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

[seanie]

The specific example addressed in the supreme Court’s ruling was rape counselling group sessions.

The 2010 Act explicitly gave this as an an example where trans women could be excluded on a blanket basis, because the presence of any male persons might cause distress or lead to women self-excluding from the service. It can be legitimate and proportionate to exclude males from female only rape counselling sessions.

What the Sipreme Court ruled, in addition to excluding all biological males from such a space, it could also be legitimate to exclude trans men who’ve undergone sufficient transition to pass as men. Because they could trigger the same concerns from the other women users.

Trans men will still need rape counselling services, but it may be inappropriate to provide that in a female only setting. It could be provided in a non-sex segregated space, or a space focused on trans people, or on an individual basis. These are available options.

 

[seanie]

It could also be provided on the basis of biological sex, as long as that’s understood and policed.

 

[seanie]

The question arises, that if a trans man is raped, which group counselling session would they prefer?

And on what basis?

 

[seanie]

The core of the Supreme Court ruling, is that if service providers operate single sex services, they have to be operated on the basis of actual sex, not whatever a person considers themselves to be.

There are other ways to provide such spaces, but self-ID is not the law.

Or reality.

 

[seanie]

And again, the issue is asymmetrical.

Biological females in male spaces, are not the same problem as biological males in female spaces.

There is an imbalance.

 

[seanie]

"All intersex people are either male or female."

Your pseudo-intellectual language doesn't make your claim any less silly.

Why is it silly?

Give reasons.

Were there reasons for this?

I may’ve missed them.

 

[Bomb#20]

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.)

Risk=zero, does it?

Then why the extraordinarily high rate of sexual offending of trans women in prison?

Pretty sure that's sampling bias. The prison service is a lot more likely to know a trans prisoner is trans if he's a sex-offender than if he's a thief. The vast majority of trans prisoners surely keep their gender dysphoria under wraps.

 

[Politesse]

The specific example addressed in the supreme Court’s ruling was rape counselling group sessions.

The 2010 Act explicitly gave this as an an example where trans women could be excluded on a blanket basis, because the presence of any male persons might cause distress or lead to women self-excluding from the service. It can be legitimate and proportionate to exclude males from female only rape counselling sessions.

What the Sipreme Court ruled, in addition to excluding all biological males from such a space, it could also be legitimate to exclude trans men who’ve undergone sufficient transition to pass as men. Because they could trigger the same concerns from the other women users.

Trans men will still need rape counselling services, but it may be inappropriate to provide that in a female only setting. It could be provided in a non-sex segregated space, or a space focused on trans people, or on an individual basis. These are available options.

So your "compromise" is to fuck over trans people completely, in all situations.

 

[seanie]

I think you’re right about that but”risk=zero” is just unsupportable nonsense.

 

[seanie]

The specific example addressed in the supreme Court’s ruling was rape counselling group sessions.

The 2010 Act explicitly gave this as an an example where trans women could be excluded on a blanket basis, because the presence of any male persons might cause distress or lead to women self-excluding from the service. It can be legitimate and proportionate to exclude males from female only rape counselling sessions.

What the Sipreme Court ruled, in addition to excluding all biological males from such a space, it could also be legitimate to exclude trans men who’ve undergone sufficient transition to pass as men. Because they could trigger the same concerns from the other women users.

Trans men will still need rape counselling services, but it may be inappropriate to provide that in a female only setting. It could be provided in a non-sex segregated space, or a space focused on trans people, or on an individual basis. These are available options.

So your "compromise" is to fuck over trans people completely, in all situations.

How so?

In all areas of life trans people should be protected from harm and harassment, and be treated with dignity and respect in accordance with their gender identity.

But in some circumstances a person’s sex matters, because other people have rights too.

Trans women are men who identify as women.

Trans men are women who identify as men.

And that’s fine.

Mostly.

But not in all situations.

 

[TomC]

The specific example addressed in the supreme Court’s ruling was rape counselling group sessions.

The 2010 Act explicitly gave this as an an example where trans women could be excluded on a blanket basis, because the presence of any male persons might cause distress or lead to women self-excluding from the service. It can be legitimate and proportionate to exclude males from female only rape counselling sessions.

What the Sipreme Court ruled, in addition to excluding all biological males from such a space, it could also be legitimate to exclude trans men who’ve undergone sufficient transition to pass as men. Because they could trigger the same concerns from the other women users.

Trans men will still need rape counselling services, but it may be inappropriate to provide that in a female only setting. It could be provided in a non-sex segregated space, or a space focused on trans people, or on an individual basis. These are available options.

So your "compromise" is to fuck over trans people completely, in all situations.

Why do you think that the Scottish government is fucking over trans people completely, in all situations?

I'm not seeing anything like that.
Tom

 

[Bomb#20]

Little effect on me directly, though my lesbian daughter is much happier with the direction of travel.

Towards her eventual exile from public gyms and bathrooms under the guise of "protecting women" from lesbian advances, you mean?

Thinking of the consequences is forbidden

And you guys accuse the gender-critical of fear-mongering. How exactly is this "eventual exile" supposed to work in your dystopian fantasy? Does the government force everybody into an FMRI machine and make us all look at porn while it scans our brains? The government knows who's a man and who's a woman; it does not know who's a lesbian.

in conservative circles.

"Conservative", I take it, refers to seanie the "Left-wing atheist"?

 

[Bomb#20]

I think you’re right about that but”risk=zero” is just unsupportable nonsense.

Absolutely. The statistics I've seen indicate female-identifying men are on average no more dangerous than the rest of the male population, but they're a lot more dangerous than women.

 

[Politesse]

Little effect on me directly, though my lesbian daughter is much happier with the direction of travel.

Towards her eventual exile from public gyms and bathrooms under the guise of "protecting women" from lesbian advances, you mean?

Thinking of the consequences is forbidden

And you guys accuse the gender-critical of fear-mongering. How exactly is this "eventual exile" supposed to work in your dystopian fantasy? Does the government force everybody into an FMRI machine and make us all look at porn while it scans our brains? The government knows who's a man and who's a woman; it does not know who's a lesbian.

in conservative circles.

"Conservative", I take it, refers to seanie the "Left-wing atheist"?

You can campaign for alt-right causes and call yourself a left-wing atheist at the same time if you like, but that doesn't make the TERF position "liberal". Anyone who is campaigning to restrict the rights of a given class of people, rather than expanding the rights of citizens generally, is at least in that respect not a liberal by any common definition of the term.

I find your line of reasoning interesting, though. Exactly what means does the government have to "knows who's a man and who's a woman"?

 

[bigfield]

You should use the restroom of your sex, or a gender neutral alternative. People should be accepting of gender non-conforming people in their single sex space. They aren’t required to be accepting of people of the opposite sex in their single sex space. But this issue pertains more to female single sex spaces, than it does to male single sex spaces.

OK how how would this work in practice?

You should use the restroom of your sex, or a gender neutral alternative.

Which restroom should a trans man use if he looks like a man?

People should be accepting of gender non-conforming people in their single sex space.

Women should be accepting of trans men in women's restrooms?

What if they clock the trans man as a man?

They aren’t required to be accepting of people of the opposite sex in their single sex space.

Would it be OK for men to refuse to accept trans men in the men's restrooms?

 

[Bomb#20]

Little effect on me directly, though my lesbian daughter is much happier with the direction of travel.

Towards her eventual exile from public gyms and bathrooms under the guise of "protecting women" from lesbian advances, you mean?

Thinking of the consequences is forbidden

And you guys accuse the gender-critical of fear-mongering. How exactly is this "eventual exile" supposed to work in your dystopian fantasy? Does the government force everybody into an FMRI machine and make us all look at porn while it scans our brains? The government knows who's a man and who's a woman; it does not know who's a lesbian.

in conservative circles.

"Conservative", I take it, refers to seanie the "Left-wing atheist"?

You can campaign for alt-right causes

This, from the guy who called binary sexes "the biblical view". So now wanting males to respect female boundaries is an "alt-right cause", is it? You know who else had ladies' rooms? Nazi Germany, that's who! When you label a concept or policy shared by hundreds of cultures from all over the world with one specific exemplar and, surprise surprise, you just happen to select the most disreputable of the cultures you can think of, what you are constructing is an ad hominem argument. Ad hominem arguments are fallacious.

and call yourself a left-wing atheist at the same time if you like, but that doesn't make the TERF position "liberal".

Who said it does? Why would anyone suspect it does? Left-wingers are not liberals; as for TERFs, remind us what the RF part stands for. RFs and other species of left-winger take liberal positions on certain issues on an a la carte basis -- why wouldn't they when broken clocks are right twice a day? But taken as a whole those philosophies are quite illiberal.

Anyone who is campaigning to restrict the rights of a given class of people, rather than expanding the rights of citizens generally, is at least in that respect not a liberal by any common definition of the term.

You appear to be equivocating on the term "rights". What do you mean by it?

If you mean legal rights or socially recognized rights or something along those lines, you just implied you don't regard abolitionists as liberal according to your (mis)understanding of the term. They were, after all, campaigning to restrict the legal and socially recognized right of people of the slave-owner class to kidnap and imprison their fellow man and force him to work without pay.

If you mean actual rights or moral rights or something along those lines, what actual moral right do you accuse the gender-critical of campaigning to restrict? The "right" of males to frighten and distress females by infringing their boundaries without their consent? If you wish to base a claim that we are not liberal by any common definition on that accusation, show your work. What evidence do you have for the existence of whichever actual moral right you have in mind?

I find your line of reasoning interesting, though. Exactly what means does the government have to "knows who's a man and who's a woman"?

Somebody in a position to know rats you out to the authorities. The common derogatory term for these notorious stool pigeons is "obstetricians".

 

[Politesse]

This, from the guy who called binary sexes "the biblical view". So now wanting males to respect female boundaries is an "alt-right cause", is it?

No, supporting anti-trans legislation is, and has been for as long as there has been an alt-right movement. I didn't say anything about Nazis, that's you, though they certainly put as many trans and intersex people to death as they could find also.

 

[Politesse]

The common derogatory term for these notorious stool pigeons is "obstetricians".

So you are getting on board with the argument that one's birth certificate is the proof of your "biological sex", and that one should have to either provide it, or submit to further medical testing if your biological sex is challenged in a legal context?

 

[Politesse]

If you mean legal rights or socially recognized rights or something along those lines, you just implied you don't regard abolitionists as liberal according to your (mis)understanding of the term. They were, after all, campaigning to restrict the legal and socially recognized right of people of the slave-owner class to kidnap and imprison their fellow man and force him to work without pay.

No, they were campaigning to end the practice of slavery, and nearly succeeded. Rights, to me, are customary privileges afforded by the state to its citizens, variously understood and justified in various nations. Not all conceptions of rights are identical, a great many philosophies of rights have been proposed over the centuries. I do, however, personally prefer a democratic model based on libertarian principles, as does the nation I reside in at least theoretically, and as is the nation we're discussing in this thread.

I think you're painting an interesting vision of "rights", here, more telling than you realize. The two forms of rights you have cited - the "right" to keep other people out of the bathroom you want to use, and the "right" to own other human beings, are all demands unreasonably made of other people, rather than rights held by oneself. You are careless of the rights you hold as a citizen - your right to medical privacy for instance, which you casually throw away, your right to not be discriminated against on the basis of sex, etc - but vigorous in wanting to claim a right to tell other people what they must do. But you have no such right. On whatever issue, wherever a class of people is told they must accept a restricted set of rights, it sets up an inherently unstable social system, doomed to collapse evenrually. In short, if you tell someone "I have the right to a class of privileges that you do not owing to the conditions of my birth", they will disagree with your claim. With words, fists, and eventually guns. Opposition mounts. Communities organize. Action is taken. You might as well try to stop the sun from setting. Formal class discriminations are on a ticking clock from the moment they are first imposed. You cite the "abolitionists"? Well, they prevailed. Their interlocutors were fundamentally unable to convince the American public that they had any such rights over their fellow-citizens, so the practice of commercial chattel slavery was ended in this country.

As to your other question, I'm only interested in legal rights, though these can only be sustained where the population considers them morally justifiable.

 

[Bomb#20]

Since I don't care enough about the Strobel thing to investigate, did it happen in a bar?

Why yes, it did! What gave it away?

A lot of stupid behavior, especially in the USA, becomes a lot more understandable when you realize that alcohol was involved.
Tom

True that. Whether Strobel was inebriated at the time of the incident is a point different participants' accounts disagree on.