Split Gendered spaces, split from Drag Shows

[Emily Lake]

So four imaginary classifiers put together still makes an imaginary classifier.

Each of these things you describe are imaginary.

There is no reality to "adult" beyond some arbitrary quantity of time past some arbitrary event.

There is no reality to "female" beyond some statistical mode, something that does not actually exist as an immediate article.

There is no reality to "human" as a species. The selection of common ancestry by which the tree is drawn is itself arbitrary.

All "species" are similarly arbitrarily drawn, for all we can place most things on one side or the other of such arbitrary boundaries.

It is something you are systematically unable to define in a real way because there is no reality to such arbitrations.

Oh FFS, please employ some sense. And JFC stop intentionally conflating figurative and literal language.

Adult is a term that is relevant to ALL sexually reproducing species. Humans have a figurative use of the term adult, by which we confer legal status, and that term is based on an arbitrarily placed line, but is in no way imaginary. In literal terms, however, a member of a species is an adult when it has developed far enough into puberty to normally be capable of reproduction. For insects it's even easier to define and less arbitrary - when they enter their final stage of their life cycle, and insect is an adult insect as opposed to one or more juvenile larval or instar stages.

Female is a term that is relevant to all sexually reproductive species that use two differently sized gametes to reproduce. You are substituting your own imagined meaning, based on some ill-defined grouping of traits, and that is irrelevant to the actual meaning of the term. Females among mammals are those that have developed a reproductive anatomy that normally is associated with the production of large sessile gametes called ova.

Human is a term that applies to the set of species with shared genetic characteristics, and which are capable of sexual reproduction with others of their species on a regular basis.

Your entire screed is inane. You are conflating arbitrary with imaginary, while simultaneously playing bait and switch with figurative and literal terminology. If your rambling bore any relation to reality, we would be unable to distinguish between a sapphire and an elephant.

 

[Emily Lake]

In a society where women did not have to be concerned about sexual assault, you would have a good point: why would there be any safety need for segregated spaces? We don’t live in such a society. Whether there is a need or simply social reason for spaces segregated spaces is a different question.

No such society exists on our planet.

 

[Emily Lake]

You keep pretending that what these women are asking for is a special privilege.

These males are demanding a special privilege. These are males demanding the special privilege of being granted the right to ignore female boundaries and to override female consent, based on their says-so. They are demanding the special privilege of denying females their own rights.

 

[Emily Lake]

Am I the only person who remembers the outrage at women sports reporters expecting to be in dressing rooms of male athletes, alongside their male counterparts?

I do remember that debate quite well, and my opinion on it was exactly the same: the law has no business discriminating on the basis of sex. Allow all reporters in, or none of them.

Well, at least you're consistent in your position of "fuck what women want".

 

[Emily Lake]

My goal is NOT to make any person feel stigmatized, threatened or uncomfortable or unsafe. Rather it is to make everyone feel safe and comfortable.

You are failing in your goal. You demand empathy but extend none. You are spreading propaganda that gets trans women hurt.

And you are advocating policies that are already getting females hurt.

I shouldn't have to set myself on fire to keep someone else warm.

If men insist upon attacking and hurting gender non-conforming males, I think men need to figure out a solution to their own fucked up dynamics. Pushing gender non-conforming males off on women to deal with is a cop-out, especially when it comes with a gigantic fucking loophole visible from Neptune that increases the risk of females.

 

[Emily Lake]

No, because you are portraying anyone born with a penis as a dangerous threat in need of control.

Anyone with a penis that insists on violating female boundaries against their consent IS a dangerous threat in need of control.

 

[Emily Lake]

But I'm starting to get actually upset here, unusually for a forum discussion. So whatever you may choose to do, I think I'd better bow out.

Oh gee, poor you, you're getting upset that women are pushing back against your demand that males should have free access to naked females without their consent?

My sympathy is extremely small. And the fact that you seem incapable of even remotely understanding the views of females in this discussion certainly isn't helping.

 

[Emily Lake]

What about countries that have coed locker rooms? Are there some statistics on those?

Here’s a discussion I found: https://www.quora.com/Has-anyone-ad...-like-a-public-pool-or-a-gym-What-was-it-like

And here’s this: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-...oms-sunday-times-women-risk-a8519086.html?amp

And this: https://publications.aap.org/pediat...ool-Restroom-and-Locker-Room-Restrictions-and

None of this should be any surprise: where unisex facilities are the norm, there seems to be more comfort in using such facilities even fir those most accustomed to segregated sites

Non-fender confirming, transgender individuals and gay individuals are at significant risk of sexual assault.

Women and girls are at significant risk of sexual assault in coed facilities.

Which, to me, argues that universal individual stalls should be the norm.

And much, much, much more strongly argues that society must must must do much more to combat sexual assault and violence.

Yep. When unisex facilities are all that is available, women and girls, as well as gay and gender-nonconforming males are at increased risk of assault.

Nobody who is not ideologically captured with quasi-religious zeal should be surprised by this. Males are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of violent and sexual assaults - regardless of era, regardless of country, regardless of culture. Setting up situations in which males have easier access to the victims of their assaults will... quelle surprise... result in more assaults.

 

[Emily Lake]

All you speak of when you speak of how people feel when they see people in a space who look some way they do not expect, is that you speak for people who are feel violated in the violation of their PREJUDICE. There is no running away from that while advocating for now people are violated by seeing something unexpected.

The prejudice is baked right into the expectation!

It is a judgement that this anatomy means they are going to act as a criminal.

It is not OK.

The holding of the expectation is prejudice. They are already prejudiced by the time they hold and have the expectation even before that expectation is violated.

Quit expecting trans people to be OK with prejudice.

There's got to be a point where you realize that you're essentially arguing that rabbits shouldn't flee when a large shadow passes above them, because not every single bird is an eagle that's going to eat them.

 

[Emily Lake]

Here’s the thing: The presence of someone in the women’s locker room or shower does NOT mean they are a woman. It should, but it does not.

If anyone could tell me how a cis woman would know that the naked person with a penis standing next to her in the shower is a trans woman, I’d be very interested and very grateful.

There is no way. None of us have ESP. None of us can read another person's mind. There is no way for any objective observer to verify whether a person is transgender or not. It does not exist.

The only thing any of us can evaluate, in 99.98% of the cases, is whether the person is male or female.

 

[Emily Lake]

What about countries that have coed locker rooms? Are there some statistics on those?

Here’s a discussion I found: https://www.quora.com/Has-anyone-ad...-like-a-public-pool-or-a-gym-What-was-it-like

From posts in your link, people don't seem to have a problem with it. This makes me wonder if it's an American worry or even a uniquely American difference in crime rate, like with guns. This is one reason I wondered about statistics. You would think that coed locker rooms make crime rate go up, but maybe the societies where they have them have more sex/sex is less taboo/or some other differences such that sex crimes are less. I think I read they have these in Japan and Netherlands. Both have low rates of sex crimes, for example. What is at play here?

I strongly suspect that this is yet another example of how religion gets everything wrong.

The Christian (and therefore American) solutions to all problems even tangentially related to sexual behaviour, are not only ineffective, but directly counterproductive.

Societies that treat nudity as inherently sexual, and sexual behaviour as inherently shameful and therefore to be kept to an absolute minimum, practiced only in private, and never discussed (particularly not with children), other than by the completely unhelpful and unhealthy command to abstain from everything and anything even vaguely sexual, inevitably produce citizens who don't really understand sex at all, don't have any useful guidance on how to express their sexual desires or urges responsibly and in ways that don't harm others, and don't even view tolerance of perfectly normal sexual expression as acceptable and polite behaviour.

Puritans are the weirdoes in this regard, and they have stamped their weirdness on the USA, and to a far lesser extent on the UK, to the point that citizens of those nations largely view puritanical craziness as the norm, to be used as a benchmark for how people ought to behave.

Suppression of sexual urges doesn't make them go away, it just forces them into paths of least resistance. If you are successful in stopping people from masturbating, and you are successful in limiting their opportunities for consensual sex, you are setting up an environment in which sexual assault and rape are inevitable.

A relaxed indifference to nakedness, a lack of proscriptions against harmless sexual behaviours (including masturbation and consensual sex), provision of factually correct education to ensure that consent is informed, and that all parties understand how to effectively protect themselves against both unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease, and the provision of easy access to contraception, is an incredibly effective defence against essentially all of the various harms (from unwanted pregnancy through to aggravated rape) that arise when these things are either not provided, or (as is the case in Christian dominated areas) actively prohibited.

Of course there will still be problems in such a society. But the Christian "solutions" inevitably (and frankly unsurprisingly) make those problems much worse.

I'm not entirely convinced.

Prevalence and characteristics of sexual violence in the Netherlands, the risk of revictimization and pregnancy: results from a national population survey - PubMed

Prevalence figures on sexual violence among a representative sample of both men and women were not yet available for the Netherlands. The aim of this study, therefore, was to investigate the prevalence of sexual violence in the Netherlands and to add these figures to the international body of...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Prevalence rates as high as 21% for men and 56% for women were found. Fifty percent of the female victims and 30% of the male victims of child sexual abuse had experienced adult victimization. Of the female rape victims, 7% became pregnant as a consequence of rape. In the Netherlands, as elsewhere, the prevention of sexual violence should be prioritized.

Even in countries with extremely liberal views toward sex... there's still an incredibly high rate of sexual assault, and the victims are still disproportionately female.

One in 10 Dutch female students has been raped, new research shows - DutchNews.nl

One in 10 female and 1% of male students in the Netherlands have been raped according to a survey of 1,000 students, human rights organisation Amnesty International said on Wednesday. Most of the students said they knew their attacker from either a date or a party. ‘We are not talking about...

www.dutchnews.nl

One in 10 female and 1% of male students in the Netherlands have been raped

 

[Emily Lake]

we're already seeing European countries making all public bathrooms "gender neutral".

As far as I'm aware, many European countries never routinely segregated public bathrooms.

The closest thing to such segregation in many places was the building of public urinals, which were obviously unsuitable for anyone who wanted to sit down, and so were typically only used by men.

In France and Belgium, such facilities were often located in busy areas, and gave privacy only between chest and knee height, being open and un-roofed.

Certainly it's typical in Brussels to find pubs and bars which have been open for several centuries, and which have never had segregated toilet facilities.

The lack of segregation in European public toilets is not a new thing - and has yet to lead to a massive increase in sexual assaults.

We were "already" seeing it in the Middle Ages. Those "Trans allies" have either been around for a lot longer than I thought, or have successfully constructed a time machine.

Urinary leash

 

[Emily Lake]

You're missing the fact that we generally aren't protected from offensive things.

But we DO generally protect more vulnerable people from danger, do we not?

 

[Bomb#20]

That's a bizarre argument -- if public toilets have been coed since the Middle Ages, when exactly should we have seen the massive increase in sexual assaults, assuming coed bathrooms are dangerous for women? Do you have reliable statistics on the rape rate in medieval Belgium?

The point is that shared bathrooms haven't been seen as a problem--implying there is no explosion of rape.

There doesn't need to be an explosion for there to be a problem. The rape rate may well have been 10% higher in Belgium ever since public bathrooms became widespread than it would have been if they'd been sex-segregated, and nobody who only notices explosions would have seen it as a problem.

 

[Emily Lake]

BTW, why should pre/non-surgical trans women feel unsafe in a men's locker room?

Because men might hurt them!

That opening the doors to women's spaces in a way that allows ANY man to enter represents a danger to a whole lot of women for the exact same reason is irrelevant.

One of these involves males getting hurt. The other only involves females getting hurt.

Also... males are the enforcers of gendered expectations on other males - and males who don't conform to those gendered expectations are "non-men" that need to be excluded from male spaces. They just wrap it up in shiny language and try to bully women accepting their own patriarchal domination as being "inclusivity" that women must take up the burden for, while they take up none of it.

 

[lostone]

You're missing the fact that we generally aren't protected from offensive things.

But we DO generally protect more vulnerable people from danger, do we not?

aren't trans people also more vulnerable?

 

[ZiprHead]

As far as I can tell, Emily Lake and Toni have neither suggested that transgenders had no place in a locker-room. Their interest is with pre-surgical transgender men. Your interest is apparently with perverts. You are obsessed with perverts.

Pre/Non op is definitely a problem. Even larger though is self-declaration. Self-Id is a problem.

I agree.

I am willing to compromise and allow post-op transwomen the *right* to use female spaces... but that has to mean that any male who shows up can be challenged on their presence there, and FEMALES retain the right to evict them from that space if WE deem it appropriate to do so.

I like how the NCAA is handling the issue.

In the decade since the NCAA established its previous policy allowing transgender athletes to compete, the controversy surrounding Thomas is the first of its kind. Those guidelines stated that transgender men should be eligible for men’s college teams immediately. Meanwhile, trans women were required to undergo one year of hormone therapy – generally consisting of taking testosterone blockers and exogenous estrogen – before being eligible for women’s teams. According to these guidelines, any trans athlete not taking hormone treatment was still also eligible to participate in an athletic program in accordance with the sex they were assigned at birth.

Under the NCAA’s new policy, which will begin in the 2022-23 academic year, trans athletes will need “documented [testosterone] levels at the beginning of their season,” a second test six months after the first, and a third test four weeks prior to championship selections. While the previous policy also required documented tests and a review panel, it stopped short of requiring this kind of consistent testing.

In addition, the NCAA has now opened the door for transgender athletes to be subject to excessive testing and stringent testosterone limits from national governing bodies. USA Swimming has already taken this approach by implementing a 36-month period in which trans women’s testosterone must be below 5 nanomoles per liter (nmol/l). That 36-month window is much longer than many existing policies. While the NCAA has stated it will not follow USA Swimming guidelines for the 2022-23 school year, the NCAA does indicate a phased rollout that would adhere to more stringent policies in adherence with the national governing bodies for each sport.

If a transwoman wants to gain access to women's spaces maybe some sort of certification needs to be involved.

Oops, forgot to add the link. https://globalsportmatters.com/scie...policy,weeks prior to championship selections.

 

[ZiprHead]

What do either of these have to do with the issue? And she's had both male and female gynecologists over the years.

I've had a female caregiver fondle my junk. She asked if I want another person in the room but I said it's not needed.

 

[Emily Lake]

Yes, women have legitimate reason to fear men--nobody's contesting that. What you are failing to establish is why locker rooms are any greater threat than life in general, especially as the data says otherwise.

I know there's got to be a term for this fallacy, but I have no idea what it is.

Currently, locker rooms have a lower level of threat BECAUSE THEY ARE SEPARATED BY SEX AND MEN ARE NOT ALLOWED IN FEMALE LOCKERS. Therefore, it is immediately clear that any male in the female lockers is a threat - they are removed by managers and administrators. If you take away that separation, you eliminate the protection that allows them to have a lower rate of assault in the first place.

You lock your car when you get out right? I bet you almost never get anything stolen from your car. Now, obviously that means that things inside your car are largely safe from threat right? So go ahead - set policy that requires that everyone leave their cars unlocked. Because the statistics show that things in cars are pretty safe from thieves.

Can you see where the flaw is?

 

[Emily Lake]

You have one article from a questionable source. There's a lot more that says the opposite of what you're saying.

Put up or shut up with your "lots more".