People who are 6'8" though were born with most of what leads them to the becoming of it, just as most people are born with most of what it will take to develop within a standard deviation of the bimodal distribution's modes.
I was not born gay.
I became
pre-gay at a young age. Anybody who knows an effeminate male child knows what pre-gay looks like.
But even if my genetics and environment predestined me, it
still does not make sense to say I was born a particular sexual orientation, and I think it is unhelpful and wrong to frame it that way.
It is supremely dishonest to say that my position is specifically "everyone is born with an orientation".
This is my position: which you failed to quote when you straw-manned it:
some babies are born straight, some are born gay, some are born bisexual some are born asexual. Some will have sexuality grow into them as a function of their born predelictions and experience.
As can be seen, I expect that even at the time of birth, some are going to be gay some are going to be straight, and some may be more malleable according to their nurtures.
At any rate the point is that it's not really a decision and is largely dependent on structures of the brain that form in particular ways, as a result of particular developmental differentiations in utero.
The same is in fact true of trans people, with aspects of gender identity becoming apparent at very young ages, and indicating that discordance is observed as a statistically significant event even at young ages.
The leading thoughts on this is that it has something to do with how the brain develops. It's not something that people choose, though I do accept it is something that folks will occasionally attempt to claim in bad faith. My thought is to take all claims in such faith seriously, and allow the consequences of doing so be visible for all to see.
This person I would see thrown in a prison claiming to be a woman, with many people who identify as men, because
they will be there for the sole reason that this is a place not specifically for "men" but for those who do or may be able to ejaculate sperms, and who do or may have a large amount of testosterone.
If they were willing to castrate themselves such as
to not produce sperms or steroids, then I would not see the issue with them
being housed with others who produce neither sperm nor steroids.
It's a long ways to go, though, in bad faith.
More, I expect their claim will lead to unwanted consequences for claiming to be a woman who will inevitably be housed with a supermajority of criminal men, some of which are most assuredly gay, and some of which will not take kindly to someone who murdered a bunch of gay people and treats LGBT issues flippantly enough to use clear bad faith...
Prisons are segregated by sex. Sex does not change, whether you surgically remove the possibility of producing new gametes or not.
If you think prisons should be segregated by some other criterion, or not segregated at all, make the case for it. But don't pretend you can substitute gender identity for sex.
I made the case for it.
Repeatedly. I
repeated it in this thread.
In the post you quoted.
If you can offer some basis behind what you call "thoughts in heads", such as "gender identity" when it is in all reality
exactly a combination of exposure to testosterone and the ability to produce sperm which generate the desire to separate folks in prisons, I would like to see it.
You are not going to be given a pass by claiming something about "appropriateness."
I think we can get along just fine being precise about the language the state uses to draw their boundaries. It avoids ambiguity and anything anyone could reasonably consider sex based discrimination.
If this person is willing to remove testosterone from their body and become unable to ejaculate sperms, I would say throw them into the "not capable of ejaculating sperms and not on testosterone" camp.
If that's what you want to keep from happening in a prison, then it's easy enough to do without the state taking sides in the man/woman game. And it
is a fucking game and a
stupid one.
We all have roles which we aspire to. Sometimes there's a house spouse, sometimes there is a trophy spouse, usually people aim for relationships that can reproduce, sometimes people aim solely for stability. Often, people have compunctions about genital matchups. In many cases there are biases against adoption for really shitty reasons.
There are a lot of people whose primal need is to find someone who loves them so much as to consent to be the mother of their children, and there is a smaller set of people for which that is something they will ever or will ever deserve to find.
There is a subset of people whose primal need is to be that mother. Again, there is a smaller set that will ever or will ever deserve to be such.
For each of these groups of the subsets of "cannot" and "ought not" have populations of all three permutations of either/or.
What is really important about people finding each other is aligning compatibly with someone who works with you. Someone calling themselves she/her won't magically make you attracted to them, won't automatically render them trustworthy, and won't automatically render them as "across a meaningful barrier" beyond that small nicety of calling them by the name and common pronouns they ask for.
Taking this tack gives far less leverage to people like this shooter than moaning and fretting that they will throw people in the "women's" estate.
The fact is, the problem here is the state calling it the "women's" estate in the first place.
So you can either whinge about having a bad reading level such that you can't garner the use of an anodyne they from a context following a singular immediate referent in conjunction with an ambiguation of gender.
You could call the prisoner "her" in an unironic sense and handle her as described: try her as a human being who murdered people in a night club, no more and no less. When it is time to imprison them identify two specific things that matter: roles in pregnancy, and testosterone.
If someone has no role in pregnancy, it's just down to testosterone.
Let the state refrain from making declarations that people are "men" or "women", and let the people who declare for others whether they are men or women see whatever consequence society as a sea of individuals offers as a result.
I'm not happy that a number of media sources are deadnaming and pronouns and so on. Then, I don't afford these groups my money in subscriptions or clicks.
