Legal definition of woman is based on biological sex, UK supreme court rules

[seanie]

I mean, the differences are much smaller pre-puberty, but on average boys are born bigger and taller. In lots of sports that helps.

And even in early childhood boys tend to be stronger and can run faster, though the difference is less pronounced.

 

[laughing dog]

And that's a good reason to replace two urinals with one normal toilet stall, is it?

YES for a unisex restroom.
And that 2:1 replacement ratio is an assumption not a physical constant.

Why?
Urinals are much smaller, more sanitary, faster, and less expensive. They are better for at least 40% of restroom stops.
Tom

Not for people who cannot use them.
Nor are they necessarily more sanitary or faster to usr.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Those who never underwent male puberty are unquestionably equal to females in competition.

Why do you believe that? The sports record for prepubescent boys is better than the record for girls of the same age in almost every event.

My understanding was that they were equal.

Read the numbers for yourself. http://age-records.125mb.com/

That's rather how I remember things as well. (Not that I checked out your numbers) Boys were more athletic and physically able than girls, generally.

But it doesn't seem very pronounced, and it's hard to say what is physical and what is cultural. The sportiest of my siblings was definitely my baby sister.
Tom

Yeah, once puberty starts it's clear. Before that it looks like noise.

 

[TSwizzle]

This case gets quite a bit of attention in California news.

The California Interscholastic Federation crowned two champions in a pair of events at Saturday's state high school track and field meet when transgender athlete AB Hernandez placed first in the high jump and triple jump – and finished second in the long jump. Hernandez shared the podium with her cisgender competitors following a rule change enacted last week that allowed athletes assigned female at birth to receive medals based on where they would have finished if a transgender athlete had not competed.

USA Today

USA Today really do tie themselves knots here, "her" when referring to Hernandez and her "cisgender competitors" which should really read "girls/young women competitors". Good old USA Today fail to provide by what margin Hernandez beat his female opponents. It was significant. If Hernandez were to compete against his fellow males, he would not even be quoted.

Even the insufferable prick Newsom says males competing in female sports is "deeply unfair". However, the difference in this track meet was that if the "transgender" athlete actually wins an event it would not effect the result of the female athletes, i.e. the race would be recorded as if the "transgender" athlete was not really in the race.

 

[seanie]

Yeah, once puberty starts it's clear. Before that it looks like noise.

And what evidence do you have to back that up?

And what evidence do you have to support your contention that a male going through puberty with medication to alter and disrupt the typical development, has no physiological advantage over females when it comes to sport?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Going to the extent of putting curtains in her car and making other unknown arrangements to urinate there without making a mess must have been quite an undertaking. That is what makes her a prude in my book.

So, a female woman who has been so traumatized by a male that she'd go out to her car to pee is a prude, by your standards?

What a patriarch.
Tom

Where's the evidence there was any actual trauma? The right keeps preaching Fear!, Fear!, Fear! but doesn't demonstrate actual bad events to justify it.

 

[seanie]

What evidence would satisfy you?

Clearly the testimony of women isn’t sufficient.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Going to the extent of putting curtains in her car and making other unknown arrangements to urinate there without making a mess must have been quite an undertaking. That is what makes her a prude in my book.

So, a female woman who has been so traumatized by a male that she'd go out to her car to pee is a prude, by your standards?

What a patriarch.
Tom

I have seen no evidence she was traumatized by anyone. Do you have some? Her parents could have been prudes and taught it to her.

I've seen no evidence about why she decided to go pee in a car.
Only that she did.

Why do you assume that you know why she did that?
You specifically called her a prude. I'm saying I don't know why she did it.
Tom

You asserted she had been traumatized, you should support that rather than blame Zipr for saying we have no evidence.

 

[TomC]

And that's a good reason to replace two urinals with one normal toilet stall, is it?

YES for a unisex restroom.
And that 2:1 replacement ratio is an assumption not a physical constant.

Why?
Urinals are much smaller, more sanitary, faster, and less expensive. They are better for at least 40% of restroom stops.
Tom

Not for people who cannot use them.
Nor are they necessarily more sanitary or faster to usr.

Yes, they are definitely more sanitary and faster and smaller.
Meaning that there is more space for facilities mainly for people who need them. And more time.

If 50% of people are male, and 80% of restroom use is to pee, then 40% of public restroom usage is taken care of by urinals. The fastest and cheapest way is the best.
Tom

 

[laughing dog]

And that's a good reason to replace two urinals with one normal toilet stall, is it?

YES for a unisex restroom.
And that 2:1 replacement ratio is an assumption not a physical constant.

Why?
Urinals are much smaller, more sanitary, faster, and less expensive. They are better for at least 40% of restroom stops.
Tom

Not for people who cannot use them.
Nor are they necessarily more sanitary or faster to usr.

Yes, they are definitely more sanitary and faster and smaller.

Evidence?

 

[TomC]

Going to the extent of putting curtains in her car and making other unknown arrangements to urinate there without making a mess must have been quite an undertaking. That is what makes her a prude in my book.

So, a female woman who has been so traumatized by a male that she'd go out to her car to pee is a prude, by your standards?

What a patriarch.
Tom

I have seen no evidence she was traumatized by anyone. Do you have some? Her parents could have been prudes and taught it to her.

I've seen no evidence about why she decided to go pee in a car.
Only that she did.

Why do you assume that you know why she did that?
You specifically called her a prude. I'm saying I don't know why she did it.
Tom

You asserted she had been traumatized, you should support that rather than blame Zipr for saying we have no evidence.

Zipr asserted that she is a prude. I pointed out that there are other explanations.

A woman who doesn't want a man in the restroom with her isn't necessarily a prude.

Bottom line though is that she has rights as well as all the guys who want to share the same restroom. She has rather more really, because there is a nearly identical option right on the other side of the wall that is entitled for males to use.
Tom

 

[Loren Pechtel]

There is a cluster of positions that generally travel together and can reasonably be considered anti-trans.

No doubt; but what does that have to do with the discussion here? Do you see anybody in the thread defending Trump's order to kick people with gender dysphoria out of the military? People are called anti-trans here for not agreeing that the progressive stack is the correct way to decide public policy and matters of fact. It is not anti-trans to say transwomen aren't women any more than it's anti-Muslim to say Mohammad wasn't God's Prophet; it's simply failing to pretend to believe and uncritically recite some subculture's intellectually vapid loyalty oath. Likewise, it is not anti-trans to say trans people have exactly the same rights as the rest of us but no extra rights on account of being trans, any more than it's anti-black to say black students have the right to be considered for college admission based on the same standard of qualification as everyone else, but no right to favoritism on account of being black.

What you seem to be missing is that the "progressive" approach is what's been done in reality without undue consequences. The anti-trans position is about rolling back the clock, not defending the status quo!

In the first place, no, the "progressive" approach is what's new. The old permissive status quo approach to men in women's single-sex spaces was based on the old situation, when the men using women's rooms were mainly pre-op transsexuals fulfilling their psychiatrists' requirement that they try living as women for a year before being approved for bottom surgery. The cultural change within transgender circles, where people then called "non-ops" became the tail wagging the dog, is what led to the politicization of the issue. Those seeking to promote the interests of non-ops started demanding as a right what was then being extended to pre-ops as a courtesy, and demanding that transgenderism no longer be classified as a mental health problem, and demanding that progressives rank trans people higher than women on their stack. Going along with the upped demands puts society on a track straight to self-id, which will mean far more men encroaching on women's boundaries than in the status quo.

You realize plenty of people don't want to have bottom surgery because the results are poor?

And self-id is about you being able to go to DMV without a psychiatrist's sign-off, not about simply deciding you're going to be female.

And in the second place, even if you were right about the status quo it wouldn't support your contention. It is not anti-trans to say trans people have exactly the same rights as the rest of us but no extra rights on account of being trans, whether granting extra rights for trans people is the status quo or not. Affirmative action for black people is the status quo. You argue for color-blind practices, so you're trying to roll back the clock, not defending the status quo. Do you think that makes you anti-black?

The thing is it's mostly a strawman attack.

And it's not that some opponents made a weak argument, but that basically all of them use the same flawed argument. When everyone trying to establish X makes the same mistake in the process it's highly suggestive that X is false.

Dude, I already asked you which argument you're calling "the anti-trans argument" that you propose to kick a pillar out from under. "X" is not an answer! What is this flawed argument that you claim basically all of them make? Emily at least has repeatedly made it very clear she thinks intersex conditions have no bearing on trans issues; as for me, I never claimed sex is a strict binary; and I'm guessing you classify both of us as "anti-trans".

That everyone is unequivocally male or female.

Loren, you keep just repeating yourself on autopilot. Turn off your autopilot, read the question, think about what the word "argument" means, and address the question you were asked. What ==> argument <== are you attributing to the people you label "anti-trans"? "Everyone is unequivocally male or female." is not an argument. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a definite proposition.

Ok, you can quibble about "argument". It's still a matter of asserting something the evidence doesn't support.

We can measure physical anatomy, we can't measure the mind. But there unquestionably is something in the mind because of how badly things tended to go wrong with surgical "correction" of the intersexed. Thus clearly we can't unequivocally state whether the mind is male or female. And I find the idea that the mind must inevitably follow the genetics preposterous. There's so many pathways in the body that it's pretty much inevitable that some out of sync conditions will occur. 10% of people are found at autopsy to have substantial deviations from standard textbook anatomy. (For example, my father had 5 renal arteries where the book says there should be one.)

Remember, the point of this exchange was to find out why those who keep assuring us sex is a spectrum and the DSD patients commonly called "intersexed" really are literally and not just metaphorically intersexed believe their being right about it has any implications for trans issues. Merely finding someone to point at and saying "Well, she's anti-trans and she says intersexed people aren't really intersexed." explains nothing.

You aren't establishing that it isn't a spectrum.

And you're still not getting it--it's not saying the trans exist, but that the argument of why they don't is invalid.

Oh for the love of god! Stop getting your understanding of people's viewpoints at second-hand from the ad hominem propaganda of their opponents. You aren't willing to believe Ukrainians are Nazis on barbos's say-so, are you? So go to the source. Who the heck here has argued that the trans don't exist?!? Of course they exist! But their existence doesn't prove they are what they think they are, any more than a Hindu's undisputed existence proves she's the reincarnation of a sacred cow.

If they exist what is supposed to be done?

What is supposed to be done?!? Why are you bringing that up as though opinions about what is supposed to be done have any bearing on whether "Transwomen are women" is true, or whether "Parliament meant biological sex" is true, or whether "Intersex conditions prove gender ideology is right" is true? Facts don't depend on policy preferences.

But to answer your question, what is to be done is something reality-based, not something make-believe-based. First let's get the facts, then we can decide what to do about them.

The question is what course of action produces the least harm.

Since we don't know how it manifests in the brain we can't establish that it's wiring and thus "anatomy" might not be relevant.

I lost you. You don't believe in souls, do you? What else is there besides brain wiring to account for the physical phenomenon of a person thinking she is or isn't a member of some set? I'm not seeing a whole lot of metastable cross-coupled Nand-gates in there.

The brain is more than connections. We know hormones have major effects. We know other things exist without being able to find anything in the hardware that's related. Perhaps you are considering such thing as "wiring", I was picturing the neural connections as "wiring"--hardware, not software.

Okay, that's a fair point in principle. But in practice it seems implausible to me that anyone's belief that he or she is the other sex depends on hormone levels rather than on wiring. Psychiatrists have been experimentally messing with their patients' hormones for like a hundred years. If hormones controlled transgenderism then psychiatrists would have reported they know how to "cure" it by now.

1) The changes can be permanent. Take away the testosterone, the penis doesn't shrink back.

2) I was presenting hormones as an example, not as a complete list.

Thus it is unquestionable that there can be a gender to the mind.

No, it is unquestionable that there can be a gender identity to the mind. Gender and gender identity are not the same concept. An awful lot of trans ideology's arguments rely on equivocating them.

What is there to distinguish between them?

"Gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed. This includes norms, behaviours and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relationships with each other. As a social construct, gender varies from society to society and can change over time.​

...​

Gender and sex are related to but different from gender identity. Gender identity refers to a person’s deeply felt, internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond to the person’s physiology or designated sex at birth".​

- World Health Organization​

To oversimplify: your gender identity is the sex-linked category you think of yourself as being in; your gender is the sex-linked category other people typically think of you as being in. That's what "socially constructed" involves.

But how others think of you is based on how you present yourself. You're not showing off your anatomy. In environments where people don't see me and don't hear my non-electronic voice (I don't know what the telephone does to my voice, but it is very common for people to think it's female) I am routinely thought female. Does that make a mismatch between my gender and my gender identity?? (Not that I really have a personal sense of gender. I have male bits, I'm fine with that, but it seems rather irrelevant.)

Gah. I knew I shouldn't oversimplify. By "category other people typically think of you as being in" I didn't mean their first impression based on the least smidgen of input; I meant their final judgment based on knowing all they need to know. If the lion's share of those people who routinely think you female only because the phone hides critical information about you would change their minds and think you male once they saw your face and your junk and your ultrasounds, that means you're in the "male" noun class. The "gender" social construct is not pig-headedly committed to first impressions.

Why should what group others think I'm in even be relevant? I'm openly atheist, to some that puts me in the category of evil. Does that make me evil?

Argumentum ad suicide? Whether a person who thinks he or she is the other sex would benefit from drafting the whole population into his or her care team, and getting them all to help the person self-perceive as the other sex, medicinally, by making an effort to conceal contrary data, has no implications one way or the other as to whether he or she is, in point of fact, the other sex.

Who is being drafted?

I'm simply saying that allowing them to live as the gender of their choice has a better outcome than not. And the claims of a burden on society don't show up in the data.

What does "allowing them to live as the gender of their choice" mean? What would "not allowing them to live as the gender of their choice" involve? Banning women from cutting their hair short and wearing traditionally male clothing and getting traditionally male jobs and changing their names to male-sounding names? Nobody does that! That sort of thing went out of style over fifty years ago. Women get to do everything men get to do and don't even get considered trans for it, just tomboys. So getting to live as they please can't be what you're talking about. Surely what you're talking about must be how other people live -- whether other people alter their own behavior to pretend they don't know perfectly well that the male-identifying woman is in point of fact female.

That's who's being drafted. If the point of all this society-wide lying the trans-activists are demanding from the rest of us is for a better mental health outcome for their favorite oppressed group, that means we're being drafted into their care team. Well, if we're going to be part of their care team, shouldn't we be getting paid for it?

I think you don't realize that we are asking for basically the status quo, you are not.

The status quo used to be prosecution for blasphemy if you contradicted the religious beliefs of Christians. Now it's prosecution for blasphemy if you contradict the religious beliefs of progressives, at least in the UK -- and American progressives very much come off as lusting after that power here too. If the status quo you want to preserve is that infidels shut up about our infidelitude and pretend to believe progressives' unscientific dogma, for the sake of the greater good of their ingroup, is there also some unscientific dogma of the infidels that you're volunteering to pretend to believe, for the benefit of somebody lower down on the progressive stack? Or is all this pious fraud they're demanding from society a one-way street?

Or is it that we don't want people being prosecuted for blasphemy for contradicting the religious beliefs of conservatives?

A fair portion of the "liberal agenda" is removing legal protections for conservative religious ideas.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Sex is not just normally binary, it is binary.

That very rarely the “expression of that sex”may not straightforwardly correspond to what is “normal”, is neither here nor there.

There are only two developmental pathways: female and male.

Only if you accept sufficiently broad definitions of "male" and "female" pathways.

But as soon as you accept a broad definition you are admitting there are differences and thus your binary division doesn't work.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The position that someone’s sex is an ineffable mystery is ideological horseshit.

It’s very straightforward 99.98% of the time.

1) To say it's not a mystery requires that it be determinable 100% of the time. Not 99.98% of the time.

2) We know there are edge cases. And if there are any edge cases why do you think we have identified all of the edge cases?

3) The surgical miscorrection of the intersexed shows that there's something in the mind separate from the anatomy. We have not identified it. And since an unknown factor clearly exists I'm left with the conclusion that it must be a mystery even if most cases are easy to resolve.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The fuck? What ideology? The legitimacy of science? If so, yes.

The ideology where you decide who women are allowed to be comfortable around. Where you decide what is fair in competitive sports leagues.

Don't give me this crap about the existence of people who have congenital abnormalities and expect that to give any dude who demands access to any women's spaces what they want. I'm not buying it.
Tom

So we should allow white women to say they don't want colored in the restroom?

Just look at the statistics. We have yet to identify an attack by someone female-presenting but with male genitals in a women's room. Risk = zero. Yet a simple perusal of crime statistics should show you that the risk of a black woman is higher than the risk of a white woman. (Yeah, I know it's socioeconomic, not race. The woman in the restroom can't identify that so it's irrelevant.)

 

[TomC]

So we should allow white women to say they don't want colored in the restroom?

Who is we?
I don't confuse race and sex.
Tom

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I have no doubt whatsoever that this much is true. Your opinion on trans people in gyms has absolutely nothing to do with the science of intersex chromosomal expression. That is your emotions talking, and nothing any scientist could say on the matter would ever change your mind. Correct? Or is there aome fact that, if discovered and somehow communicated to you, would make you okay with trans people using public spaces? I think not.

The law we're discussing, however, absolutely does concern the real science of sex and sex expression, and most people affected by it aren't trans at all. Every single UK citizen regardless of their status has been redefined and restricted by the overreach of this ruling.

DSD conditions have nothing at all to do with it.

You’re advocating for any male to access female only spaces on their say so.

And every single person is still male or female, regardless of how any court rules.

Reality supercedes law.

Their "say so" as expressed in going down to the DMV and changing their ID and living as their gender of choice. We have zero evidence of this being abused anywhere, anywhen.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Say there was someone born male, no exceptionally rare chromosomal differences, raised as male, went through male puberty, married to a woman for 23 years, fathered two children, and then at the age of 54 “transitions” to being a woman?

What makes that person a “woman”?

Because they think of themselves that way. And note that things like this don't happen out of the blue, it's a long process of accepting who you are. Or perhaps never accepting it--I have a SIL that's almost certainly lesbian--but it's unlikely she will ever admit that even to herself.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Moreover, models predict that variation should exist within the categories that HHS proposes as "male" and “female”, indicating that sex should be more accurately viewed as a continuum.* Indeed, experiments in other organisms have confirmed that variation in traits associated with sex is more extensive than for many other traits.

To take this farther--above the atomic level reality is analog. Yes, even the device you're reading this on. We call them "digital" computers but the reality is that zero is zeroish and coerced to being zero, one is oneish and coerced to being one. This is why your hard disk doesn't have anything like infinite capacity--the pieces of data must be big enough that you can be effectively certain what is to be coerced to zero and what is to be coerced to one. Likewise, speed limits on cables. The simplistic textbooks show the signal simply switching from zero to one--but in reality to do that instantly requires infinite power. The edge isn't perfectly sharp. And to do it instantly requires that all possible paths the signal can take are of exactly the same length, lest the speed at which the information moves get blurred because some electrons or photons took longer paths than others. (And, yes, this is a very real limiting factor in network cabling and CPU operation. Lightspeed is about one foot per nanosecond.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Sex and gender are two different things.

How your body was formed and what it can do is not the same thing as your identity. A father of two can have a female self identity. And they may have been "in the closet" about it for over 50 years because of their fears of rejection in a society that is hostile to transfolks.

So some men, really, really, believe that they are women.

Yeah, we know this.

But they’re not.

Yeah.

And some men really, really think they're sexually attracted to men when we all know they're mistaken, that Satan is deceiving them, that they are choosing to be perverts, and really, Alan Turing did the only decent thing when he killed himself.

I was born in the 1950s, guys. This anti- anything that has to do with sex that doesn't uphold traditional sexist tropes is nothing new.

And note that we have had lots of attempts by many, many people to "cure" homosexuality. It doesn't work, just screws them up badly. While we have nowhere near the same amount of effort on "curing" transgenderism why should we expect a different outcome??