The liminality of sex perception, sex-based spaces and bodily autonomy.

[polypostwonder]

This thread continues a discussion between BonfireLady (sorry, I wanted to tag you but the system says your username doesn't currently exist) and I on biological sex vs perceived/observed sex in https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womensrights/5530455-us-to-open-worlds-first-childrens-detransition-clinic-texas-hospital-to-offer-free-services-reversing-the-effects-of-gender-affirming-treatments?page=10&reply=152406258

She has requested I answer the following two questions:

1. would you consider that a viable way forward is for you to self-exclude from women's spaces and instead either advocate for third spaces for anyone to use (e.g. unisex facilities in addition to single-sex) or (probably your least preferred) use the men's?
2. would you support a restriction on anyone under 18 (or 25?) making permanent changes to their body, to match it with their perception of their "gender"? Similar to other restrictions on permanent body changes.

I believe I have previously answered them both. My answers today are superficially the same, but I have better thought out my answers (maybe?). To do this though, I need to share some assumptions.

In the previous thread, I believe there was somewhat of an agreement on the following statements:

1. People can identify a man when dressed in clothes 'traditionally associated' with women. Clothes are superficial to sex.
2. People look at other people and perceive their sex. People are not identifying the gametes/sry/chromosomes/other unobservable immutable biologic factor inside another person.
3. Assumptions about sex are made based on a person’s sex characteristics amongst other observable cues.
4. Pretty much every person in the whole world "exists within the expectations of sex categories". Very rarely it's unclear.
5. If a person exists within the expectations of sex categories, then socially they are treated as that sex whether they wish to be or not.

Building on those statements and previous discussion, some additional thoughts:

1. ‘Biological sex’ is defined by a person’s gametes/chromosomes/sry/other unobservable immutable biologic factor. This cannot be changed.
2. ’Observable sex’ is based upon the perception of sex characteristics rather than known biological sex and influences the placement and treatment of people in social sex categories. Perception is not under control of the observed, nor is it a demand of others.
3. Observable sex can be heavily influenced by biological sex and sex-based function. But sex-based function is not a requirement for the perception of sex.
4. Women’s rights are a cultural accommodation to rebalance access to society and ensure health, fair treatment, safety and/or dignity. Not all women require or access every right, but these rights are a vital benefit to women as a class.
5. Users of a culturally defined space for members of one sex may feel comfort, privacy or protection through separation from non-users. But all users share an equal right to feel comfort, privacy or protection.
6. Misogyny is not biologically based. It is a prejudice directed at women’s observable sex. Sexism can be biologically directed, but it can also be directed at members of an observable sex.
7. Sex realists believe every person should live and be treated by society according to their biological sex, no exceptions.
8. Trans people have a wide range of beliefs and goals. They do not share a single motivation.
9. Better quality research should be done with trans people of all ages.

I think BonfireLady is correct in saying each of us sees the other's "belief" as non-sensical and our own as position as factual. I'm hoping we can discuss this from a somewhat sensical space.

thus poster has indicated previously that they intend to enter regardless.

I doubt that a foreign birth certificate would be accepted as proof of sex in the UK, exactly because of possibility of legal falsification.
I think an affidavit from a GP would be needed.

If a man could truly turn himself into a woman, and a woman into a man, we wouldn't be having the conversations we do.

They'd be no heated debates, no reason to say 'pregnant people', no arbitrary conditions to receiving a GRC or false id. Nobody would talk about female presenting, or question what sex means anyway.

Nobody would say TWAW because they'd be no TW. Everyone would agree who is male and female.

But having to have the debate, the slogans and a diagnosis - not of sex but 'gender', shows that no one believes the man has turned himself into a women. He's just fulfilled an administrative task.

If we need to know who are women and who are men, we don't need pieces of paper, we need men and women. Having a man in the women's group is of no use or dangerous depending on the situation.

If a man disguises himself, claims to be a woman and uses spaces he knows he shouldn't, he isn't a women he's just a man chancing his arm.

You feel you are a woman. Not the same thing. Women have no Y chromosome.

There is no falsified documentation. This is a gender critical belief.

I have been on shortlists, which recognised my contributions as a woman, with a complete unambigously performed work history, career, home life, relationships and experiences made from that context. I feel no confict in receiving this recognition.

Good luck with that.

Your experience as a person of very small stature and not going through puberty might, just might, justify your inclusion on lists meant for women who have had to battle for their place against men.

But your support for other people who grew up with male privilege to do the same is absolutely wrong.

My birth was registered in the UK. I won't need luck if I am ever required to produce documentation to prove my sex.

I probably most likely would not support it. It would depend a lot on context.

Edited to add: I've also been recognised by non-sexed shortlists, which have inevitably been turned in to something sex-based by some people because of being on the list.

That is good to know and I wish we had known that earlier.

Do you feel the same about 6ft 4 rugby players in ladies loos?

I'm genuinely happy for you that you are content to live as a woman rather than as a tiny man. Life is very difficult for many small men.

I had understood that you were trans, meaning that you have an acquired gender, formally recognised by the state, which is the opposite of your sex as registered at birth.

UK law imposes obligations, and grants rights, based on sex as registered at birth, and this requires birth sex to be disclosed. How can you claim your sex-based rights in the UK if you have no way of proving your birth sex?

(I assume you do not have a DSD, which would be a different matter entirely. )

I wonder how this would have worked out if we still had different retirement ages for men and women?

Can you imagine the number of men declaring as women to retire 5 years earlier!?

We might not be in such a mess now if the legal side had come under the spotlight sooner.

Money tends to focus people's minds. Be kind wouldn't have been enough.

Yes I actually think it's a pity the pension change came too early to expose the nonsense of it all.

State pension age equalised many years after the GRA. Transgender women did claim their pensions early, and could get backdated payments if their GRC was delayed. The courts were on their side and it was, mysteriously, hailed as a great thing for human rights.

www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jun/26/uk-wrong-to-deny-transgender-woman-pension-at-60-court-rules

Jesus wept.

So they were basing it on what would have been a small number of male people with a GRC? Not just any bloke who felt like it self identified?

That is rather incredible.

Well no. You’re a 60 yr old person with health issues. You and elite sport are never going to be bedfellows.

As I understand your situation, you aren't a woman for the purposes of the Equality Act of 2010, which governs who should be in single sex spaces or be eligible for single sex services.

Under the Equality Act 2010, sex is determined by biology at birth, not by later transitions. As such, for the purposes of single-sex spaces and services in the UK, you are not legally recognised as a woman.

2.88 The Supreme Court in For Women Scotland ruled that ‘sex’, ‘woman’ and ‘man’ in the Act mean biological sex, biological woman and biological man. The judgment uses the expression ‘biological sex’ to describe the sex of a person at birth. Earlier case law [fn 12] has set out the indicators of biological sex.

The indicators in footnote 12 above are
The indicia of human sex or gender (for present purposes the two terms are interchangeable) can be listed, in no particular order, as follows. (1) Chromosomes: XY pattern in males, XX in females. (2) Gonads: testes in males, ovaries in females. (3) Internal sex organs other than the gonads: for instance, sperm ducts in males, uterus in females. (4) External genitalia. (5) Hormonal patterns and secondary sexual characteristics, such as facial hair and body shape: no one suggests these criteria should be a primary factor in assigning sex. (6) Style of upbringing and living. (7) Self-perception

This passage from Bellinger v Bellinger seems applicable
The essence of the problem, as I see it, lies in the impossibility of changing completely the sex which individuals acquire when they are born. A great deal can be done to remove the physical features of the sex from which the transsexual wishes to escape and to reproduce those of the sex which he or she wishes to acquire. The body can be altered to produce all the characteristics that the individual needs to feel comfortable, and there are no steps that cannot be taken to adopt a way of life that will enable him or her to enter into a satisfactory and loving heterosexual relationship. But medical science is unable, in its present state, to complete the process. It cannot turn a man into a woman or turn a woman into a man. That is not what the treatment seeks to do after all, although it is described as gender reassignment surgery. It is not just that the chromosomes that are present at birth are incapable of being changed. The surgery, however extensive and elaborate, cannot supply all the equipment that would be needed for the patient to play the part which the sex to which he or she wishes to belong normally plays in having children. At best, what is provided is no more than an imitation of the more obvious parts of that equipment. Although it is often described as a sex change, the process is inevitably incomplete. A complete change of sex is, strictly speaking, unachievable. -LORD HOPE OF CRAIGHEAD in Bellinger (FC) (Appellant) v. Bellinger
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200203/ldjudgmt/jd030410/bellin-2.htm

Factors 1-4 are present at birth. Hormonal levels are too but only those present at birth should be relevant, not current hormonal levels or those present during puberty since those were clearly not present at birth. Secondary sex characteristics are developed after birth and typically begin to appear during puberty so those shouldn't be considered for determining sex under the Equality Act. Factors 6 and 7 develop after birth.

polypostwonder, which of factors 1-4 suggest you're a woman and not a man?

Poly has said on previous threads that an eating disorder delayed (male) puberty, and they then took female hormones, hence being tiny.

Not sure how there isn’t a record somewhere of Poly being born male. I guess that depends on the country of birth - I can look up India Willoughby’s birth record and see that he’s a male registered as Jonathan at birth.

Thanks. Those events would all have occurred after birth and are therefore irrelevant to determining sex/biology at birth. That's why I asked polypost which factors that were present at birth pointed to him being a woman instead of a man.

Lengthy post incoming, with (slightly hypocritical, as I meant to include a TLDR... but ran out of time - ironic!) apologies...

A difficult question's been asked a few times now, without answer. I appreciate PPW's needing to juggle a lot, but as it keeps coming up, I thought I'd highlight it again.

Here are a few ways it's been asked. I've added mine as this was a while ago, and I hope Rhino doesn't mind me stealing hers as she puts it so, SO well.

Issue

It feels unethical to remove from western English vocabulary a descriptor for billions to instead replace it with something misaligned with their conception of themselves. I give an example of how that has the concrete effect of hampering our ability to refer to others; it also feels wrong as regards them (to use an analogy I think you'd appreciate, not unlike misgendering a trans person in their absence). (Me)

You leave us the choice of accepting the name "woman" and being defined on your terms not our own, as you see us not as we see ourselves, or giving up the name "woman" altogther. Either way, we lose our own existence as women because of your actions in appropriating our name to label your own feelings. (Rhino)

Analogy

If "Irish" suddenly become divorced from having citizenship of or being decended from the people of Ireland and instead became a general term for liking Guinness, fiddle music and suffering at the hands of the colonial British, I think the orginal Irish people would be rightly pissed off about that. Being told they "aren't having anything taken from them" because they can still call themselves "Irish" in an expanded circle of Guiness-drinking fiddle-fancying former colonies is justing adding insult to injury even if hitherto they actually felt quite a lot of kinship with those people... (Rhino)

Practical Implications (Example From Personal Experience)

...my own experience of literally struggling to explain the Taliban's oppression of "women", because the kids with whom I was speaking didn't understand this was biologically-based as opposed to identity-based, and I lacked the vocabulary to say this - I'll never ever forget my helplessness and horror on experiencing this consequence of women's redefinition. (Me)

Proposal & Rationale

I argue for a "woman" and "transwoman", as this enables both demographics a descriptor and political identity. Anything else feels undemocratic in our own limited context, and unethical - and also impractical - on a global and historical scale. (Me)

It is not like body sex ceases to exist and have consequences, nor can the historic experiences and social constraints attached to body sex somehow never have happened. So the idea that we no longer need the words that pertain to body sex... just makes no sense to me at all. Seems far more sensible and rational to give these new groups that you want social recognition for their own names and identities entirely separate from those that have historically meant and for most people still do mean body sex. (Rhino)

PPW???

I've put what I understand to be PPW's responses thus far...

In response to Rhino saying we need a word for the female sex:

This is not the view of women. This is the view of gender critical people.

In response to my reference to women understanding themselves by their female sex globally and historically:

I assume the billions of other women know a woman when they meet one. Not everyone believes (or cares about) what you do. When they think of women as a class, they are including women as a class. They are not implementing a spreadsheet.

This suggests PPW's counter-argument is currently that ours is a minority view and/or that women's views on this, globally (and historically) can be "assumed" to be indifferent (or aligned with PPW's own?)

I'd say this argument comes from a very personal place, which of course is relevant and important - Rhino and I could also both share bone-deep, life-defining arguments of our own about why we want to be known by a noun exclusive to the 4 billion adult human females currently living, and our sisters throughout history, and why we've excellent reason to believe a vast number of others share our view.

But as we choose to take more of an ethical, logical and practical perspective here, at least - including a rationale for why, in a complex balancing of rights, or own solution offers rights to both sides...

...I'd be interested to hear PPW's equivalent "wider perspective" arguments.

Btw, Rhino, the Irish analogy is spot-on; just SO true to how we experience this. I mean, imagine: "Arrah, the Irish wouldn't lose a wink of sleep if you started calling the Brits Irish, so they wouldn't!"*

Pasted with somewhat anxious apologies to our lovely Irish posters. I GPT'd it to make the point clearly. The stereotyped vernacular seems apt to include, as it reflects how raw this feels to so many women - males presuming to speak for us and as us... a mere hundred years after we convinced society that our husbands didn't* have the right to assume our voting preferences, and less than 50 since hubby lost the right to assert his conjugal rights over us.

Bolding went a bit crazy towards the end (yes, pedant... but I really wanted to highlight the issue...):

Pasted with somewhat anxious apologies to our lovely Irish posters. I GPT'd it to make the point clearly. The stereotyped vernacular seems apt to include, as it reflects how raw this feels to so many women - males presuming to speak for us and as us... a mere hundred years after we convinced society that our husbands didn't have the right to assume our voices at the voting booth, and less than 50 since hubby lost the right to assert his conjugal rights over us.

Being a woman has as much to do with 'paperwork' as a fart has to do with the Hadron Collider.

Being a woman is not administrative. It's not performative. It's a simple and irrevocable and immutable fact of the DNA coding that runs through every cell.

Those of us with XX chromosomes who have bodies developed around the production of large gametes have lived with this since conception, at every stage of life, and our lives have been and are shaped by our female sex in profound ways.

Because of the lifelong, profound, and far reaching effects of having a female body, women have been oppressed over thousands of years by males.

We fought for our own rights and spaces, and continue to do so, so that we have more of a chance at equitable living in society.

The idea that a bit of surgical adjustment and some certification is going to achieve the impossible and turn a male into a woman is sad. The suggestion that he is then entitled to avail himself of the things that women created because of their need and the exigencies of our lived experience, because he has decided he wants to, is spit in our faces.

I expect OP understands all of this very well.