the sex of a person in front of them and interacting with them, want us to believe that their experience is the norm. Rather than the other way round.

People don’t need to use sexist personality stereotyping to identify a person’s correct sex who is in front of them.

Sartorial presentation, you have got to be kidding me. A man in a dress is very obviously a man in a dress. 😂

I see.

Stating that intimidation, threats and violent acts towards women produces a chilling effect is comparative to women stating that those acts are creating a chilling effect in women.

I don’t think you are getting the message across that you want to.

Women, you shall not discuss the chilling effect of male people’s acts of intimidation, violence and abuse because doing so is you intimidating those male people!

And doing so will then bring retributions as have been highlighted by Howseitgoin on this thread. Somehow justified because a group should not be expected to just lay down and accept their oppression (unless that group is the group known as ‘female people’) The group’s oppression being that female people ask that their needs are respected and that those male people don’t access single sex provisions.

Apparently, this is the stage we are now at.

@StormyPotatoes if you needed any active demonstration of how we got here, you have a thread showing how it is done.

When I read that sartorial presentation has categorisational relevance to a human’s sex category, I reread the word as satirical.

Yes @Howseitgoin this caught my eye too. I assume that, like most of us here, you live in a country where cultural sex norms are not strongly enforced. So how is sartorial presentation helpful to you when sexing a stranger?

I have a male friend who looks spiffing in a dress (annoyingly, he can get away with wearing things that would make me look like an ambulant sofa). If you saw him, how would you decide whether he was a gender non-conforming man or a transwoman?