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.

This is just an assertion of what you wish was true.

You cannot observe my genes yet they are what makes me a woman.

Observed sex might, and probably does, allow a tiny proportion of men who present as female to use female spaces without challenge.

The vast majority of males using female spaces without challenge are not challenged because nobody realises that they are male. They are not challenge because

• women are too scared to speak out
• women are trained from birth not to be confrontational
• women value "kindness" higher then those males do
• they happen to hit an occasion when the women they are sharing the space with genuinely don't care.

Look at New Zealand, Argentina and the United States going the other way.

You are here arguing with feminists. The issue is you don't understand that although you love arguing with women the trans activist side has no solution when right wing male dominated groups tell you men in dresses are bad. Do you go in right wing spaces to argue this stuff? Of course not. These are the people who might actually kill trans people, but because men are in charge they get a pass. It is obvious. Male privilege at work.

Many Muslims do not like LGBT stuff at all. Look at the collapse of Your party as an example arguments over gender are key to it. Mothin Ali inside the Greens refusing to talk about gender.

Yet crazily lots of left leaning Trans activists will go to the wall to be pro Muslim though they mostly do not return the favour.

Another reason for this is that the trans cause has become unfashionable on the liberal left for a lot of people. They are way more interested in talking and marching about Gaza.

Look at the Sports debate for another great example of male privilege at work. Note that this is an area where the average guy almost universally backs the pro-women position. Because instinctively he likes to celebrate how physically stronger men are than women. This is an area where the trans side is getting wrecked because men grasp it easily. Because men being good at sport makes most men feel better about themselves. So even though sports bodies tried to give men in dresses special privileges, other guys find the idea of letting them compete against women cheating, dumb and absurd. Men in trousers are not reliable allies for men in dresses where sports are concerned. Although sports is not as important as changing rooms, prisons etc if women win there we win everywhere else sooner or later.

Any the wider point is this.Women are getting their spaces back.

Either it will happen as in the UK with left leaning women pushing it.

Or it will happen because conservative groups will push it through.

Interestingly an unspoken reality of trans people in real life, especially trans women, a big chunk of them are right leaning and will happily vote for the right, even though it might have bad social impacts for them. They will do this while moaning about feminists of course.

Makes me think of.....

I assume liminality to mean vague or ambiguous; between worlds, imaginal....rather flesh and blood meaurable reality. In Queer Theory everything is perceptual.

How do you think babies are made?

OMG that's gorgeous!

@polypostwonder I'm not sure if you're still here but thank you for starting this thread. I've now had a read through of all of it and will add a response, as promised.

Firstly, I (think I) can only see comments against my first question, so I'll stick to that topic.

TL:DR
I am potentially in the minority where I agree with you that people treat each other based on perception of their sex and I also quite like your use of "liminality" in relation to this perception, but I'm going to give a heads up that you'll likely find my thoughts on this difficult to read (I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that you are not an autogynophile BTW as I have seen nothing specific that makes me think you are). Sadly, I don't think there is a way we're going to meet in the middle on this. I'd love to be wrong but thank you for stepping forward in what I will take as a good faith attempt to do so. It's genuinely good to see you expanding on your thoughts and not just saying "sex realists believe [X]" as on many previous threads. I am responding in good faith.

More detailed response
Everyone knows their own sex. Not everyone feels comfortable with their own sex, some of whom wish to be perceived as the opposite sex. On this we appear to fully agree.

This is where it starts to get tricky:

Pretty much every person in the whole world "exists within the expectations of sex categories". Very rarely it's unclear.

Those were my words from the other thread but there was an important part on the end of it (paraphrased): it is, however, almost always possible to tell someone's sex, most obviously from their gait.

On the treating people according to perception of sex point, this one is easy. People interact based on the sex they perceive someone to be all the time, without genital inspections or SRY gene tests. Without that perception being accurate there would be very few children born (heterosexual dating would take a lot longer and be very awkward if these two things needed qualifying first), there would be no sexism (without the same qualification) and so on.

On the liminality part, I think you're absolutely right that there is certain level of androgyny in some cases that confuses people in different ways. I'm going to use an analogy but want to make it very clear that I am not intending to dehumanise anyone. The analogy is the uncanny valley that exists with humanoid robots. See screenshot and link below.

To explain the analogy: firstly, I am referring to perception of sex, not biological sex. Secondly, I'm referring mostly to edge cases i.e. where it's not obvious to everyone what sex someone is. However, I have an example which suggests that edge cases are calibrated to the person doing the perceiving, not the person being perceived. To shift the analogy into sex perception, I'll adjust some words from the link below as follows: The uncanny valley hypothesis predicts that a person appearing to be almost the opposite sex will elicit uncanny or eerie feelings in observers. I.e. something will feel 'off'.

My example
There is a male teacher at my daughters' school who wears a dress and uses a female name. I know I'm not alone in recognising this teacher's sex but several people (including me) have had difficulty in navigating conversations related to this. I will take some different perceptions in turn, starting with my own:

1. Me
   The first time I saw this teacher was over 2 years ago. I immediately clocked the teacher's gait and thought nothing of it - other than I had better lower the sound of my voice, so as not to cause upset. The window was open when the teacher walked past and I was talking with a senior member of staff about my daughter being gender questioning (at that time) and experiencing autism-related puberty distress. At the time I had never heard of autogynophilia so wouldn't have thought about strange things that have since come to light, such as this (middle-aged) teacher occasionally wearing anime-style stripy socks or having LGBTQ+ posters on the classroom walls. I don't see the teacher very often, as it's a huge school and most of the time when I'm doing school drop off/pick up, the teacher isn't walking past. It's probably only been about 4 occasions in 2+ years.

2. My oldest (autistic) daughter
   She recently asked me how you could definitively tell someone's sex. I said the most obvious way was to observe their gait. I then gave the example of Mrs X, assuming that everyone knew Mrs X identified as a transwoman. The rainbow lanyard was the obvious giveaway as to why I thought everyone knew, if nothing else (I didn't see the LGBTQ+ posters in Mrs X's classroom until nearly two years later, when I was in the classroom for a parent consultation - the room was being borrowed), so I assumed it was pretty uncontroversial as a subject. I made sure I sounded objective, and simply focused on identifying someone's sex. No mention of stripy socks or activitist posters. My daughter was upset with me and blurted out (as her sister then got into the car) "Mum says Mrs X is a man". I pointed out that I had actually said Mrs X is a male and that I deliberately avoid using the word "man" (or any pronouns whatsoever) in situations like this, because those words are the ones people argue over. She then got very angry with me that I had been avoiding pronouns for Mrs X for a very long time - from the moment I found out Mrs X's name in fact. It turns out Mrs X used to be her [subject] teacher and had previously spent lots of time supporting her during her mental health crisis. No red flags there, guv, honest. Anyway, my daughter later told me that she knew Mrs X was trans (so could clearly perceive sex) but was cross at me for not "being respectful" by using she pronouns. I tried explaining that my lack of any pronouns came from a place of respect but to no avail.

3. My other daughter
   She was also very cross with me for being "mean". However, she was completely convinced that Mrs X was a woman. For calibration, she was also completely convinced that Craig Revel-Horwood was a woman when we saw him on stage in the West End as the Wicked Witch of the West. She did notice that Mrs Trunchbull was a man, when we later saw Matilda but it's fair to say that her radar for sex perception is not quite there. Possibly because she hasn't yet encountered a personal reason why it really matters, so can't be bothered to think about it. I hope she never does a reason for it to matter.

4. The senior staff member from point 1
   I was in school for a meeting (related to my daughter's autism provision, not this) with this staff member recently. During the meeting the staff member told me that there was a note that concerned her in CPOMS (safeguarding system) that she wanted to ask me about. It said my (autistic) daughter had told her that I wouldn't use preferred pronouns, even for adults, and that she found this upsetting. My daughters already understand why I don't for children (but that relates to my second original question, so I'll leave that there). There was no other context and, given the school hadn't decided to send the police round for some supposed hate crime, I took the assumption that my daughter hadn't mentioned this teacher's name when talking about why she was cross at me. For clarity, I had suggested to both my daughters that relaying this conversation in school was not a good idea, given neither of them clearly understood my position on this and would likely misrepresent me. Thankfully, they accepted this but both were pissed off at me for my supposed disrespect. I said I could add some context and explained the gait/teacher conversation, without mentioning the teacher's name. The staff member said rather tellingly, "I know which teacher you mean, and you're wrong. Very wrong". Now obviously I could be, but I don't believe I am. Either this teacher has spotted who the influencial staff are and has curated a sob story about always being perceived to be male, or I'm wrong. I can't think of any other explanation for the staff member saying she knew exactly who I was talking about.

Why it links to the uncanny valley analogy and why it matters

In the example above, 3 out of 4 of us had perceived the teacher's sex correctly. Yet my autistic daughter and I were the only 2 who were cognisantly aware of it - and she thought it was mean and unnecessary to notice. That means 3 out of 4 of us had experienced an uncanny valley style disconnect at some point in time i.e. for all 3 of us, something didn't quite sit right in sex perception terms. Personally, I allowed myself time to validate my original perception before feeling settled on the fact that I was right in the first place. The senior staff member has clearly decided to fight those feelings of unease. All 4 of us have a certain empathy for how it would feel to be wrongly sexed. I have fully accepted that I could be wrong and have kept everything objective. It should be no more or less hurtful to have one's age mistaken than one's sex. It certainly shouldn't leave anyone wondering if the police might be sent round.

That school spends a lot of time telling all the children why it's apparently so important to be kind and use preferred pronouns. So why isn't it? Sticking purely with my original question 1, here's one example: this teacher goes on residential school trips. Personally, I think that a school coercing its staff and students to perceive a teacher to be the opposite sex and (I assume) let that teacher enter opposite sex spaces with children in them is appalling. No teacher should deceive their way into an opposite-sex space. To do so is a red flag in and of itself. To also have qualities that suggest at least the potential for nefarious motivation (i.e. from a safeguarding perspective - which is how schools manage risk) doubly so. Nobody has a voice to call out how appalling this is, including me - unless I want to face a huge backlash for wrong think.

Conclusion
I don't mind or care if you want to go "stealth". Go for it. I would hope for your children's sake (you've mentioned them on another thread) that you'll tell them about your past at some point. But that's none of my business. You wouldn't be the first parent to hide a big secret from their children. But what I do care about is anyone stealthing their way over someone else's boundaries and enforcing their beliefs on them. Everyone knows their own sex, regardless of whether others perceive it correctly or not. It's perfectly possible to subtly self-exclude without "outing" yourself. Obviously not the same thing but I once spent a whole night drinking what I said were gin and tonics - there was no gin in them but I was in the early stages of pregnancy with my first child and didn't want to tell anyone. I managed to avoid getting into rounds of drinks and nobody noticed.

It's not othering to recognise that not everyone shares your belief and to accommodate this accordingly.

Disclaimer
I've seen you called out for me-railing on lots of occasions. I actually empathise with this, as sometimes offering a personal perspective is the only way to explain a viewpoint. See above. So as not to derail with a merail, I'm not going to answer any questions from any other posters about what I have written above. But if you've read all of this and got this far, OP, and have any questions yourself about it, I will answer them as best I can within the confines of anonymity and the board guidelines.

Link
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

'Woman' is the word that has been given to adult human females. Any social connotaion the word takes on is a separate issue to the fact it denotes an adult human female. The word 'woman' itself is not arbitrarily defined. It has a fixed meaning.Queer Theory works on an assumption that there is no fixed or reliably measurable reality and that words can mean whatever you want them to.

Thank you for finding the post!

He's produced such an ocean of bullshit on here that I didn't think I could hold my breath long enough to find it.

What he said in the link provided by Sabrina:
"I know I don't "pass" I haven't been concerned with such a thing since I was 17"

Yet he claims no one knows he's a man, even his own kids. Liminal my arse.

The thing about the tide is that it is predictable and follows a certain pattern......tides both come in and go out according to the force and pull of the moon. The passage of time and history are not destinations. Fads come and go leaving reality unchanged and the under-lying forces untouched.

I know I don't "pass" I haven't been concerned with such a thing since I was 17.

I think this poster suggests that he has actually completely and magically transformed from male to female. On this basis he reckons he is no longer trans, has passed through teh looking glass, and thus become a bog standard woman.

That's my understanding, anyway.

"I know I don't "pass" I haven't been concerned with such a thing since I was 17"

The incongruity of this statement when viewed with all the other posts really is still as discordant as it was when it was first read months ago.

Given that it derives from the Latin word for a threshold, 'liminal' can mean that floaty in betweeny thing..

But it can also mean a clear boundary: a threshold marks where this ends and that begins, where my kitchen stops being my kitchen and becomes my hall.
The threshold between the two is not both kitchen and hall, it's 'liminality' marks the clear distinction between the two.

So, a valid interpretation of OP's 'the liminality of sex perception' is that there is a clear threshold, a 'limen' between the two sexes.
You're either kitchen or hall

Implants are not compromised of breast tissue though, and they do not have mammary glands.

And so eager to please......

This thread title sounds like an AI summary of a tedious novel set in Norfolk about a woman who moves to the fens from London to find herself by shagging some locals.

In what sense, though? It’s such a limited way of seeing things.

Is “our observed reality key in law?” Well, no. Imagine if we just went by our “observed age”, or “speed limit”, or (heaven forbid - way to invite stereotyping!) nationality. Or any number of other things? Our “observed crimes”, perhaps?! You may not have been noticed shoplifting… but you still were.

Is “our observed reality key in day-to-day rules, regs and behaviours?” Again, no - not where rights and safety, and associated distinctions between groups are a factor. You don’t get OAPs’ reduced rates in museums if you’re unlucky enough to look 5 years older than you actually are. When the tannoy asks if there’s a “doctor in the house”, you really don’t want that competent-looking attention seeker thrusting themselves to the front to take charge. “I didn’t see him cheat in the exam - therefore he didn’t.” “Well, we don’t know for sure that she’s Cassie’s mum’s cousin, but she says she is, and little Cassie seems to know her - yeah, she can head off with the kids.”

No, we rely on shared acceptance of an agreed reality, and each individual taking responsibility for adhering to that within laws and social structures that support them to do so.

It simplifies how society works to the point of absurdity.

Woman, doe, mare, ewe. All just names for female mammals of different species. The difference between a doe and a woman is that a woman is a female human and a doe is a female deer. The difference between a man and a woman is that a man is a male human and a woman is female human.

I think however, that some men have always had difficulty recognising that a woman is fully human.

That's excellent, popery, thank you.

(I am hoping that your username comes from an alternative spelling of Pot Pourri).

I love that there are women on here that can articulate arguments so clearly. You so often say what I'm feeling but can't find the words to express.

By the way, what does "The liminality of sex" mean? Or what is it intended to mean in the title?

I've heard of liminal spaces, but haven't heard it used in respect to sex. Thank you.

Well no, rights are conferred by the law.

When polypostwonder posted
Then my participation ends as my viewpoint is invalid within no shared reality.
I assumed it was it referred only to MouseQueen's
Your arguments are fallacious, illogical, and falsely equating social assumptions with social rights.

But it looks like it was a grand polysyllabic farewell to the thread in general.

Very sensible.

I've pointed this out before: if a poster comes on to a board with 'Feminism' in the name, and if they have ever read any threads on here, and they start off on the basis that TWAW, that sex is a spectrum, that trans-IDing men should be allowed use the women's toilet because they are 'lovely'....
the discussion isn't going to get very far because, as polypostwonder said 'there is no shared reality'.

It would be like a flat-earther standing up at a convention of geographers and asking about falling off the edge - 'there is no shared reality'.

Thanks Bonfire Lady.

I like your analogy with age as well.

"It should be no more or less hurtful to have one's age mistaken than one's sex. It certainly shouldn't leave anyone wondering if the police might be sent round".

Same as sex, most of the time your age shouldn't matter in determining how you're treated. But sometimes it matters.

A while ago, a young male colleague's first question to me was "Do you have grandchildren?" I felt a bit offended, as whilst I was technically old enough to have grandchildren, it seemed like he was clearly identifying me in an age bracket older than I was. But that's fine.

However, for age-restricted services, a boundary is needed. Hence there are laws about spaces for over 18s. And adults shouldn't compete in children's races.

Very cute, but that poor dog looks mortified! Maybe it is "liminally" happy.

At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter if someone perceives you as a woman (and most transwomen really do not pass) because your sex is male, and that means you should not be entitled to use female single-sex spaces. It really is that simple.

I also wouldn't say most people do treat transwomen in the same way they treat actual women at all. They might fawn over them for brownie points (in a way they wouldn't actual women) or call them "she" to be polite, sure, but that's not the same thing, is it?

And, of course, if they're not someone who gives a shit about gender identity, like me, they'll just treat them like the man they are whether they have fake breasts and a dress on or not. So where does that leave us when it comes to "sex perception"?